As the first wave of punk was swept away, new wave and hardcore punk rock emerged, and I gravitated toward the latter. The Bad Brains were our band. They were black, vegan Rastas who became our friends and spiritual big brothers. Racism was corny to us; our favorite band was black — what could be more punk than that? We were downtown kids, children of liberals. Rap for us was akin to what reggae was for the first wave of English punk rockers: our alternate chamber to punk rock. We liked the music, even if it was a little alien initially. The fact The Bad Brains were Rastas and brothers made the N.Y.C. hardcore scene more open-minded. We could like rap, it was okay.

New York hardcore was diverse ethnically from day one. We didn’t have the Nazi garbage that went along with So Cal hardcore. We didn’t have Nazis, we had white children of hippies, Jewish kids, Latinos, Blacks, Asian people, cute girls and future intellectuals all grooving to the Brains. It was a positive scene, a progressive environment. Then it changed.

It got more intense, more violent. The Queens kids started showing up. No knock on those dudes but their version of what the Punk ethos was and ours were very different. Max’s closed. TR 3 closed. Soon CB’s was the only place in town. The scene was getting stale. The Bad Brains broke up, reformed and broke up again. The Fun Gallery, the first graffiti gallery ever, opened on 10th Street. It was popping, and we liked going there to hang, meeting people Like Futura 2000 and Keith Haring. We got hipped to Club Negril, the first downtown hip-hop club, and we dug it. We heard hip-hop being played by DJs live, and it was amazing, life-altering even.

We rubbed shoulders with people like Rammellzee and Fab 5 Freddy, Crazy Legs, Jean Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. We saw the Rock Steady Crew breaking. Hardcore was becoming staler by the minute, and we were looking towards the next bastion of cool.

We started going to the Roxy on Friday nights and checking The Bad Brains on Saturdays when they played CB’s or Irving Plaza. I started tuning in to Mr. Magic on WHBI and The Supreme Team on Medgars Evers college radio, both underground, hard-to-find-on-the-dial rap radio shows. We figured out how to get in everywhere for free. We were early adopters, and the door people took notice. We adopted b-boy style, mixing it with our punky outfits, and by 1982 we had transformed into hip-hop-loving white kids with punk backgrounds — fresh Pumas, fat laces, ski hats, lumberjack jackets and all. It was half a goof, half homage. It just was.

We were the first wave of kids from the so-called hardcore scene who had crossed over to the adjacent culture of hip-hop. Shell toes with fat laces had replaced combat boots and hi-top chucks. I wrote graffiti and traded moshing for breaking (though I was never very good). We explored trendy clubs like Danceteria and later Area.

My friends started rapping, transforming their sound from a hardcore band to a rap group. They called themselves the Beastie Boys. Just a few years earlier, they had been a full-on hardcore band with an EP called Egg Raid On Mojo. Their foray into rap music, “Cookie Puss,” was a flukey success, a celebration of Tom Carvel’s infamous ice cream cake delight. Its release coincided with the record that changed it all: Run-D.M.C.’s “Sucker MC’s” backed with “It’s Like That.”

They both came out in the spring of ’83, and for a lot of us, by then hardcore was not the move it had once been. Run-D.M.C. was a pure, cathartic musical release, not dissimilar to when I first experienced the Bad Brains a few years earlier. They were shouting at us the way hardcore had. The songs were all drums, no melody, and I couldn’t fathom anything punker than that. The Bad Brains had broken up, Black Flag had gone weird, hardcore had gone all macho tough guy, and like many would down the road, we had lost the faith. Run-D.M.C. became our new church and hip-hop our religion.