a price, or a prize? while all three of my readers are priceless, you should definitely get a priZe! i’ll have to think about what this prize could be.

…well the great thing about a major cultural movement is that lots of people get to have their own experience with it.

when the first hiphop night in downtown was being thrown at the roxy i was about 1 years old. so, even for nyc’s lax age restrictions, that would still kinda have been pushing it. needless to say, i was not there personally to witness how rainbowed the very early days of the downtown hiphop culture actually were or not.

however, you’re right, hiphop was not the first to draw a mixed crowd. yet from the accounts in can’t stop won’t stop, from those who were there at the time, and did experience the backintheday days of this movement, it’s unmistakable that the fact that all sorts of different folks were hanging out together in the same place, and having a good time was STILL striking, regardless of what had come before.

swing and jazz and even disco may have all come earlier, but it’s clear that they did not leave enough of a sustainable legacy for the new generation of dance culture to feel like they weren’t inventing the wheel all over again when they did it. no one saw it as “disco’s evolution” (let alone swing’s). so i’m still sticking to my view that the racial integration (which is not the same thing, of course, as racial balance) of hiphop had something to it that was fundamentally different from the earlier goes at it.

perhaps it wasn’t the FIRST, but the first *sustainably* integrated culture.

also, it might help to narrow down an appropriate prize if i know what city (or at least CLOSE to what city) you live in…

This is the crazy talk! Its musically and historically inaccurate. Unless you mean that somehow the “cool”/experimental white kids brave enough to go on cultural safari and piss of their parents rocking run DMC or Whoodini is desegregation. Not to beat up on you (loved your post on DBoyds site which is how I ended up here) But HipHop has not until very recently (call it the mid-late 90s paralelling the rise of “urban” moniker) become the plurality it is seen as now.
Swing, Jazz, Disco, early R&B, all attracted a devoted avantgarde euro-american following but it didnt make the art forms any less racially imbalanced (well maybe except for jazz).

Now that I’m one of your 3 readers do I get a price?