| On screen are the few
images from this afternoon I will remember for a long
time: Jennifer Beals' ripped sweatshirt; the
silhouette of her dance double , nearly nude, splashed
with a bucket of water. It's 1982 and I'm
in Menlo Park Cinema watching Flashdance. Me and my
friends don't know what to do with all our new
hormones. At one point in the film, Beals' character
stops to watch these acrobatic kids dance(Does she
join them at some point?) in the street. Among them
are Crazy Legs and Mr. Freez of the Rocksteady Crew.
It's 1977. I just finished another family dinner
-- adobo, rice, pinakbet. The meal is silent except
for my mother slapping the roaches on our yellow walls
with her tsinelas. In the basement, I've got
the tin foil just right on the rabbit ears of my parents'
black and white TV. Tonight on What's Happening,
the Rockets only let Rerun dance with them on stage
because he's fat. I'm trying to copy his
moves. Rerun's style is called Boogaloo. B-boys
will adopt this, James Brown, capoeira, and more.
1983. I live in suburban New Jersey. Westervelt Ave.,
a street whose families, except for mine, are all
white. The next street over is Manning. The families
there are black. I have in my hands, this Saturday
afternoon after watching kung fu flicks, my mother's
broomstick. And I'm beatin' the shit out
of one of my mother's maples. I stop to look
at the fence that separates my backyard from the backyards
on Manning and there's a kid standing on the
opposite side watching me. His name is Derrick. He
says, "You know kung fu?" I say, "Yeah."
And suddenly we're beatin' the shit out
of this maple together.
By the end of next week, I meet Duane, also from
Manning, and Freddie and Billy, a couple of Puerto
Rican kids from the projects (though we just call
them "the apartments"). Freddie and Billy
have cousins in the Bronx who teach them how to break.
Me, Derrick, Freddie, and Billy, we all love to dance.
I learn some moves from them, the TV, and whatever
movies are out like Electric Boogaloo and Beat Street.
A fat kid moves in across the street from my house.
He can't dance, but he has a radio big enough
to hurt two human adult s from short range. So we
tell him he's part of the crew. We ask his father
for the cardboard their new refrigerator was packed
in. We treat the cardboard better than we treat our
parents' sofas. We dance on it for the rest
of August until school starts again.
***
My teenage summers in the early eighties simmered
in the era of b-boys and b-girls, "boys"
and "girls" who were into breakdancing.
Those days started a long affair with the music and
culture of hip hop. Fifteen years later, when I began
to write poems seriously, I thought that hip hop's
strongest influence on me would be rap -- the most
obvious connection to poetry -- but I was the worst
emcee (I still am). Obviously what hip hop was to
give me wouldn't be from emceeing. Most of what
I gained as a poet from hip hop didn't come
from graffiti or breakdancing either. It came from
making the music itself.
Poets have long been inspired by distinct yet distantly
related arts, by other contemporary and historical
artistic expressions. John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara,
Elizabeth Bishop -- a well-known list that could go
on for pages for sure -- wrote extensively from and
about painting. And Edwin Denby wrote eloquently about
modern dance. Hearing Bird's "Koko" for
the first time in my early twenties , then reading
Yusef Komunyakaa only a year or two later, I was impressed
how the poet had been influenced by jazz, how it gave
him, among other things, his rhythm. It struck me:
what jazz has been to Komunyakaa, Amiri Baraka, Quincy
Troupe and others, hip hop might indeed become to
my generation. It excited me to think of hip hop as
something to speak to and about, something to listen
to and to learn from.
For the rest of this
essay, look for Pinoy Poetics or send
us an e-mail.
Back to top. |
