I knew about [Afrika] Bambaataa coming out of the Black Spades and I knew about the presence of the Savage Skulls, but as I got deeper into it, I began to realize that there was a lot of other types of connections. I got introduced to Henry Chalfont by Pop Master Fable from the Rock Steady Crew the Zulu Kings. I interviewed him, and I knew he had done a movie on the gangs. And I knew he had done it with a woman named Rita Fetcher, who was an art teacher in the Bronx from 1968 through the early ’70s, and had filmed the gang members back then, and, along with her husband, had spent a lot of time during that time to try to move the gangs towards peace. They kept a huge library of all of this stuff, and Rita has since passed on, but Rita was kind of my angel. She took me through the whole thing and introduced me to everybody, and it became clear that this is a story that was super-huge and needed to be told on paper. It had been told on film by Henry and Rita before, but it needed to be written down. And what I learned from that process is that there’s stories like this in every single city. Anywhere where hip-hop took root, there’s stories that go back to the ’70s and the ’80s about how that scene came together. And a lot of times it involves this interface between kids that were left out of society and their need to be able to create something to make them feel as if they were alive.
PHOENIX: You begin Cant’ Stop Won’t Stop with this set piece at Yankee Stadium that echoes Don DeLillo. Did you have a sense of trying to make this something that was, aside from the history of it, literary, and what were some of your touchstones for your approach to history in that literary sense?
JEFF CHANG: God, the first section of Underworld, every time I pick it up I have to read it start to finish. And I’ve probably read it maybe two or three hundred times by now. Yeah, that was certainly an inspiration for Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop. The thing I wanted to do was — and this is gonna sound really cheesy and a bit self-glorifying, but there’s a reason to it so I have to say it. But one of the things I wanted to do was to try to help create a mythical sense of our generation, for us. Which is what a lot of writers have done in a much, much better way. Sarah Jones is doing it now on Broadway with Bridge & Tunnel. Part of the impetus for the book was the fact that we’ve been hearing — and all love to the baby-boom generation, but we’ve been hearing about the ’60s since we were born. I have a third-grader and they still teach the kids about the civil-rights movement before they teach them about the anti-apartheid — I mean, as well they should — but they’ll teach them about [the civil rights movement] and leave it at that. Folks would never get up to the no-nukes movement, the anti-apartheid movement, or Nelson Mandela or any of these types of folks that were so influential to us during the ’80s — let alone hip-hop. So as a result, we never really get a picture of who we really are. We’re always the folks who came after the civil rights generation. And as a result we’re always less than the baby-boomer or the civil-rights generation. So Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop in that sense was meant to be a finger in the eye [laughs] of people who have created these hagiographies around the ’60s. Point blank: I’ll put that shit out there. And it’s a way for folks to say, “Ah, shit, we’re not all that bad after all.”
