‘From mambo to hip-hop’
I saw a really interesting documentary earlier this summer: From Mambo To Hip-Hop: A South Bronx Tale.
The film is a musical history of one of the world’s most culturally vibrant yet, for a period, blighted neighbourhoods. In the film, the scenes of urban decay in the early 1970s could easily be swapped with places like Grozny, Sarejevo or Baghdad — except this was in the richest country in the world, not a war zone.
Here’s how the NYT described the scene in its 2006 review of the film:
Mambo and hip-hop are the kind of melting-pot phenomena that New York heats and stirs. Their roots are African, refracted through the Caribbean and the city. In their beginnings both styles also reflected, and defied, the ghetto status and economic deterioration of the South Bronx.
You can see a rough cut of the film online at Mefeedia (it can also be seen at BlipTV).
Here’s a blog post about the rough cut premiere in 2005.
Henry Chalfant is the film’s director. He also produced Style Wars, considered another hip-hop classic. Here’s an interview with him about that 1983 classic.
Billy Jam: When exactly did you start filming Style Wars. Was it in ’81 or ’82?
Henry & Tony: 1981
Tony Silver: Well Charlie started to do something before. (Film director) Charlie Ahearn and he was already filming “Wild Style” from a different perspective spending along time in the Bronx in the early club scene uptown which I think was part of his source of his inspiration and then Henry should tell the story that answers you question.
Henry Chalfant: Yeah well, Part of the ease with which these scenes happen and their willingness to share with us came from my being involved with them for a long time and started to take pictures in the mid 70′s and my collection of photo’s which I had 3 years worth before I met any writers, so I came sort of armed with a passport which gave me this incredible grand stand view of something that was evolving. To them I was a valuable source for archiving their work and so they overcame rapidly their suspicion that I was a cop and that my involvement was pretty benign and was mainly about pictures. So we had this relationship that was really valuable, they called me on the phone and told me what they were doing and wanting me to go out and get the picture and Skeme he would leave these great rap calls on my message machine and he would go “the S, the K, the EME, take it from the bottom to the T O P” things like that and he would tell me “on the 3 line I did this piece last night from top to bottom” so then I would go out and try to get it and it would help me to know where I was.
A bit long for the purpose of this post, but what the hell, it’s a cool story.
Anyways, I mention Wild Style because the 25th anniversary DVD release is coming up on Sept. 25.
The film captures the hip-hop scene of the very early 1980s. If you’re interested at all in the roots of hip-hop, watching From Mambo To Hip-Hop and then Wild Style would largely cover it off for you.