Countercultural Origins

Early rap, salsa, and punk musicians were among the most countercultural, anti-corporate artists around, nurturing their ties to the tough streets and neighborhoods where they grew up long into their careers. Not surprisingly, gangs played an important role in the emergence of much of the best music from NYC in the 1970s. The early hip-hop musician Afrika Bambaataa was a member of the Black Spades, a gang that began in the late 1960s in the Bronx public housing projects and expanded to other states, and many members from the gang would go on to form part of Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation collective of graffiti artists, breakdancers, rappers, and DJs.

Early NYC salsa musicians cultivated street credentials and ties with gangs (as can be seen in Willie Colón’s early albums, El Malo, The Hustler, and Lo Mato). Joe Bataan, a black and Filipino artist who grew up in East Harlem and sang boogaloo, soul, and salsa for Fania Records, was for a while the leader of the Dragons, a Latino street gang. Many salsa musicians came up in the ranks of the Young Lords, a Puerto Rican and Latino community organization modeled on the Black Panthers and the largest Latino street gang in NYC. One of the founders of the Young Lords in NYC was the musician, poet, and journalist Felipe Luciano, who was also a founding member of the protorappers the Last Poets, and a major promoter of salsa music with his weekly radio show City Rhythms.

Several early punk musicians came from rough working-class neighborhoods of NYC. Like Jewish mobsters and criminals, such as those of Murder, Inc., who once operated on the Lower East Side and Brooklyn, punks brought with them an aggressive, in-your-face street look, and attitude, often adopting the tough-guy greased-back hair and leather jackets of 1960s Italian, Jewish, and Latino gangs (Alan Vega would often wear a large bike chain as protection).

Early salsa, hip-hop, and punk fought against mainstream corporate control of culture. Rap and hip-hop artists were often sued for violations of copyright; salsa musicians were accused of stealing Son and other Latin rhythms that had become very commercially prominent in the US music industry; and punks made a point of spitting on the corporate idea that musicians had to be professional (or even know how to play); most never fit in with the major music studios.

The NYC music genres assaulted the consumer complacency of the mainstream music industry. Many early rap acts, like Public Enemy, continued the radical tradition of African American public speakers, political agitators, and revolutionary writers such as Malcom X, the Black Panthers, the Last Poets (who grew out of a writing workshop established in East Harlem in 1967), and Gil Scott-Heron.