Mashup at the Intersection of Deco and Hip-Hop

Forty-five years ago this month in a neighborhood in the southeast Bronx, the masters of a new music genre came together to jam. Their style was so fresh it didn’t even have an agreed-upon name yet. The event was described as a “disco tribute,” but the lineup included DJ Afrika Bambaataa, the Original Jazzy Jay, and Sha-Rock—all now recognized as among the originators of hip-hop.

That night at the Bronx River Community Center, though, the DJs and MCs didn’t take top billing. The evening’s tribute was to the genre’s “flyer men.” Flyers were how musicians spread the word about their shows. Printed by the thousands to hand out on street corners, the advertisements were meant to be ephemeral, tossed out when the party was over, but more than 1,000 of them have been preserved by the Cornell Hip Hop Archive, with nearly 500 shared via JSTOR by the Cornell University Library. The flyers were collected by those who recognized that the art form that emerged in Black communities in the Bronx through the 1970s was about more than music. The artists who designed these flyers, often in mere hours with little more than a pen and a photocopier, were creating a visual identity for an all-new culture.

The flyer promoting the the celebration of the flyer men was printed on pink paper with an energetic cut-and-paste style. It wasn’t the most memorable of the designs that fluttered around the Bronx in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but it was created by one of the community’s most prominent artists, who name checked himself in tilted lettering: “Flyer King” Buddy Esquire. (He also called out his brother, Eddie Ed, who was lesser design royalty: the “Flyer Lord.”) Cornell University has digitized about 100 of the estimated 300 flyers Buddy Esquire designed between 1978 and 1984 as hip-hop moved from community centers in the Bronx into the mainstream of American life.

Buddy Esquire—born Lemoine Thompson in 1958—was self-taught. He began his artistic career in 1972 as “Phantom 1,” the tag he painted on the sides of the 2 and 5 trains through the Bronx. That was long before the word “graffiti” was regularly paired with the word “artist,” but the spray-paint practice gave Buddy Esquire an appreciation for letter forms that’s evident from his earliest flyers. Though he’d been a writer—as graffitists were known—Buddy Esquire rejected most of the conventions of graffiti when it came to fliers.

“It took some time but I eventually created my own style,” he explained to OldSchoolHipHop.com in 2001. He felt the need to set himself apart from other flyer makers, he told Cornell PhD student Amanda Lalonde in 2011. (Buddy Esquire passed away in 2014.)

In the Cornell collection, which began as a donation of material that hip-hop historian Johan Kugelberg collected while writing Born in the Bronx, you can also find flyers by Eddie Ed, whose work often included cutout photographs, portraits, and playful cartoons of the luminaries of the hip-hop scene, and Anthony Riley, whose eye-catching designs made bold use of black backgrounds. “Riley’s flyers get brothers to think,” Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash once said.

Sisco Kid—who would be better remembered as DJ, MC, and jazz saxophonist Richard Sisco—is in the archives with his illustration-focused flyers; he and Buddy collaborated on flyers for the Cold Crush Brothers. And Phase 2—a pseudonym for Michael Lawrence Marrow—is there as well. Buddy Esquire considered him a friend and inspiration. He admired Phase 2’s style, which evoked elegance with circles and arcs.

“That’s what I tried for, you know,” Buddy Esquire told Lalonde, to “give it a level of class even though it was just a ghetto jam.” He would eventually come to call his own style “neo-Deco.”

The Art Deco style of the 1920s isn’t something typically associated with hip-hop, writes Amanda Lalonde. “What, then, do these flyers— dynamic in their mixture of styles, yet enigmatic in their seemingly anachronistic use of Deco elements—communicate about the status of shows and live hip hop in this culture?” Like hip-hop, she writes, the flyers were a mashup of influences.

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.”

Buddy Esquire himself held on to many of the flyers he produced, the works stored haphazardly in his mother’s basement before finding their way to Cornell’s collection. Perhaps he saved them because he recognized in the moment what he would later tell Lalonde: “they do, in a way, signify a time,” one that would be lost to history without such documents. Or perhaps Buddy Esquire just wanted to prove, as he told OldSchoolHipHop.com, “I am the King of Flyers! Period. I hate to put it like that but facts are the facts.”

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