Sound & Vision: Gabriel Teodros on the Teen Dance Ordinance and Seattle Tenuous History with Hip-Hop

In this last weekend’s Sound & Vision, we touched on a little bit of the history on Seattle’s Teen Dance Ordinance and now we're going to spend some time exploring more of the ripple effects that the ordinance has today.

In the recording and transcription below, producer Emily Fox chats with local musician, artist, and writer and KEXP DJ Gabriel Teodros about how the TDO impacted Seattle hip-hop – but also gives further context to how racial profiling has historically inhibited the genre and culture from thriving in the city.

KEXP: You've been involved in the hip-hop scene in Seattle. How did the teen dance ordinance impact the hip-hop scene?

Gabriel Teodros: Well, going back to the time period that was just discussed in that last piece in the early 80s, when we talk about hip-hop in that time period, I don't think you can separate it from the crack era and how that impacted the black community in Seattle specifically and in a very different way.

As hip-hop grew in popularity in sections of the South End and the Central District, police violence and police corruption was at an all-time high that I feel like really doesn't get talked about when we talk about this period in history. It was just really different for the hip-hop community. So that's part one. Part two is the way hip hop kind of grew in Seattle. Personally, I didn't know about the punk music scene and the teen dance ordinance and how it affected us. I grew up in a community in a neighborhood where it just felt like the city was trying to kill us and that there were no safe places to be if you were a young person of color in Seattle.

What do you mean by "kill you?"

Kill us? Because gang violence was at an all-time high, right? And it's something that continuously goes in cycles. But I have tons of friends that were part of the first like South End and Central District War, basically. Seattle's a very white city where we have a few communities of color. When I was growing up the two neighborhoods where my family lived, there were gangs that were literally at war with each other and we knew the police were not stopping it. And in that same time period, hip-hop was the music that let us know that we were not alone, that we were not crazy, because, you know, Chuck D famously called hip-hop the black people CNN, so we were able to see that this thing that is going on in Seattle is happening in so many different parts of the country. And we became able to join in that conversation just by telling the truth of our surroundings.

So hip-hop, in a lot of ways, was our only safe place. But because of such a high level of racism in this city, we didn't even think, as far as me like as a young person, even think that there was a place for us like the larger music industry in Seattle. There was no music industry. Hip-hop was such a neighborhood thing. When I grew up... breakdancing is part of my earliest memories of life. I was born in 1981, so I'm growing up in this era – literally.

Breakdancing was so huge in the South End – Columbia City is the neighborhood I was born in. Breakdancing was so huge that I would leave the house and everyday walk down the street there would be people with cardboard taped to the concrete. People walking down the street with boom boxes that were the size of my body. And I just I understood hip-hop as this neighborhood thing before I even knew that people called it hip-hop.

What I learned when I was much older and I was talking older hip-hop artists who are still around like SPECSWIZARD and the graffiti writer Keeper One, they told me about a law that was passed in 1984 – and this I think is important to talk about when we talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance. There was a law that was passed in Seattle that outlawed breakdancing. And that type of law seems very specific to young people of color. So when we talk about the Teen Dance Ordinance and how it affected hip-hop, I don't think you can separate it from all these other issues that were happening in Seattle that were affecting hip-hop.

The Teen Dance Ordinance was just one thing. And when we talk about how the Teen Dance Ordinance still has an impact on hip-hop today, I really don't think you can just separate it from racism in the city and police violence and police intimidation of small businesses and gentrification, currently.

I was a part of Hidmo – I called it a community center disguised as an Eritrean restaurant in the Central District. One of my best friends Rahwa Habtes and her sister Asmeret Habtes bought that spot. And this is later on in life, this is in the mid to late 2000s. Charles Mudede famously called it a mecca of hip-hop in the Central District which is where so much of hip-hop history in Seattle comes from. And in that time period, there were only two venues where you could go to in the Central District to see hip-hop: Langston Hughes, which didn't have much that time period, and the Hidmo. Maybe in the first few weeks that Rahwa bought the Hidmo, the police came in and said, "You can do any kind of music you want to do here, but we don't want to see you do any hip -op." This is in the mid to late 2000s.

And what's their justification for hip-hop?

I'm guessing they equate, you know, because of... Just white supremacy and the way that black and brown people are portrayed in the media across the board, across the nation and world. People associate black and brown people, young people with gangs and gangs with violence and hip-hop is just gangs and violence. That's what they think, right? So they went into the Hidmo and said, "You can do any kind of music you want to do, but don't do any hip-hop." Rahwa was my hero because she did it anyway. And every time we had a hip-hop show... Like Hidmo was a was a restaurant and a bar. The police would come and intimidate that venue to the point where she couldn't sell alcohol on the nights that she did all-ages hip-hop shows, but she was so committed to the community and committed to giving young people a safe place to do music that she did it anyways at the expense of her business. That's very rare.

When that happened in the mid to late 2000s, I started hearing stories from other small businesses in the South End and I would try to book shows in the neighborhood where I grew up and always come up to this wall of like, you know, "The police have come in here and told us [that] we're not supposed to do hip-hop and I don't want to mess with the police." In addition to that, there are even real estate developers, like there's a venue in the South End and I'm not going to name them because I think they're good people that just signed a lease without really thinking about the impact of this clause. But they signed a lease – and again, this is in the mid to late 2000s – where in the language of the lease, this is a music venue, there's a clause that says no hip-hop shows and no raves. And this is a venue in my neighborhood that still exists right now where that's in the language of the lease.

And still today?

Still today. To talk about the teen dance ordinance and how it affected hip-hop, I don't think you can separate it from all those issues.

I talked to a reporter at OPB, Oregon Public Broadcasting, that was talking about even just in Oregon's state constitution it's saying that black people can't own land, own businesses...

They can't walk down the street without being tarred and feathered. That was written in Oregon law. My friend Walidah Imarisha teaches a class about why there are not more black people in Oregon. It's crazy.

I mean it's institutional racism. And they're saying even today in the hip-hop community, hip-hop venues are being targeted for fire ordinances or code violations but they're not going to bust the folk venue down the street or whatever it might be. And so that's still happening today. But for that to be in a code for a building or in an ordinance or whatever it was to still say you can't play hip-hop. That's beyond the Teen Dance Ordinance, but something that's still happening today. You had said at one point, a conversation that you and I have had before, that the hip-hop community in Seattle eventually started going to Vancouver. Can you talk about that a little more?

Absolutely. I feel like a kind of like sidestepped the Teen Dance question in a way. I just wanted to give it more context. There was a lot of different ways that hip hop artists were growing up under the Teen Dance Ordinance, worked with it right? I want to give credit o a few venues that really like held it down during that whole era. The Boys and Girls Club in the Central District was one of the main places where we could do hip-hop shows.

Langston Hughes, now Performing Arts Institute – it used to be the Langston Hughes Cultural Center – on 17th and Yesler was one of the only places and there was a place called the Mecca International on 23rd and Union. It was like this tiny room where a lot of people had their first shows. So in that time period I didn't, again I'm growing up and I didn't understand what the Teen Dance Ordinance was, I thought it was just race. But it seemed like hip-hop couldn't leave the Central District. I learned later that it was also because of the Teen Dance Ordinance.

So for my generation, and I think it's really particular generation because we're the ones that grew up under the Teen Dance Ordinance without knowing what was there before or that there was a possibility of something else, we grew up having to do... Like I learned how to rap more at poetry, spoken word open mics because there was more of those in the late 90s and early 2000s and a lot of us would go to that. We would go to rap battles that would be hosted by different colleges. And yeah the idea of like headlining shows, it just really wasn't there. So that was like the extent of what you could do if you were under 21 and you're trying to make hip-hop music in Seattle or somebody was sneaking you in a venue, which happened sometimes too. But one thing that I feel we don't talk about a lot is there was a section of us, like a whole group of us, that started going to Vancouver B.C. to do shows because...

Because you could?

Because we could, because the legal drinking age was 19 at the time. I don't know enough to know like what all ages shows were like in Vancouver because we were doing primarily 19 and up shows at that point. I was 19. But Vancouver at that time, as far as hip-hop goes, I felt like there was a moment where Vancouver was more of the center of hip-hop in the Northwest.

[Teodros' former band] 500 Years did tours in Vancouver before we really did regular shows in Seattle. I mean, you can't really tour Vancouver. We would tour B.C., like we would do Victoria, Vancouver, New Westminster, Whistler. Those were my first tours. And also the group that I was in after 500 Years, the one more people remember, Abyssinian Creole, our first show that we ever did was at Context in Vancouver because there really wasn't anything to do in Seattle.

Not having an opportunity to perform as much as you think should be allowable. This impact on the hip-hop community. How much of you do you think it was racism versus the teen dance ordinance and how do we still feel those effects today? Whether that be the teen dance ordinance or whether that just be racism still at play today? How are we seeing this impact the music community here in Seattle?

It's interesting. We still have a lack of venues in the South End. People have been moved out of the Central District, so that's a whole thing. I don't think in South King County, in places like Tacoma, Kent, and Federal Way, I don't hear about venues out there where poor people live. I associate hip-hop with poor people and people of color. And when the communities are scattered and the center of where we think the venue should go... There's a lot of talk about like saving venues in the Central District, which is important. I think that is important. But what happens when our focus is so outdated that we're missing entire segments of society. Like where's a venue in SeaTac?

Where more and more people are having to move to.

Exactly. I don't know. These are things I think about. I want to shout out my guy Isaam. He's an MC from Holly Park in his early 20s who's been organizing a ton of incredible shows. Whenever I go to one of his shows and it'll be in the most non-traditional venue you can think of. It might be a recording studio, a literal recording studio that he turned into a venue for the night and it's just filled with black and brown faces from Holly Park and Rainier Vista. It's East African and African-American together, might have a Muslim focus, but people from all different religions or faiths are there speaking their hearts. And these are youth that a lot of nonprofits don't even like reach out to.

We also have like this thing in Seattle [where] there's tons of nonprofit organizations that target youth and a lot of the youth that go through these different programs that we have in Seattle just cycle through and there's tons of youth that get forgotten from there too. So when I see somebody like a young person like Isaam creating a venue and creating a space and all these artists taking over the space and making it theirs, to me, that's the solution. It's got to come from the community. It can't come from us. If that makes sense.

Sound & Vision airs Saturday mornings at 7 AM PST. Hosted by Emily Fox and John Richards, the show "uses interviews, artistry, commentary, insight, and conversation to that tell broader stories through music, and illustrate why music and art matter."