"Punk Rock Rap": Hip Hop, Punk, and the Integration of the Downtown Manhattan Arts Scene, 1977–83

In the early 1980s, legendary DJ Afrika Bambaataa changed his look. The Bronx-native found his inspiration downtown and began emulating a style, which he felt evoked “the wild punk look.” Bambaataa’s change came when he had a “vision... I’ve got to grab that black and white audience and bridge the gap.” To realize his “vision,” he would routinely invite the predominantly white audiences that he played for at downtown clubs to visit Bronx joints. While he admitted that initially black audiences “didn’t see what I was trying to do” and thought he was “crazy as hell,” eventually, blacks and whites appreciated and engaged with each other’s cultural scenes. This paper will explore a brief moment in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when downtown Manhattan was consumed by what the Bronx hip hop group the Cold Crush Brothers called, “Punk Rock Rap.”

This paper intervenes into the histories of two musics that have traditionally been narrowly studied along racial lines. While hip hop pioneers like Bambaataa, Grandmaster Caz, and Fab 5 Freddy, and their punk counterparts like Blondie, the Tom Tom Club, and the Clash have all emphasized how the two genres are inseparably linked, music historians and journalists have neither stressed, nor, in most cases, mentioned hip hop and punk’s many connections. Yet while the punk and hip hop scenes influenced each other, I maintain that punk rock wielded greater influence over hip hop. After all, in order for hip hop to expand its fan-base, and allow hip hoppers to make money off their craft, hip hop had to come downtown. This paper explains how coming downtown did much to commercialize hip hop, changed the Bronx music scene, and helped create modern hip hop culture by bringing together the previously disparate art forms of graffiti, b-boying, DJing, and MCing.