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The racial and social geography of uptown/downtown applies to any city in America, whatever the size. Uptown and down, there are plenty of racial stereotypes to go around. One that dies particularly hard for downtowners is that when uptown kids dress to chill, they turn themselves out like some wild amalgam of Cab Galloway going for broke and Isaac Hayes going to a gogo. That is inaccurate, but it does have one small home truth: musicians, more than anyone else, set the style, just as, this minute, rap music is setting the beat.
Originating in the South Bronx in the mid-'70s, rap music is a cultural anthropologist's mother lode. It combines musical influences as disparate as disco, George Clinton funk, conventional R & B and Ennio Morricone scores for Italian westerns, cross-pollinates them with the Jamaican disc jockey's art of "toasting" (talking over the instrumental breaks in records) and a street kid's fondness for boasting, synthesizes the results with some distinctly contemporary audio technology and winds up with a sound that invites deejays at local dance palaces to "scratch" the surface. The deejays set the needle down in the groove of a record, turn the disc back and forth and get weird, repeated percussive effects, then jump quickly to another groove, another record, while some rap groups, called MCs, singsong over the music. The result, besides being danceable and extremely def, is familiar and disorienting at once. Just like the clothes.
One of the premier deejays of the rap scene is Grandmaster Flash, who, with his MCs, the Furious Five, turned out one of 1982's best singles, a seven-minute-long and atypically political number called The Message. Flash and the crew are treach, which is short for treacherous and slang for what a decade ago would have been called superfine. Grandmaster favors leathers, tip to toe, and has FLASH spelled out in lightning-bolt letters on the back of his jacket. Mr. Ness, of the Furious Five, favors metal studs, while his compatriot, Melle Mel, currently opts for fur. This is work wear, not street clothing, but Melle Mel knows what message they are putting across. "It gives you a more dominant, primitive look. We dress like this because in a lot of ways people expect us to. The whole principle in rapping is to be No. 1." Flash and the Five learned a fast lesson in fashion and stereotype when they opened for the Clash in May 1981. The crowd was all downtown, mostly white and heavily new wave, and booed the boys when they showed up in their flashy stage duds. The next night, when they wore street clothes onstage, the group was more warmly received.