'Style Wars' premieres on PBS
Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant's documentary on New York City subway graffiti and the surrounding hip-hop scene airs on PBS. Capturing writers like Dondi, Seen, Skeme, and Cap alongside Rock Steady Crew b-boys against the backdrop of the Koch administration's anti-graffiti crackdown, the film becomes the definitive visual record of early-1980s hip-hop's graffiti and breaking elements.
Why it matters
January 18, 1983. PBS aired Style Wars on Independent Lens. The film, made by Tony Silver and the photographer Henry Chalfant, is the documentary about New York City subway-car graffiti in the early 1980s. It is also, accidentally, the documentary about everything else hip-hop was doing in the early 1980s. The Rock Steady Crew are in it. Crazy Legs is in it. Frosty Freeze is in it. The writers themselves (Dondi, Seen, Skeme, Cap) talk to the camera about their cars the way actual painters talk about actual canvases. The film also has Mayor Koch in it, and the Transit Authority chief, and a bunch of cops with high-pressure paint-removal hoses. The film is partly about the running war between the writers and the city. The writers were not going to win that war. They knew. They kept painting anyway. If you want to know what it looked like, on the actual cars, in the actual yards, in the actual moment when the cars were being written and the city was about to win, Style Wars is the document. There is not another one quite like it.
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