Yeah okay, here goes the old man preaching again. Anyway, there is an amusing and continuous argument going on between myself and some lady who is pissed off because I LOL’d her little cousin’s half-assed attempt at a tag. For some unknown reason, boredom and entertainment more than anything, I have been going back and forth with this person regarding my ego and this and that. It’s hardly uncommon, especially on the site in question, to run into this drama and the funny typing matches that ensue but this one has become so heated to that individual that it inspired me to write yet another of my grumpy old man diatribes on the history and tradition of this craft and why it’s so vital that we forward it properly.
I am not about to go into the whole mess about the beatdowns and the violent way we used to do things as kids, but I reference it solely because it is a part of our history that has just as much meaning as the evolutions of lettering and how to control a can. People love to whine and bitch and complain about how those of us old cats are so rude to the toys and the younger cats. But for real, has our history been so forgotten or wasted that the art itself is no longer respected? Is it really an expectation now in the hiphop community that we praise substandard work and encourage the uneducated to slander the sacred traditions that we all helped create. Note that I said hiphop, but only because that is the community that embraced us so readily in the past. The thing that gets to me alot of the time is that very association though. The marriage of graffiti art and hiphop has done a significant amount of damage to this vocation that it sickens me. Hiphop itself has dug itself so far into shit that it is unrecognizable when put up against its roots. Like graffiti, we have a culture brought on by a need. In its earliest form, both hiphop and graffiti writing were the best and most accessible ways for the kids of the ghetto to espress themselves legitimately beside the kids from outside the ghetto. Remember those days? The ones where everyone was trying to GET OUT of the ghetto???
Like any good subculture, the media had to have a chunk of this oh so popular craze because more participants always equals more money and America came to embrace(= consume) these street kids and their new funky culture. So, as a result, there had to be definition…categorization and hence comes these four elements everyone loves to talk so much about. I swear that tour to Europe back in the day really fucked us some. Yeah, alot of people got outrageously rich when they wouldn’t have been able to feed themselves otherwise. But look once at what it has become. It ain’t pretty, that’s for sure. it wasn’t long before the “find ways to make ourselves happy and celebrate live regardless of what it feeds us” days became a new market for what actually made the innercity community so scary for the gentry that wouldn’t go near it. Soon came the songs glorifying robbing and stealing. Next came the ones glorifying the evils of pimping. drug dealing and the gangsta life. Sadly enough, these are the things that ended up representing hiphop culture to America and the world. The very same subculture that did everything it could to separate itself from the dirt within began to glorify it instead. All at the hands of the record labels and mercenary individuals that would sell their souls for a dollar. The graffiti community got to suffer this as a result.
In Miami it was the Chicago gang influence mostly. They were always there, but in the late 80′s they were an epidemic. I can tell you of multiple great graffiti artists that lost alot over that period but the one that sticks out most would have grown up to be the most prolific writers to date. This young man was up from one end of the beach to the other and plenty of other places in the city. You couldn’t find a city bus that didn’t have his name on it somewhere. He was a friend to most of the greatest writers in Miami at the time. He was beaten to death in front of a school because of a few words on his shirt. Dude wasn’t even into the gang thing. But we lost him anyway. These injustices are among the things that make me wonder why we continue to associate ourselves with hiphop and its commercialization. As artists, do we really have time for gang affiliations? Does it make us better knowing how hard it was to grow up and stay alive?
I never noticed how much damage it has done until I moved to this small town in PA. The city will always be the city. Hard times will always be hard times. There will always be poverty and always evil in one form or another. But what people fail to realize is that small town America has its ears and eyes wide open. There are 12 and 13 year old kids posting crip graffiti in places where these gangs were never heard of until the whole commercialization of this pseudo hiphop culture. Young kids in small towns wearing their hats sideways and throwing gang signs that they have no idea of the meaning behind just because they think it will connect them to a bigger world. There still isn’t a ton of gunplay going on, but how long will it be until they figure that out too?
I pride myself on the rough past that I survived. I go on constantly about the trials and rites of passage it took to make me who I am today. I share a common kinship with all of the writers from that era for that very reason. But we, as former and current Kings and Masters of our vocation need to clean this mess up. WE ARE RESPONSIBLE for letting this happen to our youth and culture because WE as writers didn’t do everything we could to pass it on the right way. WE have a standard to enforce and it is up to us ALL THE TIME to weed out the fakers and half-steppers that would do our craft injustice. There are no exceptions. We let them in, it is up to us to keep them out and bring our art back to what it was. A Rite of Passage is in order. An insistence on the dues being paid. I am not insinuating that we start beating up toys and jacking them for their cans. There are other resources that no longer make that necessary. But if we don’t fix this, graffiti art will go down in history as one of the four elements of what has become a washed out facsimile of what it was in the first place.
It’s funny that the chick I mentioned earlier wants to go on about ego and how the half-assed that insult us should be shown respect. I don’t know about you, but after almost 30 years of doing this thing and probably 25 or so of them teaching it….I beg to differ.
