Brooklynites are gawking at one of the borough’s newest residents: an 18-foot-tall metal sculpture of the 1980s comic-book character “Rappin’ Max Robot.”
The mammoth piece of public art — fabricated in Brooklyn by apprentice welders — spent time outside the Hip Hop Museum in The Bronx and will now hang out in Brooklyn Borough Hall Plaza before heading to its final home: Paris, where it will commemorate the introduction of break-dancing into the Olympics.
The 7,000-pound behemoth is inspiring shock and awe among borough passers-by — many of whom aren’t actually sure what it is.
“My first thought was, ‘What’s he doing?’” Christopher Taylor, a 54-year-old retiree from Brooklyn, told The Post last week as he gazed at the robot figure leaning on a massive boombox. “I thought it was a bug, that these things are antennae coming out of his head.”
But Taylor soon caught on, saying Rappin’ Max Robot was a “hip-hop guy.
“He’s coming up out of the ground, like hip hop,” Taylor said. “Hip hop has been influencing our planetary culture — it’s monumental. It’s nice to see something from the culture.”
Leo Martinez, a 64-year-old construction worker from The Bronx, said, “It’s weird, it’s beautiful.
“It looks like he have antennae, and the position is weird, like he’s leaning [on the boom box]. Like a cartoon,” the hardhat said.
Unveiled in Brooklyn the day before Halloween, the sculpture was created by Welder Underground, a Bushwick-based nonprofit apprenticeship program that breathed life into Rappin’ Max, the world’s first hip-hop comic-book character that sprang from the mind of the late artist Eric Orr.
“Hip hop is so much more than music; it’s culture,” Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso said in a statement of the sculpture.
“When hip hop was first created over 50 years ago, New Yorkers created a system of expression that transcends national boundaries and holds the power to bring us closer together.
“Rappin’ Max Robot epitomizes the many ways hip hop can take shape – whether it’s through breaking, as a comic book, or in a massive metal sculpture created by Brooklyn welders,” Reynoso said.
But not everyone is thrilled with the rusting gray fixture.
“It’s silly,” Brooklyn artist Sylvia Nagy said. “Probably it’s good for kids or those guys playing on the subway platform, skateboarders. I’m impressed by its size, but it’s not for me.”
Others brushed aside such killjoy comments.
“I love the rustic look of it — it looks like it was nothing that was made into something, like hip hop,” said Wendell Wells, a 39-year-old musician and tech consultant from Brooklyn.
“Hip hop comes from the basic roots of life in the urban environment, and we take it, and we intertwine it with music, and we make something that’s beautiful, something that’s long-lasting, something that everybody can appreciate.”
The sculpture will sit in the plaza for the next six months, after which it departs for its permanent home at the Place de la Bataille-de-Stalingrad in Paris.
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