"Why are we doing this? Well because it will be fun."

Don’t forget! You can just wake up in the morning and do hip-hop! You don't need any equipment, you don't need an advance from a record label & you definitely don't need permission...just skill & gumption...like the folks who organized this:

February 19, 2006: 5TH ELEMENT SUBWAY SERIES (NYC): , 6 pm - 9 pm. Going back to old school when beatboxers, emcees and other vocal groups did performances and battles on subway trains and on street corners. Unamplified beatboxers and emcees will be performing on the back of the "E" Train. There will be NO drums or kazoos or small portable amps! We will be meeting at West 4th subway stop on the UPTOWN side at the last car on the "E" Train. We will be traveling to every stop on the way up and will travel back down to West 4th where we all go out and eat a falafel and then go home! Why are we doing this? Well because it will be fun. Info courtesy of www.beatboxerent.net and Tools of War

About 40 people turned up, though that number dwindled as we drifted out into Queens (I don't know why I thought the E train went uptown...I guess I was thinking of the A/C). But motion cyphers are the place to be. The reasons are several, most of them ephemeral*: movement adds energy, it's a public area so you draw in diverse participants, you don't have to pay again to get home (you're already on the subway!), and it transforms a common daily experience into a spectacle.

But, for me, the biggest selling point is the one everyone sees, but no one thinks about: even though they buffed the trains, the tunnel walls still constitute the single largest communal art project ever undertaken by human beings. Underneath the city of New York lies a collectively developed, ongoing mural that is one-hundred and thirty seven miles long.**

I once looked out the front window of a C train from 125th Street all the way down to Chambers Street (That's from Harlem to the Financial district...pretty much the length of Manhattan), and saw something that astounded me: about every five feet there was an upright steel I-beam and REVS had tagged up on virtually every single one. I am talking about literally thousands of tags that hardly anyone will ever notice, much less appreciate. The idea that someone would take the time to realize a goal like that says something very fundamental about hip-hop.

"Hip-Hop is asking you a question. And that question is:

'What are you going to do?' "
- DJ Stevie D, in the documentary Scratch

*Word to Greg Tate.

**Actually, come to think of it, if there are 137 miles of underground tunnel, then the mural is actually 274 miles long, 'cause it's on both sides. OK, I stand corrected.