Chilling Out on Rap Flash

By JAY COCKS

New city music brings out the last word in wild style

Def. Definitely def. Definitely def indeed.

It's coming to your town; it may even be there now. Look around. Hooded sweatshirts and cockeyed caps, leather bomber jackets and sheepskin coats heavy enough to bench press. Pristine white sneakers--"kicks" to you, Jim--laced up with byzantine complexity; luxury-label cords and knife-creased jeans; burnished belt buckles that might be police state special issue. Could be the population of the local high school, right? Standard teen-age uniform, right? You're whacked. Look closer, and start uptown. Def thrives at that address.

Def stands for maximum cool, part of the patter of a complex, sometimes convoluted, urban street culture that includes rap music, graffiti art and dancing that goes by a couple of generic styles and several specific names. Like spray-painted murals down the side of a New York City subway, or a ghetto blaster carried on a shoulder broadcasting 130 beats a minute all over a Bronx street, this subculture, nicknamed hip hop, is about assertiveness, display, pride, status and competition, particularly among males. Clothes are not only a part of this offhand cultural statement; they are a kind of uniform for cultural challenge.

Hip hop is black, young and ineffably, unflappably cool: "chilly the most." It also shows signs of traveling well. Groups like The Bronx's Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five tour the country, and some new wave nightspots have devoted evenings to the new street music where post-punkers can check out the sartorial flash of the hip hoppers. There are already rap clubs in London, and last summer's No. 1 song on the German charts was a bit of Euro-rap called Der Kommissar.

While the vanguard of this scene may have passed into their 20s, the audience is largely high school. The boys may like to imitate the cocky flash of what a graffiti artist named Phase 2 calls "the stickup kids," but most of them score their clothes as gifts from parents or--goodbye to another bit of downtown mythology--pay for them with money from part-time jobs. Clothes in this culture are seminal enough to work hard for. "People tend to think if you're poor, you're not supposed to have anything," Phase 2 says. "But when you see something you want, you'll hustle up the money, and not everybody hustles reefer to do it, either." Price may not crimp style, but it remains a persistent problem. Says Mira Gandy, 15, who works part time as an usher at a Broadway theater: "I go out with $100 and come back with only three things."

All the attitudes and the looks of black teen-agers have a way of working themselves off the streets and into closets all over town, just as the work of high-fashion designers becomes assimilated into a more generalized style. Fashion does not just waft down to the streets. It also comes up from there. In rap style you find not only a retro-replay of the past and a sometimes ironic comment on it, but also a fast back alley to the future.

The racial and social geography of uptown/downtown applies to any city in America, whatever the size. Uptown and down, there are plenty of racial stereotypes to go around. One that dies particularly hard for downtowners is that when uptown kids dress to chill, they turn themselves out like some wild amalgam of Cab Galloway going for broke and Isaac Hayes going to a gogo. That is inaccurate, but it does have one small home truth: musicians, more than anyone else, set the style, just as, this minute, rap music is setting the beat.

Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays set the needle down in the groove of a record, turn the disc back and forth and get weird, repeated percussive effects, then jump quickly to another groove, another record, while some rap groups, called MCs, singsong over the music. The result, besides being danceable and extremely def, is familiar and disorienting at once. Just like the clothes.

One of the premier deejays of the rap scene is Grandmaster Flash, who, with his MCs, the Furious Five, turned out one of 1982's best singles, a seven-minute-long and atypically political number called The Message. Flash and the crew are treach, which is short for treacherous and slang for what a decade ago would have been called superfine. Grandmaster favors leathers, tip to toe, and has FLASH spelled out in lightning-bolt letters on the back of his jacket. Mr. Ness, of the Furious Five, favors metal studs, while his compatriot, Melle Mel, currently opts for fur. This is work wear, not street clothing, but Melle Mel knows what message they are putting across. "It gives you a more dominant, primitive look. We dress like this because in a lot of ways people expect us to. The whole principle in rapping is to be No. 1." Flash and the Five learned a fast lesson in fashion and stereotype when they opened for the Clash in May 1981. The crowd was all downtown, mostly white and heavily new wave, and booed the boys when they showed up in their flashy stage duds. The next night, when they wore street clothes onstage, the group was more warmly received.

Flash and the Five sport a wardrobe that goes for a lot of "gusto," money, in straight talk, so their audience would be hard pressed for direct imitation. Like rapper talk, which pulls in language from such diverse sources as '40s hipster, '60s hippie and even cockney rhyming slang (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn's crime-haunted Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, is "Do or Die"), rapper flash is eclectic. The jeans, the leathers, the heavy personalized belt buckles, even the jewelry, are modifications of street-gang uniforms. A lot of the aggressive energy that once went into street fighting now goes into competitive dancing, like "breaking," an elaborate and athletic choreography of splits, handstands, spins, acrobatic turns and assorted outrageous maneuvers. Breaking has already attracted mainstream attention, but uptown it is being overtaken by newer dances, like the Webboe and the Smurf, in which the dancers move with the goofy, ironic precision of the Saturday-morning TV cartoon trolls.

"Fresh" is the ideal now. It stands, figuratively, for stylish, but it literally means clean, new, right. Sneakers without a smudge; jeans unblemished. But there is humor as well as rigor in rap flash. If you think high, knitted ski caps worn at impossible angles are just funny-looking, you only get half the joke. Printed legends like I'D RATHER BE SKIING refer not to snowy slopes but to white mounds of a certain illicit inhalable substance. Greek fisherman hats, or bike-team hats, even shirts with alligator trademarks are worn with what Rap Scene Writer Michael Holman calls "absurd humor." He sees it as a deliberate mockery of the preppie look, of "the powers that be. Sheepskin contradicts the hip hop aesthetic because it's kind of organic, kind of hippie. But it's status-oriented because it's expensive."

Rap dancing, especially breaking, is an essentially male competition, but even in fashion the boys dominate. Gentlemen's Quarterly is treach. "Males have more plumage," says Monica Lynch, vice president of Tommy Boy records, a Manhattan rap label. "Guys are out there flashing their stuff, and the girls are usually wearing a watered-down version of what the guys have on. The girls don't want to look all that nasty." Maybe not, but with their penchant for leather pants or layers of Kamali-esque sweatshirtings, they have a sure knowledge of the impact of style. Says Lisa Lee, 19, who raps with Cosmic Force: "If you don't have the right clothes it can give you a bad name. Nobody wants to be with you."

What's right in one neighborhood can be troublesome in another. When a Bronx break dancer named Crazy Legs took a recent trip to Chicago, wearing his hat at a precarious 45DEG angle, a local told him, "You better not wear your cap that way 'cause you could get hurt. Somebody could think you're a gangster." Still, hip hop has been downtown long enough that stylistic confusion like this is a little less frequent. Every Friday night, crews of rappers make the trip from The Bronx to the lower West Side of Manhattan, where they do their stuff at a roller disco called the Roxy. The crowd there is mostly new bohemian types. They watch with the guilty pleasure of anthropologists visiting Soul Train, as rappers pick up on a little new wave style (miniskirts and studs are making a showing in the South Bronx) and make their moves. Downtown, however, there is a palpable difference in the proceedings. "We bring everything here from our neighborhood to put on a show," is the way Crazy Legs explains it. "But uptown it's not a show. It's our way of life." --ByJayCocks.

Reported by Stephen Koepp/New York

With reporting by Stephen Koepp/New York This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.