Draw Thug Graffiti

Draw Thug Graffiti

Hip Hop Graffiti Roots

Hip Hop Graffiti began in New York City during the late 1960's when a small number of teenagers from Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and other impoverished neighborhoods began blanketing the city with their "tags"-stylized signatures of names they had invented for themselves.

The marking of names, slogans, and images in shared spaces was not new to the city, but limited in size, number, and to certain neighborhoods or sites, the earlier inscriptions of gangs, activists, and other scribes had attracted little public notice.

In contrast, new writers like Taki 183, Julio 204, and Frank 207 were primarily concerned with visibility and recognition-"getting up" their names often and in places where they could be seen by as many others as possible-and they used the city's walls, bridges, monuments, subway stations, and other public places as their billboards. They quickly gained the admiration of their peers as well as many in or associated with the art scene; but public officials and the mainstream press, despite some early indications of neutrality, regularly excoriated graffiti as "one of the worst forms of pollution we have to combat."

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Meanwhile, in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, hundreds if not thousands of mostly Black and Puerto Rican adolescents ignored these attacks and began saturating public places with their tags. As the numbers of New York City taggers multiplied during the early 1970's, simply getting up one's name in large numbers was no longer sufficient for recognition. Writers began to seek out even more risky and conspicuous tagging spots to enhance their reputations, and the exteriors of subway trains, with their combination of danger and visibility across large sections of the city, rapidly became their most prized canvasses.

Inspired by the long, thin, tightly packed letters of Top Cat 126, some writers began to enlarge and embellish their tags. Soon originality in design and color-what the writers called style-was the primary source of status among writers, the thing, according to pioneering writer Vulcan, that "defines who you are [and] separates the men from the toys [unskilled beginners]." New spray paint technologies and the introduction of ultra wide markers made bigger proportions, new hues, and more complex techniques possible, and writers responded with a rapid succession of innovations. Stay High added images to his stretched letters. Super Kool used the wide nozzle from a can of spray starch to decorate a car with thick pink letters silhouetted by a band of yellow, a technique that Phase 2 further developed in his "bubble letters" and other styles. One of the most inventive and respected of the early "style masters," Phase 2 recalls this flurry of creativity as a time when "I'd develop some ideas and a few styles and other styles were feeding and bouncing off of them, transforming, or just going in other directions . . . then these styles and maybe a few others would go through the same process." [ Draw Thug Graffiti ]

The writers' began to refer to their larger and more technically sophisticated creations as "masterpieces" or simply "pieces" to distinguish them from the simple tags of beginners, and before long, they were covering the subway trains with pieces such as "top to bottoms," "end to ends," "whole cars," two-car "worms," and even "whole trains," often decorating their lettering with cartoon characters, landscapes, depictions of urban life, and other imagery. Lee describes one such piece:

The best piece I ever done to my mind was the "Earth Is Hell-Heaven is Life" two-car. "Heaven is Life" had clear letters and soft colors. It was my view of heaven. Flowers and mountains, the sun, a dove, butterflies, and God in a preaching attitude with his hands up. On the next car, I went off. I told the city how it really looks. There was a soldier holding a gun, his whole body was Shadow Green, and near him it said, "Stop the War." I drew factories that were gray and dim with smokestacks. I drew a man hanging his dog, to emphasize cruelty to animals. I drew a dude choking his lady. I drew blood splats and I drew the President up there preaching, with people looking up to him. Behind him was an American flag, but it wasn't really, and it said "Vote for Nixon," and all that. It had missiles laid up, the sky was dim, shaded with orange from fires. And it said, "Earth is Hell" in burning letters.

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By the mid-1970's, the city's most skilled writers were painting elaborate works like this on trains, walls, tunnels, outdoor handball courts, and in a few cases, for mainstream art galleries and collectors. Quantity would continue to bring fame to writers such as IN and CAP, who in the late 1970's and early 1980's covered the subways and other surfaces with throw-ups-large, bubble letter tags executed quickly and with little attention to style. But for many if not most writers, the "piece" and the artistic skill necessary to create it had become the primary currency of respect. Exciting new music and dance forms were also emerging in New York City during the mid-1970's. In the Bronx and Brooklyn, for example, several DJ's who provided music for house and neighborhood block parties began to experiment with new sounds, manipulating records back and forth to create a scratching sound and to mix segments or "breaks" from existing recordings into a thick carpet of dance music. Soon, emcees were fronting the DJ's and entertaining the crowds by overlaying the music with verbal play or "rapping" while "break dancers" performed acrobatic moves drawn from African and Brazilian dance traditions. The graffiti pieces covering the subways and other public sites had much in common with these music and dance forms. All germinated in the same urban neighborhoods and conditions, and some of the DJ's, rappers, and dancers were or had been graffiti writers. Most others were friends, who often recruited artists to decorate the sites of their music and dance events. They also shared a similar method, with each reassembling and reshaping bits from the past into exciting, original forms. Together these music, dance, and visual expressions comprised a new urban culture, a rich mix of artistic practices that have come to be known as hip hop. Today graffiti in the tradition of Phase 2 and other pioneers is commonly referred to as "hip hop graffiti," a designation that some writers find inaccurate or even, in the words of early writer Lady Pink, "extremely annoying." [ Draw Thug Graffiti ]

Indeed, tags, throw-ups, and pieces originated independently and should not be considered a mere subsidiary of the hip hop music conglomerate. Still, the label is useful in distinguishing most graffiti from the scrawling of gangs and others and as a reminder that a number of kindred cultural forms rose from what many consider to be the barren urban landscape of the 1960's and 1970's. Hip hop graffiti has become an international phenomenon over the last three decades, expanding from its New York roots to other cities in the U.S. and across the world. Despite massive eradication efforts by public agencies, it remains a persistent, visible characteristic of modern urban life. In New York, for example, the Metropolitan Transit Association has greatly reduced the amount of graffiti in and on the subways since the mid-1980's, but writers have responded by "taking the streets," blanketing buildings, highway walls, freight trains, and other conspicuous sites with throw-ups. Meanwhile, the painting of "pieces" has gravitated toward "invisible" spaces under highway bridges, around abandoned buildings, and in isolated warehouse and industrial areas, where writers can paint with less fear of arrest. Located in areas where most of the city's middle and affluent classes seldom travel, many assume that these elaborate murals have largely disappeared. The proliferation of graffiti "zines," videos, and websites over the last 10-15 years demonstrates otherwise. These alternative media have assumed functions previously performed by the subways, connecting writers across the U.S. and world into a common culture and making their work available to a wider public.

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