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A House Is Not a Home At a time when youth culture is again taking center stage in America, the rest of the country is fascinated by black and Latin kids' street life precisely because of its vivid, flamboyant, energetic style. It symbolizes hope for the future - born of a resourceful ability to make something special, unique, original, and utterly compelling out ofa life that seems to offer very little. As Fab Five Freddy puts it, "You make a new style. That's what life on the street is all about, just being you, being who you are around your friends. What's at stake is a guy's honor and his position in the street. Which is all you have. That's what makes it so important, that's what makes it feel so good - that pressure on you to be the best. Or to try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with. If it's true that this stuff reflects life, it's a fast life." 17 AHouse Is Not 0 Home Kool Lady Blue moved her theater of operations from the Negril to Danceteria while Negril is closed for repairs. The Negril is a reggae club where for the past few months, on Thursday nights, KLB Productions/ Wheels of Steel has been presenting the best deejays, emcees, and performers in evenings of rapping, dancing, and entertainment. It's a fluid scene like a party in someone's basement where white, black, Latino kids mix to dance with one another, and to perform in every sense. To be out there. To get down. At Danceteria, the immense space cast this heretofore friendly occasion in a new light. Take last week's event. Somehow the buildup was much bigger than the reality. The ads promised "girl rappers" and "electric boogie." Blue let everyone know that she had found the best dancers in the Bronx and tracked them down and they'd be performing on Tuesday at Danceteria. I got there early- around 10:30 - and saw Take One and Crazy Legs from the Rock Steady breaking crew, there to watch the show too, maybe learn some new electronic moves. Not too many other people Village Voice, April 13, 1982. 153 154 The African-American Connection were there, but the deejays were spinning discs and a few people were dancing. Take introduced me to the guys who would be performingLoose Bruce and Paulie Gee. They were over in a comer practicing unobtrusively and I could see that Blue was really right. These guys could segment their bodies with a drawn-out shudder that looked like a cold electric shock was passing slowly through their veins. Their feet always seemed bolted to the ground while their bodies swiveled robotlike along a vertical axis. Or else they'd do a slippery step, miming walking backward, as though they were stuck on a conveyor belt. And all the time their bodies were going through these contortions, they smiled with a spacy grin on their faces. I didn't see any girl rappers around. Take introduced me and Marty to Phase Two and we all went upstairs to talk because you couldn't hear anything over the music. The upstairs at Danceteria is decorated like someone's awful rec room from the fifties and numerous TV sets were broadcasting what looked like chance-edited imagery . It all seemed very homey. At midnight we went back downstairs to see if the show had started. Well, some kind ofshow had started, even ifit wasn't the show. The way the white kids were dressed up in punk regalia and dancing as outrageously as possible, not partnering, just presenting themselves as dancing beings, turned social dancing from an act of personal pleasure, or a way to dance with someone, to a mode of dancing fOT someone, anyone. At the same time, closer to the stage, the black and Latin kids, friends or competitors of the evening's acts, were performing in a much more conscious style, lining up in formations to mark the time ofa reggae tune, in a kind of undulating marching step, or stepping out into a circle of space to underscore a funk tune with a spasm offootwork. The space made everything strange. You kept waiting for the show to start but you weren't sure where it would happen. Loose Bruce and Paulie Gee would start up over in a comer and the crowd (by now it...

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