Wild Style

Before the Hollywood exploitation of the New York Hip Hop scene saw the entertaining but totally camp and clueless Breakdance movies rake in the dollars, the originators of the worlds most popular music collaborated on a scrappy, badly acted but riveting look at New York street life, which brought together the four elements of the culture, B-Boying, Graffiti writing, rapping and DJing, into a strange hybrid of drama and documentary.

Following the adventures of a Graffiti artist who lives to cover the cities trains in his art , it ambles along in a rather plotless fashion but does feature classic scenes of breaking, alongside jaw droppingly good early rapping from the likes of the Furious Five and Double Trouble.

Essentially an update of those old time movies starring Garland and Rooney, where the kids get together to put on a show, it concludes with a big Hip Hop jam in a city park. A master class in the old school, fans of the history of Hip Hop will love seeing Grandmaster Flash and Grand Wizard Theodore showing off their newly minted scratch mixing skills, while the body popping, free style rapping and awesome street art mean this, alongside the must see documentary Style Wars, is a vital historical document that preserves a more innocent time in rap culture, before the whole thing was tainted by major label intrusion.