Behind the hip hop flyers of the 1970s: Art Deco, comics, and more

In the Bronx of the 1970s, loosely organized parties held in discotheques and parks helped pave the way for what became hip hop culture. The young artists who promoted these events—the designers of the earliest hip hop flyers—drew on a range of influences that included comic books, Japanese anime, and Art Deco architecture and design. 

At JSTOR Daily, April White writes about the intersection of Art Deco and the foundation of hip hop. She directs readers to Cornell University Library’s hip hop archive, the digital component of which offers scans of more than 1,000 flyers for these important parties, and cites a piece by Amanda Lalonde, Associate Professor of Musicology at the University of Saskatchewan.

In 2011, Lalonde was a PhD student at Cornell, and she interviewed legendary flyer artist and graffiti writer Buddy Esquire about his work. Her article, “Buddy Esquire and the early hip hop flyer,” appeared in Popular Music in 2014. (Esquire died in February of that year.)

White writes at JSTOR about Lalonde’s research: 

In Buddy Esquire’s artwork Lalonde finds the distinctive borders and dry-transfer fonts of the Art Deco era alongside hints of graffiti art in the stars, arrows and other 1970s flourishes that dot the flyers. Buddy Esquire claimed the comic books about the Fantastic Four he read as a child and a sign-painting book he checked out of the library as a teenager as inspirations, but Lalonde identified another, more subtle influence on the flyer man: the Art Deco buildings of the Bronx.

“If the posters were purely Deco, they would have been anachronisms with little appeal and relevance,” she writes, “but Buddy Esquire’s Deco components, surrounding contemporary elements, seem to wink.”

Although it technically took shape prior to 1925, the international decorative style known as Art Deco got its name from a sumptuous art fair held in Paris exactly 100 years ago called the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes. During the 1920s and 1930s, Art Deco emerged in the work of furniture designers, decorators, jewelers, illustrators, and architects, and hundreds of Art Deco buildings were built in the Bronx. 

Horace Ginsbern, an award-winning architect born in Russia but raised in Manhattan, is less known to today’s design nerds for his firm’s work on the Chock full o'Nuts restaurant chain than he is for his pioneering Art Deco-era projects in the West Bronx. They include the Noonan Plaza and Park Plaza apartment complexes, both of which are New York City-designated landmarks designed by Ginsbern and his partner, Marvin Fine. The latter was built between 1929 and 1931, and it’s one of the first Art Deco apartment houses in the borough. The Bronx’s Grand Concourse is stacked with architecture created in this style—it’s home to distinctive Art Deco structures such as the Dillerwood Apartments, designed by Israel L. Crausman, and the so-called “Fish Building,” designed by Ginsbern and Fine and named for the striking mosaics depicting marine life at the entrance.

While coming of age in the Bronx, it would have been difficult for Buddy “The Flyer King” Esquire and his friends to ignore these elegant and imposing buildings, with their wealth of terra cotta motifs, sharp spires, and alluring, intricate mosaic tile embellishments.

Lalonde discusses the impact that Art Deco had on Esquire’s proto-hip hop flyers, which can be seen in his Jazz Age-style backdrops and strategic use of contrasting colors (bold pairings of gold and black or blue-green and black are an Art Deco hallmark). Esquire loved Marvel Comics and Star Wars but also mined Art Deco’s Broadway family of fonts and blended “Art Deco-inspired borders” with “neutralized graffiti and disco motifs.” He integrated photography, illustration, hand-lettering, and magazine cutouts in his designs and referred to his style as “neo-deco.”

Esquire painstakingly created more than 300 flyers in the late 1970s and early 1980s that promoted parties and live music events at venues such as Ecstasy Garage and T-Connection. The gatherings featured performances by the likes of DJ Afrika Bambaata, Grandmaster Flash, and Clive "Kool Herc" Campbell, the father of hip hop. Indeed, Esquire—as well as other graff writers/designers such as Sisco Kid and PHASE 2—created handbills for crucial hip hop events helmed by Kool Herc before the term hip hop even entered our lexicon. 

During the early 1970s in downtown Manhattan, when police were regularly raiding David Mancuso’s Loft parties and DJs at discotheques like The Gallery or Reade Street were packing dance floors with long, uptempo R&B cuts such as “Girl, You Need a Change of Mind” by Eddie Kendricks and War’s “City, Country, City,” Kool Herc was uptown, digging out the drum breaks on James Brown and Dennis Coffey records. The Jamaican-American DJ worked doubles of his vinyl across two turntables, cueing up the start of a given cut’s instrumental passage just as it ended on the other deck, thereby manually extending a song’s danceable, percussive-heavy segments. 

“Africa Bambaataa remembers that Herc began to turn to ‘certain disco records that had funky percussion breaks like the Incredible Bongo Band when they came out with Apache and he just kept that beat going,’” writes Tim Lawrence in his indispensable Love Saves the Day. He continues:

“Cymande’s ‘Bra’ or ‘Give It Up or Turn It Loose’ by James Brown, the Dynamic Corvettes’s ‘Funky Music Is the Thing’ and ‘Get Into Something’ by the Isley Brothers provided other percussive nuggets for Herc’s venture into breakbeat eternity, and the crowd’s crazed response persuaded him to make the technique a part of his nightly repertoire.” 

It’s worth noting that both Lawrence and Lalonde argue that hip hop and disco had a much stronger relationship in these early years than has been widely reported. In a Journal of Popular Music Studies piece that explores the parallels between Herc’s techniques and those of the era’s disco DJ Walter Gibbons, Lawrence writes that Bronx discotheques “were incubators for early rap” and that “disco/dance and hip hop/rap DJs drew on the same pool of funk, soul, uptempo R&B and imported records.”

At a now-legendary party in 1973, Herc, a former graffiti artist who ran with a gang called the Ex-Vandals, cycled through funk and R&B LPs and 45s for friends and neighborhood locals. He was flanked by a mostly borrowed setup that night—his father’s Shure P.A. system was adequate for the space—but his gear evolved with time. The fledgling Kingston-born DJ later looked to mimic the towering rigs of mid-century Jamaica’s dancehall parties when he hauled his records to subsequent gigs at Cedar Park and elsewhere.

A back-to-school jam organized by his sister, Cindy Campbell, the event in August of ‘73 took place in the recreation room of the building where Herc’s family lived at 1250 Sedgwick Avenue. Cindy’s older brother looped grooves for jubilant dancers well into the early AM hours, and the party marked the launch of hip hop as we know it.

Joseph "Grandmaster Flash" Saddler, who used to peer in at the extensive record collection his father kept in the closets of his childhood home, would produce innovative DJ techniques that cemented his status as another pioneer of hip hop after having closely studied Herc's party routines.

"The first hip-hop flyers that I consistently saw were for Kool Herc’s earlier ’70s jams, even before the term was insinuated,” Michael Lawrence “PHASE 2” Marrow told writer Jerome Harris for a 2019 story at AIGA’s Eye on Design.

For his photocopied flyers "made from Letraset, markers, cut-up photographs, and glue" in the 1970s, the Bronx-born flyer artist and iconic graffiti artist PHASE 2, now recognized for having invented “bubble letters,” drew on a range of influences for his work that included the Jack Kirby comics that made an impact on Esquire and others.

PHASE 2 called his style “Funky Nous Deco.” Like Esquire, he was interested in Art Deco and the geometric elements and other flourishes commonly associated with the design of the period. 

“For Buddy Esquire, the ‘neo-deco’ aesthetic was intended to promote shows (and his own services as a flyer artist) by elevating the status of events,” wrote Lalonde in 2014.

“The flyers’ Deco-inspired frames acted metaphorically as facades for the often nondescript spaces in which the shows actually took place: as the flyers indicate, many shows were hosted by high schools or community centres. Buddy Esquire frames it this way: ‘That’s what I tried for, you know: give it a level of class even though it was just a ghetto jam.’” 

All images courtesy of Cornell University Library's hip hop archive. A much shorter version of this post was originally published on July 19, 2019.