Episode 047: Crack is Wack

In which we discuss public art, crickets, and Timothée Chalamet

Driving along Harlem River Drive recently I saw Keith Haring’s legendary Crack is Wack mural, and it made me think suddenly:

Hey, pot is legal! 

That is a sentence when I was a kid I never thought I’d say out loud.

Now, I’m not a drug partaker myself, but I have a relatively laissez-faire attitude towards the whole thing. The never-ending, completely ineffective anti-drug campaigns that haunted everyone in the 80s and 90s certainly didn’t stop any kids from taking drugs, but they did drill into our heads that drugs were illegal, that’s for sure.

Haring’s orange handball court might be the only anti-drug message that ever worked. 

Crack is Wack, Keith Haring, 1986

There have been two versions of the original Crack is Wack mural in the abandoned handball court at 2nd Ave and East 128th Street, right off Harlem River Drive. The one shown here is the second one, the one still standing. 

The first was almost immediately defaced and turned into a pro-crack message and subsequently painted over by the city.

Haring himself was arrested as soon as he was finished with the original installation, but such was the outcry from the media and the neighborhood itself that Haring was let off with a slap on the wrist. 

Soon after, the Parks Department invited Haring to recreate the mural. He was given paint and a city truck to drive around and find a new site for the work. Anywhere he wanted. But the artist insisted on using the original site and repainted the wall with today’s artwork, very similar to the first.

In 2019 the mural was completely restored. The process was very complicated, you can read about it here.

This was a tough one for me to reduce. I took a good eight or ten different approaches before I settled on this one. It sits somewhere in-between one of my grid patterns and some straight-ahead geometric shapes. I think the slight 1- and 2-percent angles of certain lines get it there in the end

Crack is Wack - Reduction.

There were a few things I wanted to get across in this beat:

• Raw sounding, to echo the artwork’s IRL environs

• Taking place outdoors

• And of course, a straightforward overall vibe to mirror Haring’s simple lines 

I don’t think I can compose something simpler than this. I listen to a lot of great minimalist and atmospheric music, but every time I try and do something that simple I just have to fill it up with bells and whistles. 

Not this one though. I imagined myself at 14 years old in the garage with my buddies trying to figure out how to play some AC/DC song. I just tried to channel those young kids with guitars and drums and no idea what they were doing. This beat is really just smashing away at things.

I hear different instruments as their own little worlds that happen to be playing simultaneously. It felt like the perfect thing to do was to have the choir and organ parts be in parallel keys. I think the vox are in F major and the organ is in F minor? I’d have to go back and check exactly what I was doing there, but you get the idea. They kind of sound like they go together but there is definitely something off.

Finally, the whole thing sits on top of the loveliest bed of a field recording I made of a park near the house. Birds, crickets, the whole thing. You can really hear it during the bass breakdown just before the drop.

I love origin stories. The Godfather II immediately comes to mind. Batman of course. Also very good was the recent Wonka, which the three of us went to see for our annual New Year’s Day movie outing. Yes, Timothée Chalamet is delightful. Olivia Colman can’t help but be good. But Hugh Grant as the Oompa Loompa? Come on, that’s outlandishly great casting. I’m guessing the Oompa Loompa spinoff series is mere nanoseconds away from being greenlit.  

Wait, back to Haring. His origin story is just fantastic. The artist spent a full half dozen years developing his signature style by creating white chalk drawings throughout the NYC subway system. Sometimes up to 40 in a single day !!!

Cats like Haring just aren’t going to be denied. They are going to be great or work themselves to death trying to get there.

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