In our new weekly series, we’re revisiting some of our favorite music movies—from artist docs and concert films to biopics and fictional fantasies—that are available to stream or rent digitally. Spoilers ahead.
It’s 1982 and the 149th Street-Grand Concourse station in the Bronx is teeming with teenagers scribbling in notebooks. They call themselves writers but they are really artists working across all forms of spray-paint graffiti—doing straight letters, doing throw-ups, doing wildstyles. They tag and bomb hoping to go all city, or have their art run across New York via its train lines. Sometimes they sketch their nicknames and calling cards in an intricate form of calligraphy. Sometimes they do more elaborate illustrations of the cops or Debbie Harry.
This footage, from the 1983 documentary Style Wars, constituted the mainstream’s first look into the contentious world of graffiti writers. One, going by Skeme, is seen debating the very meaning of the act with his mother in their kitchen. She doesn’t get it. Going all city? “To what end?” she asks the crew filming them. Skeme retorts, “It’s a matter of knowing that I can do it. It’s for me and other graffiti writers—that we can read it. All these other people who don’t write, they’re excluded. I don’t care about them.”
This is the existential struggle at the heart of Style Wars, one of the earliest documents of hip-hop culture. The movie connects three of the movement’s pillars—rapping, b-boying, and graffiti writing—and follows the kids creating this fledgling subculture while adults try to stamp out the sparks of a perceived insurrection. For the young people tagging, graffiti remade New York in their image. For those chasing them, that image was a blight on a city trying to rebuild itself into a shining metropolis. The artfulness of the film is in how it acknowledges these dissenting sides without ceding to authority. It recognizes the power dynamics at play, even between artists in their own community, and prioritizes the writers—not just their work but their lives, too.
By the early 1980s, graffiti was a serious point of contention in New York City. Mayor John Lindsay declared a war on it in 1972, condemning the “thoughtless behavior which lies behind graffiti vandalism.” Still, no real progress was made in keeping trains clean, even with the city spending $10 million a year on it. In 1977, suffering from a recession, the city brought in Ed Koch as mayor, and he was even more aggressive in his efforts to curtail the art. He recruited celebrities for an anti-graffiti campaign and spent $22 million to build barbed wire fences around subway yards patrolled by dogs. The argument around graffiti began to reflect the broken windows theory: proof that the natural order had been disrupted and that, without swift action, crime would escalate. Graffiti, people believed, could lead to complete anarchy.
But not all agreed. In the Village Voice, critic Richard Goldstein made the case for graffiti as a movement: “Like conceptual art and Pop [Art], graffiti questions the context in which art is appreciated,” he wrote in 1980. “It renews the dream of work for its own sake, the idea of creation as a democratic process—in short, radical humanism.” Photographer Henry Chalfant was making a celebrated career as a graffiti documentarian. Art galleries were showing wildstyles by artists like Noc 167, Daze, and Crash alongside the work of certified street artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. By the late ’80s, graffiti had become a symbol of the counterculture: In Do the Right Thing, Spike Lee spotlit graffiti that read “Dump Koch.”
The anti-graffiti coalition in Style Wars is led by Koch, MTA Chairman Richard Ravitch, and detective Bernard Jacobs. Koch described graffiti as an offense akin to pickpocketing and shoplifting. “They’re all in the same area of destroying our lifestyle and making it difficult to enjoy life,” he says in the film. But these interviews make it clear whose quality of life takes precedence for the city’s leaders. Their biggest problem with graffiti culture is that they can’t just ignore the kids making it anymore.
In contrast, Style Wars really tries to understand the young members of the early hip-hop community. Director Tony Silver shows how rivalry, originality, and technique informed graffiti, break dancing, and the earliest raps. The film is at its best when focusing on what fuels these artists. The b-boy faceoff featured in Style Wars is so important and so taxing to the members of the Rock Steady Crew, you’d think control of their entire borough was on the line. Skeme’s exchanges with his mother illustrate a widening ideological gap within the black family; to her, as a concerned parent, the graffiti writer lifestyle is high risk with no reward, and she is right about the dangers: imprisonment, getting injured on the track, encountering the wrong person during a late-night run. But to Skeme, it feels like immortality is at stake. The idea of preserving the graffiti legacy is furthered by the relationship between 16-year-old Dez, who grew up to become the renowned DJ Kay Slay, and 14-year-old Trap. Dez is like a big brother to Trap, guiding his hand as he learns to write. “I won’t let nothing happen to him,” Dez says. “He can be another Picasso.” Trap’s face lights up at the prospect.
Following the taggers through Style Wars, their enthusiasm becomes infectious, and their rationale becomes obvious. It’s thrilling to hear the kids talk about outmaneuvering transit authorities, watch them infiltrate train yards in the dark and work collaboratively on pieces, and then see the finished products rolling around the city: 3D names reimagined as big, colorful figures, sketches of Campbell’s soup cans that resemble Pop Art. The final products bear so much of the artists’ personalities, down to the way they draw their arrows and shape their letters, it’s easy to see why taggers feel so connected to them.
Maybe that’s why the most compelling conflict in Style Wars isn’t between the writers and the city: It’s between artists—the writers who paint trains and walls—and bombers—the mutineers who tag over the graffiti of other artists. There are more artists than bombers, but the bombers are more active and subversive: After time-lapse footage shows the evolution of the large, wall-covering mural Seen has overseen throughout the film, Style Wars shows that elaborate work completely blotted out with a crudely drawn colorless blob. It’s ironic to hear the artists talk about bombers the way the authorities talk about artists, and even more interesting to hear the bombers explain their agenda: “The object is more,” says Cap, one of the most prolific bombers in the film and its only antagonist under 25. “Not the biggest and the beautiful-est, but more.”
The unifying graffiti artist principle is to have your work appreciated by as many people as possible, but bombers simply believe in quantity and nixing the tags of others. When the artists gather at Grand Concourse to rally against the bombers, it’s almost like a UN summit, with writers from different crews in different boroughs convening to address the bombing menace threatening to overwrite all their work. They take turns coming up with possible solutions and, though they have different philosophies for getting their names seen—some are spammers, others are perfectionists—they share one common goal: to be constantly visible and indisputable in a city that seeks to erase them.
The social politics of graffiti writing and rap music are blatantly parallel, and that is reflected in the Style Wars soundtrack: It’s a trove of early hip-hop songs, including the Fearless Four’s “Rockin’ It,” Treacherous Three’s “Feel the Heartbeat,” and the Sugarhill Gang’s “8th Wonder.” The nascent genre, rising in tandem with graffiti, is the film’s lifeblood. K-Rob Vs. Rammellzee’s “Beat-Bop” plays as a mural of tags is splashed across the screen. Dez and one-armed tagger Kase2 giddily trade bars from Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” on a train platform until the the scene seamlessly transitions into the actual song scoring footage of a changing city, and the film’s point really takes hold: hip-hop was repainting the concrete jungle.
Style Wars is the linchpin of the early ’80s hip-hop canon that includes narrative films like Wild Style, Breakin’, and Beat Street. It won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1984 and became a cult phenomenon. Watching the doc now, it feels like the origin of many now-inarguable truths: that graffiti wasn’t a gateway to violence but an escape from it; that rap wasn’t merely a passing fad; that b-boying could be done professionally; that the spread of hip-hop was inevitable. It showed that the impact of graffiti was, even from its humblest beginnings, bigger than destruction—and it represented its subjects as young creators serious about their craft, with promising futures beyond the train yard. Essentially, Style Wars realized the potential of an entire culture.
Stream Style Wars on Amazon Prime or Tubi, rent it on YouTube
Further viewing: Wild Style (stream on Tubi), Exit Through the Gift Shop (rent on Amazon)
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