Outside the Lines With Rap Genius
OTL 45: Michael Holman Exerpt #3 - Accidental History
SameOldShawn: You had one final thought about breaking
Michael Holman: Well, three. Three final thoughts. One is that -- and this is kind of weird and strange, and I think a lot of people may...I don't know how they're going to take this. And again, this is just my opinion, but I've had this verified by many people uptown, who grew up in uptown culture
That the downtown impresarios like myself, Charlie Ahearn, Marty Cooper, Henry Chalfant, Fab 5 Freddy, whatever -- as we're bringing the culture downtown and presenting it to our community, to the rest of New York City, to the rest of the world vis-a-vis the press, we were naively creating a culture that didn't exist
And by that I mean, of course the DJs were doing their thing, and of course the b-boys were doing their thing, and the rappers, and the graffiti artist, etcetera, way before we ever got involved. But they weren't doing it together, under one umbrella. We sort of thought they were. We sort of assumed that they were. I mean, you know, we went uptown and this was going on, that was going on, within a certain vicinity, so this must be a cohesive culture. It wasn't
The idea that b-boys were in crews that had graffiti artists representing them, and the DJ -- that's bullshit. That didn't happen. We thought it did. So we put together this culture and presented it, naively thinking we were just kind of tightening it up a little bit and brushing it off and getting it together and presenting it to our audience. And the whole time, we didn't realize that all these artists were saying, well, we're not going to say anything to Michael or to Freddy or whatever, but, uh, we don't know these guys. We don't know these rappers. We don't know these aerosol artists. We don't know these dancers. We wouldn't normally hang out with them. But since we're getting paid and this is working out and we got a new audience, what the hell? Let's do it!