Archives of the Ordinary

I have had the opportunity to return this week to the Hip Hop Special Collection at Cornell University. After spending time at the archive last fall and experiencing the collection of materials on hip-hop stored in the Rare Manuscripts Division at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, I was much better prepared for what I might encounter on this visit. I am in Ithaca this week for a few days attending a conference, and am using free spaces in between the various conference offerings to spend time in the archives.

Knowing that I would have a little more luxury of time, I decided that I would request access to materials donated to Cornell by Charlie Ahearn.

What I have found in my first day with the two big boxes of materials that Ahearn donated is mind-boggling, puzzling in some ways, and very touching. Even though I have never met the man and until my first encounter with his materials in the Hip Hop Special Collection knew very little about him and his contributions to hip hop's history and evolution as a global culture, my experience with his materials makes me feel as if I would like to get to know him. I am intrigued by what he took the time to save and chose to donate to Cornell, and I am eager to find out more.

Who is Charlie Ahearn? Most people in hip hop circles know him as the director of Wild Style, a 1983 documentary style film that is regarded as one of the classic films of the early beginnings of hip hop. What I learned from a quick Google search after poring through a series of images, media articles, photographs, handwritten notes, and postcards is that he has been a longtime film director, freelance writer, and radio host. He was born in 1951 in Binghamton, New York, and moved to New York City in 1973 to attend a studio arts program at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With his twin brother John, he became involved with an artists group known as Colab -- or Collaborative Artists.

His interest in hip hop was seeded when he began filming kids in the Smith projects neighborhood where he lived in the late 1970s who were dancing in the streets. "There was a gym at the Smith projects and kids would come there and dance," Ahearn said in an interview with JayQuan, available at http://www.thafoundation.com/charliea.htm." I distinctly remember hearing the DJ cutting up James Brown , and the kids would drop to one leg , and stick the other leg out in synchronous fashion like a line of guys at once. To this honky from upstate New York it looked like tribal dancing , I had never seen anything like it , and I didn’t know what Breakdancing was at the time. But I did have my camera and I would tape this even though I didn’t know what it was. I was very excited by this." Adding to the mix were giant-sized murals that renowned graffiti artist Lee Quinones was making at the time.

Intrigue with the arts escalated into professional practice as Ahearn began creating films to show in the area projects, interviewing the artists themselves, and then in 1980 meeting Fred Braithwaite ("Fab Five Freddy") who told Ahearn he wanted to talk to him about making movies. From there, he was in the middle of hip hop and his work on "Wild Style" began.

Some of Ahearn's Wild Style contributions were part of the "Now Scream" exhibit that the Cornell Rare Books and Manuscripts Collection (of which the Hip Hop Special Collection is a part) organized in 2013. What I went through at the Hip Hop Special Collection today, however, differed from what I remembered viewing in that exhibit last fall. While I still have several more folders and another big box to go through, what I saw today offered a variety of different perspectives on what hip-hop meant in its beginning years. Ahearn, for instance, saved flyers for a kung-fu school and a range of images featuring martial arts performances, often in publications in Asian languages. He himself described kung-fu movies as "the common bond for '70s street culture as kids from all boros poured into the 42nd Street theaters" in a pitch for a "Wild Style prequel" that he included in the collection. The multi-racial and multi-lingual dimensions of these works interested me as they seemed to speak to the hybridity of forces that cohered into the artistic and cultural practices that are associated today with hip hop. With this poly-cultural focus also came a sense that preparation for war and performance of dance were interdependent. This aspect of Ahearn's collections resonated with understandings of the practice of martial arts that I had picked up in my studies of tai chi in the 1990s as being simultaneously about promoting personal health and preparing one's self for battle and self-defense should the need arise.

Also built into Ahearn's contributions to the archive was a sense through his journalistic writings of living conditions in the New York City boroughs where hip hop thrived. They weren't pretty. Even after the early hip hop artists (Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and DJ Kool Herc, among others) began promoting their messages of self-discipline, knowledge, unity, enjoyment, and peace, life was violent. Ahearn's articles document a shooting at a jam where Grandmaster Flash was spinning as well as violence in the South Bronx neighborhood where his brother John was making plaster casts of individuals for an upcoming gallery show. These "tell it like it is, not how you'd like to imagine it to be" slices of hip hop life are instructive as I continue to try and build my knowledge of a past in which I was alive but did not (could not?) live as those who created hip hop did.

These insights were underscored by a review of "Wild Style" in the collection that described the film as follows: “Shot in the sturdy, no-frills manner of a 1950s industrial documentary, Wild Style rises above the cartoon cooning of feel-good bullshit like Breakin’ (1984) and Beat Street (1984) and Rappin’ (1985). Ahearn mixes into the narrative performances from true schoolers like the Cold Crush Brothers and the Rock Steady Crew, and reveals the roots of hardcore hip hop." The reviewer goes on to note that Wild Style also "takes a political view of the Downtown art scene, celebrating its racial diversity but also exposing its ‘voyeuristic fascination with the other.’ "

I left the collection when it closed at 4:30. Reflecting on the experience later, I thought about what it meant to save and what it meant to discard. One could make an argument that library archives house nothing that is outside the realm of the ordinary. What Charlie Ahearn offered were boxes of pictures, images, newspaper clippings, typewritten pages of manuscripts, posters, flyers, brochures, and materials of a similar nature. They were pieces of his life, and because he became a documentarian of hip hop, they have become valuable to those of us who seek to explore hip hop more. Within this ordinary past emerged something quite extraordinary that is likely to persist for generations to come.