Beat Street
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Beat Street is a 1984 mainstream hip hop dramatic feature film, and the second following Breakin'. It is set in New York City during the popularity rise of hip hop culture in the early 1980s.
The movie was the East Coast answer to the Los Angeles-set Breakin', displaying break dancing, DJing, and graffiti with a mild social undertone. Some of the plotline was based on the graffiti documentary Style Wars. Most visibly, the villain character Spit in Beat Street was lifted from the way the real-life graffiti artist Cap was portrayed in Style Wars.
Notable performances include a song by Grandmaster Melle Mel & the Furious Five, breakdance battles between the New York City Breakers and the Rock Steady Crew, and cameos by beatboxer Doug E. Fresh, Richard Lee Sisco, and the Treacherous Three.