Like a burned-out psych band name-dropped in Mojo magazine, the Jackpot Records Film Fest is back. This year’s lineup
includes new documentaries about Austin, Texas’ music scene in the ’60s
(Dirt Road to Psychedelia), crate-digging (Vinyl), and
fated ’60s also-rans the Remains (America’s Lost Band). The
festival closes with a program compiling the best of TV Carnage,
a hodgepodge of the most atrocious television a VHS cassette can hold.
But the festival’s jewel will screen on Tuesday night when Michael
Holman’s Graffiti Rock—the first hiphop show conceived for
a national TV audience—gets a rare public airing.
Today, the legacy of 1984’s Graffiti Rock is mixed. Holman
believes his critics—who claim he merely exploited a nascent
subculture—miss the point. “There’s this assumption that if you
were to go back to the Bronx as late as ’81, everyone was into hiphop,”
Holman said in a phone interview. “But nothing could be further from
the truth. It was still an underground thing, relegated primarily to
junior high school kids.”
With that in mind, Holman focused primarily on the younger
generation who were upholding the scene’s cosmopolitan ethic. “They
couldn’t afford to go to discos. So they partied uptown at parties
thrown by Afrika Bambaataa,” Holman says, referring to the DJ
legendary for spinning everything from James Brown to the
Monkees.
By the time Holman secured the finances to produce the show, hiphop
was gaining critical acceptance with the first album by Run-DMC, who
made their TV debut on Graffiti Rock. But in 1984, television
executives were still unconvinced, and Holman’s pilot was never picked
up.
This impasse only delayed the inevitable. Once hiphop finally
crossed over, it was with gangsta rap in the early ’90s. Here, hiphop’s
growth strayed from the old school’s cosmopolitan roots, to a
conservative obsession with “keeping it real” pumped into millions of
suburban teenagers’ homes via MTV. Twenty-five years after its taping,
one can look at Graffiti Rock not as a harbinger of what hiphop
became, but as a document of a subculture’s dashed possibilities.