Get Your Reps In: Legendary New York Street Artists Make Their Mark in “Style Wars”

Style Wars (1983)

The epitomizing image of Style Wars is an easy choice. This seminal hip-hop documentary time and again focuses on a subway car rolling down the track, graffitied from nose to tail with the tags of self-labeled “writers” popularizing a new art form.

Yet it’d be far too simple to say that the legendary New York street artists in Style Wars—Dondi, Kase2 and Seen, to name a few—are using the subway as a moving billboard. Emblazoning trains that carry 3.5 million people a day, their work flows through New York City’s central nervous system. It proves they exist.

Tony Silver’s documentary, which also spends time with the Rock Steady and Dynamic Rockers dance crews, depicts the cradle of hip-hop about to burst. Like any great portrait of an underground movement, Style Wars captures vibrance, a cultural manifesto, cloistral pettiness, opposition from the mainstream, and the constant march of outsider art toward commodification.

New York mayor Ed Koch and the Transit Authority thought they could literally whitewash the subway cars and stop this movement in its tracks. They didn’t realize that the train had left the station. Clinton, Jan. 14.

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