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A Hip-Hop Comic Book Star Comes to Life in Steel

A statue of Rappin’ Max Robot is bound for Paris. But first it’s making a stop in the Bronx.

Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll meet a new iteration of Rappin’ Max Robot that is bound for Paris, via the Bronx. We’ll also get details on Robert Kennedy Jr.’s testimony in the court case seeking to have him removed from the November ballot in New York.

Clark Ivers, Welder Underground

Rappin’ Max Robot began life as a comic book character only a few inches tall. Now he is a man of steel. He has a skin of steel plates up to an inch thick that covers an I-beam skeleton.

He is on his way to Paris, to take note of breaking’s debut in the Olympics, but he will get there a little late. First he will spend some time in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.

Today an 18-foot-tall statue of Rappin’ Max Robot that was fabricated in Brooklyn will be hauled to a spot outside the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. The museum is not scheduled to open until next year. But Marc Levin, who with his wife, Adina, runs the studio and foundry where the statue took shape, said it would be assembled for a Champagne toast on Saturday, the second day of breaking events at the Olympics.

Hip-hop is a “wondrous and centerless tangle,” The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote last year, so perhaps it is not surprising that the toast will not be the only hip-hop event this weekend. Sunday is the 51st anniversary of the day hip-hop is said to have gotten its start, in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and a group that is not affiliated with the museum is planning a march from that neighborhood to Crotona Park, a couple of miles away.

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Source: Music - nytimes.com


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