For the global hip hop and graffiti scene, the year 1984 was a defining era. The movie Beat Street hit theaters and triggered an avalanche that keeps on rolling to this day. While in the West, documentaries like Style Wars or movies like Wild Style provided the blueprint, the reality behind the Iron Curtain looked completely different. In this episode, I have Jon Chardiet as my guest, who played the iconic main role of the graffiti painter Ramo in the movie Beat Street. Why did Beat Street make such a massive impact especially in the East of Germany? While other hip hop movies were strictly blocked in the GDR, Beat Street was officially shown in state cinemas and on television. The reasons for this were political. The GDR leadership saw the movie as a perfect social critique of a rough New York shaped by poverty. The fact that the teenagers in the film grow up in poor conditions and Ramo dies in the subway tunnel at the end was seen as a prime example of the cruel capitalist system. However, the plan of the officials backfired. Instead of loathing the system, the East German youth absorbed the aesthetics, breakdancing, and graffiti. Beat Street thus became the big bang of East German hip hop culture. In the graffiti community, the film has often been viewed critically from a cultural-historical perspective. The pieces in the movie were mostly not painted by real writers from the New York scene of that time, but by film set artists, surprisingly under the guidance of Bill Blast or Phase2. The result was an often very naive, simplistic look. Yet, due to a lack of other sources, it was precisely this film graffiti that heavily shaped the style of the East German graffiti pioneers in the eighties and early nineties. Despite these justified compromises in authenticity, the film still has a gigantic fanbase today from the generation that picked up their very first can, or mostly markers, back then precisely because of Beat Street. Spray cans were not available for purchase in the GDR. Now, many decades after the theatrical release and 35 years after I saw the film for the very first time myself, the circle is complete. Jon Chardiet, now 65 years old and with a successful career as an author and actor under his belt, was a guest in Dresden for a weekend at the ALL41 and Back in the Days Festival by the House of Urban Culture, an annual mecca for hip hop enthusiasts, collectors, and nostalgics. Away from the hustle and bustle of the festival, I met up with Jon for an extensive deep dive conversation. We talk about all the questions that have been burning under our fingernails for decades. He shares how he got the role in the first place and what the atmosphere on set in the New York of the early eighties was really like. We shed light on the bizarre translation errors in the German dubbing and, of course, talk in great detail about his legendary movie death in the fight with Spit. For me personally and a film producer myself, this is a piece of hip hop and graffiti history and a journey back to the days when graffiti was just beginning to network into a scene and conquer the world. The new ILOVEGRAFFITI Podcast Episode 094 is available for streaming right now on all popular podcast platforms.
