What a card! NYPL marks 50 years of hip-hop in ‘Wild Style’

nypost.com:

“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. “You know, the 600 volts of electricity, running around in the tunnels in the dark.

So in comparison, I wasn’t nervous.”On Friday, that iconic “Wild Style” logo created by Goodstone and fellow graffiti artists Zephyr and Revolt will be tagged somewhere they most likely never expected — on a special-edition New York Public Library card marking half a century of the culture New York gave the world.

Five decades after the art form was fathered by DJ Kool Herc on Aug. 11, 1973 — at a Bronx birthday party for his sister in the recreation room of his apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue — the beat of the street is getting loud in the library, with a limited issue of 50,000 cards.“At our Schomburg Center [for Research in Black Culture], we had the original ‘Wild Style’ soundtrack cassette,” said Brandy McNeil, NYPL deputy director of branch programs and.