Track 06. Wild Style
Upon watching the film Wild Style, the first thing that a viewer will notice is that the film shows its 25 years quite easily. After the viewer can get past the low-budget and sometimes awkward scenes/acting, the movie shows the very essence of the founding four pillars of hip-hop: DJing, MCing, break dancing, and graffiti. When discussing hip-hop culture, most of the time the predominant aspect is MCing, but Wild Style showcases the importance of all four (focusing on graffiti mostly, but giving ample time to each of the other three aspects). More importantly, it intertwines them, as they were not all individually created in a vacuum, but rather, they were all byproducts of the Bronx youth of the 1970s. The film itself offers a microcosm of the New York hip-hop culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
The way that the four pillars are represented shows the very core of hip-hop, not solely as a Black movement, but rather an urban movement that included Latinos (and to a much smaller degree, whites) as well. As far as the graffiti writing, the film occurs at an interesting point in the history of tagging, where graffiti began to become accepted in artistic circles and began getting publicity and canvases to paint. The integration of hip-hop culture was just beginning to take shape, though later in the 1980s, there was a sense that hip-hop was on a downtrend with the decline of graffiti and break dancing. However, during this film, there are no signs of a decline. Instead, all four are given significant time—possibly because the film was shot on location with many staples of early hip-hop culture like Grandmaster Flash, Busy Bee, The Cold Crush, the Rock Steady Crew, and even legendary taggers like Lee Quinones, Sandra Fabara, and Andrew Zephyr Witten.
It is interesting, however, to see how much hip-hop has evolved over the past 25 years since Wild Style was released. Interestingly, there are only two white characters throughout the entire film, whereas everyone else is Black or Latino. The fact that the hip-hop audience of today is predominantly white shows the shift from an urban-youth offshoot to the most profitable genre in American music. It is interesting that just 25 years ago, Wild Style was released independently as the first hip-hop movie, and now the industry has led to numerous high-budget motion pictures, another example of the meteoric rise of hip-hop. It is also refreshing to see hip-hop as a largely underground movement. Looking at the music today, it seems to be quite formulaic, where producers and record labels can almost ensure success for their various talents. In Wild Style, it shows the type of recklessness from the founders of hip-hop that allowed the music and the culture to grow so exponentially.
Overall, Wild Style’s impact is two-fold. First, it is a historical ode to the early movement as it was just beginning to take form. In all its awkwardness, the roots of the movement were shown in quite a positive light. Secondly, it showcases, as previously stated, the evolution of hip-hop from its roots to where it is today. The mix of graffiti, break dancing, MCing, and DJing offers the roots of the movement, where without these humble beginnings, there could be no Jay-Z or BET. Wild Style is a seminal film about the beginnings of the hip-hop movement, where taggers lashed out against authority by tagging trains, and parties were thrown to showcase these new talents.
