What a card! NYPL marks 50 years of hip-hop in ‘Wild Style’
“Wild Style,” Charlie Ahearn needed a fresh way to brand his indie film to appeal to a world that wasn’t yet hip to the cultural movement, born in the South Bronx 50 years ago.So, one summer night in 1983, three graffiti artists created the “Wild Style” mural in Riverside Park — a clever piece of guerrilla marketing that would become the defining symbol of early hip-hop.“I remember being there watching them [paint], and I look over — there’s a cop car about 100 feet away from us,” Ahearn told The Post. “Like everything we did in the movie, it was totally illegal.”And for then 17-year-old graffiti artist Aaron “Sharp” Goodstone, the dusk-till-dawn assignment was more like a walk in the park, compared to his more daring spray-paint sprees.“Painting on [subway] trains, which was our principal direction, was always illegal, obviously — and it was extremely dangerous,” he said.