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Discovering Hip Hop: NYC Subway Series

Hip Hop Subway Series

Contributed by Lewis Wasser on 7/2/07

Above A performer raps on an NYC subway train during the Hip Hip Subway Series season finale.

Hip hop, I recently discovered, can be so many things. A relative hip hop amateur, I had always viewed the scene one dimensionally, focusing on the music and missing the existence of the culture that surrounds it. My perspective changed a few weeks ago when I witnessed the season finale of the Hip Hop Subway Series - a collection of outrageous hip hop parties that take place on NYC subway train. For the first time, I saw hip hop at its most pure, at its most intimate with the street, flying downtown through the bowels of NYC. The Hip Hop Subway Series Finale, presented by Beatboxer Entertainment and the Hip Hop Theatre Festival, was an expression of the raw emotion and joy embodied by hip hop culture, a mixture of the rhythm of the train’s movement with the voices and bodies of the people.The Hip Hop Subway Series began with four individuals who, a little over a year ago, embarked on a journey to recreate the more joyful days of their hip hop pasts. The night of Sunday June 3 was its culmination. What had begun as a group of four riders, bringing hip hop music to the street, had grown into the event materializing before my eyes, with anywhere from forty to sixty artists and hangers-on along for the ride. Stylistically, racially, and everything in between, the crowd was the picture of diversity, seemingly united only by proximity and an expansive and varied love of hip hop culture.The organizer of the event, Kid Lucky - aka Pacman, and ensconced in a yellow and black helmet to prove it - of Beatboxer Entertainment, stood at the end of the downtown A train platform in the NYC Port Authority subway station, and began the evening with a “disclaimer” shouted over the roar of passing trains. Lucky explained that he started the tradition of the Hip Hop Subway Series because the business surrounding the music was “wearing me down and making me someone I didn’t want to be.”

In a follow up conversation a few weeks following the finale, he expanded on this theme; likening his love of hip hop to a man’s love for a woman, he stated that one has “to remember when it gets rough why you fell in love” initially. The Hip Hop Subway Series served as a way to remind himself of what had drawn him to hip hop to begin with. By bringing hip hop to the subway, he was emulating a tradition started by Tamacia Kastner, who he describes as “probably the most underrated woman in hip hop.”

Tamacia’s parties, hip hop rides through the subway system taking the trains in alphabetical order, were, as Kid Lucky put it, “fun in my life,” and the Subway Series was a way to recreate this fun. The finale of the series of subway rides organized as a result was a combination of performance art and hip hop music, almost constantly moving from 42nd Street in Manhattan to Staten Island. The performance began at the end of the A train in the Port Authority, progressed to the last car of the N train, snaked its way down Manhattan underneath the surface of Broadway, and culminated with a ride to Staten Island on the ferry. Throughout the entire journey the rhythm was almost non-stop, broken only to allow for short hip hop plays (the Hip Hop Theatre Festival aspect) and the rhythm of spoken word, and often overlaid with rhymes and accompanied by dance.

Following a brief play at the point of origin, Kid Lucky separated the artists from the spectators and film crews. The performers, an eclectic crowd of beatboxers, MCs, singers, and B-boys and B-girls (breakdancers), stood in a clump at the end of the A platform, about to embark on their journey. The beatboxers laid down a beat, the singers began to sing, the MCs began to rhyme, the B-boys and B-girls began to break, and the crowd began to move to its own beat in a harmonious mass, following the yellow head of Kid Lucky as he began his ascent up the stairs. Kid Lucky’s aim, to show a “well-rounded version of hip hop,” and include “everything that revolves around the term hip hop,” was certainly realized, as each person brought their own unique hip hop contribution to the table.

The walk through the Port Authority station to the N train platform was like a scene from the Pied Piper, as numerous hangers-on trailed beyond the artists, and spectators along the way began stopped at the edge of the musical and lyrical madness to watch. This event was clearly about bringing the music to the people. Or, as Kid Lucky put it, this was “real hip hop.” As the group flooded the last car of the downtown N train, people climbing onto seats and hanging over rails, the entire car seemed alive, pulsing with the beat as hands slammed the ceilings and walls in harmony with the beatboxers. Punctuating the nearly non-stop rhythm and music emanating from the group were brief lulls filled with the expressive prose of spoken word artists, their grievances and dreams, realized and broken, bared for the group to see through the vividness of their words, as well as moments when the music continued but the groups stopped to let the bodies of the B-boys and B-girls flail about in the most precise manners, creating human windmills in a small space surrounded by people.

As this brief foray into the NYC subway system made abundantly clear to me, hip hop is many things; it is breakdancing, it is beautiful poetry, it is rhythm, it is fun, but most importantly, in its aggregate, it is an expansive, rich culture - a multi-faceted force to be reckoned with. Hip hop culture is so many things because the people who identify with it are so different from one another in so many ways, drawn to various facets for an eclectic mix of reasons. But in the end, they are all part of this greater thing, hip hop, waiting for an opportunity to burst forth and remind people who they are and what exactly they love.