Cellphones lit the air like lighters as fans crowded and pushed their way to record a moment in hip-hop history as Slick Rick the Ruler performed a cameo DJ appearance at the Bronx Museum of the Arts on Friday.
The event was a celebration of 50 years of hip-hop and an exhibit launch party for Dianne Smith’s, “Two Turntables and a Microphone” – an homage to the genre through the lens of a Bronx-born artist who was entrenched in the scene.
“Before hip hop became a global cultural phenomenon, it was just about the people in the community having agency in expressing themselves; having a voice when they were rendered virtually invisible” Smith told the Bronx Times.
Smith recalls the devastating Bronx fires of the 1970s and said that despite the horror, the youth was still able to find light in dark times through block parties and a sense of community.
“As much as the Bronx was burning, I still had those memories of joy and I wanted to speak to that with this exhibition,” she said.
Smith’s “Two Turntables and a Microphone,” curated by Souleo, an American curator, writer and events producer, is a collection of multi-media artwork and ephemera that evokes nostalgia of an era where a borough was literally rising from the ashes and forging a new identity and a new language to speak to that identity – the birth of hip-hop.
As part of the exhibit two 12-inch TVs are stacked atop each other. The bottom one showing a clip from a CUNY TV “Arts in the City” episode titled “History of Hip Hop in the Bronx” (2015). In it, several celebrities of the era speak to the genesis of hip-hop and its construction. GrandMaster Caz explains that the four cornerstones of hip-hop are DJing, MCing, graffiti and breakdance. On the other TV plays, “A Decade of Fire” (2018) – a film about the devastating history of the fires that ravaged the South Bronx and left the borough looking like a war-torn nation with its rubble and dilapidated buildings.
On a pedestal nearby sits “Afro Puff” (2009) — a mound of black wire is piled in concentric shapes to mimic the coils of black hair and is adorned with a black power afro pick. The piece is playful while delivering a profound message of struggle.
Several large, rectangular pieces of wood hang on the walls and are covered from corner to corner in an array of differently colored squiggles done in Montana markers – a popular brand among tag and graffiti artists of the time. The wild lines imitate the art of the era.
“By no means do I claim to be a graffiti artist, but I do have a profound respect for that genre,” said Smith.
Born in 1965, Smith grew up on 178th Street and Arthur Avenue and later moved to the Grand Concourse. She attended LaGuardia High School where she hung out with DJ Dana Dane, the Kango Crew and the legendary Slick Rick (then Richard Martin Lloyd Walters). In the late 1970s, they sang and rapped and actively participated in a burgeoning genre. Smith says that the joy she felt on those school days is the joy she hoped to reflect in her first exhibit at the Bronx Museum of the Arts.
Hip-hop has persevered for a half-century at a chart-topping rate and shows no signs of letting up. With four songs currently on the Billboard 100 list and household names like Drake; Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and Nicki Minaj, it is no surprise that the industry raked in $2.7 billion in 2021, an increase from 2020.
On its 50th anniversary, those familiar with its beginnings reflect on hip-hop’s trajectory. “I feel like we need to get back to the essence of hip hop, back to it being a joyous place, back to it being about having fun and community building,” said Souleo. “It’s a little too commercialized, a little too gangsta’.”
With events planned throughout the summer in the Bronx and NYC to commemorate the momentous occasion, hip-hop heads will pack out Yankee Stadium on Aug. 11 — the date of the 50th anniversary — for a concert celebration with some of the industry’s biggest names, including Snoop Dogg, Fat Joe, Lil Wayne, Lil Kim and Slick Rick.
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Slick Rick the Ruler told The Bronx Times, “We’ve had some stagnated problems, but we’re still here.”
And here it seems it will stay.
If you don’t know, you better ask somebody.
“Twoturntables and a Microphone” will run at the Bronx Museum of the Arts through Aug. 20.
Reach ET Rodriguez at etrodriguez317@gmail.com. For more coverage, follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram @bronxtimes
