Hip-Hop into the Video Age: New York Teenhood, Malcolm McLaren and the British Eye

Abstract

In the 1980s, the popularizing of domestic video technology coincided with a boom in British youth television and music videos of New York hip-hop’s visual world. These provided crucial pre-conditions for hip-hop’s London explosion. This article analyses these historical media shifts, the early evolution of rap’s imagery and testimony from early London hip-hoppers to examine how music video’s dynamic multimedia visuality opened up both hip-hop’s fashion ‘code language of status’ and new bodily velocities, enabling hip-hop’s transference from New York to London as a multifaceted youth movement. It considers the role of Malcolm McLaren and the World’s Famous Supreme Team’s video ‘Buffalo Gals’.