STYLE WARS: REVISITED
As Martha Cooper and Henry Chalfont’s Subway Art is to print, so Tony Silver and Henry Chalfont’s epic Style Wars is to video, in documenting what would ultimately become one of the biggest cultural movements of the late 20th century, evolving ever onwards into the 21st with no sign of abating.
Any, and we mean any, b-boy or b-girl worth the salt on their fries and the sugar in their shake will know that Style Wars is one of the richest resources for real knowledge on not just graffiti, but a whole gamut of elements that make up the hip-hop spectrum. A soundtrack that will have you popping and locking in your seat, visuals so dope you could easily project it at a party and make guests think you’ve hired a VJ, this is the film for genuine hip-hop heads. But Silver’s razor-sharp editing combined with Chalfont’s virtually obsessive image capturing makes Style Wars way more than the sum of its parts; think a very skinny DJ Kay Slay rapping The Message to Kase2 on an elevated platform, when suddenly the Grandmaster Flash original drops and Kay Slay continues to mime over it; think the legendary Mr. Freeze explaining the difference between ‘the hump’ and ‘the headache’ while the rest of the Rock Steady Crew continue the hilarious juvenile banter that breakdancing started in his mom’s house; think the mighty Skeme arguing in the kitchen with his mother over the merits of being ‘all city’ and her unwitting doodles while on the telephone (‘yes you do doodle dough’); the Seen montage to Dion’s ‘The Wanderer’, the list could go on and on.
Unlike Wildstyle, which was more like Fame for b-boys, Style Wars came with a proprietary sense of aplomb that meant you really could take what was being said as hip-hop gospel: Seen drops knowledge on ‘bits’ and ‘doo-dads’; Crazy legs demonstrates his evolution of ‘the turtle’; Kase2 introduces his ‘superdooley tough work’, a computer rock style so complicated “I don’t think you’d even be able to read it”. There is an undeniable, unavoidable sense of the energy these kids had as they rode the crest of popular culture’s biggest wave since rock and roll and Silver and Chalfont were undoubtedly gobsmacked as direct beneficiaries – you can almost feel their eyes bulging from behind the camera.
Style Wars unashamedly is what it says on the tin: it’s a film about style, oodles of it, and how the kids of New York City were tapping into this newfound reserve and battling to proclaim his or her own as the best. Anyone who doesn’t understand the importance of style in hip-hop, from b-boying to writing, spitting to scratching, from rocking caps to the back to rocking uptowns downtown, needs to do their homework and watch this. Then watch it again. Then watch it again. There are lines so well known in this, that in certain circles you can feel like you’re at a Big Lebowski convention, babbling to others in an indecipherable code of ‘so why is you talkin’ ‘bout it for’s and ‘I kill you man’s.
The re-release entitled Revisited, sees the original in all its carriage-burning glory, accompanied by a wealth of extras even those who own the first would find hard not to get excited by. Nearly an hour of unseen footage in the form of interviews and out-takes, as well as catch ups with a lot of the original artists, features gems such as the stubborn as ever Caps going over burners in a legal spot; a baby-faced Skeme still at odds with his mother; Zephyr and Revolt explaining how twisted they would get when out bombing at that time; Iz the Wiz (RIP) poignantly admitting he would trade every drop of fame for the return of his health (he sadly died of a heart attack on June 19 of this year, having lived with kidney failure, the result of years of breathing in the noxious fumes that gathered in tunnels he would bomb as a kid). Even all the extras from the first DVD release are there including the invaluable ‘Destroy All Lines’, a continuous rolling carriage showcasing some of the best of Chalfont’s flicks and another absolute winner for anyone with a projector and some heads to entertain.
For anyone that already owns a copy of Style Wars, the re-release is a worthy cop (plus when shit is this dope, it’s always good to have a back up right?); anyone who has yet to come into ownership of one of the best documentaries ever made, go buy this now, or we’ll go over all your pieces, for everrrrrrrrrrrr.
John Whybrow
