Chapter 1Bronx River Houses

Foreword

Every critic keeps an origin story about himself, and mine was always a story about records. Wu-Tang, Nas, the Marley Marl productions, the whole cold-weather canon I spent twenty years learning to hear well enough to write down. But an origin story is a convenience. It begins where the teller wants it to begin. Mine actually began earlier than any record I ever reviewed, in a courtyard in the Bronx River Houses, with a man who took the loose, ungoverned practices of a burning borough — the DJ, the dancer, the writer on the wall, the kid with the mouth — and gave them a name, a count, and a nation to belong to. I did not come to this book to write around Afrika Bambaataa. I came to write from him. Everything on my beat was downstream of what he built.

That is the debt, and it is the reason I avoided this book for years.

Because to write about Bambaataa is to write about the architect of the culture I have given my working life to — and, since 2016, to write about a man against whom several young men have testified that he abused them as boys, in the same apartment, through the same organization, across the same decades in which he was assembling the thing I love. He denied it. The testimony is contested; accounts converge and one was later recanted; a court entered a judgment against him by default rather than after a trial of the facts. I have not written a verdict. I am not equipped to render one, and this book does not pretend otherwise. What I can say is that the founding myth I inherited does not survive contact with the record intact, and that a critic who loves the culture is obligated to say so.

I expected, going in, that the two stories would sit at a distance from each other — the public founder over here, the private allegations over there, a life I could sort into a bright half and a dark one. That is not what the record shows. Working from the public documents, the accusers' own published accounts, the court filings, and four decades of press, I kept finding the same apartment doing two jobs at once. The charisma that organized a movement and the charisma described in the testimony are not two charismas. They are one, running in both directions through the same rooms. That was the finding that reorganized the book.

So why a book at all, on a man this compromised? Because the alternative is worse. The alternative is the anniversary reel that gives the music six paragraphs and the boys one sentence, or none. Bambaataa named the elements the whole world now organizes hip-hop around; he made a record in 1982 that is still, at this hour, the rhythmic substrate of the most dominant popular music on earth. A figure that consequential does not get to be reduced to a caption, in either direction. He earned the full accounting. So did the people who say he harmed them.

This book tries to hold both without letting either go. That is the only honest posture I found available, and it is the one I have tried to keep.

— Jamal Whitestone, Brooklyn

Chapter 1 · Bronx River Houses

The South Bronx in the spring of 1957, when Lance Taylor was born to a single mother in an apartment in the Bronx River Houses public housing project at 174th Street and Bronx River Avenue, was already, by every available demographic and economic metric, beginning the descent that would, by the late 1970s, make it the most photographed example of urban American collapse since the Great Depression. The Bronx River Houses themselves had been built in 1951, on a footprint of approximately fourteen acres, by the New York City Housing Authority, in the architectural mode of the immediate-postwar public housing development: nine fourteen-story brick buildings arranged around a central courtyard, set back from the surrounding streets behind the kind of perimeter landscaping that the postwar planners had believed would convert the project into a self-contained community. The believing had, by 1957, already begun to collapse. By 1957 the demographic composition of the project had shifted from the mixed African-American, Puerto Rican, and white-ethnic population the Housing Authority had originally envisioned toward a substantially more concentrated Black and Puerto Rican population, as the white-ethnic residents had moved out across the early 1950s in response to a complex of factors including the broader American suburbanization of that period, the federal mortgage subsidies that had favored single-family suburban purchases over urban rentals, and the racial-housing dynamics that had operated, in compressed form, throughout the postwar New York City housing market.

The housing project's origins were not, in the self-understanding of the Housing Authority that built it, particularly modest. The 1951 opening was presented by the Housing Authority as a demonstration of what the postwar urban renewal program could accomplish. The nine buildings would house more than a thousand families in 1,247 apartments ranging from one-bedroom to five-bedroom units, all of them with natural light from windows facing either the courtyard or the surrounding streets, all of them with modern kitchens and private bathrooms, all of them replacing the overcrowded and deteriorating tenement stock of the surrounding South Bronx blocks that the Housing Authority's clearance program had demolished. The clearance had been, in its immediate consequence, the displacement of several thousand families from the surrounding blocks into other sections of the South Bronx and into similar projects under construction in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and upper Manhattan. The displaced families were not always well served by the displacement. But the project, in the formal presentation of its 1951 opening, was a triumph of urban planning and social provision.

By the time Lance Taylor was eight years old, the Bronx River Houses had become, by standards of the broader South Bronx in 1965, a relatively functional public housing development surrounded by an increasingly dysfunctional neighborhood. The functioning of the development itself was substantial. The building had functional elevators (most of the time). The building had hot water (most of the time). The building had functional heating (most winters). The building had a community room on the ground floor that the project's tenants used for various organized activities including youth programs, parenting workshops, and the kind of community-meeting events that the project's tenant association had organized across the previous decade. The building was, by the standards of subsequent decades, an organized social environment. The dysfunction was the surrounding neighborhood. The surrounding neighborhood, by 1965 and increasingly across the late 1960s and the early 1970s, was declining at a tempo that would, by 1977, produce the broadcast moment that the popular memory has fixed on: the Yankee Stadium camera, at the World Series, panning across the burning South Bronx during a Howard Cosell broadcast, the moment condensed in cultural retelling into the line "the Bronx is burning" — a line whose exact wording the historiographic record treats as apocryphal, though the image it names was real. The burning had, by that moment, been operational for nearly a decade.

What the burning consisted of, in operational reality, was the consequence of several intersecting structural conditions: the deindustrialization of the New York City manufacturing base, which had reduced the available employment for working-class residents of the outer boroughs by approximately one-third across the period from 1965 to 1975; the federal urban-renewal-and-highway construction projects that had displaced approximately 60,000 South Bronx residents across the construction of the Cross Bronx Expressway in the 1950s and early 1960s; the heroin epidemic that had begun to spread through the area in the late 1960s and that had, by the early 1970s, become the dominant illicit-economy condition of the neighborhood's commercial life; the deterioration of the older South Bronx housing stock under the pressure of below-cost rents, deferred maintenance, and the institutional failures of the city's housing-court infrastructure; and the systematic arson conducted by landlords seeking to collect insurance payouts on properties whose underlying real-estate value had collapsed below the insured value. The arson was the visible piece of the broader collapse. The fires that filled the air over the South Bronx across the 1970s (at peak, more than 12,000 reported fires in the borough across a single year, a number that worked out to more than thirty fires per day) were symptoms of a structural disintegration whose underlying causes were considerably more boring than the fires were dramatic. The fires were the consequence. The structural disintegration was the cause. The cause was both economic and political; it was both racial and class-based; it was both local and federal; it was both deliberate and accidental.

The most visible deliberate element was the work of Robert Moses, the New York City and New York State construction coordinator whose Cross Bronx Expressway, completed in 1963, had cut through the working-class South Bronx neighborhoods with a seven-lane gash that required the demolition of approximately sixty city blocks of existing housing, the displacement of approximately 60,000 residents, and the physical severance of the South Bronx street grid in ways that isolated the neighborhoods on its north and south sides from each other. The expressway had been Moses's design from the beginning; he had rejected a viable alternative alignment one block south, along the northern edge of the nearly-unpopulated Crotona Park rather than through the populated residential blocks, for reasons that historians continue to debate. The 60,000 displaced residents of the Cross Bronx Expressway project moved, in the main, into the South Bronx public-housing projects, into the deteriorating private rental stock of the adjacent South Bronx blocks, and into the new projects under construction in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and upper Manhattan. The displacement concentrated the poverty the urban renewal was, in its formal self-presentation, intending to alleviate. The concentration produced, across the subsequent decade, the conditions of social and physical deterioration that the burning would make visible.

The 1977 blackout was the most dramatic single event of the deterioration's visible history. On the night of July 13 and into the morning of July 14, 1977, a series of electrical system failures in the Consolidated Edison infrastructure produced a complete loss of electrical power across New York City that lasted approximately twenty-five hours. The blackout, in the well-maintained neighborhoods of Manhattan and the outer boroughs, was an inconvenience: darkness, spoiled food, traffic disruptions. In the South Bronx and in the similarly distressed neighborhoods of Brooklyn and upper Manhattan, it was the occasion for the most extensive looting the city had seen since the labor-market disturbances of the Depression era. The South Bronx looting was not the spontaneous criminality the subsequent journalistic and political commentary would characterize it as. It was the expression of a population whose relationship to the commercial infrastructure of the surrounding neighborhood had been, across the prior decade, one of exclusion: a population that did not own the stores being looted, that had not been able to afford what the stores sold, and that, in twenty-five hours of suspended law-enforcement presence, expressed its exclusion in the form of property redistribution conducted at speed. Approximately 1,600 stores were looted or burned across the South Bronx and the neighboring areas across the blackout period. The damage estimate, in 1977 dollars, was a little over $300 million. What the estimate did not capture was the consequence: that in the aftermath of the looting and burning, entire commercial blocks of the South Bronx were vacant, the stores unable to reopen without insurance settlements that did not arrive. The commercial desertion was the consequence. The consequence was the additional physical deterioration.

Jimmy Carter visited the South Bronx on October 5, 1977, three months after the blackout, on a trip that his advance team had organized as a demonstration of his administration's commitment to the American urban crisis. He was driven through Charlotte Street, in the Crotona Park East neighborhood, a block that had been substantially cleared by the combination of building abandonment and arson. The photographers who accompanied the presidential motorcade documented the rubble. Carter stood in the street in the autumn sunlight and looked at the empty lots and the stripped-out shells of apartment buildings and, turning to his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Patricia Harris, instructed her to "see which areas can still be salvaged" and to get a map of the whole area showing what could be done. The instruction was sincere. The photographs were dramatic. The policy response was inadequate. The Carter administration allocated approximately $70 million for South Bronx redevelopment across the years following the visit. The allocation was roughly a quarter of the 1977 blackout looting-and-fire damage alone. The redevelopment was not, by the reading of the subsequent South Bronx history, particularly effective across the period from 1977 through approximately 1985. The pictures of Carter at Charlotte Street became iconic images of the American urban crisis of the 1970s. The crisis did not end with the picture-taking.

Lance Taylor grew up at the intersection of all of these conditions. He was raised primarily by his mother, who worked, by the various subsequent characterizations Lance himself would give in interviews across the decades, in some combination of clerical, food-service, and housekeeping employment that kept the household above the absolute-poverty threshold but did not provide the economic margin that would have permitted any substantial deviation from the day-to-day operational management of household survival. The household lived in one of the project's nine fourteen-story brick buildings, in a unit whose configuration — three rooms, single bathroom, kitchenette opening onto a small living area — was the standard configuration the New York City Housing Authority's 1951 design had specified for the project's three-bedroom-equivalent units. The apartment would, across the subsequent decades, become operationally consequential to Lance's adult life as the residence at which much of his cultural-organizing work would be conducted across the late 1970s and the 1980s. By the testimony of multiple of the post-2016 accusers, it would also become the residence at which much of the alleged abuse would occur. The two functions of the apartment, operational center of the cultural-organizing work and location of the alleged abuse, were, by the testimony, conducted contemporaneously across the same decades.

His maternal uncle, a man whose name Lance has not, in the public record, identified, was the principal male figure of his early childhood, and was the person from whom Lance, by his own subsequent characterization, first absorbed what would become the political-cultural framework of his adult life: an Afrocentric worldview that traced contemporary African-American conditions to particular historical sources (the slave trade, colonial Africa, the postcolonial liberation movements of the 1960s) and that proposed, as a response, the cultural and political reorganization of African-American identity around an explicitly African heritage rather than around the assimilationist frameworks that the broader American civil-rights establishment was, in the late 1960s, still in many ways operating within. The uncle had records. The records included Sly and the Family Stone, James Brown, the Last Poets, recordings of African political speakers, recordings of pan-African music, recordings of jazz musicians whose work the uncle had identified as politically aligned with the Afrocentric framework: Pharaoh Sanders, Sun Ra, Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Lance, by twelve, was listening to all of them. He was, by twelve, also beginning to organize his own social environment around principles that the uncle's framework had articulated.

What the uncle's record collection was introducing Lance to, in the historical context of the South Bronx of the late 1960s, was a framework that was simultaneously deeply radical and deeply traditional. The Last Poets, the spoken-word collective that had formed in 1968 at Marcus Garvey Park in Harlem and whose recordings across the late 1960s and early 1970s were among the most politically uncompromising of the Black Arts Movement, were the link between the street-corner oral tradition of the African-American South and the coming form of hip-hop. Jalal Mansur Nuriddin and Umar Bin Hassan were performing over percussion on recordings like "When the Revolution Comes" and "This Is Madness" with an intensity and a rhythmic flow that would not be directly translated into a commercial genre until the founding South Bronx DJs gave those rhythms a new context. Sun Ra, the eccentric bandleader who had been recording in Philadelphia and New York since the mid-1950s, was performing a version of Afrocentrism so extreme it was cosmic: his performances claimed ancient Egyptian antecedents, extraterrestrial origins, and a mythology of Black cultural reclamation so sweeping it was less a political program than a religious cosmology. The Art Ensemble of Chicago, with their face-paint and African instruments and avant-garde jazz dissonance, were making a similar claim from within the institutional framework of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians. These were not minor influences. They were the most intellectually demanding Afrocentric cultural-political formations of their period, and the uncle's record collection was giving Lance Taylor access to them in the apartment in a Bronx River Houses tower in the late 1960s. The access was the inheritance. The inheritance was the framework.

The school he attended was Stevenson High School in the Soundview neighborhood of the South Bronx, at the time one of the largest public high schools in New York City. Stevenson, by 1971, was operating as the de facto staging ground for the structural reality of the South Bronx's gang ecosystem. The gangs that organized themselves at Stevenson and at the surrounding South Bronx high schools across the late 1960s and early 1970s were not, in their actual character, the criminal-enterprise gangs that the term "gang" would conjure in the post-1980s American cultural imagination. They were, instead, social-and-protective formations whose primary functions were the management of in-school and out-of-school social conflict among teenage boys, the organization of social events (parties, basketball tournaments, cross-neighborhood walks), and the negotiation of territorial claims that the deteriorating economic geography of the South Bronx had made more operationally consequential than they would have been in a more functional commercial environment.

The major gangs of the South Bronx in the late 1960s and early 1970s were geographically organized and named by the territories they claimed. The Black Spades controlled a stretch of the eastern South Bronx from Soundview through Hunts Point and the Bronx River Houses corridor. The Savage Nomads operated in the northern sections. The Ghetto Brothers, under Benjy Melendez (known as Yellow Benjy) and his brothers, were centered in the area around 174th Street and Southern Boulevard. The Reapers operated around Tremont Avenue. The Seven Crowns and the Savage Skulls held sections of the western South Bronx. The Young Sinners, the Turbans, the Latin Aces, the Bachelors, the Imperial Bachelors, the Dirty Dozens: the names accumulated across the dozens of smaller street formations that organized the social geography of virtually every South Bronx block in the early 1970s. The combined membership of all the South Bronx gangs was estimated by the New York City Police Department in 1973 at approximately 11,000 active members. The statistic, in the cold light of sociological reading, is not primarily evidence of teenage criminality. It is evidence of the depth of the social dysfunction that the decades of urban disinvestment, arson, displacement, and economic abandonment had produced in the South Bronx. The gangs were the organizational response to the dysfunction. They were the social form that filled the vacuum the deterioration had created.

The Ghetto Brothers represent, in the larger South Bronx gang history, one of the underappreciated antecedents of the hip-hop cultural transformation that Bambaataa would subsequently claim and receive the primary credit for. Yellow Benjy Melendez, a Puerto Rican boy who had grown up in the gang culture of the South Bronx, had begun in 1971 to organize the Ghetto Brothers as a gang that did not fight. The organizational experiment had been, in its 1971-1973 version, a sustained attempt to redirect gang energy into music. The Ghetto Brothers had a band. The band played funk and Latin rock at parties organized in the community rooms of the public housing projects. The parties were the cultural predecessor of the hip-hop block parties Bambaataa would, several years later, organize at the Bronx River Houses. Melendez's experiment ended, in December 1971, when a Ghetto Brothers peace envoy named Cornell "Black Benjy" Benjamin was murdered by another gang during a truce negotiation. The subsequent Ghetto Brothers memorial party — a defiant decision to hold a cross-gang gathering in honor of Benjamin's peace work rather than to retaliate — produced the largest single multi-gang gathering the South Bronx had organized to that point. The Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting, as it would subsequently be called, was attended by representatives of dozens of South Bronx gangs and produced a formal multi-gang peace agreement that held, in varying degrees, across the subsequent several years. Bambaataa was aware of the Ghetto Brothers' work; the Bronx River Houses and Ghetto Brothers territories overlapped enough that the two gang communities had regular contact. The precedent was real, and the Ghetto Brothers had shown, before Bambaataa made the same demonstration at larger scale, that gang energy could be redirected through music and through deliberate community organizing.

Lance joined the Black Spades sometime in 1969 or 1970, at age twelve or thirteen. The Spades had been founded in approximately 1968 in the Bronxdale Houses in the Soundview section of the Bronx, by a group of teenage boys whose initial organizational impulse had been the protection of the project's adolescent population from the surrounding South Bronx gang ecosystem, and had spread from there to the Bronx River Houses and the other Soundview-area projects. By the early 1970s, the Spades had grown into the largest gang in New York City, with cumulative chapter membership across the broader Bronx and surrounding neighborhoods estimated by various contemporary observers at perhaps four to seven thousand members. The Bronx River Houses chapter, which Lance joined, was one of the divisions of the broader apparatus. He rose, across the next several years, through the Spades' Bronx River Houses chapter to the position of warlord, the title given, in the Spades' nomenclature, to the chapter member responsible for negotiating territorial conflict and for organizing the chapter's response to inter-gang disputes. The role required, in operational practice, the maintenance of working relationships with the warlords of the surrounding South Bronx gang chapters: the Savage Nomads, the Ghetto Brothers under Yellow Benjy Melendez, the Reapers under various leadership across the period, the Seven Crowns and the Savage Skulls under their respective warlords. The cumulative warlord network across the South Bronx was, in operational reality, a diplomatic apparatus through which the surrounding gang ecosystem managed its inter-chapter relationships. Lance Taylor was, by 1973, one of the senior figures in the apparatus.

The gang ecosystem that Lance Taylor operated within as a Black Spades warlord had, by 1973, developed its own complex internal culture that the subsequent journalistic and cinematic representations of the period have largely mischaracterized. The gang culture of the South Bronx in the early 1970s was not primarily a culture of random violence and criminal enterprise, though violence was present and criminal enterprise was present. It was, more accurately, a culture of social organization that had developed, in the absence of adequate institutional alternatives, its own regulatory apparatus for managing the forms of social conflict that the structural conditions of the South Bronx had produced. The gangs organized social events. They organized basketball leagues. They conducted internal disciplinary processes for members who violated the gang's codes. They maintained, in certain circumstances, working relationships with each other through the warlord-diplomatic apparatus that the prior paragraph has described. They were, in their operational reality, a compensatory social institution, compensating, through gang structure, for the absence of the school-system, employment-system, and community-institutional functioning that the broader South Bronx collapse had depleted.

The single gang event that had the most direct consequence for the subsequent cultural development of the South Bronx was the December 1971 Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting. The meeting had been organized in the aftermath of the murder of Cornell "Black Benjy" Benjamin, a Ghetto Brothers peace ambassador who had been killed while trying to negotiate a truce between the Ghetto Brothers and the Seven Immortals. Benjamin's murder had, in the logic of the inter-gang ecosystem, been an act that demanded retaliation; the Ghetto Brothers, under Yellow Benjy Melendez, had instead responded with the call for a peace meeting at which representatives of all the major South Bronx gangs would gather to negotiate a collective de-escalation. The meeting, held at the Boys Club on Hoe Avenue in the South Bronx, was attended by representatives of approximately forty gangs. The resulting agreement, informal, unwritten, but substantially observed, produced a period of reduced inter-gang violence across the subsequent several years. It was, in the language of subsequent commentators, the first major Bronx gang peace. The Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting's significance to the subsequent hip-hop cultural development was, as the film Wild Style and the subsequent scholarship on the early hip-hop period have noted, considerable: the reduction of inter-gang violence in the post-1971 period was the condition that permitted the block-party culture to develop without the constant threat of gang-territorial violence that would have made public outdoor cultural events unsafe. The peace was the precondition of the parties. The parties were the precondition of hip-hop.

What the warlord position required, in its daily operational reality, was the management of information. The warlord had to know which gang chapters were in active conflict with which others, which territories were being disputed, which figures in the surrounding gang ecosystem were available for negotiation and which were not. The warlord had to maintain, simultaneously, the respect of his own chapter's membership and the working relationship with opposing warlords that made negotiation possible. The role was, in operational terms, diplomatic: it required the sustained management of multiple simultaneous relationships under conditions of ongoing threat. It also required the organizational capacity to translate diplomatic outcomes (truce agreements, territory-boundary settlements) into operational directives that the chapter membership would follow. Both capacities, the diplomatic and the organizational, were the capacities Lance Taylor would, in his subsequent cultural-organizing work, translate from the gang-diplomatic context into the cultural-organizing context. The warlord had been the apprenticeship. The cultural organizer would be the journeyman. The third role, the foundational hip-hop figure, would be the master.

By 1973, when he was sixteen, Lance was the warlord of the Bronx River Houses Black Spades. He had, by sixteen, been operationally responsible for the management of perhaps two hundred Bronx River Houses teenagers' social and protective relationships with the surrounding South Bronx gang ecosystem. He had developed, in this role, the leadership and organizational capacities that would become the substrate of the cultural project he would, three years later, begin to construct under a different name. The cultural-organizing achievement was, by every cumulative reading of its subsequent scale and success, evidence that the leadership and organizational capacities Bambaataa had developed in the gang context were unusually substantial. Not every warlord becomes a cultural organizer. The capacity for the translation was his. The translation would be the work.

What he carried out of the Bronx River Houses childhood was an understanding that the cultural and economic conditions of the South Bronx in the 1960s and 1970s were not, by any honest reckoning, sustainable across another generation, and that the response to the conditions had to be the construction of new institutional and cultural forms that could absorb the energy that the old forms (gangs, illicit economies, decaying housing) were failing to absorb. The understanding would, across the next several years, organize his thinking. The thinking would, across the next decade, produce the Universal Zulu Nation, the four pillars of hip-hop culture, the codification of structure within which the entire post-1980 hip-hop cultural movement would develop.

What the Bronx River Houses childhood had also produced, by the reckoning of every historical account of the period, was a man of tremendous social charisma. The ability to walk into a room full of people who wanted to fight each other and to walk out of the room having prevented the fighting was not a bureaucratic skill. It was the expression of a personality that other people found, in some fundamental way, compelling. The young men of the South Bronx gang ecosystem followed Bambaataa because he was, in the language available to them, someone worth following. He was funny. He was smart. He knew more about music than anyone around him. He knew more about the wider world than anyone around him. He was generous with what he knew, pulling others toward the record collection, the ideas, the vision of the world that the uncle's framework had supplied and that his own subsequent reading and listening had expanded. The charisma was real. It was the engine of the cultural-organizing achievement. It was also, by the testimony, the engine of the access-and-grooming pattern that the cultural-organizing apparatus made possible. The charisma was not divided between the cultural and the predatory. The charisma was single and it operated in both directions simultaneously.

The understanding had its origin in the Bronx River Houses. The origin was the place. The place was the project. The project was the structure within which the rest of the work was conducted. Without the project, the rest of the work, by the historical reading available to anyone examining the period, would not have been done.