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80s, Life: Jean Michel Basquiat in Downtown 81 · by Abe Beame
In the beginning, there was chaos. Or as Jean Michel Basquiat, referencing Genesis, says frequently, “the Earth was formless, void, darkness upon the face of the deep. The spirit moved across the water and there was light. And it was good.” This would serve as a fitting tag for Edo Bertoglio’s glorified home movie Downtown 81, a film that is essential material for anyone with a passing interest in Hip Hop’s beginnings, modern art, or the recent history of New York City. The plot, barely worth mentioning, loosely revolves around a young artist’s efforts to sell a painting and fuck a supermodel. In the meantime the audience is treated to an insider’s look at the early 80’s music and social scene on the Lower East side of Manhattan, an experimental, amorphous blend of genres and styles.
The film’s author, a Warhol protégé and music writer named Glenn O’Brien, wrote the lead for his then largely unknown, charismatic friend Samo, a graffiti deity also known as Park Slope native Jean Michel Basquiat. O’Brien felt that JMB was an emblem of the City, using its trains, walls, and street signs as a giant canvas for his enigmatic prose graf. At one point early in the film Basquiat says that the streets of New York look like art to him. You get a sense, as he walks through the ruins below Union Square, that the City birthed his style. Basquiat’s paintings spoke to unified ideas, but he fashioned them after the chaotic collages of words, symbols and images seen on the bombed out buildings and broken windows that surround him throughout the film.
Downtown 81 has survived and was deemed worthy of a restored re-release thanks to the rare face time we get with its notorious star. It’s somehow appropriate that the audio track was lost at some point and all we get is image, with the vocals being dubbed by Saul Williams. We see Jean Michel at the infancy of his career, a radiant child at 19, on the cusp of his meteoric rise to stardom. Instantly noticeable is the difference between the JMB on display here and the one Julian Schnabel and Jeffery Wright collaborated to portray in 2001’s Basquiat (1996), a stuttering, drug gobbling savant who was more the product of 80s art buzz culture than his own talents. One similarity both films convey is Jean Michel’s penchant for aloof, in-joke humor, but in 81 Basquiat is assertive and electric, radiating an exuberant star quality with every clarinet riff and raised eyebrow. To be fair, this is long before he was star fucked and dumped in a ditch off the FDR by the New York literati who crowned him, but the contrast is startling to a viewer coming in with fresh eyes.
The film brings to life a Lower East Side ruled by the fabled Youth Culture, a crossroads of art, music and dance that truly was something you lived. (No KRS) Where Fab Five Freddy and Lee Quinones are bombing in broad daylight around every corner, your neighbor is robbing that tourist, freestyle sessions pop off in dingy squatter holes, and everyone is an artist or musician with an angle (though not much has changed in that last respect). But the film’s most compelling moment is its prophetic, surrealist ending.
After finally tracking down the mythic European supermodel JMB has spent a majority of the film in pursuit of, he decides he’s uninterested in love on someone else’s terms and blows her off for a forty. On his way home he’s stopped by a homeless woman curled up in a doorway. The bag lady claims to be a fairy princess under a spell who will grant him his every wish in return for his kindness. JMB kisses her and in a flash of smoke and light it’s none other than Blondie’s Debbie Harry in Tinkerbell garb. Harry was an outsider who became an icon, and according to Jeff Chang’s Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, “seemed to be the object of every graffitti artist’s desire” after name-dropping Fab 5 on her legitimacy lending, 1981 crossover Hip Hop hit, “Rapture.” She disappears and is replaced by a suitcase full of money lying at Jean Michel’s feet. He walks out of the alley into the street, buys a Cadillac El Dorado with Jersey plates off a white, bewildered yuppie and drives off into the night.
With plastic performances from its acting non-actors and a focus on race and class in New York, Downtown 81 could serve as an heir or potential counterpoint to John Cassavetes’ debut film, Shadows. While Shadows focuses on the limitations and contradictions of a city adjusting to a new order during the last gasps of the Jazz Age, Downtown 81 is a cry of liberation emitted by a small scene in the village a generation later as Hip Hop takes its first steps, celebrating its diversity and comfortable in its skin for the first time. Kid Creole performs Afro-Cuban Hip Hop that sounds like New Wave, DNA plays New Wave that sounds like the blues. The general feel is that of excitement and endless possibility, and everyone’s in on it. Needless to say, this is a far cry from the meticulously categorized, rigidly defined genres and sub genres that comprise Rap today.
The filmmakers intended for Downtown 81 to be a profile of a rough and tumble New York peopled by con men and callous landlords, seen from the eyes of one of its most brilliant, precocious children. Critics hail it as a relic of a lost city, a memory of the bohemian shit-hole paradise they knew and loved before it was murdered by money and micro-policing. Despite everyone’s best intentions the show is stolen by its stage. Downtown 81 is a film that brims with the eternal warmth and humanity of its city, familiar to anyone who has had the privilege of walking its hallowed corridors.
Comments for "80s, Life: Jean Michel Basquiat in Downtown 81"
Great write-up, Abe; the film sounds as amazing as its star and setting.
— R.H.S. Feb 7, 10:53 AM
Agree with the previous comment. Sounds really great!
— d Feb 7, 11:41 AM
the god jmb. he and rakim transformed urban culture forever.
— 456 Feb 7, 02:59 PM
The only fault I have with the review is that Basquiat with Jeffrey Wright was released in 1996, not 2001.
Anyways, it inspires me to add Downtown 81 to my queue.
— Jay B Feb 7, 03:46 PM
dope post, i’ll have to check this out. it always makes me happy to see basquiat get some shine in hip-hop circles.
— sizzle88 Feb 7, 04:15 PM
Thanks Jay B. Fixed.
— Rafi Feb 7, 05:51 PM
I have this DVD ... Its nice. I really like the biography movie too.
— nunya bizness Feb 7, 09:31 PM
really dope write up…. gonna definitely peep this flick
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— rizz Feb 8, 11:15 PM
That was precocious!
— b-illa Feb 11, 01:21 PM
HOW IS (WHAT HE DO) IS ART TO EV ERYBODY?
— dasha morgan Feb 28, 02:13 PM