Wackies: Bullwackie in New York (1986)
Slip on a sidewalk crack in NYC today, and they’ll be a documentary crew there to film it (and ready to raise funds for the feature on Kickstarter), but the early years of reggae/soundsystem culture in NY went largely undocumented. That’s why it’s so cool that Wackies: Bullwackie in New York exists. The story of Wackies label proprietor Lloyd Barnes, one of the original NY reggae studio operators, and the producer behind Horace Andy’s Dance Hall Style and other little-known but mind-blowing dub and dancehall discs, was directed by a guy called Christopher Coy who, as far as we can tell, never made anything else. That’s too bad because, like Wackies himself, the movie has a lot of style, showing a side of New York even most New Yorkers rarely see, way up in the North Bronx on White Plains Road. Large up the Ego Trip crew for putting us on to this great slice of mid-80s NYC life.