Youth culture in global cinema

the sound of the south bronx 89
ternalistic view of the growing graffiti practice and emergent urban youth
culture in New York City, while Krush Groove was a musically exciting but
ultimately unsatisfying attempt to loosely portray the life of record producer
Russell Simmons, his label Def Jam, and his production company. 7 In the
same vein of the latter film was Beat Street (produced by Harry Belafonte),
Rappin’, and the Breakin’ series. These films were more about music and
having a good time, and for the most part backed by commercially driven
funding, yet plot devices still often turned on issues of race and the struggle
over urban spaces. 8 Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style was an independent ‘‘art’’
film, whose funding was derived primarily from European sources, most notably
the West German television station ZDF and the United Kingdom’s
Channel 4.This film imagined an all-rapping, all-dancing, all-painting South
Bronx where performance was intimately connected with both bettering the
community and personal transformation.
Ahearn’s film also sought to uniquely bridge two somewhat traditionally
opposed modes of filmmaking, the documentary and the musical. The result
was an intensely original docudrama that challenged contemporary media
visions of the South Bronx as a social problem riddled with crime and drug
abuse. This film also sought to transform the stereotype of the graffiti writer
from a destructive teenaged ‘‘hood’’ to a sensitive young artist concerned
with the integrity of his work. While the immense popularity of rap today
has somewhat diminished the ‘‘otherness’’ of such notorious and legendary
hip-hop locations as the South Bronx and Compton, a review of Beat Street,
a less gritty film that also takes place in the South Bronx, reveals the absolutely
‘‘foreign’’ territory these films introduced in the early ’80s. Jim Welsh,
writing in ’84, avows that ‘‘Beat Street is an agreeable picture once one gets
over the culture shock, overflowing with a tremendous energy and inventiveness.’’
9 Clearly there is a crucial territory that needs to be addressed here,
a space of difference captured by these inner-city teen musicals or teenpics
that is only hinted at by Feuer in her brief reference to School Daze and
Hairspray.
What links these films is the cinematic exploration of hip-hop culture—
graffiti, rap, spinning and mixing records, break dancing—and the potential
appropriation of hitherto ‘‘white’’ spaces of performance culture associated
with the musical. I have chosen to focus specifically on Wild Style because
it managed to suggestively evoke these aspects of hip-hop culture through
the negotiation of ‘‘real’’ urban spaces while at the same time also largely
conforming to the structure of the classical Hollywood musical. Thus, by
placing this film in dialogue with Feuer’s notion of the teen musical as reconstructionist,
I argue that Wild Style also takes on larger issues haunting the