bALLrOOm DIps INTO ThE mAINsTrEAm

DAILY NOTE
THURSDAY, MAY 23, 2013
16 22
of
VOGUING
ballroom dips into
the mainstream
nile rodgers is terrified / the ramones / basquiat makes noise
THE DAILY NOTE
LAST NIGHT
You better work! Today’s Daily Note presents the
story of voguing, a movement that brims with
energy, creativity, passion, fierceness, and the
ego of New York City. Voguing is more than just a
dance, it’s a lifestyle—one that brings pride, peer
recognition, and a strong sense of self. The scene
has bubbled back up recently, but in the beginning
it was about young people from society’s margins
flipping their limitations and using whatever
they could to express themselves. That’s what
art is all about. Also in this issue, Michael Holman
talks about the night he started a band called
Gray with Jean-Michel Basquiat, a Brooklyn kid
who wrote poetic graffiti as SAMO before going
on to become an art-world superstar and getting
posthumously name-checked by rap moguls like
Jay-Z, Kanye, and Rick Ross. (Rozay even has a
tattoo of Basquiat on his thigh. You’re welcome.)
The members of Gray embraced their inability
to play their instruments and found new ways to
get unexpected sounds out of them. It’s a good
reminder that being without is sometimes the best
starting point for creative expression.
ABOUT Red bull music academy
MASTHEAD
Editor in Chief Piotr Orlov
Copy Chief Jane Lerner
Senior Editor Sam Hockley-Smith
Senior Writer/Editor Vivian Host
Contributing Editors Todd L. Burns
Shawn Reynaldo
Staff Writer Olivia Graham
Editorial Coordinator Alex Naidus
Creative Director Justin Thomas Kay
for Doubleday & Cartwright
Art Director Christopher Sabatini
Production Designer Suzan Choy
Photo Editor Lorenna Gomez-Sanchez
Staff Photographer Anthony Blasko
Top row: AnnaLove; Squalloscope; Kaan Düzarat and Carrot
Green tag-teaming.
Second row: Julian Cubillos; De La Montagne crowd-surfing;
Pleasure Cruiser.
Third row: André Laos; De La Montagne, Kaan Düzarat, and
Mr. Selfish; the crowd at Tammany Hall.
Fourth row: Crowd at Tammany Hall; Simonne Jones; De La
Montagne.
Fifth row: Sinjin Hawke; DJ Slow.
Sixth row: Hudson Mohawke, Nick Hook, and guest; Brenmar,
Hudson Mohawke, and Nick Hook; DJ Slow and Sinjin Hawke.
All photos by Anthony Blasko and Dan Wilton
Contributors
Sue Apfelbaum
Marina D
Adrienne Day
Michael Holman
Krisanne Johnson
Mike Rubin
Julianne Shepherd
Nick Sylvester
Cover Photo Krisanne Johnson
Escuelita’s, NYC 2008
All-Seeing Eye Torsten Schmidt
Correction: Our May 21 story on the passing of
Anthony ‘Romanthony’ Moore misstated his age at the
time of his death on May 7; he was 45.
The Red Bull Music Academy celebrates
creative pioneers and presents fearless new
talent. Now we’re in New York City.
The Red Bull Music Academy is a worldtraveling series of music workshops and
festivals: a platform for those who make a
difference in today’s musical landscape.
This year we’re bringing together two
groups of selected participants — producers,
vocalists, DJs, instrumentalists and
musical mavericks from around the world — in
New York City. For two weeks, each group
will hear lectures by musical luminaries,
work together on tracks, and perform in the
city’s best clubs and music halls. Imagine
a place that’s equal parts science lab,
the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and
Kraftwerk’s home studio. Throw in a
touch of downtown New York circa 1981, a
sprinkle of Prince Jammy’s mixing board,
and Bob Moog’s synthesizer collection
all in a 22nd-century remix and you’re
halfway there.
The Academy began back in 1998 and has
been traversing the globe since, traveling
to Berlin, Cape Town, São Paulo, Barcelona,
London, Toronto, and many other places.
Interested? Applications for the 2014 Red
Bull Music Academy open early next year.
The content of Daily Note does not necessarily represent the opinions of
Red Bull or Doubleday & Cartwright.
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3
FROM THE ACADEMY
UPFRONT
Boi-1da: It’s funny, my mom started making beats. It’s the weirdest
thing ever, her making beats on Reason one day. She was trying to
show me how to use it and I was like, ‘This is confusing.’ I don’t
know, man, I’ll just stick with what works for me.
Q: Does your mom have some bangers?
Boi-1da: She had one track that was kinda crazy. It was kinda sloppy
and all-over-the-place, but it was going somewhere... My mom, a
40-year-old Jamaican woman—[it’s] the most hilarious thing to me.
— Producer Boi-1da, May 22, 2013
TONIGHT
Santos Party House
United
States of
Bass
Brian Eno’s 77 Million
Paintings at the Fabrica
gallery in Brighton,
England, 2010.
Almost
Infinite
Brian Eno quiets the mind.
amongst the tightly controlled chaos that
is city life, a moment of clarity or sanity can be
hard to find. Quiet time becomes yet another
thing to rigorously schedule into your day. It’s
exhausting. But sometimes these moments pop
up unexpectedly—you’ll be riding the subway
or walking on a relentlessly crowded street,
both hyper-aware of your environment and
willfully ignoring it at the same damn time.
77 Million Paintings, an audio-visual installation by Brian Eno, is a place where New Yorkers can take pause. Showing in the former location of Café Rouge on West 32nd Street, this
marks the New York debut of Eno’s piece, and
is also the largest indoor version that’s been
produced since the piece premiered in 2006.
77 Million Paintings is a “generative work”—a
term coined by Eno 20 years ago to describe art
that makes itself as you watch it—that explores
vast combinations of visual and sonic elements.
Images are chosen at random and then laid on
top of one another, so that the final output is a
continuous stream of ever-changing material.
There aren’t many of the initial “primitives,”
as Eno calls the original paintings, but when
overlaid four at a time, the number of possible
distinct combinations is a whopping 77 million.
Eno is fascinated by combinatorial mathematics. His idea of generative art takes “a systems approach to making art,” as he explained
during his recent lecture at Red Bull Music
Academy, “where essentially you are creating a
conceptual machine, which then keeps producing stuff.” This effectively ensures that the same
image or soundscape never repeats.
Despite the constant mutation of the piece,
the effect is one of stillness. Eno is known as
the godfather of ambient, a genre which, at its
most basic definition, is music that creates an
environment. With his art, Eno is interested in
creating moments of meditative respite, spaces that spark reflection or just inner quiet. “It’s
slightly religious, perhaps,” he says. “It’s not
dissimilar to the feeling I was having in Lincoln Cathedral in England—a place where people come and sit still. Probably some of them
pray but I would imagine quite a lot of them
don’t. They’re just enjoying a place where you
can be in that space, and surrender to it. I am
concerned with making something that is of
some kind of spiritual and even therapeutic use
to people.”
-Olivia graham
77 Million Paintings is open Tuesdays–
Sundays from noon to 8pm through June 2 at
145 W. 32nd St., Manhattan.
FROM CROYDON
WITH DUB
Essential tracks from dubstep’s
early history.
L
ong before Snoop rapped over Flux Pavilion and Skrillex was a
household name, Mala, Hatcha, Plastician, and Skream built the
foundations of dubstep by playing with half-time structures of
gigantic bass and massively reverbed snares. These four pioneers
touch down at the Roots of Dubstep show at SRB tomorrow night—
here’s a primer on some early dubstep anthems you’re likely to hear.
Big Freedia
Afrika Bambaataa
Egyptian Lover
DJ Magic Mike
DJ Assault
DJ Funk + Many More!
MAY
23
UPCOMING
EVENTS
SRB Brooklyn
Santos
Party House
Plasticman,
“Pump Up the
Jam”
Right before he changed
his name (so as not to
be confused with Richie
‘Plastikman’ Hawtin),
grime and dubstep pioneer Plastician issued
this snaky, 4/4-touched
roller with oozing bass
loops cut through by
gunshot-sharp snares
and menacing atmospheric leads.
Hatcha & Benga,
“10 Tons Heavy”
Digital Mystikz,
“Anti-War Dub”
Hatcha helped shape
dubstep, working at the
scene’s crucial record
store (Big Apple), releasing on the seminal
Tempa label, and becoming one of the first DJ
residents of Rinse FM, a
pirate-turned-legal radio station that is the
genre’s key transmitter. This track finds
him teaming up with former protégé Benga for a
gurning slice of liquid
low-end straight from
the darkside.
Mala and Coki run DMZ, a
party and record label
dedicated to exploring dubstep’s roots
in Jamaican dub and
sound-system culture.
Probably their finest
hour, this track is a
smoky, melancholy slab
of roots consciousness
underpinned by a warm
blanket of sub-bass.
The Roots
of Dubstep
Skream
Mala
Plastician
Hatcha
MAY
24
Grand Prospect Hall
12 Years MAY
Of DFA
The whole
label family on
four stages
25
The Well Brooklyn
The Roots
of Dubstep
Friday, May 24
10 PM to 4 AM
at SRB Brooklyn,
177 2nd Ave.,
Brooklyn
Skream,
“Midnight
Request Line”
Arguably the most famous song of dubstep’s
formative years, by one
of the genre’s biggest
stars. Croydon native
Oliver ‘Skream’ Jones
was only 19 when he
crafted this mysterious
missile for Tempa, a
deceptively simple mix
of arpeggiated sonar
sounds and submarine
reverb.
Benga & Coki,
“Night”
The combination of Benga’s techno sensibilities with Coki’s dark
and dubby style produced
one of the most enduring
dubstep tracks (and an
instrumental people always sing aloud, weirdly). It’s an iconic raft
of bleeps floated atop
a gangster’s bounty of
head-nodding bass.
The DoOver NYC
Special
Aloe Blacc &
Many More
MAY
26
Saint Vitus
Oneohtrix
Point Never
Evian Christ
Bill Kouligas
More
MAY
26
NYU Skirball Center
Down and dirty
A tale of beats and booty with Miami bass don Magic Mike.
Do you remember the first time you heard 808
bass? Being from Florida, everything had the 808
in it. We always knew the sound from “Planet Rock”
onwards so there wasn’t some [epiphany] like,
“Oooh.” But when you start talking about sustained
bass and modulating it and all of that, the first time
I really heard that was ’84 or ’85. The Beastie Boys
did “Slow and Low” and I think that was the first
time that I really heard low-end put to the test… and
the Beastie Boys wasn’t even from Florida! Then after the fact, a lot of other groups started picking up
on it, in ’85, ’86 with Shy D and MC ADE and all
these other different groups that was coming out of
Fort Lauderdale and Miami. That’s when everything
just kind of changed.
Given that you lived in Miami for at least part of
the ’80s, you obviously saw a lot of crazy things.
Aw yeah. I think the craziest party I’ve ever seen was
Luke from 2 Live Crew’s party at Jack the Rapper.
That had to be in ’91, maybe ’92. Jack the Rapper
was one of the first original 13 black DJs for radio
back in the day. He would do this convention every
year called the Family Affair; it really catered toward
people who wanted to promote music and he would
always have the ballroom for different big groups.
Anyway, Luke had the whole ballroom rented out
and turned it into a strip club. No one had no clothes
on, and all I could do was scratch my head and say,
“Wow.” Once the common folk left the party and just
industry people were there, then it got really crazy.
A TALK
with
James
Murphy
MAY
27
Deviation @ Sullivan Room
Benji B
FaltyDL
Dorian
Concept
More
MAY
27
West Park Church
Pantha
du Prince
& The Bell
Laboratory
MAY
28
RECORDED LIVE
FOR RED BULL MUSIC ACADEMY RADIO
TUNE IN AT RBMARADIO.COM
Magic Mike plays at United States of Bass on May 24 at Santos Party House, 96 Lafayette St., Manhattan.
4
5
FROM THE ARCHIVES
Q&A
NILE RODGERS
The super-producer goes from Sesame Street
and the Apollo to living Chic.
In the past, you’ve talked about jazz, about being a big
Temptations fan, and being obsessed with that whole era.
But when you met Bernard Edwards, Chic’s bass player
and producer, you were actually the hippie and he was the
R&B guy. Completely 100% correct. Bernard Edwards was so
old-school R&B. He really fit in. I did not fit in. My first real job
was with Sesame Street. I got that gig because I auditioned and
they didn’t care that I had green cornrows, and when I undid
the green cornrows I had this big green afro. I only did that gig
for a year because the guy who vacated it was Carlos Alomar
and he went to play in the Apollo Theater house band. Then
David Bowie hired him with my other buddies, Luther Vandross
and those guys, and they became the Young Americans. There
was an opening at the Apollo and I auditioned for that. It wasn’t
much of an audition—I was recommended by the woman from
Sesame Street, whose husband was the manager of the Apollo
Theater at that time. She told them that I was a really great
guitarist and a fantastic reader, and I got the gig with the house
band. It was a revue format. Every now and then they’d have
one band that would do a bunch of songs, but typically you’d
have one-hit wonders—a person would come out and do their
one or two songs that were hits. All the audience got were songs
that were pretty familiar. Everyone had their little routine and
shtick, but the band had to be ready for anything.
as soon as he does that, this coffin opens and it’s Screamin’ Jay
Hawkins. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen his routine, but he
looks like a skeleton, he’s got this rattle in his hand. I’m terrified. And I jump up and grab my guitar, take the cable out, and
I’m running around with my big jazz guitar across stage, and
Screamin’ is running after me. And I run stage right but now
they’re blocking me, ’cause all the people waiting to go on are
standing there. And I run to the other side and the audience
is crying with laughter ’cause they know it’s totally real. Meanwhile, the thing that made it funny to my friends is, at that time,
I was a kung fu master. I was studying kung fu, and I’m running
across stage like a total chump. Screamin’ Jay just nailed the performance that night and the old guys in the band decided, “Let’s
teach this young blood what it’s all about.” That was my first day.
Everybody had planned it; everybody was in on it. They couldn’t
have done it without a rehearsal—they just wanted to show me
what the Apollo was like. Trial by fire.
At this point had James Brown already recorded the Live
at the Apollo record? Oh yeah.
What was it about your relationship that made you click?
We wanted to be professional. In those days a lot of bands were
sloppy and we were playing in the hood at dives, what we’d call
the Chitlin’ Circuit. We were getting $15 a night and we had to
do four or five sets. They expected a show. Bernard and I always
wanted to be good. Some of the guys would just get through the
show ’cause they figured they’d never be back, but Bernard and
I had a powerful work ethic and we always wanted the shows to
be great. If he didn’t know something, I would tell him. We were
bandleaders and we didn’t know it.
So when you were walking into the Apollo on 125th Street,
were you walking in with pressure on your shoulders,
knowing what amazing stuff had already been recorded
there? Not only that. I knew about Jimi Hendrix winning the
talent show. Don’t get me wrong—even though I was a jazzy guy,
everybody went to the Apollo every now and then. A lot of the
bands I was playing with would wind up playing at the Apollo.
So it wasn’t like when I got the gig as the house-band guy that I’d
never been to the Apollo. Luther Vandross was my friend and he
took me there to see Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles. I never saw
anything like that. So it was our place to hang.
6
Often the rhythm section—the drums, the bass—can be the
heart of the band, but it’s interesting to hear you talk about
the solid relationship between guitar and bass. It’s funny, a
few weeks ago a friend of mine I haven’t seen for years found an
One thing that’s synonymous with your productions is the
breakdown. Can you talk about the breakdown and why it’s
so infectious in club culture? Even in live R&B the breakdown
is important. What we do is we break it down to almost nothing
and then we rebuild the track in the listeners’ ears—that’s the
Chic formula. You hear one instrument coming in at a time. You
hear it on “Dance, Dance, Dance,” our first single, but you really
hear us take it to a higher artform in the song “Good Times.” The
Chic motto was: a song is an excuse to go to a chorus. That’s why
our songs start with the chorus—that’s the hook, that’s what gets
you. So the song is just an excuse to go to the chorus and the
chorus is just an excuse to go to the breakdown.
What was New York like in the ’80s? I know you were a
regular at Studio 54 and all those classic spots. It was probably the most fun I’ve ever had. If you took that chunk out of
life, you boys and girls wouldn’t be who you are. That era was so
powerful and so bohemian, so revolutionary and so open, it gave
us probably a false sense of power, a false sense of what we could
do. In fact, the big companies were still in control but we felt like
we were able to push against the boundaries.
The great thing about music (unlike the other electronic
arts) is that it doesn’t have to be translated. We can all understand it. I can go and play “Le Freak” in Russia and sing it just
like that and everyone sings the songs. Think about it… How
profitable is that? If you do a film, you’ve got to put in subtitles.
If you do a book, in Spain no one can read it unless it’s translated. A record is super-profitable ’cause once you make it and you
hit that number, you just ship it out the door. You don’t have to
do any more work. Obviously, the powers that be really want to
protect that business and I understand why that type of greed
is very seductive.
People who are in the business or want to get into the business: the first thing you have to do is make sure you love this. I
never believed I’d make it to the level I made it to, but I always
believed I’d be a working musician and be able to pay my bills
and live the life I wanted to live, and that I’d be able to play
music for a living. And if you want to do that, that’s absolutely
achievable—you can do it, be you a DJ, singer, musician, whatever. It’s great to set your sights on the brass ring, but make sure
you love what you’re doing, that even if you don’t get paid you
still show up for work.
Interviewed by Benji B at Red Bull Music Academy Madrid
2011. For the full Q&A, head to redbullmusicacademy.com/
lectures.
inset Photo: Gianfranco Tripodo. opposite photo: Dan wilton
The crowd at the Apollo was famously unforgiving. How
did it feel when you walked on stage and saw the unforgiving, thumbs-up, thumbs-down audience? I was lucky. The
very first show, this is what happened to me: I go and do the
audition and it’s Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman,” which is
in F-sharp and it’s 15 pages long. You have to have three music
stands taped together. The bandleader tells me I don’t have to
make the rest of the audition ’cause, “Wow, that’s incredible! You
played ‘Clean Up Woman’ for 13 pages! You’re the man!” So they
let me go walking around and told me to be back an hour before
showtime. At the Apollo—I don’t know if they still do this—but
they’d go, “The half is in,” then there was this siren sound and
we’d all run around getting ready to play. There are a couple
of guitar players, and we’re waiting to go onstage and I’m so
focused ’cause this is the Apollo. I don’t want to lose this job. I’m
getting $375 a week. I need to do this.
I didn’t pay attention that they’d rolled in a coffin on the side
of the stage. I’m looking at the conductor… He goes “Bang!” and
So how do we go from that initiation experience to you
starting your own band? At that point, I’d already been with
Bernard Edwards and another guy named Harold Alexander and
a guy named Gylan Kain who was in the Last Poets. So I was
already gigging in New York and I had lots of other gigs, but I
always tried to bring Bernard in. It just sounded better.
early videotape of me and Bernard and the band that eventually
became Chic. You could tell from that tape how we clicked. We
carried this thing. We could’ve just been a trio, but there were
five of us: two guitars, bass, drums, and a lead singer. We didn’t
need horns—we had it in the parts and that’s what people were
used to in the hood. If it didn’t sound like the record, you would
get booed. Bernard and I were responsible for the melodic, the
harmonic, and the bass parts. The drummers we figured would
learn the grooves. We thought about doing it as a duo, because if
Bernard and I showed up, we had it covered. And that’s basically
why we were so tight.
7
feature
feature
NEW YORK
IS BURNING
Voguing moves out of the ballroom and
into the limelight.
WORDS Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
PHOTOgraphy krisanne johnson
8
All photos taken at
the Lab in Brooklyn,
and at Vogue Knights
at Escuelita’s in
Manhattan, NYC 2008.
feature
feature
D
istilled to its core, voguing is ultimately about the look: having
it, giving it, working it. Although it’s usually difficult to pinpoint
the exact moment a street movement becomes a worldwide
phenomenon, voguing’s roots in the mainstream can be traced to
a single street address: 72 Thompson, a boutique in Soho where,
in 1981, Swiss culture-maven Susanne Bartsch first started importing high-end
clothing for nightlifers. (She would eventually expand to 465a West Broadway
with help from silent partner Peter Gatien, the notorious proprietor of New York
clubs like Limelight and Tunnel.) Decorated “like a Dali-esque funeral parlor,”
according to fashion iconographer Simon Doonan’s Wacky Chicks, Bartsch’s
store was the first place in New York City to sell clothing by then-burgeoning
London avant-garde designers like John Galliano and Vivienne Westwood.
Whatever was new and fashionable, the voguers coveted. Cutting-edge designs went a long way on the vogue runway, down which those with the most
stylish walk, dance, and face won trophies and prizes—but most of all bragging rights—at drag balls that took place first in Harlem, then all over the
city. Because many of those in the mostly poor, gay, trans, black and/or Latino
ball scene weren’t moneyed enough to pay for a Galliano gown, they would
descend on Bartsch’s stores to shoplift the
next-level pieces she stocked. They’d drape
themselves in designs that sparkled and
flowed as they fashion-posed for uptown
fame. Bartsch, familiar with “mopping”
(stealing in drag parlance), learned to recognize her own grifted garments on the vogueball runways. “I would go to the balls,” she
laughs, “and they would be wearing the
items they had mopped from me!” Rather
than disassociate with ball culture and the
disadvantaged fashionistas who appreciated
her taste, Bartsch felt her calling was to be
in nightlife. Inspired by her “shining star”—
the legendary vogue dancer Willi Ninja—she
organized the Love Ball, the event that set
off the fuse that exploded voguing all over
the world. “I was blown away by the way
this extremely socially and economically
challenged community overcame their ob-
10
stacles,” says Bartsch. “They transformed potential roadblocks into brilliant
creativity, art, beauty, and success.”
Staged on May 10, 1989, the Love Ball was a high-end, celebrity-studded charity affair to raise funds for the Design Industry Foundation for AIDS. It was the
first large-scale vogue ball that exposed outsiders to the culture en masse. Where
balls had been held mostly in Harlem community centers or, on occasion, Midtown clubs, the Love Ball’s competitions were now being judged by the likes of
supermodel Iman and Vogue magazine’s editor-at-large Andre Leon Talley. Never
before had so many of New York’s wealthy and elite been exposed to ball culture.
Legend has it (and Susanne Bartsch agrees) that the Love Ball was where Madonna saw voguing for the very first time. They raised $400,000 for AIDS research
that night. Chi Chi Valenti, a journalist and the “Brooke Astor of New York nightlife” (as Marc Jacobs called her), would write in the program for the Love Ball’s
1991 sequel that the first event was “simultaneously a massive coming-out party
for the uptown ball culture, and the end of a certain naiveté that had been inherent in that culture.” A year later, Madonna would release “Vogue,” with a David
Fincher-directed video starring Ninja and voguers Jose and Luis Xtravaganza of
the House of Extravaganza. Another Love Ball judge, Talking Heads’ David Byrne,
told the New York Times, “It was kind of confusing. I saw things I never saw before.”
What Byrne saw then, and what he might
see at a ball now, are two entirely different
animals. Ball culture has traced an unexpected path: voguing went from underground
balls at local VFWs to dancing with Madonna
on the Billboard charts before diving back
underground. In 2008, the culture began
bubbling up outside itself once more—interest is presently at its height, mostly owing to
the increasing popularity of vogue house DJs
like MikeQ and Vjuan Allure.
Consequently, voguing has branched out
as well, split up into subcategories of style
and execution for the purpose of the dance
battle. Vogue Femme and Vogue Dramatics are two of the most popular categories
among younger voguers today, while Old
Way and New Way are categories that delin-
eate specific eras. Old Way, the fundamental platform of voguing, developed in
the 1970s with poses cribbed directly from the extreme modeling in Vogue—
hands on hips and elbows out in a turkey splay—but always incorporating balletic grace, Fred and Ginger’s creamy swiftness, and the strength and vim of
martial arts. An Old Way voguer sliding down the runway might punctuate a
catwalk with a pop, dip, and spin.
New Way began developing in the 1990s and is more gymnastic than Old Way,
with emphasis on elasticity and floor moves that incorporate splits and other
leg contortions. With Vogue Femme, there are fluid moves like the duckwalk,
a plié shuffle accompanied by butterflying hand language—its lucid femininity
makes it especially appealing. “When you get into vogue categories, there are
so many guidelines and rules for Old Way and New Way. Voguing Femme has
more expression and elements to it, and a lot more people can do it because it’s
more interpretive,” explains Vjuan Allure, who’s been DJing balls since 1999 and
invented the mutation of Masters At Work’s “Ha Dance” (sometimes known as
the “Allure Ha”) that most voguers still move to in 2013.
If Femme is the least rigid, Vogue Dramatics is the flashiest style, and the
one that most of America would recognize, thanks in part to Leyomi Mizrahi’s
acrobatic, star-turn suicide dips (also known as “sha-blams”) on 2009’s America’s Best Dance Crew, which gave voguing its most visible mainstream platform
since 1993 or so. Though Madonna had given vogue an unprecendented level of
attention, the shallow exposure ultimately positioned it as a fad. Because most
of America thought voguing was simply a dance—and weren’t invested in the
culture from whence it came—it fell away from mass consciousness almost as
quickly as it came. For some, this was fine: drag-ball culture had flourished since
1920s Harlem, and a lack of interest in voguing from outsiders didn’t change its
path. But it had its own negative effects. As DJ Sprinkles wrote in the liner notes
for his 2009 exegesis “Ball’r (Madonna-Free Zone),” “[Madonna] had taken a very
specifically queer, transgendered, Latino, and African-American phenomenon
and totally erased that context with her lyrics, ‘It makes no difference if you’re
black or white, if you’re a boy or a girl.’ Madonna was taking in tons of money,
while the Queen who actually taught her how to vogue sat before me in the club,
strung out, depressed, and broke.”
“What do you get out of [sha-blamming]? Slamming your fucking body on the
floor,” laughs Michelle Visage. Where there is history, there will be traditionalists. Visage was first taught to vogue by Willi Ninja in the mid-’80s and, with the
House of Ninja, was the first-ever biological woman to walk in a vogue ball. (True
to her name, she was a face-and-body queen, and she often won her categories.)
“Not to take away anything from these kids, and there is a talent to it, but I think
there is not as much thought into it [now]. You gotta evolve, but where it came
from is missing in New Way. Voguing has a base—it’s emulating models in a
magazine. I think that’s really where my problem is. If somebody can morph the
two, and keep some of the old aspects with the new sha-blamming death drop,
that could be really interesting.”
Visage still does Old Way, and performed in clubs several times a week
through the ’80s, while both attending college and being the bleached-blonde
lead in the freestyle trio Seduction. (Madonna once accused Visage of trying to
steal her look, though watch the video for 1989’s “It Takes Two”—which is full
of voguing—and it seems like it might be the other way around.) Some of the
New Way acrobatics—and, to some, the de-purification of the dance—point back
to its mainstreaming, as well as more formally schooled dance students joining the culture. Salim ‘Slam’ Gauwloos was one of them, a young professional
dancer who joined Madonna’s troupe and became the handsome white face of
her “Vogue” video. Jose Xtravaganza taught him the moves, which Slam now incorporates into his contemporary dance classes at Alvin Ailey Extension School.
Most recently, a Longchamp ad starring supermodel and dancer Coco Rocha
gave a touch of secret Old Way and catwalking to high-end handbag consumers.
The mainstreaming of vogue was always something Willi Ninja saw from
the corner of his eye. After Madonna’s house hit blew up, his dancing and style
a crucial part of it, he became a fixture in music videos and walked the runway
for Jean-Paul Gaultier. Most significantly, Ninja was the first voguer to bring the
dance to an institutional-art level when he collaborated on postmodern works
with choreographer Karole Armitage. He would later perform with Doug Elkins
at the Joyce Theater, and take his work “The House of Ninja” to Summerstage
in Central Park and to the prestigious Théâtre de Suresnes Jean Vilar at the Sorbonne in Paris. Ninja, who passed away in 2006 from AIDS-related heart failure,
is remembered not just because he was one of the most beautiful dancers ever,
but because he had the foresight and confidence to know that voguing could be
preserved as an important American art form. Mainstreaming ball culture didn’t
have to be solely about commerce.
In the 21st century, painter and performance artist Rashaad Newsome understands this as Ninja did, and is a descendant of his legacy, preserving voguing
and ball culture in institutions as much as possible. In 2010, Newsome brought
voguing to the Whitney Museum via a multimedia performance and through two
videos that showcased New York voguers Shayne Oliver and Twiggy Prada exhibiting Vogue Femme and New Way styles. “I think the reason voguing remained
underground was because it was tied to the black and Latino gay community,”
says Newsome. “The vogue scene came out of a need for a safe space for the black
and Latino gay community to express themselves... As an artist, I feel that the
practice of vogue is very much a part of performance-art history, and as museums care for, conserve, and collect artifacts and objects of artistic, cultural, or
historical importance, I can think of no place better for the pieces to live.”
The first time Newsome ever saw anyone voguing, it was 1993. He was 17, at
a house party, and over the moon. “I was a huge hip-hop fan and I had never
seen anyone ‘break’ like that,” he says. Though breakdancing and voguing are
two entirely different styles set to entirely different music (hip-hop and house,
respectively), there was a time in the 1980s when the two intersected and informed each other.
Long before the dances were immortalized in museums and NYC’s hallowed
dance halls, they criss-crossed on the streets and, most significantly, the clubs.
The locus points were multigenre venues: voguers were at Red Zone, the Underground/the Sound Factory, Latin Quarter, and Escuelita; they bumped up
with b-boys at the Loft and, later, the Tunnel. “Straight up, it all came up in the
clubs and the streets,” says Jonathan Lee, who learned to dance from Robin
Dunn, Crazy Legs, and Mr. Wiggles, and now teaches hip-hop dance at the
Alvin Ailey Extension School. “Especially with voguing culture and the gay
community, but people would dance in the club the way they wanted to dance.
That’s where everyone could and can meet. People in the club are gonna dance
regardless of their style. Even now, people who are lockers will lock to the music and voguers will vogue to the music—it just comes down to the DJ. At the
club you can find everyone.” The Loft during the 1980s was the most significant
intersection of b-boying and voguing, in which breakers and banjee boys—
gay men who dress socio-typically “masculine”—would combine elements of
Old Way and popping and locking, creating a still-enduring style known as
“lofting.” But in the late 1980s, as b-boying’s popularity waned and voguing’s
phased in, the denizens passed each other on the way.
As voguing has been codified in museums and commercials, one important
aspect to Newsome is how its past speaks to its future, and vice versa. “My interest in vogue is how it functions as a language that is constantly in a state of
flux,” he says. “One cannot really go to a school and learn how to vogue. You go
to where it’s happening, learn the language and make it your own. So in a lot
of ways, whenever you encounter vogue, you’re encountering what’s in front of
you and everything that came before it. [We should encourage] more experimentation of the language of vogue, so that it can live forever.”
11
COLUMNS
COLUMNS
L A N D M A RKS
A column on
the gear and
processes that inform
the music we make.
par q uet c ourts ’ light up gold, one
of 2013’s most celebrated rock albums, was recorded in the band’s practice space on a Tascam 388 eight-track reel-to-reel. Jonathan
Schenke, who engineered and mixed the record, explains how the limitations of budget,
space, and equipment forced him and the band
into a number of unique creative decisions.
RBMA: You do a lot of off-site recording.
Jonathan Schenke: I started doing mobile
recording out of necessity. My friends didn’t
have money to rent a studio, so we’d record
where we could. You can get solid sounds
wherever, it just requires a slightly different
approach. I generally close-mic everything,
baffle the amps to cut down on bleed, and
ditch the room mics.
LO G O S
The origins of
iconic images from
NYC's musical history
explained.
for original punk rockers Johnny, Joey,
Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone, less was more.
Their economy of dress—tight tees, biker
jackets, ripped jeans, and canvas sneakers—
matched the efficiency of their sound: fast,
compressed, unadorned rock ’n’ roll. An
odd bunch from Forest Hills, Queens, the
Ramones banded together in 1974 as brothers
in musical ambition (if not blood). But friend
and artist Arturo Vega visually communicated
a “more is more” approach in their logo,
enlarging the Ramones name in a heavy,
highly visible typeface and incorporating the
Great Seal of the United States.
Vega designed many of the band’s graphics
throughout the Ramones’ 22-year career.
Born in Mexico, he was enamored with
symbols of power, specifically the bald
eagle in US heraldry. “I always thought of
the Ramones as… an all-American band,”
Vega told the Fringe Underground site. In
a 2012 podcast interview with Going Off
Track, he described modeling the eagle on
the Ramones t-shirt design from the reverse
side of an Eisenhower dollar. An early poster
centers on Vega’s midsection and his eagle
belt buckle, blown up from a photo-booth
12
self-portrait. Punk magazine cofounder and
Ramones illustrator John Holmstrom recalls
that image: “There was a vague feeling
of S&M about it, and its simplicity to me
defined the New York punk rock scene.” In
1976, the bicentennial year, Vega decided
upon the eagle from the US seal, modified the
iconography, and added the band members’
names (which would change with the lineup
over time). The emblem first appeared on the
back of the Ramones second album, Leave
Home, released in January 1977.
“Using a national symbol was a perfect
move back then, because the punk scene
was trying to distance itself from the hippie
scene,” says Holmstrom. “What better way to
do so than embrace patriotism?”
For the band name, Vega wanted to be
simple and direct with an all-caps sans
serif, eventually settling on Franklin
Gothic, the same font that would appear on
the Run-DMC logo a decade later. Most of
the original Ramones have passed on, but
Ramones t-shirts are as present as ever.
The logo, Holmstrom says, “has become so
iconic, not just for the band but for all of
-Sue Apfelbaum
punk rock.”
RBMA: Where did you track the Parquet
Courts record?
JS: We recorded Light Up Gold in the band’s
practice space. We had the drums on one side
of the room with the amps along the other,
baffled with blankets and the other amps left
in the space. We made a vocal-booth situation
with some blankets hanging from a lofted storage shelf, and I had my setup on a table in the
corner. It was all live-to-tape, but we were able
to get enough isolation to do punch-ins and
keep the mix tight. I was monitoring on headphones, which was the hardest part.
RBMA: You recorded on the Tascam 388. How
did the limitations of eight tracks affect your
process?
JS: It forces you to commit to your decisions,
whether it’s combining multiple things on one
track or just choosing a take. I love it. It makes
us all work that much harder to get things
right. Most of the percussion and background
vocal takes are just one mic with everyone
spaced around it to get a good blend.
Or we’d have multiple instruments on the
same track but in different sections of the
song, like background vocals in the chorus
and a guitar solo in the bridge. It’s kinda crazy how much you can fit onto eight tracks if
you really try.
RBMA: Would you say there’s a 388 sound?
JS: The 388 definitely has its own sound, no
doubt about it. It’s a quarter-inch eight-track,
so you’re dealing with 1/32 inches for each
track to store sound. Like any other form of
compression, you start to lose detail in the
low and high frequencies as you cram sound
into that tiny space. The 388 does it in a cool,
unique way—really thick, compressed, and
midrange-y. There’s also this little bump in
the upper frequencies before they roll off that
makes the cymbals on Light Up Gold sound
like static, this wild sounding ssshhhhh. It
sounds “wrong,” but in a really good way.
Crotona
Park Jams
The places, spaces,
and monuments of
NYC's musical past,
present, and future.
a p r evi ous edition of this column focused on
Queensbridge Housing Projects, the largest housing development in North America and the onetime residence
of hip-hop legends such as Marley Marl and Roxanne
Shanté. If raw talent came from the projects, that talent
was honed during park-jam sessions that would unfold
in public spaces like basketball courts and parks across
the city.
One such public-gathering place is Crotona Park
in the South Bronx, a few miles to the northwest of
Queensbridge. Crotona was a major locus for jams in
the ’70s and ’80s, but as hip-hop became a global phenomenon, the original park-jam scene faded. Christie
Z-Pabon, an events producer who came to New York
in 1996 from the Pittsburgh suburbs, was determined
to maintain the tradition; she and her husband, Jorge
Fabel Pabon, founded Tools of War, a grassroots organization devoted to preserving and promoting early hiphop culture. This summer marks the tenth anniversary of their Crotona Park Jams, a party for DJ pioneers
that has featured Grand Wizard Theodore, Kool DJ Red
Alert, Grandmaster Caz, Biz Markie, Grandmaster Flash,
Jazzy Jay, Kurtis Blow, and Afrika Bambaataa, among
others. “I think we’ve done great for Bronx tourism,”
says Z-Pabon. “People can see what a true old-school
park jam was like back in the day.”
Why invite just legends? Z-Pabon says that, to her, it
seems only right to do so. Tools of War hosts other, more
intimate park jams in Harlem, such as Spanish Harlem
Hop in White Park, and Digger’s Delight in St. Nicholas
Park, but Crotona belongs to what Grandmaster Caz,
the event’s longtime MC, calls the “big-boy stage.” “We
give them space so that they don’t have to compete with
Skrillex,” Z-Pabon says with a laugh. “Not that I’m inviting Skrillex.”
Z-Pabon and her husband host the Crotona Park
Jams every Thursday in July (because of the Fourth of
July holiday, the 2013 season begins on July 11), so that
you can personally witness history in the remaking.
One thing has changed, however: “Grand Wizard
Theodore says that he looks out into the audience and
sees all the people from back in the day, but now they
bring their kids,” says Z-Pabon. “We make it so everyone
feels welcome.”
-Adrienne Day
Top
5…
INFLUENTIAL NYC
Nightclubs
PRESENTED BY
Though not a complete history of
nightlife in New York, a handful of
clubs have impacted the music world
in such a way that their presence
is still felt to this day. Here are
Turntable Lab’s top five.
THE BRONX
past featured landmarks
1 max neuhaus’
12 Daptone
“times square”
2 The Thing
Records
13 The Village
Secondhand
Store
Gate/Life/Le
Poisson Rouge
3 The loft
14 The Anchorage
4 Marcy Hotel
15 Electric Lady
5 Andy Warhol’s
Studios
Factory
6 Queensbridge
Houses
1
7
7 Record Mart
8 Deitch
6
5
8
5
Projects
9 Area/Shelter/
7
Vinyl
10 Studio B
15
11 Market Hotel
QUEENS
5
13
3
9 8
2
10
8
MANHATTAN
4 12
14
12
11
What: Crotona
Park Jams
Where: South Bronx
Why: Hip-hop
legends spin for a
new audience
When: 2003-present
STATEN ISLAND
BROOKLYN
1 2 3 4 5
The Mudd Club
It was the crossroads of the uptown
and downtown scenes:
punk rock, no wave,
and everything in between. Cultural icons
such as Jean-Michel
Basquiat, David
Byrne, and Madonna
were all part of the
historical transitional period exemplified by the Mudd
Club.
The Roxy
The roller disco
turned dance party supported hip-hop
just as it was finding its voice and on
its way to becoming a
full-fledged cultural
movement.
Limelight
The most notorious
of Peter Gatien’s
nightclubs, Limelight
opened in a renovated
gothic church in the
early ’80s. The club
hosted the quintessential ’90s club-kid
scene. Techno, house,
and industrial drew
the masses, but it
was the drugs that
made the headlines.
Tunnel
Mecca Sundays at the
Tunnel are forever marked in hip-hop
history. Funkmaster
Flex on the decks,
Mobb Deep, Jay-Z, and
thousands of others
in attendance every
week. It encapsulates
the transition from
Golden Era to jiggy
in all its glory.
APT
APT was one of the
last true Manhattan
spots to offer quality music pre DJ-overload. It featured a
lineup of solid selectors including our
own Snack N Cmish, DJ
Spinna, Bobbito, In
Flagranti, and Lord
Finesse sometimes all
in the same week.
-Nick sylvester
13
New York story
Gray band members,
clockwise from left:
Vincent Gallo, Wayne
Clifford, Nick
Taylor, Michael
Holman, Jean-Michel
Basquiat, NYC 1981.
new york story
Going Gray
The night I started a band with Basquiat.
WORDS Michael Holman (as told to Mike Rubin)
photo marina d
Michael Holman played a key behind-the-scenes role in the explosion of New York City’s hip-hop
culture in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Among his accomplishments, Holman introduced Malcolm
McLaren to rap music; was the first writer to use the term “hip-hop” in print while at the East Village
Eye; and promoted shows by artists like Afrika Bambaataa, Grand Wizard Theodore, and DJ Kool
Herc at the East Village club Negril. Before all that, however, Holman brought uptown graffiti writers
and the downtown art scene together for the first time. Holman shared with us the story of how he
threw the historic Canal Zone party and the night he met artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, his future
partner in the experimental noise band Gray.
i was a wall street banker when I first came to New York. When I tell
people that, their mouths drop. It’s hilarious, I know, but the first important job
I got was as a junior credit analyst at Chemical Bank. [I was] ready to rise up the
ranks because I graduated from the University of San Francisco with a degree in
economics, so it was kind of a normal thing to do. I was there for a year, and on
the weekends I was smoking pot with my friends. [During that time] I helped
create the Canal Zone party, which brought the downtown and uptown artists
together for the first time; [it was] a massive, historic party—and the first time
I met Jean-Michel Basquiat—created by myself, Stan Peskett, and Fab 5 Freddy.
Stan Peskett I knew from San Francisco. He was friends with the Tubes, and
the Tubes were a band that I was in—that was my baptism into show business.
When I came to New York, Peskett was like the only person I really knew. So, I’m
working at Chemical Bank and on the weekends I’m hanging out with him and
smoking pot and helping him with his installations that he’s doing for Fiorucci
and Canal Jeans and things like that.
One day I’m reading in the Village Voice a little article about the Fab Five
graffiti group which was made up of Lee Quiñones, Slave, Doc, Mono, Slug, and
Fab 5 Freddy, and what they were offering in this little article was, “We’ll come
to your home or place of business and do giant graffiti burners for a price.” That
was the little blurb that they had; it was really funny, and I called them up and
invited them over. Now Stan and Freddy and I are hanging out, talking about
cool ideas, talking about what [Freddy] was into, which was this whole urban
uptown hip-hop thing—they were from Brooklyn mostly but I’m talking about
Harlem and the Bronx—and so he’s hipping us to that world and we’re hipping
him to our world and back and forth. We thought, “Why don’t we put on a party
and invite all of the Fab Five crew to do giant burners and invite the downtown
artist world so they can see what this is upfront and meet these guys—so that
these artists from two different worlds, two different walks of life, can meet each
other?” And so we did.
[Canal Zone] happened on April 29, 1979, in a loft building on the north
side of Canal Street. [It was at] Canal and Greenwich, about two blocks west
of the river; it wasn’t too far off the West Side Highway. The Fab Five crew did
these giant graffiti burners on giant sheets of clear plastic, which was a kind
of novel thing to do, and we invited the whole downtown scene and it was an
amazing party. Jean-Michel Basquiat had heard about this—he didn’t know any
of us and none of us knew him, but we had heard of him because we had all
seen the SAMO graffiti tags everywhere that he was doing with Al Diaz. Jean
shows up early at the party, at the beginning before it really got started, told
us who he was, and demanded to have participation as an artist in this, so we
were like, “Yeah, sure.” That was the nature of those days. Somebody shows up
with a shaved mohawk hairdo, a black guy looking so weird and different and
avant-garde and says, “I want to be down too. I want to do something too!” The
nature of that time was like, “Okay, sure, what do you want to do?” And so we
got him a big nine-foot-wide roll of photo-grade paper, and he did a piece that
said “Which of the following is omniprznt? A. Lee Harvey Oswald, B. Coca-Cola
Logo, C. General Melonry, D. SAMO ©.”
[Meanwhile] I was doing all these interviews on video as Word Man. I’m interviewing Lee Quiñones and I’m interviewing this person and that person and
then I interview Jean. I was kind of doing this goofy thing where I would ask
people questions and then pull the microphone away before they could answer
and then ask another question. I don’t even know why I was doing it. I was just
being a dick, being a California kid not knowing how to be cool in New York. So
I’m interviewing Jean and I’m doing the same thing and he’s excited because
he’s never been on video camera being interviewed. He was so far ahead of everyone; he was like five years younger than me, maybe 19 at the time, but he was
14
50 years older than me in terms of sophistication and understanding and making it as an artist. He was 50 years in front of everybody. And he knew, “I have
to be at this party, I have to be videotaped, I have to be there.” And it panned
out. It became part of his legacy, part of the fodder that built up his life story
and career. I went up to him off camera and apologized, and he said, “No, that’s
okay. You wanna start a band?” And I was like, “Sure.” I was off the hook—I was
given this second chance to be cool again.
In the beginning of Gray, it was myself, Jean, an old high-school buddy of
Jean’s named Shannon Dawson (who would later go on to create Konk), and then
Wayne Clifford. We played this angry, blaring, loud, confrontational music. Sometimes it was kind of mellow too, but it was very minimal, and I thought it was really good. It was like nothing anybody else did. Shannon played trumpet, Wayne
played a keyboard, I played some drums, and Jean played either clarinet or this
Wasp synthesizer that I got him. Shannon [eventually] left the band because his
horn playing really wasn’t fitting—it was forcing us into a groove that wasn’t
allowing us to really experiment and explore, so we kind of kicked him out of
the band, I hate to say, and then we brought in Nick Taylor, who played guitar.
Our attitude was like, “Let’s embrace the idea that we don’t know how to play
our instruments and let’s only have people in the band who don’t know how to
play instruments. Let’s approach the instruments in a new way. Let’s play them
as if we were aliens from another world and we had no idea how the instrument
was meant to be played, but we knew beautiful music and sound when we heard
it.” We were completely turning the meaning of the instrument on its head and
finding new ways to create unexpected sounds from the instruments, and that
became the real cornerstone of our music. Sometimes we’d play our instruments
in a conventional way, sometimes we wouldn’t. Jean started to play the electric
guitar with a little file, on the floor, with the strings completely loose; he’d be
pulling this metal file across the guitar strings and it would be making these
plink-plunk-plink-plink-plunking sounds. [He would also] play the Wasp synthesizer in such a way that… I have that same synthesizer and I cannot figure
out how he got these sounds, just brilliant sounds.
“Ignorant” was a term that we used back then that kind of captured who we
were. A carelessly done or casually created work of art or sound or music that
should not have worked but [actually] worked brilliantly—that was our definition of ignorant. So like a Godard film would be, “Oh man that is so ignorant,”
or a piece of music or sound you made or the way you were dressed or painting
or whatever. The greatest compliment you could give it was ignorant. It was
something that shouldn’t work, [that] should be horrible but is brilliant, and
that was our favorite aesthetic. It was our aesthetic: ignorance.
If we had stayed together at this critical juncture in ’81, we probably would
have released music. But here’s what happened: Jean blew up as a painter. He
did that PS1 show and his career just exploded. He was like, “I’m not going to
be a famous painter who’s in a band.” That [would have been] okay [for an]
unknown in the early days, in the late ’70s, but by ’81 or ’82, for Jean to have
blown up the way he was going to, he had to design his career correctly. He had
to be very calculating, and one of the calculations was that he had to leave the
band, and it kind of spread us to the far corners. I got heavy into film, Nick got
heavy into DJing, Wayne got heavy into painting, so we kind of all went our
different ways. But we would have released music if we had stayed together a
little longer.
Michael Holman is a visual artist and filmmaker who teaches at the
School of Visual Arts. He was one of the authors of the screenplay
for Basquiat and the host of the pioneering early ’80s hip-hop TV
show Graffiti Rock.
15
Brian Eno
77 Million Paintings
"disorienting,
challenging,
and—after a
few minutes of
concentration—
beautiful."
-Huffington Post
THROUGH june 2
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