The premise of All the Streets Are Silent: The Convergence of Hip-Hop and Skateboarding (1987-1997) is all in the title. Director Jeremy Elkin and the extensive array of talking heads examine both the hip-hop scene and the skateboarding culture that arose out of New York City in a pivotal period. The film offers some perspective about each cultural mainstay separately before telling us how they were brought together by a shared sense of community. Unfortunately, anyone casually aware of this history won’t really gain more insight, and those who never cared about it won’t find a foothold of interest to be illuminated.
This is simply too much material to cover in one movie. Though the narrative eventually narrows its focus to a few key people in the overlap between hip-hop and skateboarding, the first hour is mostly celebratory, with Elkin locating and interviewing an impressive roster of names and faces. Fab 5 Freddy, a pioneer of the street art movement before hosting his own, massively popular MTV series, comments on the irony of these two pieces of urban culture converging in the first place. After all, for a long time, skateboarding was “a white thing” and hip-hop was a “a Black thing.”
That changed with the introduction of boom boxes on the streets where kids – at first, predominantly white and eventually quite diverse – would listen to the music of Beastie Boys. That was followed by the miniaturized counter-culture in the wake of the AIDS epidemic and the “War on Drugs” that pitted inner-city kids against the police; then Mars, a nightclub in operation from 1988 to 1992, came along and changed the entire game. Creator and proprietor Yuki Watanabe is credited as the one who cultivated the intertwining careers and deejaying stints of music legends like Grandmaster Flash, JAY-Z and the Notorious B.I.G., and even unexpected names like Ben Stiller and Madonna, through his club promoters and connections.
This is all fairly standard information for those aware of the scene at this time, and Elkin is unable to bring it to life. Furthermore, he rushes through the skateboarding material with a similar attitude of including as much material as he possibly can. There is no doubt that these stories are interesting and worthy, but Elkin is clearly not the man to tell them. The interview subjects are generous about their feelings, but not particularly insightful.
Eventually, All the Streets Are Silent settles into something that could have worked. Upon their official “convergence” with the death of the Mars club, these artifacts of a new counterculture were the basis of Larry Clark’s Kids, that great and unsparing depiction of teen life in Washington Square Park from 1995. Hints of a better, clearer movie come from the specters of Harold Hunter and Justin Pierce, two towering figures who died young and who are remembered by their co-stars Rosario Dawson and Leo Fitzpatrick. It’s warm and moving as a tribute, but it comes too late in a movie that’s all about the recitation of facts and the straightforward reconstruction of a specific time.
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