Graffiti: So Cool It’s A Pillar of Hip Hop

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Speaker 1 Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 37 Hey, and welcome to the podcast.

Speaker 32 I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and we are doing a wild style today.

Speaker 40 You're on Stuff You Should Know.

Speaker 42 One of those episodes where it's like this this topic is cooler than we are, but we're going to give it our best to try to get across how neat it really is.

Speaker 46 Oh, man.

Speaker 47 I'm not going to say when.

Speaker 49 Maybe you can guess, but there's one portion of this that

Speaker 12 it'll be the most like middle-aged white dude thing ever.

Speaker 54 Okay.

Speaker 56 I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.

Speaker 52 Okay, I'll see if you can. You'll probably know when I go into my voice.

Speaker 57 Okay.

Speaker 59 Is it that old witch voice that you like to do?

Speaker 7 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 61 You'll know the voice. All right.

Speaker 40 Is it an Italian thing?

Speaker 54 No, not Italian. All right.

Speaker 58 I'll figure it out then.

Speaker 62 We're talking graffiti, obviously, Chuck.

Speaker 64 I don't know if everybody knows that.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 65 I mean, we covered some of this in our hip-hop episode for sure, but this is one of the pillars of hip-hop culture, as we'll see.

Speaker 66 But graffiti needed its own thing.

Speaker 3 And graffiti in the United States, we basically think of as sort of a late 60s East Coast thing.

Speaker 47 And this isn't one of those things.

Speaker 68 I do see where Livia put in like cave drawings, but I'm not even going to talk about that

Speaker 52 because I was like, come on, Livia.

Speaker 7 But

Speaker 71 very good point here in Mexico and like the 1930s where mural art and sort of public art during the Mexican Revolution was a big thing.

Speaker 68 And so Chicano kids in the 1930s sort of brought that same style to LA and other cities in the 1930s and 40s.

Speaker 66 before the spray can was invented.

Speaker 49 But I feel like that is a genuine sort of precursor to what we know as modern graffiti.

Speaker 56 Yeah, because they were, well, they were writing on walls. Sometimes they were using paint and brushes.

Speaker 77 Markers didn't exist, spray cans didn't exist yet, but they were using what they had a lot of times just to tag their neighborhood as like this turf belongs to this gang.

Speaker 45 But they added flourishes that kind of gave rise to some of the details and touches that are still around in graffiti today.

Speaker 62 So it is definitely a valid

Speaker 89 river that flowed into this larger river that flows into the ocean of graffiti that's on planet earth, which would be the hip-hop culture.

Speaker 93 I mentioned the spray can.

Speaker 3 That's obviously a vital part of graffiti.

Speaker 67 That was invented in 1949 by a paint owner in Illinois, a paint company owner named Ed Seymour and his wife. And I tried to find her name.

Speaker 94 What's her name?

Speaker 77 Bonnie.

Speaker 53 Oh, I couldn't find it. You found Bonnie?

Speaker 96 I had to look really hard, yes, but I found it.

Speaker 81 Bonnie, isn't that a lovely name?

Speaker 52 Nice work.

Speaker 53 Yeah, I do love the name Bonnie.

Speaker 66 But they said they were trying to coat radiators with an aluminum coating. So they invented the spray can.

Speaker 4 And right away, like, you know, people that were protesting or maybe

Speaker 66 artists on the down low, because you can hide a can pretty easily.

Speaker 71 You can work with it very quickly.

Speaker 11 It works on a lot of different kinds of surfaces.

Speaker 67 So all of a sudden, spray cans, you know, really paved the way.

Speaker 56 Yeah.

Speaker 75 Potsy from Happy Days famously was a clandestine artist using spray paint.

Speaker 7 Oh, really? I don't remember that one.

Speaker 11 Hey, I could have seen that being a Happy Days episode.

Speaker 39 Yeah, but

Speaker 91 Pozzi. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 37 Maybe Ralph Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then just freaked out.

Speaker 12 Probably would have been Richie.

Speaker 40 Yeah, I guess so.

Speaker 44 Man, that was such a good show.

Speaker 11 Like a real lesson learner episode.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 101 Yeah, and the Fonz, who you'd think would be like a spray paint graffiti artist like Vandal is the one who talks to Richie.

Speaker 60 He's like, that's not cool.

Speaker 58 So there's a lot of advantages to using spray paint.

Speaker 103 That's why graffiti really kind of started.

Speaker 95 This is like where its roots really took root.

Speaker 39 Markers are another thing that people use.

Speaker 56 And most people think of spray paint with graffiti, but markers are important.

Speaker 107 And they didn't come around until the 1950s.

Speaker 74 So you had spray paint before you had markers, which is surprising to me.

Speaker 82 And if you want a nice little trivia question, Magic Marker was the first marker for commercial sale starting in 1953.

Speaker 20 That makes sense because that's became sort of the proprietary eponym in a way.

Speaker 92 Exactly.

Speaker 60 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 47 Not so much anymore, I feel like, but in our era, for sure.

Speaker 81 Yeah, because it's fun to say.

Speaker 7 Yeah,

Speaker 7 it's a marker that creates magic.

Speaker 91 Exactly.

Speaker 12 I didn't really consider markers as graffiti, but then I was like, yeah, like every everything like on the inside of a Marta train or a New York subway car, like that's all marker.

Speaker 79 All marker. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 103 It's very important for what's called hand style, as we'll see.

Speaker 12 That's right, but we need to talk about cornbread, right?

Speaker 105 Yeah, so there's a guy named Daryl McRae who will tell anybody who sits still long enough that he was the person who invented graffiti.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 81 And he makes a really good case.

Speaker 102 Unfortunately, there's some other people who are doing the same thing at the same time, but you could still say cornbread, which was his handle, his tag,

Speaker 87 was one of the very first people who took up graffiti starting in 1965.

Speaker 12 Yeah, he was but a 12-year-old.

Speaker 50 He's a Philly guy, and he was in Juvie.

Speaker 67 And

Speaker 4 in Juvie, he said, I don't want this white bread.

Speaker 52 I want cornbread.

Speaker 67 My grandmother made cornbread, and I love that stuff.

Speaker 113 So he got the nickname cornbread.

Speaker 78 I don't think he got the cornbread, though.

Speaker 73 I doubt if he got the cornbread.

Speaker 52 That's very labor-intensive to make cornbread.

Speaker 92 For sure. I mean,

Speaker 52 compared to just opening up a bag of white bread, you know.

Speaker 56 Also, though, I think at places called Youth Development Center, they don't give you your preferred food.

Speaker 68 They give you what you're going to eat yeah like oliver twist style yeah no requests please no more uh so he took that nickname started writing it uh on the walls there at his institution that he was in and then when he got out in 1967 he would take to the streets of philly writing his name cornbread uh especially like if he knew that his uh sweetie pie was on the bus he would write it along the bus route so she could see that and be impressed sometimes running alongside the the bus yeah like while it was going.

Speaker 47 Other bus lines, and that was sort of the, you know, the beginning along, as we'll see in, you know, which was already happening in Spanish Harlem of sort of the early point of graffiti, which is like a name, you know, later on they would call it a tag.

Speaker 68 And the point was to get that out in as many places as you could.

Speaker 97 And

Speaker 67 like.

Speaker 50 You were super cool if you did it in like a very risky or hard to reach place, like the wall in front of the cop shop or the top of a water tower or something like that.

Speaker 81 Yeah.

Speaker 38 And so you add in the flourishes that Chicano kids came up with in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s in LA

Speaker 41 with getting your tag out there as many places as you can.

Speaker 84 That's the, that is definitely the beginning of

Speaker 83 graffiti.

Speaker 95 And this is where most people point to as the start of the whole thing.

Speaker 111 In the 60s and 70s in New York City, all of this started to blossom.

Speaker 108 All these things kind of came together and just the right hands and graffiti became a thing, just slowly but surely.

Speaker 110 Um, like you said, some of the first people were just writing their names, and they would come up with this tag.

Speaker 77 And some of the earliest tags came from Spanish Harlem, where you would have your nickname and then a number, like Turk 182.

Speaker 101 Um, and Turk would be your nickname, 182 would be the street you hailed from.

Speaker 103 Uh, I think Turk 182 was entirely made up, I don't think it was a docudrama, but one of the first two was Julio 204 and Taki 183.

Speaker 48 Yeah, Taki 183, Taki was a nickname, a Greek nickname for Demetrius, still is.

Speaker 68 But Taki was a, this is in like 69 or 70, was a delivery worker.

Speaker 66 So Taki went all over the city.

Speaker 6 So it was a really good way to get the Taki 183 tag all over the place.

Speaker 3 And it got so far and wide that Taki was actually part of a New York Times article in 1971.

Speaker 12 And all of a sudden, it inspired people saying, hey, like, this is the cool new thing to do on the street.

Speaker 76 Yeah, or else they hated Taki 183 for defacing New York all over the place.

Speaker 92 Good point.

Speaker 85 That same year that the article on Taki 183 came out, there was the first graffiti crew kind of came together, Writers Corner 188.

Speaker 45 They met at the corner of Audubon and 188th Street, 188th Street, as they say in New York.

Speaker 75 And the crew was called WC-188.

Speaker 59 And it was like one of the first ways that people started sharing different style tips and kinds of markers that did different things.

Speaker 102 It was just the first way that different people doing the same thing came together and figured out how to do it better.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 69 And like I said, it was sort of a quantity over quality thing for a while.

Speaker 67 I think that's sadly kind of part of it now a little bit when I see graffiti around Atlanta.

Speaker 68 There's some really good stuff and also some

Speaker 11 really kind of not so great tags that I see a lot.

Speaker 64 lot yeah and more often than not it's the not so great ones right kind of like watching adults skateboard yeah

Speaker 68 I mean man Atlanta just doesn't have the skateboarders that's a west coast thing and I never see I always see those guys trying to do the tricks but they never land the tricks exactly that's exactly like junkie tags which is I think called toy in the

Speaker 44 the graffiti world.

Speaker 3 Oh, really? Toy if your tag is just sort of not great?

Speaker 42 Yeah, if it's just junky, amateurish graffiti, it's toy graffiti.

Speaker 56 Well, I wonder if these people are like, hey, man, I'm not such a great artist.

Speaker 7 Lay off. I'm trying.

Speaker 104 Well, they would say, stop doing what you're doing and go do something else then, because the streets are made for good graffiti, not toys.

Speaker 92 Right.

Speaker 70 The subway was where things got really a little more like

Speaker 65 artistic, I guess.

Speaker 68 Riding on a subway train in New York, you could obviously get your name out to more people because that subway is going all over the place.

Speaker 50 It's also risky.

Speaker 68 And as we'll see, risk is a big, you know, I mentioned like the wall in front of the police station.

Speaker 98 Like, risk is a big, big part of it.

Speaker 69 Because

Speaker 68 as you'll see, like, when they made great efforts in the 70s and 80s in New York to stop this stuff,

Speaker 47 it wasn't like they were like, oh, boy, we better stop doing this graffiti.

Speaker 13 It was sort of like, game on, man.

Speaker 10 Like, this is what we're looking for.

Speaker 70 Like, now we know they're after us, so it makes it even more sort of challenging and risky.

Speaker 106 Yeah.

Speaker 59 I mean, these early graffiti artists were by definition juvenile delinquents to a person.

Speaker 56 So the idea of adding more challenges to them just played exactly into their whole ethos.

Speaker 106 Ethos.

Speaker 102 I can never remember.

Speaker 68 And to be clear, with this sub, I just want to, if you don't understand, they're not spray painting the moving subway cars.

Speaker 51 They would break into the rail yards at night.

Speaker 50 And all of a sudden you have this huge canvas just sitting there.

Speaker 44 Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 83 And like you said, a lot of people would see see it because that subway car the next day would be traveling all over New York, so that was a big deal.

Speaker 87 And that's kind of what you think of when you think of late 70s, early 80s graffiti in New York.

Speaker 83 Subway cars is kind of traveling all over the place with really cool, colorful graffiti on them.

Speaker 92 Totally.

Speaker 84 Do you want to take an early break, or do you want to keep talking and get into some different kinds and styles?

Speaker 98 Maybe let's break down the styles first.

Speaker 86 All right, let's do it.

Speaker 89 So, it turns out there's three categories of graffiti in order of easiness to increasing hardness.

Speaker 84 There's got to be a better way to put it, but I'm leaving it there.

Speaker 119 There's tags,

Speaker 40 which Olivia calls very sterilely basic identifying signs.

Speaker 92 I love that one.

Speaker 68 Well, tags didn't come along until 1990, the word.

Speaker 86 Right, but essentially it's your signature.

Speaker 77 It's your nickname.

Speaker 56 spelled out in a very stylized way specific to you. That's what hand style is.

Speaker 37 And then when you use your hand style to put up that nickname in a certain stylized way on the wall, that today, at least, that's a tag.

Speaker 124 That's one of the three kinds of graffiti.

Speaker 6 Yeah.

Speaker 3 And before they called it tagging in 1990 back in the day, as they say, they would call it hitting maybe or bombing or just writing.

Speaker 52 Throw-ups, terrible name, is the next kind.

Speaker 65 It can incorporate your tag as like your signature, but it's usually more than that.

Speaker 94 It's tag plus.

Speaker 66 A lot of times it's multicolor, like two or three colors, maybe even more if you've got the time.

Speaker 72 It's, you know, it's more, it's just simply said it's kind of more artistic.

Speaker 62 Yeah, and they're almost always like bubbly letters from what I can tell.

Speaker 47 Yeah, unless it's the block style, which I like.

Speaker 91 Yeah, blockbuster?

Speaker 119 Yeah. I like those as well.

Speaker 85 Those are it's a different style.

Speaker 86 They're not throw-ups.

Speaker 45 It's a kind of a style that could be used in throw-ups.

Speaker 61 And they're a lot of times used on using rollers, but they're really large letters.

Speaker 110 A lot of times they're more straight than bubbly, which is the differentiation, like you were saying.

Speaker 44 I like Blockbuster too, Chuck.

Speaker 99 Yeah, me too.

Speaker 68 And then you've got the best kind when you might get a whole subway car and mini hours to decorate this thing or a whole wall.

Speaker 99 And those are called pieces, just like you would call an art piece a piece, because it is an art piece.

Speaker 91 For sure.

Speaker 110 They're way more detailed, way more colors.

Speaker 56 They have all sorts of crazy, cool effects, like fades from one color to another they might have sparkles on them they might somehow have like a chrome effect there's a lot more decoration to them they're just amazing that's probably what most people think of when they think of graffiti or pieces yeah and these all are they get they start out easy like you just practice doing tags then you move on to throw-ups and then you move on to pieces eventually and so they also take different amounts of time like once you get good at tagging you can do this in like less than a minute maybe five if you're just starting out.

Speaker 39 It can take a minute if you're really, really good and have been doing it a long time to put a throw up up.

Speaker 108 It can take 15 minutes if you're still figuring out your way.

Speaker 91 Those pieces, this surprised me.

Speaker 129 They can take days to do with multiple crews working on the same thing.

Speaker 59 It can still take days.

Speaker 64 And if you're just one dude making a piece, a masterpiece, it can take months, weeks and months to get it done, which, I mean, if you're doing this illicitly, like on a wall somewhere, having to go back like night after night

Speaker 117 to do this and not get caught, that's rather thrilling, if you ask me.

Speaker 53 Well, and the uh

Speaker 12 just the time investment for something that a third of the way through or halfway through or toward the end could get could go away.

Speaker 91 I thought about that too, man. That's got hurt.

Speaker 52 That would really suck.

Speaker 56 What about wild style?

Speaker 83 I referred to it early on.

Speaker 9 Wild style is obviously super stylized.

Speaker 3 It's where you get sort of the overlapping letter patterns.

Speaker 67 It's usually fairly bright and like you mentioned, like a lot of shading, maybe a 3D effect.

Speaker 11 A lot of times these pieces have wild style involved.

Speaker 130 Right.

Speaker 82 Yeah, it's kind of like the most advanced form, I guess, just because it's so

Speaker 56 it's just really hard to do.

Speaker 38 And it's the most intricate usually, but it's also kind of like gone beyond what most people appreciate as graffiti,

Speaker 45 where they have no idea what this thing says.

Speaker 86 Like other graffiti artists can read it, but the average person is just like, oh, look at that smash of colors.

Speaker 85 It's kind of like how metal bands

Speaker 89 logos have kind of evolved to where you're like, I have no idea whose album this is.

Speaker 103 It's very much similar that Wild Style is.

Speaker 86 But one thing that stuck out to me, Chuck, Wild Style, I'm like,

Speaker 75 that probably came around in maybe the 90s at the earliest.

Speaker 59 It's from the 70s too.

Speaker 105 Like all of this stuff is from the 70s.

Speaker 111 So in the 70s in New York City, the general guidelines for what constitutes graffiti still today were laid out and established by those people.

Speaker 59 Like it's still followed today.

Speaker 77 I think that's amazing.

Speaker 119 You know, I thought it'd be added piece by piece over the decades, but no, they figured it out pretty much right out of the gate.

Speaker 106 Yeah, that's cool. I love it.

Speaker 4 And then if you've ever seen like, and this is a little more West Coast, like the old English style or like the the Western saloon lettering.

Speaker 11 That's known as Cholo style, a word that, you know, is sort of associated with like gang culture, like Mexican gang culture.

Speaker 51 But that developed from that Chicano writing culture on the West Coast and then spread around.

Speaker 47 Like you can see that on the East Coast, but it's definitely, I feel, like, more West Coast thing.

Speaker 12 And that looks super cool, too.

Speaker 55 No, it definitely does.

Speaker 62 There's also, they use a lot of characters, cartoonish characters of like gangbangers with bandanas like almost over their eyes, that kind of dude.

Speaker 83 yeah um they show up a lot it just seems like there's a lot more cartoon figures in cholo style than say like new york graffiti there was one more style that i ran across called anti-style or ignorant style and essentially it's like what most people would call toy it's just primitive it's amateurish but it's done on purpose because it's done by graffiti artists a lot of whom are actually really good um who are like this has gotten totally out of control have you seen this wild style stuff we need to like get back to basics and just have fun with with this again.

Speaker 42 And so they're kind of trying to recapture what the earliest graffiti artists from like the 70s were doing as they when they figured it out as they went along.

Speaker 56 A lot of people hate it, can't stand it.

Speaker 45 They think it's just a dumb idea.

Speaker 62 But from what I can tell, if you're a good artist doing purposefully primitive work, it's actually pretty cool looking.

Speaker 92 All right.

Speaker 12 Should we take that break?

Speaker 38 I do want to take that break, Chuck.

Speaker 47 All right, let's go get our spray cans, shake them up, and we'll be right back.

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Speaker 12 All right, so we mentioned markers early on

Speaker 50 and obviously like I said inside like on the wall of a subway car

Speaker 50 a lot of times

Speaker 67 maybe not even inside but if you just want to provide detail for a larger piece on like the exterior of a subway car or wall or something yeah you could use a marker and in the early days pilot marks a lot and dry mark DRI and Sanford King size were they were very broad broad tip markers.

Speaker 51 So those were some of the early markers that were the most popular.

Speaker 11 And you could also refill a lot of those with different kinds of ink.

Speaker 68 So the, you know, the felt was just sort of the instrument, and you could put whatever color or mix colors if you wanted to.

Speaker 94 For sure. And they would also make their own stuff.

Speaker 69 It's a very sort of DIY style of art where they were making their own tools and components, maybe like shoe polish bottles and stuff like that.

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 62 You also mentioned that it's one of the four pillars of hip-hop.

Speaker 59 There's technically five as far as Africa Bombada is concerned.

Speaker 83 And that would be knowledge is the fifth pillar, like knowledge of self, knowledge of where you come from, your history,

Speaker 64 real KRS-1 stuff, you know?

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 56 And so as being part of hip-hop culture, I don't know if we said the other ones, MCing and DJing and breaking.

Speaker 102 Yeah.

Speaker 117 And graffiti and knowledge.

Speaker 83 Those are the five pillars of hip-hop.

Speaker 102 And like the other stuff, like MCing and DJing and all that, and breaking in particular, there's a real competitive element to graffiti, like

Speaker 88 where you can go so far as you end up in a war with other artists where you're spraying over their stuff and spraying over your stuff.

Speaker 40 And that is not, you're not supposed to do that.

Speaker 59 Like if you spray over somebody's stuff, it better be terrible work and you better be really good at it.

Speaker 44 Because that's a huge flex, I guess you would say, if it was 2024.

Speaker 114 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 50 It has also intersected with other art forms over the years.

Speaker 69 In the 1980s, there was a comic artist named Vaughan Bode who was very influential to this culture.

Speaker 65 He had a couple of characters, Puck and Cheech Wizard.

Speaker 116 He came up with,

Speaker 47 I think he came up with these characters like in the 1950s.

Speaker 92 Wow.

Speaker 49 But then in the 60s, they were in like self-published comics and then went a little more, and when I say mainstream, obviously not mainstream, mainstream, but like 72 to 75, they were in the national lampoon.

Speaker 49 lampoon, so a little more mainstream. Right.

Speaker 114 And if you think you've heard that name before, that sounds familiar.

Speaker 47 You might have heard the song Sure Shot by the Beastie Boys.

Speaker 113 I'm like Vaughan Bode.

Speaker 51 I'm a Cheech Wizard, never quitting, so you won't listen.

Speaker 86 Very nice. Well said.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 I knew I had heard that before.

Speaker 52 I was like, that's been in a song. I know it.

Speaker 45 Yeah, and Cheech Wizard is essentially like a giant wizard hat with some legs coming out of it.

Speaker 74 That's Cheech Wizard, and he's like a wise, smart ass kind of, well, wizard hat.

Speaker 110 And I don't, I know, I didn't see why, but for some reason, graffiti culture just loved that stuff.

Speaker 89 So Cheech Wizard shows up, and Puck the Lizard show up in a lot of graffiti from the 70s and 80s.

Speaker 83 And then one of the other influences I saw that Cheech Wizard or Von Bode had,

Speaker 111 his lettering for his comics.

Speaker 45 He like, from what I can tell, he came up with bubble letters and that that made its way into graffiti directly from Von Bode's comics.

Speaker 67 Well, graffiti and the book covers of

Speaker 47 math books of Gen X kids.

Speaker 54 Yep.

Speaker 12 Big into the bubble lettering.

Speaker 85 Yeah, using those

Speaker 111 pens with like the five different colors that you can click down.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I was okay at it.

Speaker 109 I definitely used those pens.

Speaker 66 I remember G's giving me a lot of trouble and S is giving me a lot of trouble.

Speaker 39 Those were hard.

Speaker 7 But I tried.

Speaker 56 How was your

Speaker 60 bubble cue?

Speaker 53 Oh, God.

Speaker 99 Is that a thing?

Speaker 128 It is. That sounds possible.

Speaker 64 I think I just laid down the gauntlet for somebody to come up with that.

Speaker 92 Oh, wow.

Speaker 72 So graffiti starts to spread around the world.

Speaker 19 Britain in the late 70s,

Speaker 68 Amsterdam in particular, and the Netherlands and their punk scenes in the late 70s. They started doing some of this stuff.

Speaker 51 And then it also helped spread because of...

Speaker 51 of media a little bit.

Speaker 68 I mean, most of it was fairly underground media at the time, unless it was some like news report that had a scathing report.

Speaker 69 But there was a photographer named Henry Chalfont who did a few projects, one of which I highly recommend watching on YouTube, a documentary from 1983 called Style Wars, which is a really good watch.

Speaker 83 It's one of those ones where you're like, I feel cooler just watching this thing.

Speaker 106 Yeah.

Speaker 75 He just turned the, he turned the camera.

Speaker 123 He and the director, Tony Silver, who worked together, they turned the camera on these graffiti artists and just had them talk and show what they were doing and explain why they were doing this.

Speaker 110 And then interspersed is like

Speaker 38 breakdancing from the Rock Steady crew when they were just starting out.

Speaker 119 Like, it's just super cool, like this captured time capsule, like moment in time where this is all starting.

Speaker 117 They, they totally, like, Henry Chaufont, like, got it.

Speaker 75 He was like, we need to document this because this is going to be important.

Speaker 109 Yeah, it's amazing.

Speaker 51 I mean, there's, there's other things like photographs and this and that, but when you look at the birth of a, of a new art form and sort of a virgining culture, to have this sort of one document so like perfectly capture this moment in time, like you were talking about, it's, I mean, that should be in like the Library of Congress, like that kind of stuff.

Speaker 81 For sure.

Speaker 67 Or whatever. What's the film version of that?

Speaker 46 I can't remember the name of it.

Speaker 96 The Fiberio Fombus.

Speaker 106 Yeah.

Speaker 92 Oh, wow.

Speaker 117 I know that deserved a wow.

Speaker 43 I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel here in year 17.

Speaker 54 Oh, so you said that

Speaker 100 like a document, right?

Speaker 62 It actually is kind of referred to in graffiti culture still today.

Speaker 42 Like, if somebody's starting out and they're like, what should I go?

Speaker 107 What can I learn from?

Speaker 105 One of the things that people will refer them to is Style Wars, because again, these like essential guidelines were laid down at this time.

Speaker 62 So you can still learn a ton from watching Style Wars.

Speaker 56 Or Henry Chalfant got into a couple of other projects too.

Speaker 82 One with a photographer named Martha Cooper called Subway Art.

Speaker 89 I've also seen newbies referred to that book too.

Speaker 83 And then another one with another photographer, James Prigoff, called Spray Can Art.

Speaker 38 So Henry Chauffont had a real impact on like documenting this stuff

Speaker 56 that still is important today.

Speaker 52 Yeah, it was kind of like it made me think of the guy, I can't remember his name, but the famous photographer who captured the Southern California skateboard culture early on because they seem like kind of the only people doing that in such a sort of artistic and profound way.

Speaker 52 Right.

Speaker 57 Yeah, for sure. Good stuff.

Speaker 62 Two other things to call out.

Speaker 107 There's a photographer named Gordon Matta Clark who documented

Speaker 88 in photographs, just like tags all around New York City.

Speaker 83 Has a pretty cool,

Speaker 82 I think they make showings of his photographs sometimes.

Speaker 83 And then the movie Wild Style actually came out a year before Style Wars, 1982.

Speaker 82 It's considered the first hip-hop movie ever.

Speaker 86 I think it was a Fab5 Freddy project, but it has the Rock City crew, one of the rare early woman graffiti artists, Lady Pink, she's in it.

Speaker 95 And then King Ad Rock is in it before he was called King Ad Rock, before the Beastie Boys.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 91 But there's a ton of, like, the whole premise of this, it's a movie, like a fictional movie.

Speaker 103 But the whole premise is this guy's being hired to,

Speaker 61 well, I guess put up some graffiti by this, I can't remember, another dude or a company or something like that.

Speaker 106 All right. I'll check that out.

Speaker 18 Thanks.

Speaker 3 So, you know, we mention graffiti as art because graffiti is art.

Speaker 66 But as far as being accepted into like the legitimate art community, that sort of happened in fits and starts over the years.

Speaker 66 There was an, I guess the first academic article about graffiti was in 1969 in the Urban Review by Herbert Cole. It was called Names, Graffiti, and Culture.

Speaker 47 And then a few years later, in 1972, a big deal happened when

Speaker 71 or a big deal for that culture at least.

Speaker 71 Hugo Martinez is a student activist at City College in New York, and he helped start a collective called United Graffiti Artists with a bunch of Puerto Rican teen graffiti artists.

Speaker 3 And that was sort of the first collective where he was like, hey, do this stuff on canvas because this is art.

Speaker 10 And they had an exhibition at City College and then the very first graffiti art gallery show at the Razor Gallery in Soho that same year.

Speaker 39 Right.

Speaker 62 Yeah, they became really influential.

Speaker 85 The next year in 1973, choreographer Twyla Tharp, she had the United Graffiti artists do basically the scene decorations for her performance in Chicago.

Speaker 59 I can't remember what it was called, but weirdly, the dance was choreographed to Beach Boys music with graffiti in the background.

Speaker 118 It was a real mishmash.

Speaker 54 Wait, did you say Beastie Boys music?

Speaker 106 No, I said Beach Boys.

Speaker 86 And the whole time, she just kept going, Twyla, Twila, Twyla,

Speaker 45 while she danced.

Speaker 78 That's good.

Speaker 7 You're getting better.

Speaker 40 Yeah, it comes and goes.

Speaker 68 We did mention, you know, obviously

Speaker 12 the other side of the coin is there is, and still are people that think this is just vandalism.

Speaker 52 They think it's

Speaker 73 just like urban decay happening before our very eyes.

Speaker 50 And in the early 70s, New York got on board that line of thinking, at least the government did when Mayor John.

Speaker 51 Lindsay declared a war on graffiti.

Speaker 68 That following year in 72, the city council said it's illegal to even carry an aerosol can in a public facility.

Speaker 47 And then in 75, they created the Transit Police graffiti squad.

Speaker 115 And, you know, they're cleaning up subway cars.

Speaker 3 But like I said earlier,

Speaker 68 all this was like game on.

Speaker 66 Like there's not a single graffiti artist that was intimidated or scared out of doing what they were going to do because of this.

Speaker 4 If anything, it heightened it.

Speaker 117 Yeah, another example of that is they outlawed selling spray paint to teenagers in New York City.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 59 And so graffiti artists were like, okay, we'll just start stealing it.

Speaker 56 That's cheaper anyway.

Speaker 42 So stealing your spray paint became like just a part of graffiti in New York in the 70s and 80s.

Speaker 7 Yeah, not condoning that.

Speaker 56 Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents, and I wasn't kidding.

Speaker 68 Ed Koch, famous New York mayor in the latish 70s and 77, was very anti-graffiti and would razor wire the subway yards, had guard dogs.

Speaker 142 He had cops like staking out houses and following kids home from school.

Speaker 106 That's nuts, man.

Speaker 51 Yeah, that's just nuts.

Speaker 86 So I think, I don't know if Koch, yeah, I think Koch was still mayor at the time.

Speaker 102 They came up with the Metro Transit Authority's Clean Car Program.

Speaker 77 And this one actually had an impact.

Speaker 107 This was beyond Razor Wire and German Shepherds.

Speaker 89 Like this was, if we find a train car has been hit overnight with graffiti, it's not going to go back out there until that graffiti is cleaned off.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 86 So imagine like working all night or whatever and getting your piece up, and it gets cleaned off before it even leaves the transit station.

Speaker 87 So

Speaker 56 that actually worked.

Speaker 77 And by 1989, apparently like whole car

Speaker 117 graffiti was just not around anymore in New York.

Speaker 55 Like you can still see it on cars, but they used to use the entire car.

Speaker 90 There was a really famous one by Futura 2000 and Dondi, which is called Brake.

Speaker 100 And it's considered one of the greatest full subway car

Speaker 87 masterpieces anyone's ever done.

Speaker 117 It's beyond description.

Speaker 37 Just go look up Break by Dondi and Futura 2000.

Speaker 7 What did you think of it?

Speaker 62 I thought it was amazing because it just completely departed from any kind of, I know how just ridiculous I sound right now.

Speaker 111 It departed from any kind of convention.

Speaker 62 It used all sorts of new elements and stuff that I hadn't seen anywhere else.

Speaker 117 And you really had to kind of examine it in detail and then also stepping back to kind of take the whole thing in.

Speaker 36 I didn't love it. Yeah.

Speaker 81 I mean, I could see that. It's

Speaker 91 yeah, exactly.

Speaker 11 Or let's say this.

Speaker 3 I've seen a lot other stuff that I thought was like, maybe it just appealed to me more.

Speaker 125 I was about to say it was way better, but that's, again, it's just in the eye of the beholder.

Speaker 99 Man, that was a really great way to put it.

Speaker 99 So, thank you. I appreciate that.

Speaker 47 Again, I mentioned earlier that it was a sort of a DIY community when I like figuring stuff out, sharing tips and tricks with one another.

Speaker 66 And from the beginning, they would use various nozzles from other types of cans or, you know, caps, they would call them, from different products to provide different ways of painting.

Speaker 3 I know that, you know, when you spray that, I don't use the stuff, but that Easy Off oven cleaner, you know, sprays that big wide area.

Speaker 66 So they started using that to achieve the same effect with paint.

Speaker 67 And they, they,

Speaker 52 I mean, they were a real, I guess when they were buying the paint,

Speaker 47 made a difference in the profits of rust oleum and Krylon over the 70s for sure.

Speaker 110 Yeah, but Rustoleum and Cryon were Krylon were specifically avoiding marketing or making their products attractive to graffiti artists.

Speaker 106 They couldn't do that.

Speaker 55 No, this was this was

Speaker 89 no, you did not want your your brand being accused of catering to graffiti artists at the time.

Speaker 129 But it was still pretty good.

Speaker 130 It was useful.

Speaker 60 And one of the reasons why is because they were both chock full of lead up until the late 70s.

Speaker 131 And lead does all sorts of great stuff for spray paint.

Speaker 83 It makes it dry faster.

Speaker 56 It makes colors brighter.

Speaker 110 It's more durable. It's moisture resistant.

Speaker 45 So when the lead got taken out, that was a real bummer for graffiti artists.

Speaker 89 Yes.

Speaker 85 Yeah.

Speaker 102 I mean, I could see that having a huge impact.

Speaker 36 Yeah.

Speaker 46 You know, in Europe, they did market.

Speaker 97 There were a couple in the 90s.

Speaker 51 The Montana and Molotov brands of spray paint actually target street art markets and have all kinds of like, you know, weather-resistant paints and crazy colors and different effects with their caps.

Speaker 47 So they embraced it and basically said, hey, come buy our stuff.

Speaker 83 Yes, but if you're a purist in America, you probably are still using Rustilium or Krylon.

Speaker 38 Yeah.

Speaker 85 One of the other things that really kind of evolved that helped things along was

Speaker 56 not having to take the spray nozzle off of EasyOff anymore and having nozzles that were designed and sold for graffiti art, like all sorts of different kinds of nozzles that do all sorts of different kinds of things.

Speaker 53 Yeah.

Speaker 47 I mean, you know, fat lines and skinny lines, different caps that achieve those effects.

Speaker 12 They had calligraphy caps.

Speaker 52 If you've ever been in a paint store and looked at, you know, sometimes you can even spray a little piece of cardboard they have there on the wall.

Speaker 39 Lucky.

Speaker 46 But, you know, sometimes it's a little round pinhole, but sometimes it's a slot.

Speaker 71 And those are calligraphy caps, like a horizontal line.

Speaker 67 I never knew that.

Speaker 59 I think those are big in Cholo graffiti, too.

Speaker 37 Yeah.

Speaker 102 Needle caps, they make splatters.

Speaker 82 So if you want like controlled drips, you don't want uncontrolled drips or unintentional drips, but you might want your piece to have some drip look to it.

Speaker 39 So you would use needle caps.

Speaker 117 They also add texture to the lines because there's like a

Speaker 32 splattery haze that when you step back just kind of softens the lines a little bit from the needle caps.

Speaker 82 It's pretty cool.

Speaker 7 Should we take our second break?

Speaker 108 I think we should.

Speaker 53 All right. We'll come back right after this.

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Speaker 56 So if you wanted to get into this kind of thing, there's a place to start and it's called developing your hand style.

Speaker 80 And that is your own personal way of

Speaker 58 writing your tag, essentially.

Speaker 82 And graffiti artists will come up with like their own entire alphabets that they just design themselves.

Speaker 84 And there's a really great website that's super useful if you do want to get into graffiti called bombingscience.com.

Speaker 38 They have a post of 61 different graffiti artists and their alphabets, essentially, that they've created for their tags.

Speaker 123 And it's really cool.

Speaker 107 Some of them, you're like, I have no idea what letter that is.

Speaker 86 But

Speaker 62 even still, it's just super neat that people have put this much thought into it and come up with a font, essentially, their own personal font that they use for graffiti.

Speaker 59 And the way that you do that is by practicing it to develop your own hand style.

Speaker 111 And that is essentially step one.

Speaker 56 And you do that not on a wall or any public place or even with paint.

Speaker 74 You start out with pens and markers, figuring it out.

Speaker 3 That's right.

Speaker 113 And now we're going to give you some tips.

Speaker 54 Oh, okay. There we go.

Speaker 11 You're going to want to shake that can up, guys.

Speaker 3 Got to shake it really, really good.

Speaker 93 All kidding aside, you do want to shake that can up

Speaker 51 because that's what makes the paint flow really well.

Speaker 68 Don't shortchange that shake.

Speaker 60 I feel like I'm speaking for a lot of listeners and saying that I can't help but feel a little forlorn that you're not doing this whole list in that voice.

Speaker 7 All right, I'll keep going.

Speaker 14 Okay.

Speaker 118 Step two, guys, can control.

Speaker 19 So this is how you're going to avoid those unwanted drips.

Speaker 6 Get a feel for that pressure.

Speaker 4 It's going to determine how quickly you're going to move that hand to achieve the end result that you're after.

Speaker 91 Very nice. Can control.

Speaker 92 It's called.

Speaker 94 And then finally, guys,

Speaker 68 you're really going to want to adjust that distance from the wall.

Speaker 7 If you're closer, it's going to be thinner.

Speaker 69 It's going to be more saturated.

Speaker 2 It's going to be great for outlines.

Speaker 3 You step a little further away.

Speaker 68 It's going to diffuse out.

Speaker 11 It's going to cover a wider area.

Speaker 125 It's just science, guys.

Speaker 118 Very nice, man.

Speaker 7 All right. And scene.

Speaker 59 So, yes, the upshot of all this is figuring out the nozzle pressure and the distance from the wall are basically the two most basic things that you can understand and learn about graffiti, but it's also the things that come up the most.

Speaker 46 That's right.

Speaker 12 And some of the rules, which I kind of like to see, you don't tag churches.

Speaker 72 You don't graffiti churches.

Speaker 47 You don't graffiti schools. You're not supposed to at least.

Speaker 71 Hospitals, you're not supposed to do this to someone's house or their car or certainly a headstone at a cemetery or nature, like trees and rocks.

Speaker 47 You don't, those big rocks in Central Park,

Speaker 7 you you don't tag those that's not what you're supposed to do and of course you don't snitch because you know what they get

Speaker 75 they get a stitch or two from what I understand that's right yeah there's a story of a artist named Cope II who was still considered legendary but he was accused of snitching and just like overnight his reputation just went into the gutter oh wow yeah I imagine yeah they don't they they don't take snitching lightly for sure um and then there's other things too like we've basically been focusing on spray paint for a good reason.

Speaker 40 I mean, it's the first medium, they're the most used medium, and then there's markers and all that.

Speaker 87 But there's other stuff you can do that's considered graffiti, too.

Speaker 100 You can get yourself some sort of poster, get some wheat paste, and stick it up like an old-timey handbill that you might see.

Speaker 91 Yeah, you can make stickers, a lot of people make stickers.

Speaker 123 You can come up with stencils like a real Banksy.

Speaker 78 And all of these things have like the advantage of most of the work being done at home in a studio, out of sight, not in public.

Speaker 117 And then you can throw them up pretty quickly and move on and not get caught.

Speaker 123 I think that makes it a different form of graffiti in that sense.

Speaker 56 But it's still, I mean, it's still street art at the very least.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think so.

Speaker 73 And then Livia dug up this thing called reverse graffiti, which I had never heard of.

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 51 And she used a very good example, like when you

Speaker 66 use your finger to write wash me on a dusty car,

Speaker 51 you're using an

Speaker 69 an inverse of something to create an image. So

Speaker 47 a lot of times

Speaker 12 it's like a political statement maybe, or maybe to call attention to like pollution or the environment or something like that.

Speaker 97 And it's also one where they're saying like, hey, I'm cleaning a surface technically, not defacing anything.

Speaker 46 So come at me.

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 118 And they'll still just come along and be like, oh, no, we're going to, now we're going to clean this wall now that you've done this.

Speaker 12 Now that you put something beautiful up. Right.

Speaker 62 Yeah.

Speaker 77 So over the years, some people have really kind of made the jump into like

Speaker 56 mega mondo fame, like art world fame, who started out as graffiti artists.

Speaker 74 One of them was Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Speaker 44 A lot of people point to him as a wildly successful artist who started out in graffiti.

Speaker 87 Samo was his tag.

Speaker 63 He started out in the late 70s with a friend named Al Diaz.

Speaker 90 By the 80s, his paintings were some of the most expensive in the art world, and he was friends with Andy Warhol.

Speaker 40 And by 1982, he had a solo exhibition.

Speaker 119 This is like

Speaker 58 a graffiti artist.

Speaker 75 This is a huge leap for somebody to make.

Speaker 82 And I think he might have been the first. I think he came before Keith Herring.

Speaker 14 Yeah, Basquiat had a pretty good indie movie made about him.

Speaker 46 I think it was Jeffrey Wright that played him.

Speaker 46 Back in the maybe 90s.

Speaker 39 It was really good.

Speaker 72 But yeah, you mentioned Keith Herring too.

Speaker 109 They were friends.

Speaker 12 We were just in New York for fall break and the family went to MoMA and the Whitney and we saw Basquiats and obviously Warhol's and some Keith Herring stuff in person, which is always a thrill.

Speaker 116 And Keith Herring, I know we've talked about before, but he started drawing in chalk on the, like when they would take an advertisement down on the subway walls, there would be this like backboard there and he would put his art up there and was very famous initially at least for the radiant baby was kind of his tag.

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 4 And if you don't know the radiant baby, like if you looked it up, you'd probably seen it somewhere before.

Speaker 47 It's very famous.

Speaker 53 Yes.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 86 It's like a crawling silhouette with like

Speaker 61 light lines coming off of it.

Speaker 12 Yeah. And very sadly,

Speaker 11 Jean-Michel Basquiat would pass from a heroin overdose in the late 80s.

Speaker 49 And Keith Herring died from complications from AIDS and HIV, I believe, in 1990.

Speaker 32 I read an interview with Basquiat.

Speaker 59 It must have been in like 1988 because the interviewer, it was like he got up no less than two or three times to go shoot heroin in this rather short interview.

Speaker 37 Like he could not not do it. He would have gotten sick like that quickly.

Speaker 7 Jeez.

Speaker 86 There's also

Speaker 56 Shepard Ferry is very famous

Speaker 128 for his Andre the Giant has a posse stickers that he made.

Speaker 78 And then also for his hope poster of Barack Obama during the 2008 election.

Speaker 7 Yeah, Shepard Ferry. Good work.
Yep.

Speaker 61 And we've mentioned Banksy, right?

Speaker 114 Yeah.

Speaker 12 I mean, do we have to talk about Banksy?

Speaker 79 No, there's a couple other ones that I want to call out that are still working today.

Speaker 57 Yeah, let's do that.

Speaker 59 So Dondi White, he's an overlooked one.

Speaker 62 He was the one who, with Futura 2000, did that full car called Break, but he hung out with Keith Herring and Basquiat and Kenny Scharf and Futura 2000.

Speaker 120 Like he was a, he never really made the leap to the major art world.

Speaker 105 He was like an old school underground

Speaker 91 artist.

Speaker 99 Yeah. And did you mention?

Speaker 69 No, you didn't mention Lady Kay. Who'd you mention earlier?

Speaker 130 Lady Pink.

Speaker 114 Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different.

Speaker 50 Lady K is French, I believe, right?

Speaker 52 In Paris?

Speaker 83 I believe that's where she was born.

Speaker 101 And she might be working there still, either Paris or New York.

Speaker 12 Yeah, very cool stuff there, too.

Speaker 86 Yeah. And then also, so check out her stuff.

Speaker 77 And then check out Renz, R-E-N-S, who's working in Copenhagen.

Speaker 56 It is mind-numbing how amazing this work is.

Speaker 58 Like, I just can't even imagine conceiving a lot of a lot of it, let alone being good at it.

Speaker 71 Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Speaker 47 It's really like, I'm looking at some of them now, man.

Speaker 52 It's, that's amazing.

Speaker 38 And then there's one called Kid Olt, who is a vandal, actually, like, purposefully vandalizes luxury brand stores who have collaborated with graffiti artists for their brands.

Speaker 63 They don't like that.

Speaker 46 So they will like, it's not really like pieces that they're putting up it's more like huge huge vandalizations of of these stores oh wow yeah oh that's is that the one that's like uh like stores that are kind of co-opting graffiti is like the cool thing you'll go hit them yeah okay kid ult yeah but they're probably like great oh yeah i'm sure oh wait you mean the stores yeah

Speaker 81 I don't know. I've heard that they don't like kiddult very much.

Speaker 36 Oh, really? Okay.

Speaker 80 And then lastly, the um I want to call out apothecary who never really got off the ground um that's Yumi's tag

Speaker 89 from when she got into this she's always been interested in b-boy culture so of course she came up with graffiti a graffiti tag and I think she realized like fairly early on this is way too long

Speaker 12 apothecary to um to use as a tag so I don't think I think it kind of petered out fairly early on I'm gonna have to tell Emily that because uh I mean obviously apothecary's right up her alley so yeah for sure that's that's funny

Speaker 12 you got anything else I got nothing else I'm gonna work on my my tag and come up with a tag and a font nice yeah get busy on your hand style yo yeah

Speaker 74 since we were just talking about hand style again I think that means it's time for listener mail

Speaker 51 yeah this is from Ben in Connecticut who's been listening for quite a while and recently heard our Selex episode, The Great Finger in The Windy's Chili Caper.

Speaker 92 I remember that one.

Speaker 57 It was incredible.

Speaker 67 We were commenting about

Speaker 115 the way Letterman and Leno covered that and that Letterman was funnier.

Speaker 142 You know, no surprise there for me, at least.

Speaker 12 I assume you as well.

Speaker 68 And then Josh mentioned Leno's well-known love of cars

Speaker 66 to differentiate the late-night host.

Speaker 67 However, guys, David Letterman is well known within the indie car racing world as one of the owners of Rahal Letterman Lanigan Racing.

Speaker 46 The team won the Kart Kart Indy Championship in 1992, the year the team was founded, and has won the Indy 500 twice with drivers Buddy Rice in 2004 and Takuma Sato in 2020.

Speaker 66 So while Lino may be more well known for his love of automotive history and tinkering with race cars, David Letterman is also well known within the automotive world.

Speaker 68 And that is from Ben in Connecticut.

Speaker 67 So I think the takeaway there is Letterman owns Leno once again.

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 131 What was who was that, Ben?

Speaker 14 Yeah, and it's a low-hanging fruit to bag on Lino, so

Speaker 47 I don't think I'm original or cool for doing so.

Speaker 106 I don't know.

Speaker 102 But it's, I mean, you still mean it.

Speaker 92 Yeah.

Speaker 131 Yeah, thanks a lot, Ben.

Speaker 43 That was a very arcane fact that I definitely hadn't heard.

Speaker 124 And I also just realized that Arcane would be a great tag to Arcane.

Speaker 53 Well, you and

Speaker 115 you and Yumi went out together and did this, like Arcane and Apothecary together, they'd be like, who is this new power couple in graffiti?

Speaker 101 This crew is amazing.

Speaker 92 Wow. What hand style.

Speaker 66 I know. And I'd say, guys, you got it just right.

Speaker 127 Yeah, thank you for doing that voice.

Speaker 101 You really

Speaker 76 think you saved the episode.

Speaker 4 I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he used to do the white voice.

Speaker 128 Oh, is that who that was?

Speaker 4 Yeah, just a little bit.

Speaker 110 I was going to guess Johnny Carson on Helium doing George W.

Speaker 101 Bush.

Speaker 107 Yeah, go back and listen.

Speaker 81 You'll be like, oh my gosh.

Speaker 58 Well, I think that's it.

Speaker 63 Yes, Ben, thank you very much for that email, Ben.

Speaker 124 And if you want to be like Ben and get in touch with us, we love that kind of thing.

Speaker 37 You can send it off to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.

Speaker 1 Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, my HeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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Speaker 1 This is an iHeart podcast.