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Flash and the Five sport a wardrobe that goes for a lot of "gusto," money, in straight talk, so their audience would be hard pressed for direct imitation. Like rapper talk, which pulls in language from such diverse sources as '40s hipster, '60s hippie and even cockney rhyming slang (Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn's crime-haunted Bedford-Stuyvesant ghetto, is "Do or Die"), rapper flash is eclectic. The jeans, the leathers, the heavy personalized belt buckles, even the jewelry, are modifications of street-gang uniforms. A lot of the aggressive energy that once went into street fighting now goes into competitive dancing, like "breaking," an elaborate and athletic choreography of splits, handstands, spins, acrobatic turns and assorted outrageous maneuvers. Breaking has already attracted mainstream attention, but uptown it is being overtaken by newer dances, like the Webboe and the Smurf, in which the dancers move with the goofy, ironic precision of the Saturday-morning TV cartoon trolls.
"Fresh" is the ideal now. It stands, figuratively, for stylish, but it literally means clean, new, right. Sneakers without a smudge; jeans unblemished. But there is humor as well as rigor in rap flash. If you think high, knitted ski caps worn at impossible angles are just funny-looking, you only get half the joke. Printed legends like I'D RATHER BE SKIING refer not to snowy slopes but to white mounds of a certain illicit inhalable substance. Greek fisherman hats, or bike-team hats, even shirts with alligator trademarks are worn with what Rap Scene Writer Michael Holman calls "absurd humor." He sees it as a deliberate mockery of the preppie look, of "the powers that be. Sheepskin contradicts the hip hop aesthetic because it's kind of organic, kind of hippie. But it's status-oriented because it's expensive."
Rap dancing, especially breaking, is an essentially male competition, but even in fashion the boys dominate. Gentlemen's Quarterly is treach. "Males have more plumage," says Monica Lynch, vice president of Tommy Boy records, a Manhattan rap label. "Guys are out there flashing their stuff, and the girls are usually wearing a watered-down version of what the guys have on. The girls don't want to look all that nasty." Maybe not, but with their penchant for leather pants or layers of Kamali-esque sweatshirtings, they have a sure knowledge of the impact of style. Says Lisa Lee, 19, who raps with Cosmic Force: "If you don't have the right clothes it can give you a bad name. Nobody wants to be with you."