Were graffiti and rapping and breakdancing as inter-related as everyone thinks?
To this day, I don’t think there’s a clear answer. Now they’re inter-related because people have been saying so for 20 years. But that’s okay. That’s how culture happens. You can decide on culture. It’s 20 years old in that regard so that’s plenty of time. What’s important is that now they’re considered a unified culture. Certainly at that time there was nothing you could look at in a magazine and say ‘there is a culture, it’s called hip hop’. I wouldn’t read this in a magazine and go, ‘mmm, based on that I must go and do this film’. I can’t imagine that. How did you first come in contact with it, then? Were you a club-goer or record collector? Everybody was a club-goer at that point. It was the seventies. I grew up in upstate New York. I came to New York in 1973. I was involved with art groups. I was part of the art community here in New York. In the mid-seventies, there was a movement among artists to get the hell out of art galleries and to go somewhere else. A lot of artists went t
