Who Deserves the Future?
Paul Thompson considers the life and death of Afrika Bambaataa
Art by DJ Short
On the evening of July 13, 1977, a series of lightning strikes left New York City without power overnight. The next day, a Con Edison spokesman described the outage as an “act of God,” which apparently enraged Abe Beame to the point that the mayor’s aides had to prevent him from storming into the utility company’s headquarters to hold its executives to account for their negligence. In one of those symmetries that either proves some sort of cosmic balance or proves that a night-shift reporter was a little bit bored, approximately 4,000 people had to be rescued from the suddenly-defunct subways, while approximately 4,000 people would eventually be arrested for a variety of alleged crimes. The next day, that same ConEd spokesman told the Daily News that the lightning strikes had had “a cascading effect,” which was true, but probably not in the way he meant it to be.
Suspiciously tidy as the story might seem to us now, those who were there agree: The ‘77 blackout allowed for a radical leap forward in the then-fledgling world of hip-hop. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people, most of them young men, took the opportunity to boost turntables, amps, mixers, and other equipment from boutique shops and department stores. These weren’t just aspirant DJs hoping to break their way into the scene—we’re talking people who would go on to be foundational figures in the genre, unboxing their first GLI speakers thanks to a lapse in modernity. As MC Debbie D said to Rolling Stone 45 years after the fact: “How else were you going to get it?”
From its beginnings, hip-hop had been about resourcefulness in the face of economic, political, and practical constraints; the workarounds were as varied as they were ingenious. But in the summer of ‘77, there was one clear model these bandits were chasing as they waved flashlights down the aisles of abandoned stores: Afrika Bambaataa. The idea that anyone could match the Bronxite’s record collection was preposterous, but, at least the hardware could be emulated. In the same magazine spread, MC Shy D puts a fine point on it: “Bambaataa influenced everybody.” So this equipment streamed out into the street, over broken glass, carried by folks who might have imagined turning their new speakers around so they would pulse out of project windows, just as this instant icon had done in the Bronx River Houses.
Bambaataa, born Lance Taylor, died earlier this month due to complications from prostate cancer. He was 68. If he had never released a record, he would have still been an essential figure in hip-hop’s formation and transformation for the parties he threw and records he blended in the late 1970s. The same would go if he had simply released “Planet Rock,” the 1982 single that represents perhaps the largest single imaginative leap in hip-hop production. And if “Planet Rock” and the parties never happened, his ad-hoc worldwide tours with his Zulu Nation would have laid the track for the eventual globalization and commercialization of what was once and unmonetizable, underground culture. There was a new world dawning, and with every blend, every rechristening, every impulsive mohawk, Afrika Bambaataa was helping to shape it.
There was a time, in the 1950s, when West Side Story-ass street gangs held incredible influence on Manhattan Island. But by the middle of the Vietnam War, they had mostly dissipated, in large part due to the way heroin had snaked its way through New York. When Bambaataa, who was growing up in Bronx River, was 12, a new wave of gangs had started to emerge; he quickly joined a local outfit that would become the Black Spades. Conflict between different crews spiraled out, the way these things do. By 1973 or ‘74, those projects had gotten so hot, so littered with shell casings that they became known as Lil Vietnam.
When it came time for recent history to be written, Bambaataa’s friends and crewmates cast him as a communicator and consensus builder rather than a warlord. Steven Hager, who wrote about Bambaataa for the Village Voice in 1982, spoke to people who grew up in and around Bronx River with him, and to a person they recall a young man interested in keeping those even younger on the straight and narrow. (The artist himself is more matter-of-fact. “I was into street gang violence,” he tells Hager.) In hindsight, the most chilling bit of attempted mythmaking comes when a friend of Bambaataa’s tells Hager he “has some kind of gift with kids.”
In January 1975, Bambaataa’s best friend was murdered by two police officers. The community gritted its teeth and made sure no one started an out-and-out war with the cops; Bambaataa himself credits the Amsterdam News with dissuading any suicide missions. Still, by the end of that year, the new gangs had scattered. In December, Bambaataa graduated high school, and his mother bought him his first pieces of stereo equipment. By the next summer, he was DJing on a regular basis, at parties that quickly became the most exciting, most discussed, and most emulated—not just in the Bronx, but in all of New York. DJ Kool Herc, whose 1973 back-to-school party is generally cited as the beginning of what would come to be known as hip-hop said Bam was the only DJ he ever really respected. “He always plays music I never heard before,” Herc told the Voice.
Herc and Bambaataa were friendly rivals, even as they traced something of an analog-digital split; while Bambaataa would gladly mix the Munsters theme song into warped versions of James Brown standards, he was fixated on importing electronic music, especially from Germany, to the decks. An even younger South Bronx DJ, Grandmaster Flash, came along and pushed the form into new, more ostentatiously technical territory; Bambaataa understood what was going on and doubled down on taste and curation as opposed to chasing Flash, or Grand Wizzard Theodore, who at the same time was pioneering the record scratch.
“Rappers Delight” came out in 1979; rappers and DJs scrambled, as those lifting equipment did during the ‘77 blackout, to get record deals. Bambaataa put out a single that was fucked with and altered by the guy who fronted the money. He hated it. Herc was stabbed at one of his own parties; he was fine, but it was as if the anticipated commercial explosion came at the expense of the palliative effect hip-hop initially had on the neighborhoods.
So Bambaataa regrouped. He enlisted Arthur Baker, John Robie, and Tom Silverman to make what would become “Planet Rock,” a six-and-a-half minute fugue of post-Kraftwerk digitized bug-out that sounds like a transmission from two millenia on. In the forty-some years since it came out, the creators have squabbled over who did what in the studio, whether certain sounds were sampled or recreated, and who pushed the MCing to be more legato, to the point of slurring, and instantly rendered all competitors antique. None of that really mattered. All of a sudden, the future was here.
Which is all well and good. But a decade ago, a series of men came forward, one at a time or in pairs, to allege that Bambaataa had sexually abused them, many when they worked for him as “crate boys,” young assistants who lugged records and equipment to and from Zulu Nation events in hopes of apprenticing under an alien. The details of the allegations are graphic and they are well-documented. If these men—if any of these men—are to be believed, Bambaataa was not only molesting boys as if by habit, but was using his station as a community leader to do so, and to pressure everyone into silence after the fact.
When you’re young and taken advantage of in this way, your world gets scrambled. You start to believe that your body, your sexuality, is the only thing that makes you worthy of existing in an adult world; you sexualize yourself to survive, all while your abusers make you feel disgusting for having that sexuality. The silence becomes self-directed. You seek extremity, or escape—be it through more sex, or through drugs, or even death. You learn that your body is all you have, and then that your body isn’t even yours.
I’m writing this after getting home from dinner with a rapper two or three generations younger than Bambaataa, who spent a lot of time in New York during his youth. I asked him how open a secret the allegations were. He told me that they usually came out when younger folks would be talking adoringly about Bambaataa: an older head would snap Fuck him, and allude to what we all now know. I offered that it must have felt, in those moments, like there was no opportunity to ask for clarity, for details. Not exactly, the rapper said. We didn’t want to know.
In 2010, the legendary music writer Dave Tompkins published How to Wreck a Nice Beach, an expansive and digressive history of the vocoder. The machine was developed by the Pentagon to beat codebreakers; during the latter stages of World War II, it was installed in hidden spots across the globe to communicate in secret, including about the bomb. Presidents whispering about nuclear annihilation, the frequencies of their voices yanked apart and reconstituted into something else. In the opening scene of Nice Beach, Bambaataa sits across from Tompkins, paging through a brochure published by the NSA. At one point, Bambaataa chuckles. The future doesn’t always go as the self-proclaimed visionaries swear it will.