
A bankrupt New York was the cradle of rap in the early 1970s. Among other things, in order to save money, the city shut down eight fire precincts. Demographic changes and white flight from the South Bronx led many landlords to walk away from their buildings, or even to burn them for insurance money.

This is the backdrop for the hip hop movie Wild Style.

When the film first screened in New York City, Vincent Canby, the powerful film critic for the New York Times, explained to his readers:
The full film is linked on your syllabus. Here is the famous basketball throwdown scene between the teenaged Cold Brush Brothers and Fantastic Freaks.
Read about the making of the film here.
Cold Crush in 2013, in a concert to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the film:
The Rock Steady Crew, also featured in the film, with a hit they had the same year:

Lady Pink (Rosie) is still making work. Check her out here.

So is Lee Quiñones (Zoro), pictured above with his wife.
And watch the trailer for a new documentary on Jean-Michel Basquiat (1961-1988), who was part of the street art scene:

(Geoffrey Holder as Baron Samedi in the James Bond film Live and Let Die, 1973.)
In Wild Style, the white journalist who goes uptown to get her story listens to Blondie in her car and rocks a Debbie Harry look. Blondie’s 1981 hit “Rapture” syncretized various current forms of black popular music, including disco and rap. The video contains references to West African/Carribean religion, including Baron Samedi, the lord of the dead in Haitian voudou (and Basquiat has a cameo). What else is going on in this video? Is “Rapture” an homage to black culture, or a ripoff?
As a gallery owner says in the 1983 documentary “Style Wars,” which treats the same topics as “Wild Style,” Blondie was a popular meme in graffiti art.
Watch it here.
On the other hand, in 1979, the conservative cultural critic Nathan Glazer declared about graffiti artists:
This is considered to be the first commercially-released rap single, the 1979 “King Tim III” by the Fatback Band — a live funk band playing instruments, not samples — with rapper Tim Washington.
The first commercially-released rap single to achieve mainstream success was “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugar Hill Gang, also released in 1979.
“Rapper’s Delight” uses samples from the song “Good Times” by Nile Rodgers’s disco-funk band Chic. Note how different the sound is from a live band.