11, 1973 - at a Bronx birthday party for his sister in the recreation room of his apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue - the beat of the street is getting loud in the library, with a limited issue of 50,000 cards. On Friday, that iconic “Wild Style” logo created by Goodstone and fellow graffiti artists Zephyr and Revolt will be tagged somewhere they most likely never expected - on a special-edition New York Public Library card marking half a century of the culture New York gave the world.įive decades after the art form was fathered by DJ Kool Herc on Aug. “You know, the 600 volts of electricity, running around in the tunnels in the dark. “Painting on trains, which was our principal direction, was always illegal, obviously - and it was extremely dangerous,” he said. Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, Charlie Ahearn, Fab 5 Freddy and photographer Martha Cooper - who shot the iconic hip-hop mural in Riverside Park - get their “Wild Style” library cards at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“Like everything we did in the movie, it was totally illegal.”Īnd for then 17-year-old graffiti artist Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, the dusk-till-dawn assignment was more like a walk in the park, compared to his more daring spray-paint sprees. “I remember being there watching them, and I look over - there’s a cop car about 100 feet away from us,” Ahearn told The Post.
So, one summer night in 1983, three graffiti artists created the “Wild Style” mural in Riverside Park - a clever piece of guerrilla marketing that would become the defining symbol of early hip-hop. NY Post concert review: Drake’s MSG concert was anything but ‘A Blur’ĭJ Kid Capri tells Jalen Rose how he helped Kendrick win that PulitzerĪs director of the first hip-hop movie, “Wild Style,” Charlie Ahearn needed a fresh way to brand his indie film to appeal to a world that wasn’t yet hip to the cultural movement, born in the South Bronx 50 years ago. Here’s how to go to Lollapalooza for under $125 How much are tickets to LL Cool J and Run DMC’s Rock The Bells in Queens?