As director of the primary hip-hop movie, “Wild Style,” Charlie Ahearn needed a fresh technique to brand his indie film to appeal to a world that wasn’t yet hip to the cultural movement, born within the South Bronx 50 years ago.
So, one summer night in 1983, three graffiti artists created the “Wild Style” mural in Riverside Park — a clever piece of guerrilla marketing that might grow to be the defining symbol of early hip-hop.
“I remember being there watching them [paint], and I look over — there’s a cop automotive about 100 feet away from us,” Ahearn told The Post. “Like all the things we did within the movie, it was totally illegal.”
And for then 17-year-old graffiti artist Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, the dusk-till-dawn task was more like a walk within the park, in comparison with his more daring spray-paint sprees.
“Painting on [subway] trains, which was our principal direction, was at all times illegal, obviously — and it was extremely dangerous,” he said. “You already know, the 600 volts of electricity, running around within the tunnels at midnight. So as compared, I wasn’t nervous.”
On Friday, that iconic “Wild Style” logo created by Goodstone and fellow graffiti artists Zephyr and Revolt will likely be tagged somewhere they almost certainly never expected — on a special-edition Recent York Public Library card marking half a century of the culture Recent York gave the world.
Five many years after the art form was fathered by DJ Kool Herc on Aug. 11, 1973 — at a Bronx birthday celebration for his sister within the recreation room of his apartment constructing at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — the beat of the road is getting loud within the library, with a limited issue of fifty,000 cards.
“At our Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture], we had the unique ‘Wild Style’ soundtrack cassette,” said Brandy McNeil, NYPL deputy director of branch programs and services. “And so we desired to type of do that re-creation with the library card.
“And,” she added, “because we represent The Bronx, and hip-hop began within the South Bronx … we wanted to return to where it began.”
In June 1980, Ahearn met Fab 5 Freddy on the Times Square Show, a pop-up event showcasing underground artists — where a young Jean-Michel Basquiat publicly showed his work for the primary time — and the NYC hip-hop legend pitched the director his idea for “Wild Style.”
“We had been negatively depicted almost on a regular basis — young blacks and Latins — and I assumed, you recognize, ‘We’re not all bad people,’ ” said the previous “Yo! MTV Raps” host, who was born Fred Brathwaite. “I desired to get a technique to showcase that we were performing some creative things. They may not have been all completely legal, in fact.”
And hip-hop — whose 4 essential elements include MCing, DJing, graffiti art and breakdancing — got its close-up when Ahearn wrote, directed and produced “Wild Style.”
Along with working on the music for the film with Blondie’s Chris Stein, Freddy co-starred with the “real-deal pioneers of all of it,” including graffiti artists Lee Quiñones and Lady Pink, rap group the Cold Crush Brothers, and breakdancing squad the Rock Regular Crew.
“I feel the necessary thing that we decided to do in that type of independent underground film space was to have the actors, or the people featured, just about play themselves — do things that they’re type of already doing and related to,” said Freddy, now 63. “So though the film has a narrative, it gives it a documentary feel of Recent York at the moment.”
However the movie — taking its name from the Wildstyle graffiti technique that marked Recent York on the time, which Ahearn describes as “a type of muscular interlocking lettering form” — needed some more promotional pop before it was released within the Big Apple in November 1983.
“Zephyr and Revolt collaborated on the design of the mural,” said Goodstone. “Zephyr did the preliminary sketch on the wall, after which myself and Revolt blocked in all the colours.”
And for Freddy, it’s a really fab technique to give back on the Recent York Public Library, which may also be hosting a Hip-Hop 50 dance party on the Stephen A. Schwarzman Constructing on Fifth Avenue and forty second Street on Aug. 5.
“I used to be at all times within the library as a child, reading and curious,” he said, “so hopefully it touches people in the identical way.”