AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
This was the heart of South Dallas, the trenches. No evidence exists that Roy Tarpley was ever in attendance, but I’d bet on it. B-boys and D-boys intermingled with models and around-the-way girls. The ballers, hustlers, and dope dealers of South Dallas coexisted in uneasy communion. Late at night, when you could feel the bass deep in your sternum, the spot would erupt to the seismic shake of Nemesis’s regional anthem “ Oak Cliff.” The walls shook from Whodini, LL Cool J, Too Short, N.W.A, and the DFW’s own Fila Fresh Crew. They freaked and hit pop locks, the Roger Rabbit, and the wop. From Thursday night until the break of dawn Sunday morning, the dance floor rumbled with a thousand rowdy but chic revelers. By the end of Reagan’s second term, a local entrepreneur named Tommy Quon had resurrected it as the hip-hop epicenter of North Texas. Originally a segregated postwar movie palace christened the Forest Theater, it was alternately transformed into a jazz cellar, a recording studio, and the stage for legendary seances by B.B. The property had already weathered several boom-and-bust cycles. The only thing anyone can agree on is that at the height of hip-hop’s first Golden Age, all the action in the Triple D went down at a club called City Lights. All exact dates have dissolved into a haze of liquor, hair spray, and the tinnitus caused by long-gone 808 claps. It was the winter of 1987-88 in South Dallas, or maybe it was the following summer. Vanilla Ice was discovered on Martin Luther King Jr. “Robby Van Winkle and Vanilla Ice are the American dream come true.” -Vanilla Ice, Ice by Ice I.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |