November 20, 2025 • 48 mins
Graffiti – the good kind, done with lots of style and skill – developed when some kids in NYC took up cans of spray paint and started to figure out how to outdo one another. They laid down styles that are so fine they’re still being used by artists today.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we are doing a wild style today. You're
on Stuff you Should Know, one of those episodes where
it's like 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 3 (00:28):
Oh man, I'm not gonna say when. Maybe you can guess,
but there's one portion of this that it'll be the
most like middle aged white dude thing ever.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Okay, I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Okay, I'll see me. You'll probably know when I go
into my voice.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Okay, is it that old witch voice that you like
to do?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
No, no, no, no, you'll know the voice.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
All right. Is it an Italian thing?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
No? Not Italian?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
All right, I'll figure it out. Then we're talking graffiti obviously, Chuck,
I don't know if everybody knows that.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, 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. But
graffiti needed its own thing, and graffiti in the United States,
we basically think of as sort of the late sixties
East Coast thing, and this isn't one of those things.
I do see where Livia put in like cave drawings,
(01:22):
but I'm not even going to talk about that, sure
because I was like, come on, Olivia.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
But.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Very good point here in Mexico and like the nineteen
thirties where mural art and sort of public art during
the Mexican Revolution was a big thing, and so Chicano
kids in the nineteen thirties sort of brought that same
style to La and other cities in the nineteen thirties
and forties before the spray can was invented. But I
feel like that is a genuine sort of precursor to
(01:51):
what we know is modern graffiti.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, because they were, well, they were writing on walls sometimes,
they were using paint and brushes. Markers didn't exist, spray
can didn't exist yet, but they were using what they
had a lot of times just to tag their neighborhood
as like this, this turf belongs to this gang. But
they added flourishes that kind of gave rise to some
of the details and touches that are still around in
(02:14):
graffiti today. So it is definitely a valid 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 3 (02:29):
I mentioned the spray can that's obviously a vital part
of graffiti. That was in nineteen forty nine by a
paint owner in Illinois, a paint company owner named ed
Seymour and his wife. And I tried to find her name.
What's her name, Bonnie? Oh, I couldn't find it. You
found Bonnie.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I had to look really hard, yes, but I found
it Bonnie. Isn't it a love of name?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Nice work? Yeah? I do love the name Bonnie. But
they said they were trying to coat radiators with an
aluminum coating, so they invented the spray can, and right away,
like you know, people that were protesting or maybe artist
on the down low, because you can hide a can
pretty easily, you can work with it very quickly. It
(03:10):
works on a lot of different kinds of surfaces. So
all of a sudden, spray cans, you know, really paved
the way.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah. Pazzi from Happy Days famously was a Clandestinian artist
using spray paint.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Oh really, no, I remember that one I could Hey,
I could have seen that be in a Happy Day's episode.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, but I wouldn't have been yeah, exactly. Maybe Ralph
Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Just fade out, but probably would have been Richie.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, I guess so. Man, that was such a good.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Show, like a real Lesson Learner episode.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
And the fond who you'd think would be like a
spray paint graffiti artist, like Van Doll, that's the one
who talks to Richie's like, that's not cool. So there's
a lot of advantages to using spray paint. That's why
graffiti really kind of started. This is like where its
roots really took root. Markers are another thing that people use,
(04:04):
and most people think of spray paint with graffiti, but
markers are important and they didn't come around until the
nineteen fifties. So you had spray paint before you had markers,
which is surprising to me. And if you want a
nice little trivia question, magic marker was the first marker
for commercial sale starting in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
That makes sense because that's became sort of the proprietary
eponem in a way.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Exactly. Yeah, for sure, not.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So much anymore, I feel like, but in our era,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, because it's fun to say.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yeah, it's a marker that creates magic.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
I didn't really consider markers as graffiti, but then I
was like, yeah, like everything like on the inside of
a marta train or a New York subway car, like
that's all marker.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
All marker.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's very important for what's called handstyle, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
That's right. But we need to talk about cornbread, right.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah. So there's a guy named Darryl McCrae who will
tell anybody who sits long enough that he was the
person who invented graffiti. Yeah, and he makes a really
good case. Unfortunately, there's some other people who were doing
the same thing at the same time, but you could
still say corn bread, which was his handle his tag.
Was one of the very first people who took up graffiti,
(05:19):
starting in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah, he was but a twelve year old. He's a
Philly guy, and he was in Juvie, and in Juvie
he said, I don't want this white bread. I want
corn bread. My grandmother made cornbread and I love that stuff.
So he got the nickname Cornbread.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I don't think he got the corn bread though.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
I doubt if he got the corn bread. It's very
labor intensive to make cornbread for sure, I mean compared
to this opening up a bag of white bread. You know.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Also, though, I think at places called youth development center,
they don't give you your preferred food day, give you
what you're going to.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Eat, Yeah, like Oliver Twist style.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, no requests please, no more.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So he took that nickname, start riding it on the
walls there at his institution that he was in, and
then when he got out in nineteen sixty seven, he
would take to the streets of Philly writing his name Cornbread,
especially like if he knew that his sweetie Pie was
on the bus, he would ride it along the bus
route so she could see that and be impressed.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Sometimes running alongside the bus.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, like while it was going other bus lines. And
that was sort of the you know, the beginning along
as we'll see and 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, and the point was to
get that out in as many places as you could,
(06:42):
and and like 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 2 (06:53):
Yeah, and so you add in the flourishes that Chicano
kids came up within the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and
in la with getting your tag out there as many
places as you can. That's the That is definitely the
beginning of graffiti. And this is where most people point
to as the start of the whole thing. In the
(07:13):
sixties and seventies in New York City, all of this
started to blossom. All these things kind of came together
and just the right hands and graffiti became a thing,
just slowly but surely. Like you said, some of the
first people were just writing their names and they would
come up with this tag. And some of the earliest
tags came from Spanish Harlem, where you would have your
(07:35):
nickname and then in number like Turk one eighty two,
and Turk would be your nickname, one eighty two would
be the street you hailed from. I think Turk one
eighty two is entirely made up. I don't think it
was a docu drama. But one of the first two
was Julio two to four and Taki one eighty three.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, Taki one eighty three. Taki was the nickname, a
Greek nickname for Dmitri. It still is. But Taki was
a this is in like sixty nine or seventy was
a delivery worker. So Taki went all over the city.
So it was a really good way to get the
Taki one eighty three tag all over the place, and
it got so far and wide that Taki was actually
(08:16):
part of a New York Times article in nineteen seventy one,
and all of a sudden it inspired people saying, hey,
like this is the cool new thing to do on
the street.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah or else they hated Taki one a three for
disraacing New York all over the place.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That same year that the article on takiy three came out,
there was the first graffiti crew kind of came together
Writer's Corner one eighty eight. They met at the corner
of Audubon and one eighty eighth Street, one hundred and
eighty eighth Street, as they say in New York and
the crew was called WC one eighty eight, and it
was like one of the first ways that people started
(08:52):
sharing different style tips and kinds of markers that did
different things. It was just the first way that different
people doing the same thing came together and figured out
how to do it better.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, And like I said, it was sort of a
quantity over quality thing for a while. I think that's
sadly kind of part of it now a little bit.
When I see graffiti around Atlanta, there's some really good
stuff and also some really kind of not so great
tags that I see a lot.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, and more often than not, it's the not so
great ones, right, kind of like watching adults skateboard.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, god yeah, I mean, man, Atlanta just didn't have
the skateboarders. That's a West Coast thing I never see.
I always see those guys trying to do the tricks,
but they never land the tricks exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
That's exactly like junkie tags, which is I think called
toy in the the graffiti world.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Oh really, toy If your tag is just sort of
not great.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, if it's just junkie amateurish graffiti, it's toy graffiti.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Well, what if these people are like, hey man, I'm
not such a great artist. Lay off, I'm trying.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Will they I would say, stop doing what you're doing
and go do something else then, because the streets are
made for good graffiti.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Not toys.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
The subway was where things got really a little more
like artistic. I guess, riding on a subway train in
New York you could obviously get your name out, you know,
to more people, because that subway's going all over the place. Right,
It's also risky, and as we'll see, like risk is
a big you know, I mentioned like the wall and
from the police station, Like risk is a big, big
(10:31):
part of it. Because like as you'll see, like when
they made great efforts in the in the seventies and
eighties in New York to stop this stuff, it wasn't
like they were like, oh boy, we better stop doing
this graffiti. It was sort of like game on man,
like this is what we're looking for. Like now we
know they're after us, so it makes it even more
(10:52):
sort of challenging and risky.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, I mean these early graffiti artists were by definition
juvenile delinquents to a person, So the idea of adding
more challenges to them just played exactly into their whole
ethos etho, Yes, I could never remember.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
And to be clear that with this, I just want
to if you don't understand, they're not spray painting the
moving subway cars. They would break into the rail yards
at night, and all of a sudden, you have this
huge canvas just sitting there.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, exactly, And like you said, a lot of people
would see it because that subway car the next day
would be traveling all over New York. So that was
a big deal. And that's kind of what you think
of when you think of late seventies early eighties graffiti
in New York subway cars is kind of traveling all
over the place with really cool, colorful graffiti on them.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Do you want to take an early break or you
want to keep talking and get into some different kinds
and styles.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, maybe let's break down the styles first.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
All right, let's see it. So it turns out there's
three categories of graffiti in order of easiness to increasing hardness.
It's got to be a better way to put it,
but I'm leaving it there.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
There's tags, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Which Olivia calls very sterily basic identifying signs.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
I love that well, tags didn't comelong until nineteen ninety
the word, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
But essentially it's your signature. It's your nickname spelled out
in a very stylized way specific to you. That's what
handstyle is. 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.
(12:31):
That's one of the three kinds of graffiti.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Yeah, and before they called it tagging in nineteen ninety,
back in the day, as they say, they would call
it hitting maybe or bombing or just writing yep, throw ups.
Terrible name is the next kind. It can incorporate your tag.
It's like your signature, but it's usually more than that.
It's tag plus a lot of times it's multicolor, like
(12:54):
two or three colors, maybe even more if you've got
the time. It's you know, it's more. It's just said,
it's kind of more artistic.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, and they're almost always like bubbly letters from what
I can tell.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, unless it's the block style, which I like.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, blockbuster, Yeah, I like those as well. Those are
it's a different style. They're not throw ups. It's kind
of a style that could be used in throw ups,
and there are a lot of times used using rollers,
but they're really large letters. A lot of times they're
more straight than bubbly, which is the differentiation. Like you
were saying, I like Blockbuster too, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah, me too. And then you've got the best kind
when you might get a whole subway car and many
hours to decorate the saying, or a whole wall. And
those are called pieces, just like you would call an
art piece a piece, because it is an art piece
for sure.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
They're way more detailed, way more colors. They have all
sorts of crazy cool effects, like fades from one color 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
(14:09):
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,
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 can take fifteen minutes if you're
(14:32):
still figuring out your way those pieces. This surprised me.
They can take days to do. With multiple crews working
on the same thing, it can still take days. 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
(14:52):
a wall somewhere, having to go back like night after
night to do this and not get caught, that's it's
rather thrilling.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
If you asked me, well, and the just the time
investment for something that a third of the way through
or halfway through or towards the end could get could
go away.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I thought about that too. Man, that's kind of hurt.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
That would really suck.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
What about wild style I referred to it early on.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Wild style is obviously Superstylized's where you get sort of
the overlapping letter patterns. It's usually fairly bright and like
you mentioned, like a lot of shading, maybe a three
D effect. A lot of times these pieces have wild
style involved, right.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, it's kind of like the most advanced form, I guess,
just because it's so it's just it's really hard to
do and it's the most intricate usually, But it's also
kind of like gone beyond what most people appreciate as graffiti,
where they have no idea what this thing says. Like
other graffiti artists can read it, but the average person
(15:57):
is just like, oh, look at that of colors. It's
kind of like how metal bands logos have kind of
evolved to where they're like, I have no idea whose
album this is. It's very much similar that wild style is.
But one thing that stuck out to me Chuck wild style.
I'm like that probably came around in maybe the nineties
(16:18):
at the earliest. It's from the seventies too, Like all
of this stuff is from the seventies. So in the
seventies in New York City, the general guidelines for what
constitutes graffiti's still today were laid out and established by
those people, Like it's still followed today. I think that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
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 3 (16:43):
Yeah, that's cool. I love it. And then if you've
ever seen like and this is a little more West coast,
like the old English style or like the western saloon
lettering that's known as solo style, a word that you know,
sort of associated with like gang culture, like Mexican gang culture,
but that developed from that Chicano writing culture on the
(17:05):
West coast and then spread around, like you can see
that on the East coast. But it's definitely I feel
like more West Coast thing. And that looks super cool.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Too, No, it definitely does. 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. Yeah,
they show up a lot. It just seems like there's
a lot more cartoon figures in Tolo style than say
that New York graffiti. There was one more style that
I ran across called anti style or ignorant style, and
(17:33):
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, who are like this has gotten totally
out of control. If you've seen this wild style stuff.
We need to like get back to basics and just
have fun with us again. And so they're kind of
(17:53):
trying to recapture what the earliest graffiti artists from, like
the seventies. We're doing as they when they figured it
out as they went along. A lot of people hate it,
can't stand it. They think it's just a dumb idea.
But from what I can tell, if you're a good
artist doing purposefully primitive work, it's actually pretty cool looking.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
All right, should we take that break?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I do want to take that break, Chuck, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Let's go get our spray hands, check him up, and
we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
I want to learn about a terris or call it
red actol, how to take a bank is gone. That's
a little hunt the word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
All right. So we mentioned markers early on, and obviously,
like I said, inside, like on the wall of a
subway car. A lot of times 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
(19:12):
dry mark dri and Sandford King size were they were
very broad tip markers. So those were some of the
early markers that were the most popular. And you could
also refill a lot of those with different kinds of ink.
So the you know, the felt was just sort of
the instrument and you could put whatever color or mixed
colors if you wanted to, for sure. And they would
(19:32):
also like make their own stuff. 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 2 (19:42):
Yeah, you also mentioned that it's one of the four
pillars of hip hop. There's technically five as far as
Africa Bombarda is concerned, and that would be knowledge as
the fifth pillar, like knowledge of self, knowledge of where
you come from, your history, real KRS one stuff, you know. Yeah,
and so as being part of hip hop culture, I
(20:04):
don't know if we said the other onesing and DJing
and breaking, Yeah, and graffiti and knowledge, those are the
five pillars of hip hop. And like the other stuff
like mceing and djaying and all that, and breaking in particular,
there's a real competitive element to graffiti, like where you
can go so far as you end up in a
(20:25):
war with other artists where you're spraying over their stuff. Yeah,
spraying over your stuff, and that is you're not supposed
to do that. Like, if you spray over somebody's stuff,
it better be terrible work and you better be really
good at it, because that's a huge flex. I guess
you would say if it was twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, for sure. It is also intersected with other art
forms over the years. In the nineteen eighties and there's
a comic artist named von Bode who was very influential
to this culture. He had a couple of characters, Puck
and Cheech Wizard he came up with. I think he
came up with these characters like in the nineteen fifties wow.
(21:06):
But then in the sixties they were in like self
published comics and then went a little more and want
to say mainstream obviously not mainstream mainstream, but like seventy
two to seventy five they're in the National Lampoon, so
a little more mainstream.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And if you think you've heard that name before, that
sounds familiar, you might have heard the song sure Shot
by the Beastie Boys. I'm like von Bode I'm a
cheach Wizard, never quitting, so you won't listen very nice
Well said, yeah, I knew I had heard that before.
I was like, that's been in a song, I know it.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, And cheach Wizard is essentially like a giant wizard
hat with some legs coming out of it. It's cheech
Wizard and he's like a wise, smart ass kind of
well wizard hat. And I don't know, I didn't see why,
but for some reason, graffiti culture just loved that stuff.
So cheach Wizard shows up and Puck the Lizard show
up in a lot of graffiti from the seventies and eighties.
(21:59):
And then one of the other influences, I saw that
that cheech Wizard or von Bode had his lettering for
his comics. 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 3 (22:16):
Well, graffiti and the book covers of math books of
gen X Kids. Yep, I was big into the bubble lettering.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, using those those pins with like the five different
colors that you can click.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Down, Yeah, I was okay at it. I definitely use
those pins. I remember G's giving me a lot of
trouble and S has given me a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Those were hard, but I tried. How was your out
of bubble Q?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Oh God, is that a thing? It is now possible.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I think I just laid down the gauntlet for somebody
to come up with that.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Oh wow. So graffiti starts to spread around the world,
Britain in the late seven and amster Amsterdam in particular.
In the Netherlands and their punk scenes in the late seventies,
they started doing some of this stuff. Yeah, and then
it also helped spread because of media a little bit.
I mean, most of it was fairly underground media at
(23:14):
the time, unless it was some news report that had
a scathing report. But there was a photographer named Henry Chalfont, Yeah,
who did a few projects, one of which I highly
recommend watching on YouTube, a documentary from nineteen eighty three
called Style Wars, which is a really good watch.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
It's one of those ones where you're like, I feel
cooler just watching this thing.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
He just turned the he turned the camera. 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, and then interspersed is like break dancing
from the rock Steady Crew when they were just starting out.
Like it's just super cool, like this captured time capsule
(23:59):
like moment into yeah, where this is all starting. They
totally Henry Chaufont like got it. He was like, we
need to document this is because this is going to
be important.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, it's amazing. 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 in
sort of a urgeon in culture to have this this
sort of one document so like perfectly capture this moment
in time like you were talking about. It's I mean
that that should be in like the Library of Congress
like that kind of stuff for sure or whatever. What's
(24:30):
the film version of that, I can't remember the name.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Of it, The Fiberio of Fambus.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
I know that deserved a while. I'm really screeping the
bottom of the barrel here in year seventeen. Oh so
you said that it was it was like a document, right.
It actually is kind of referred to in in graffiti
culture still today, Like if somebody's starting out and they're like,
what should I go? What can I learn from? One
(24:59):
of the things that people refer them to Style Wars
because again, these these like essential guidelines were laid down
at this time, so you can still learn a ton
from watching Style Wars or Henry Chaufont got into a
couple of other projects too, one with a photographer named
Martha Cooper called Subway Art. I've also seen newbies referred
to that book too, and then another one with another photographer,
(25:22):
James Prigoff called spray cant Art. So Henry Chaufont had
a real impact on like documenting this stuff that still
is important today.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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,
you know, right, you know, yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Two other things to call out. There's a photographer named
Gordon Matta Clark who documented photograph in photographs just like
tags all around New York City. Has a pretty cool
I think they'd make showings of his photographs sometimes. And
then the movie Wild Style actually came out a year
before Style Wars nineteen eighty two. It's considered the first
hip hop movie ever. I think it was a Fab
(26:13):
five Freddie project. But it has the Rock City Crew,
one of the rare early woman graffiti artists, Lady Pink,
she's in it, and then King ad Rock is in
it before he was called King ad Rock before the
Beastie Boys. Yeah, but there's a ton of like the
whole premise of this, it's a movie, like a fictional movie,
but the old premise is this guy's being hired to well,
(26:37):
I guess put up some graffiti by this. I can't
remember another dude or a company or something like that.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
All right, I'll check that out.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
So, you know, we mentioned graffiti as art because graffiti
is art, but as far as being accepted into like
the legitimate art community, that sort of happened in fits
and starts over the years. There was an I guess
the first academic article about graffiti was in nineteen sixty
nine in The Urban Review by Herbert Coles called names
Graffiti and Culture, and then a few years later in
(27:08):
nineteen seventy two, a big deal happened when, or a
big deal for that culture at least Hugo Martinez as
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. And that
was sort of the first collective where he was like, hey,
(27:28):
do this stuff on canvas because this is art. 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 2 (27:39):
Right, Yeah, they became really influential. The next year, in
nineteen seventy three, choreographer Twyla Tharp, she had the United
Graffiti Artists do basically the scene decorations for her performance
in Chicago. I can't remember what was called, but weirdly,
the dance was choreographed two Beach Boys music with graffiti
(28:04):
in the background. It was a real mishmash when the
whole Beastie Boys music, no, I said, beach Boys, And
the whole time she just kept going Twila, Twila, Twila.
Well she danced, that's good, You're getting better. Yeah, it
comes and goes.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
We did mention. You know, obviously, the other side of
the coin is there is and still are people that
think this is just vandalism. They think it's just like
an urban decay happening before our very eyes. And in
the early seventies, New York got on board that line
of thinking, at least the government did, when Mayor John
Lindsay declared a war on graffiti. That following year, in
(28:44):
seventy two, the city Council said it's illegal to even
carry an aerosol can in a public facility. And then
in seventy five they created the Transit Police Graffiti Squad,
and you know, they're cleaning out subway cars. But like
I said, early all this, all this was was like
game on. Like there's not a single graffiti artist that
(29:04):
was intimidated or scared out of doing what they were
going to do because of this. If anything, it heightened it.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah. Another example of that is they outlawed selling spray
paint to teenagers in New York City. Yeah, and so
graffiti artists who were like, oh, okay, we'll just start
stealing it. That's cheaper anyway. So stealing your spray paint
became like just a part of graffiti and New York
in the in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, not condoning that.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents and I wasn't kidding.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Ed Koch, famous New York mayor in the latest seventies
and seventy seven, was very anti graffiti and would razor
wire the subway yards, had guard dogs, he had cops
like staking out houses and following kids home from school.
That's nuts, man, Yeah, that's just nuts.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
So I think I don't know if Koch, Yeah, I
think Koch was still mayor at the time. They came
up with the Metro Transit Authority's Clean Car program, and
this one actually had an impact. This was beyond razor
wire and German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Like.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
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. Yeah, So
imagine like working all night or whatever and getting your
piece up and it just cleaned off before it even
leaves the transit station. So that actually worked him. By
nineteen eighty nine, apparently, like whole car graffiti was just
(30:33):
not around anymore in New York. Like you can still
see it on cars, but they used to use the
entire car. There's a really famous one by Futura two
thousand and Dondie which is called Break, and it's considered
one of the greatest full subway car masterpieces anyone's ever done.
(30:53):
It's beyond description. Just go look up Break by Dondee
in Future A two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
What did you think of it?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
I thought it was amazing because it just completely departed
from any kind of I know how just ridiculous I
sound right now. It departed from any kind of convention.
It used all sorts of new elements and stuff that
I hadn't seen anywhere else, and you really had to
kind of examine it in detail and then also stepping
back to kind of take the whole thing in. I
(31:21):
didn't love it, yeah, I mean I could see that
that's hard, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Or let's say this, I've seen a lot other stuff
that I thought was like, maybe it just appealed to me. Mohere.
I was about to say it was way better, but
that's again it's just in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Man. That was a really great way to put it,
So thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I appreciate that again, I mentioned earlier that it was
a sort of a DIY community when how I like
figuring stuff out, sharing tips and tricks with one another.
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.
I know that you know when you spray that I
(31:58):
don't use the stuff, but that off oven cleaner. You know,
spray's that big, wide area. So they started using that
to achieve the same effect with paint. And they, I mean,
they were a real I guess when they were buying
the paint. Made a difference in the profits of Rustolium
and Crylon over the seventies, for sure.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah, but Rustolium and Cryon were Crylon were specifically avoiding
marketing or making their products attractive to graffiti artists. They
couldn't do no, this is no. You did not want
your brand being accused of catering to graffiti artists at
the time. But it was still pretty good. It was useful.
(32:42):
And one of the reasons why is because they were
both chuck full of lead up until the late seventies,
and lead does all sorts of great stuff for spray paint.
It makes it dry faster, it makes colors brighter, it's
more durable, it's moisture resistant. So when the leg got
taken out, that was a real bummer for griffist. Yes, yeah,
(33:02):
I mean I could see that having a huge impact.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, you know, in Europe they did market There were
a couple in the nineties, 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. So they
embraced it and basically said, hey, come buy our stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yes, but if you're a purist in America, you probably
are still using rustolium or cry line.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
One of the other things that really kind of evolved
that helped things along was not having to take the
spray nozzle off of easy off 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 3 (33:52):
Yeah, I mean, you know, fat lines and skinny lines,
different caps achieve those effects. They had clear calligraphy caps.
If you ever been at 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 2 (34:07):
Lucky.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
But you know, sometimes it's a little round pinhole, but
sometimes it's a slot. And those are calligraphy caps like
a horizontal line. I never knew that.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I think those are big and solo graffiti too. Yeah,
needle caps they make splatters, 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, so you would use needle caps. They
also add texture to the lines because they there's like
a like a splattery haze that when you step back
(34:40):
just kind of softens the lines a little bit from
the needle caps. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Should we take our second break?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I think we should.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
All right, we'll come back right after this purpose.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
I want to learn about a terris ORTA call it
red actol. How to take a perfect.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Is gone.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
That's a little hunt the Lizzie word up, Jerry.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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 and that is your own personal way of
writing your your tag essentially, and graffiti artists will come
up with their own entire alphabets that they just designed themselves.
(35:40):
And there's a really great website it's super useful if
you do want to get into graffiti called bombingscience dot com.
They have a post of sixty one different graffiti artists
and their alphabets essentially that they've created for their tags,
and it's really cool. Some of them you're like, I
have no idea what letter that is, but even still,
(36:01):
there'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. And
the way that you do that is by practicing it
to develop your own handstyle, and that is essentially step one.
And you do that not on a wall or any
public place or even with paint. You start out with
pens and markers figuring it out.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
That's right, And now we're going to give you some tips.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Oh, okay, there we go.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
You're gonna want to shake that can up, guys, got
to shake it really really good. All kidding aside, You
do want to shake that can up because that's what
makes the paint flow really well. Don't short change that shake.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
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 point.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
All right, I'll keep going.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Step two, guys can control. So this is how you're
gonna avoid those unwanted drips. Get a feel for that pressure.
It's gonna determine how quickly you're going to move that
hand to achieve that the end result that you're after.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Very nice can control, it's called.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
And then finally, guys, you're really gonna want to adjust
that distance from the wall. If you're closer, it's gonna
be thinner, it's gonna be more saturated. It's gonna be
great for outlines. Step a little further away, it's going
to diffuse out it's gonna cover a wider area. It's
just science, guys, very nice man ah right, and scene.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
So yes, the upshot of all this is the figuring
out the nozzle pressure in the distance from the wall,
or 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 3 (37:50):
That's right. And some of the rules which I kind
of like to see. You don't tag churches. You don't
graffiti churches. You don't graffiti schools. You're not supposed to
at least hospitals. You're not supposed to do this to
someone's house or their car, or certainly headstone at a cemetery,
or nature like trees and rocks. You don't know, those
big rocks in Central Park, you don't tag those. That's
(38:13):
not what you're supposed to do. And of course you
don't snitch, because you know what they get.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
They get a stitch or two. From what I understand,
that's right. Yeah, there's a story of an an artist
named Cope two who was still considered legendary, but he
was accused of snitching and just like overnight, his reputation
just went into the gutter.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Oh wow, yeah, I imagine.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Yeah, they don't take snitching lightly for sure. And then
there's other things too, Like we've basically been focusing on
spray paint for a good reason. I mean, it's the
first medium, they're the most used medium, and then there's
markers and all that, But there's other stuff you can do.
That's considered graffiti too. You can get yourself some sort
of poster, get some wheat paste and stick it up
(38:58):
like an old timey hand bill that you might see. Yeah,
make stickers, sure, people make stickers. You can come up
with stencils like a real bank sye. 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, and then you can throw them up
pretty quickly and move on and not get caught. I
(39:22):
think that makes it a different form of graffiti in
that sense. But yeah, it's still I mean, it's still
street art at the very least.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, I think so. And then Lyvia dug up this
thing called reverse graffiti, which I had never heard of. Yeah,
and she used a very good example, like when you
use your finger to write wash me on a dusty car,
you're using in, you know, an inverse of something to
create an image. So a lot of times it's like
(39:50):
it's like a political statement maybe or maybe to call
attention to like pollution or the environment or something like that. Yeah,
and it's also one where they're saying like, hey, I'm
cleaning a surface technically not defacing anything, so come at me.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, and they'll still just come along and be like, oh, no,
we're going to now we're going to clean this wall.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Now that you've done this, now you put something beautiful
up right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
So, over the years, some people have really kind of
made the jump into like mega Mondo fame, like art
world fame, who started out as graffiti artists. One of
them was Jean Michelle Basquiat. A lot of people point
to him as a wildly successful artist who started out
in graffiti. Same o was his tag. He started out
(40:36):
in the late seventies with a friend named al Diaz.
By the eighties his paintings were some of the most
expensive in the art world, and he was friends with
Andy Warhol and by nineteen eighty two we had a
solo exhibition. This is like a an art like a
graffiti artist. This is a huge leap for somebody to make.
And I think he might have been the first. I
(40:57):
think he came before Keith Hering.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah, Basquiat had a pretty good indie movie made about him.
I think it was Jeffrey Wright that played him back
in the maybe nineties. It was really good. But yeah,
you mentioned Keith Hearing too, they were friends. We were
just in New York for fall break and the family
went to MoMA and the Whitney and we saw Bosquillot's
and obviously Warhols and some Keith Haring stuff in person,
(41:21):
which is always a thrill. And Keith Hearing, I know
we've talked about before, but he started drawing in chalk
on the like when they would take a advertisement down
on the subway walls, there would be this 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. Yeah. And if you don't know
(41:44):
the Radiant Baby, like if you looked it up, you'd
probably seen it somewhere before. It's very famous.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yes, Yeah, it's like a crawling silhouette with like light
lines coming off of it.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Yeah. And very sadly, Jean Michel Basquiat would pass from
a heroin to us in the late eighties, and Keith
Haring died from complications from AIDS and HIV. I believe
in nineteen ninety I read.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
An interview with Basquiat. It must have been in like
nineteen eighty eight because the interviewers it was like he
got up no less than two or three times to
go shoot Heroin in this rather short interview, like he
could not not do what he would have gotten sick
like that quickly. Jeez. There's also Shepherd Faerry is very
(42:28):
famous for his Andre the Giant has a posse stickers
that he made, and then also for his Hope poster
of Barack Obama during the two thousand and eight election.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Yeah, Shepherd Fairy, good work, yep.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
And we mentioned Banksy, right.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, I mean do we have to talk about Banksy?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
No, there's a couple other ones that I want to
call out that are still working today.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
So Dondie White, he's an overlooked one. He was the
one who with Future of two thousand did that full
car called Break. But he hung out with Keith Herring
and Bosquillacht and Kenny Sharf in Future of two thousand
like he was a he never really made the leap
to the major art world. He was like a old
school underground artist.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Yeah, and did you mention Now you didn't mention Lady K.
Who'd you mention earlier?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Lady Pink?
Speaker 3 (43:20):
Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different lady Kay is French.
I believe, right in Paris.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
I believe that's where she was born, and she might
be working there still, either Paris or New York.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, very cool stuff there too.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah. And then also so check out her stuff, and
then check out Wren's R. E. N. S. Who's working
in Copenhagen. It is mind numbing how amazing this work is.
Like it just can't even imagine conceiving a lot of
a lot of it, let alone being good at it.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. It's really like I'm looking
at some of them now, man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
And then there's one called kid Olt who as a
vandal actually like purposefully vandalizes luxury brand stores who have
collaborated with graffiti artists for their brands. They don't like that,
so they will like it's not really like pieces that
they're putting up. It's more like huge, huge vandalizations of
(44:20):
these stores.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Oh wow, yeah, Oh that's is that the one that's
like like stores that are kind of co opting graffiti
is like the cool thing. He'll go hit them. Yeah, okay,
kid Old, Yeah, but they're probably like great.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Oh yeah, I'm sure. Oh wait, you mean the stores. Yeah,
I don't know. I've heard that they don't like Kiddle
very much really, OK. And then lastly, the I want
to call out Apothecary, who never really got off the ground.
That's Umi's tag from when she got into this. She's
always been interested in bee boy culture, so of course
(44:53):
she came up with graffiti a graffiti tag, and I
think she realized, like fairly early on, this is way
too long Apothecary to use as a tag, So I
don't think I think it kind of petered out fairly
early on.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
I'm gonna have to tell Emily that because uh, I mean,
obviously Apothecary is right at par ally, so yeah, for sure,
that's funny.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (45:15):
I got nothing else. I'm gonna work on my my tag.
I'm gonna come up with a tag and a font.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Nice. Yeah. Get busy on your handstyle yo. Yeah, since
uh we were just talking about handstyle again, I think
that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Yeah. This is from Ben in Connecticut, who's been listening
for quite a while and recently heard our Selects episode
The Great Finger in the Wendy's Chili Caper. That's kind
that one that was incredible. We were commenting about the
way Letterman and Lenno covered that, and that Letterman was
was funnier. You know, no surprise there for me, at
(45:55):
least I assume you as well. Yeah uh, And then
Josh mentioned Leno's well known of cars to differentiate the
late night hosts. However, guys, David Letterman is well known
within the Indy car racing world as one of the
owners of Rahal Letterman Lanagan Racing. The team won the
Kart Indie Championship in nineteen ninety two, the year the
team was founded, and has won the Indy five hundred
(46:17):
twice with drivers Buddy Rice in two thousand and four
and Takuma Sato in twenty twenty. So while Leno 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. And that is from Ben, Connecticut.
So I think the takeaway there is a Letterman owns
(46:38):
Leno once again.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, what was who was that? Ben?
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Yeah? And it's so low hanging through to bag on Lino.
So I don't think I'm original or cool for doing so.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Oh no, but it's I mean you still mean it? Yeah, Yeah,
thanks a lot, Ben. That was in a very arcane
fact that I definitely hadn't heard. And I also just
realized that Arkane would be a great tag too. R Kane.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Well, you and you and you me went out together
and did this like Arcane and Apothecary together. They'd be like,
who is this new power couple in DVD?
Speaker 2 (47:15):
This crew is amazing?
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (47:17):
What handstyle?
Speaker 3 (47:18):
I know? And that'd say, guys, you got it just right.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, thank you for doing that voice. You really sure
think you saved the episode.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he
used to do the White Boys.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Is that who that was?
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Yeah, just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
I was gonna guess Johnny Carson on Helium doing George W.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Bush.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, go back and listen, you'll be there. Oh my god,
Well I think that's it. Yes, Ben, Thank you very
much for that email. Ben, And if you want to
be like Ben and get in touch with us, we
love that kind of thing. You can send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
Stuff Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and we are doing a wild style today. You're
on Stuff you Should Know, one of those episodes where
it's like 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 3 (00:28):
Oh man, I'm not gonna say when. Maybe you can guess,
but there's one portion of this that it'll be the
most like middle aged white dude thing ever.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
Okay, I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.
Speaker 3 (00:41):
Okay, I'll see me. You'll probably know when I go
into my voice.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
Okay, is it that old witch voice that you like
to do?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
No, no, no, no, you'll know the voice.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
All right. Is it an Italian thing?
Speaker 3 (00:53):
No? Not Italian?
Speaker 2 (00:54):
All right, I'll figure it out. Then we're talking graffiti obviously, Chuck,
I don't know if everybody knows that.
Speaker 3 (01:00):
Yeah, 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. But
graffiti needed its own thing, and graffiti in the United States,
we basically think of as sort of the late sixties
East Coast thing, and this isn't one of those things.
I do see where Livia put in like cave drawings,
(01:22):
but I'm not even going to talk about that, sure
because I was like, come on, Olivia.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
But.
Speaker 3 (01:29):
Very good point here in Mexico and like the nineteen
thirties where mural art and sort of public art during
the Mexican Revolution was a big thing, and so Chicano
kids in the nineteen thirties sort of brought that same
style to La and other cities in the nineteen thirties
and forties before the spray can was invented. But I
feel like that is a genuine sort of precursor to
(01:51):
what we know is modern graffiti.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Yeah, because they were, well, they were writing on walls sometimes,
they were using paint and brushes. Markers didn't exist, spray
can didn't exist yet, but they were using what they
had a lot of times just to tag their neighborhood
as like this, this turf belongs to this gang. But
they added flourishes that kind of gave rise to some
of the details and touches that are still around in
(02:14):
graffiti today. So it is definitely a valid 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 3 (02:29):
I mentioned the spray can that's obviously a vital part
of graffiti. That was in nineteen forty nine by a
paint owner in Illinois, a paint company owner named ed
Seymour and his wife. And I tried to find her name.
What's her name, Bonnie? Oh, I couldn't find it. You
found Bonnie.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
I had to look really hard, yes, but I found
it Bonnie. Isn't it a love of name?
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Nice work? Yeah? I do love the name Bonnie. But
they said they were trying to coat radiators with an
aluminum coating, so they invented the spray can, and right away,
like you know, people that were protesting or maybe artist
on the down low, because you can hide a can
pretty easily, you can work with it very quickly. It
(03:10):
works on a lot of different kinds of surfaces. So
all of a sudden, spray cans, you know, really paved
the way.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Yeah. Pazzi from Happy Days famously was a Clandestinian artist
using spray paint.
Speaker 3 (03:21):
Oh really, no, I remember that one I could Hey,
I could have seen that be in a Happy Day's episode.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Yeah, but I wouldn't have been yeah, exactly. Maybe Ralph
Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then.
Speaker 3 (03:32):
Just fade out, but probably would have been Richie.
Speaker 2 (03:35):
Yeah, I guess so. Man, that was such a good.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Show, like a real Lesson Learner episode.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (03:41):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
And the fond who you'd think would be like a
spray paint graffiti artist, like Van Doll, that's the one
who talks to Richie's like, that's not cool. So there's
a lot of advantages to using spray paint. That's why
graffiti really kind of started. This is like where its
roots really took root. Markers are another thing that people use,
(04:04):
and most people think of spray paint with graffiti, but
markers are important and they didn't come around until the
nineteen fifties. So you had spray paint before you had markers,
which is surprising to me. And if you want a
nice little trivia question, magic marker was the first marker
for commercial sale starting in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 3 (04:24):
That makes sense because that's became sort of the proprietary
eponem in a way.
Speaker 2 (04:28):
Exactly. Yeah, for sure, not.
Speaker 3 (04:30):
So much anymore, I feel like, but in our era,
for sure.
Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, because it's fun to say.
Speaker 3 (04:35):
Yeah, it's a marker that creates magic.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Exactly.
Speaker 3 (04:39):
I didn't really consider markers as graffiti, but then I
was like, yeah, like everything like on the inside of
a marta train or a New York subway car, like
that's all marker.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
All marker.
Speaker 3 (04:49):
Yeah it is.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
It's very important for what's called handstyle, as we'll see.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
That's right. But we need to talk about cornbread, right.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
Yeah. So there's a guy named Darryl McCrae who will
tell anybody who sits long enough that he was the
person who invented graffiti. Yeah, and he makes a really
good case. Unfortunately, there's some other people who were doing
the same thing at the same time, but you could
still say corn bread, which was his handle his tag.
Was one of the very first people who took up graffiti,
(05:19):
starting in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3 (05:22):
Yeah, he was but a twelve year old. He's a
Philly guy, and he was in Juvie, and in Juvie
he said, I don't want this white bread. I want
corn bread. My grandmother made cornbread and I love that stuff.
So he got the nickname Cornbread.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
I don't think he got the corn bread though.
Speaker 3 (05:37):
I doubt if he got the corn bread. It's very
labor intensive to make cornbread for sure, I mean compared
to this opening up a bag of white bread. You know.
Speaker 2 (05:44):
Also, though, I think at places called youth development center,
they don't give you your preferred food day, give you
what you're going to.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Eat, Yeah, like Oliver Twist style.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, no requests please, no more.
Speaker 3 (05:58):
So he took that nickname, start riding it on the
walls there at his institution that he was in, and
then when he got out in nineteen sixty seven, he
would take to the streets of Philly writing his name Cornbread,
especially like if he knew that his sweetie Pie was
on the bus, he would ride it along the bus
route so she could see that and be impressed.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
Sometimes running alongside the bus.
Speaker 3 (06:21):
Yeah, like while it was going other bus lines. And
that was sort of the you know, the beginning along
as we'll see and 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, and the point was to
get that out in as many places as you could,
(06:42):
and and like 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 2 (06:53):
Yeah, and so you add in the flourishes that Chicano
kids came up within the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and
in la with getting your tag out there as many
places as you can. That's the That is definitely the
beginning of graffiti. And this is where most people point
to as the start of the whole thing. In the
(07:13):
sixties and seventies in New York City, all of this
started to blossom. All these things kind of came together
and just the right hands and graffiti became a thing,
just slowly but surely. Like you said, some of the
first people were just writing their names and they would
come up with this tag. And some of the earliest
tags came from Spanish Harlem, where you would have your
(07:35):
nickname and then in number like Turk one eighty two,
and Turk would be your nickname, one eighty two would
be the street you hailed from. I think Turk one
eighty two is entirely made up. I don't think it
was a docu drama. But one of the first two
was Julio two to four and Taki one eighty three.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Yeah, Taki one eighty three. Taki was the nickname, a
Greek nickname for Dmitri. It still is. But Taki was
a this is in like sixty nine or seventy was
a delivery worker. So Taki went all over the city.
So it was a really good way to get the
Taki one eighty three tag all over the place, and
it got so far and wide that Taki was actually
(08:16):
part of a New York Times article in nineteen seventy one,
and all of a sudden it inspired people saying, hey,
like this is the cool new thing to do on
the street.
Speaker 2 (08:25):
Yeah or else they hated Taki one a three for
disraacing New York all over the place.
Speaker 3 (08:30):
Good point.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That same year that the article on takiy three came out,
there was the first graffiti crew kind of came together
Writer's Corner one eighty eight. They met at the corner
of Audubon and one eighty eighth Street, one hundred and
eighty eighth Street, as they say in New York and
the crew was called WC one eighty eight, and it
was like one of the first ways that people started
(08:52):
sharing different style tips and kinds of markers that did
different things. It was just the first way that different
people doing the same thing came together and figured out
how to do it better.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Yeah, And like I said, it was sort of a
quantity over quality thing for a while. I think that's
sadly kind of part of it now a little bit.
When I see graffiti around Atlanta, there's some really good
stuff and also some really kind of not so great
tags that I see a lot.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Yeah, and more often than not, it's the not so
great ones, right, kind of like watching adults skateboard.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Yeah, god yeah, I mean, man, Atlanta just didn't have
the skateboarders. That's a West Coast thing I never see.
I always see those guys trying to do the tricks,
but they never land the tricks exactly.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
That's exactly like junkie tags, which is I think called
toy in the the graffiti world.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Oh really, toy If your tag is just sort of
not great.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
Yeah, if it's just junkie amateurish graffiti, it's toy graffiti.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
Well, what if these people are like, hey man, I'm
not such a great artist. Lay off, I'm trying.
Speaker 2 (09:59):
Will they I would say, stop doing what you're doing
and go do something else then, because the streets are
made for good graffiti.
Speaker 3 (10:06):
Not toys.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
Right.
Speaker 3 (10:10):
The subway was where things got really a little more
like artistic. I guess, riding on a subway train in
New York you could obviously get your name out, you know,
to more people, because that subway's going all over the place. Right,
It's also risky, and as we'll see, like risk is
a big you know, I mentioned like the wall and
from the police station, Like risk is a big, big
(10:31):
part of it. Because like as you'll see, like when
they made great efforts in the in the seventies and
eighties in New York to stop this stuff, it wasn't
like they were like, oh boy, we better stop doing
this graffiti. It was sort of like game on man,
like this is what we're looking for. Like now we
know they're after us, so it makes it even more
(10:52):
sort of challenging and risky.
Speaker 2 (10:54):
Yeah, I mean these early graffiti artists were by definition
juvenile delinquents to a person, So the idea of adding
more challenges to them just played exactly into their whole
ethos etho, Yes, I could never remember.
Speaker 3 (11:08):
And to be clear that with this, I just want
to if you don't understand, they're not spray painting the
moving subway cars. They would break into the rail yards
at night, and all of a sudden, you have this
huge canvas just sitting there.
Speaker 2 (11:18):
Yeah, exactly, And like you said, a lot of people
would see it because that subway car the next day
would be traveling all over New York. So that was
a big deal. And that's kind of what you think
of when you think of late seventies early eighties graffiti
in New York subway cars is kind of traveling all
over the place with really cool, colorful graffiti on them.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Totally.
Speaker 2 (11:38):
Do you want to take an early break or you
want to keep talking and get into some different kinds
and styles.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Yeah, maybe let's break down the styles first.
Speaker 2 (11:46):
All right, let's see it. So it turns out there's
three categories of graffiti in order of easiness to increasing hardness.
It's got to be a better way to put it,
but I'm leaving it there.
Speaker 3 (12:00):
There's tags, yeah.
Speaker 2 (12:01):
Which Olivia calls very sterily basic identifying signs.
Speaker 3 (12:06):
I love that well, tags didn't comelong until nineteen ninety
the word, right.
Speaker 2 (12:10):
But essentially it's your signature. It's your nickname spelled out
in a very stylized way specific to you. That's what
handstyle is. 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.
(12:31):
That's one of the three kinds of graffiti.
Speaker 3 (12:34):
Yeah, and before they called it tagging in nineteen ninety,
back in the day, as they say, they would call
it hitting maybe or bombing or just writing yep, throw ups.
Terrible name is the next kind. It can incorporate your tag.
It's like your signature, but it's usually more than that.
It's tag plus a lot of times it's multicolor, like
(12:54):
two or three colors, maybe even more if you've got
the time. It's you know, it's more. It's just said,
it's kind of more artistic.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
Yeah, and they're almost always like bubbly letters from what
I can tell.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, unless it's the block style, which I like.
Speaker 2 (13:10):
Yeah, blockbuster, Yeah, I like those as well. Those are
it's a different style. They're not throw ups. It's kind
of a style that could be used in throw ups,
and there are a lot of times used using rollers,
but they're really large letters. A lot of times they're
more straight than bubbly, which is the differentiation. Like you
were saying, I like Blockbuster too, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (13:30):
Yeah, me too. And then you've got the best kind
when you might get a whole subway car and many
hours to decorate the saying, or a whole wall. And
those are called pieces, just like you would call an
art piece a piece, because it is an art piece
for sure.
Speaker 2 (13:46):
They're way more detailed, way more colors. They have all
sorts of crazy cool effects, like fades from one color 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
(14:09):
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,
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 can take fifteen minutes if you're
(14:32):
still figuring out your way those pieces. This surprised me.
They can take days to do. With multiple crews working
on the same thing, it can still take days. 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
(14:52):
a wall somewhere, having to go back like night after
night to do this and not get caught, that's it's
rather thrilling.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
If you asked me, well, and the just the time
investment for something that a third of the way through
or halfway through or towards the end could get could
go away.
Speaker 2 (15:09):
I thought about that too. Man, that's kind of hurt.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
That would really suck.
Speaker 2 (15:13):
What about wild style I referred to it early on.
Speaker 3 (15:18):
Wild style is obviously Superstylized's where you get sort of
the overlapping letter patterns. It's usually fairly bright and like
you mentioned, like a lot of shading, maybe a three
D effect. A lot of times these pieces have wild
style involved, right.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
Yeah, it's kind of like the most advanced form, I guess,
just because it's so it's just it's really hard to
do and it's the most intricate usually, But it's also
kind of like gone beyond what most people appreciate as graffiti,
where they have no idea what this thing says. Like
other graffiti artists can read it, but the average person
(15:57):
is just like, oh, look at that of colors. It's
kind of like how metal bands logos have kind of
evolved to where they're like, I have no idea whose
album this is. It's very much similar that wild style is.
But one thing that stuck out to me Chuck wild style.
I'm like that probably came around in maybe the nineties
(16:18):
at the earliest. It's from the seventies too, Like all
of this stuff is from the seventies. So in the
seventies in New York City, the general guidelines for what
constitutes graffiti's still today were laid out and established by
those people, Like it's still followed today. I think that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (16:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:38):
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 3 (16:43):
Yeah, that's cool. I love it. And then if you've
ever seen like and this is a little more West coast,
like the old English style or like the western saloon
lettering that's known as solo style, a word that you know,
sort of associated with like gang culture, like Mexican gang culture,
but that developed from that Chicano writing culture on the
(17:05):
West coast and then spread around, like you can see
that on the East coast. But it's definitely I feel
like more West Coast thing. And that looks super cool.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Too, No, it definitely does. 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. Yeah,
they show up a lot. It just seems like there's
a lot more cartoon figures in Tolo style than say
that New York graffiti. There was one more style that
I ran across called anti style or ignorant style, and
(17:33):
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, who are like this has gotten totally
out of control. If you've seen this wild style stuff.
We need to like get back to basics and just
have fun with us again. And so they're kind of
(17:53):
trying to recapture what the earliest graffiti artists from, like
the seventies. We're doing as they when they figured it
out as they went along. A lot of people hate it,
can't stand it. They think it's just a dumb idea.
But from what I can tell, if you're a good
artist doing purposefully primitive work, it's actually pretty cool looking.
Speaker 3 (18:14):
All right, should we take that break?
Speaker 2 (18:16):
I do want to take that break, Chuck, all right.
Speaker 3 (18:18):
Let's go get our spray hands, check him up, and
we'll be right back.
Speaker 1 (18:34):
I want to learn about a terris or call it
red actol, how to take a bank is gone. That's
a little hunt the word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (18:50):
All right. So we mentioned markers early on, and obviously,
like I said, inside, like on the wall of a
subway car. A lot of times 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
(19:12):
dry mark dri and Sandford King size were they were
very broad tip markers. So those were some of the
early markers that were the most popular. And you could
also refill a lot of those with different kinds of ink.
So the you know, the felt was just sort of
the instrument and you could put whatever color or mixed
colors if you wanted to, for sure. And they would
(19:32):
also like make their own stuff. 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 2 (19:42):
Yeah, you also mentioned that it's one of the four
pillars of hip hop. There's technically five as far as
Africa Bombarda is concerned, and that would be knowledge as
the fifth pillar, like knowledge of self, knowledge of where
you come from, your history, real KRS one stuff, you know. Yeah,
and so as being part of hip hop culture, I
(20:04):
don't know if we said the other onesing and DJing
and breaking, Yeah, and graffiti and knowledge, those are the
five pillars of hip hop. And like the other stuff
like mceing and djaying and all that, and breaking in particular,
there's a real competitive element to graffiti, like where you
can go so far as you end up in a
(20:25):
war with other artists where you're spraying over their stuff. Yeah,
spraying over your stuff, and that is you're not supposed
to do that. Like, if you spray over somebody's stuff,
it better be terrible work and you better be really
good at it, because that's a huge flex. I guess
you would say if it was twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3 (20:43):
Yeah, for sure. It is also intersected with other art
forms over the years. In the nineteen eighties and there's
a comic artist named von Bode who was very influential
to this culture. He had a couple of characters, Puck
and Cheech Wizard he came up with. I think he
came up with these characters like in the nineteen fifties wow.
(21:06):
But then in the sixties they were in like self
published comics and then went a little more and want
to say mainstream obviously not mainstream mainstream, but like seventy
two to seventy five they're in the National Lampoon, so
a little more mainstream.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right.
Speaker 3 (21:19):
And if you think you've heard that name before, that
sounds familiar, you might have heard the song sure Shot
by the Beastie Boys. I'm like von Bode I'm a
cheach Wizard, never quitting, so you won't listen very nice
Well said, yeah, I knew I had heard that before.
I was like, that's been in a song, I know it.
Speaker 2 (21:38):
Yeah, And cheach Wizard is essentially like a giant wizard
hat with some legs coming out of it. It's cheech
Wizard and he's like a wise, smart ass kind of
well wizard hat. And I don't know, I didn't see why,
but for some reason, graffiti culture just loved that stuff.
So cheach Wizard shows up and Puck the Lizard show
up in a lot of graffiti from the seventies and eighties.
(21:59):
And then one of the other influences, I saw that
that cheech Wizard or von Bode had his lettering for
his comics. 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 3 (22:16):
Well, graffiti and the book covers of math books of
gen X Kids. Yep, I was big into the bubble lettering.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Yeah, using those those pins with like the five different
colors that you can click.
Speaker 3 (22:29):
Down, Yeah, I was okay at it. I definitely use
those pins. I remember G's giving me a lot of
trouble and S has given me a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2 (22:39):
Those were hard, but I tried. How was your out
of bubble Q?
Speaker 3 (22:45):
Oh God, is that a thing? It is now possible.
Speaker 2 (22:50):
I think I just laid down the gauntlet for somebody
to come up with that.
Speaker 3 (22:53):
Oh wow. So graffiti starts to spread around the world,
Britain in the late seven and amster Amsterdam in particular.
In the Netherlands and their punk scenes in the late seventies,
they started doing some of this stuff. Yeah, and then
it also helped spread because of media a little bit.
I mean, most of it was fairly underground media at
(23:14):
the time, unless it was some news report that had
a scathing report. But there was a photographer named Henry Chalfont, Yeah,
who did a few projects, one of which I highly
recommend watching on YouTube, a documentary from nineteen eighty three
called Style Wars, which is a really good watch.
Speaker 2 (23:29):
It's one of those ones where you're like, I feel
cooler just watching this thing.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (23:33):
He just turned the he turned the camera. 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, and then interspersed is like break dancing
from the rock Steady Crew when they were just starting out.
Like it's just super cool, like this captured time capsule
(23:59):
like moment into yeah, where this is all starting. They
totally Henry Chaufont like got it. He was like, we
need to document this is because this is going to
be important.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Yeah, it's amazing. 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 in
sort of a urgeon in culture to have this this
sort of one document so like perfectly capture this moment
in time like you were talking about. It's I mean
that that should be in like the Library of Congress
like that kind of stuff for sure or whatever. What's
(24:30):
the film version of that, I can't remember the name.
Speaker 2 (24:32):
Of it, The Fiberio of Fambus.
Speaker 3 (24:35):
Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 2 (24:38):
I know that deserved a while. I'm really screeping the
bottom of the barrel here in year seventeen. Oh so
you said that it was it was like a document, right.
It actually is kind of referred to in in graffiti
culture still today, Like if somebody's starting out and they're like,
what should I go? What can I learn from? One
(24:59):
of the things that people refer them to Style Wars
because again, these these like essential guidelines were laid down
at this time, so you can still learn a ton
from watching Style Wars or Henry Chaufont got into a
couple of other projects too, one with a photographer named
Martha Cooper called Subway Art. I've also seen newbies referred
to that book too, and then another one with another photographer,
(25:22):
James Prigoff called spray cant Art. So Henry Chaufont had
a real impact on like documenting this stuff that still
is important today.
Speaker 3 (25:33):
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,
you know, right, you know, yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Two other things to call out. There's a photographer named
Gordon Matta Clark who documented photograph in photographs just like
tags all around New York City. Has a pretty cool
I think they'd make showings of his photographs sometimes. And
then the movie Wild Style actually came out a year
before Style Wars nineteen eighty two. It's considered the first
hip hop movie ever. I think it was a Fab
(26:13):
five Freddie project. But it has the Rock City Crew,
one of the rare early woman graffiti artists, Lady Pink,
she's in it, and then King ad Rock is in
it before he was called King ad Rock before the
Beastie Boys. Yeah, but there's a ton of like the
whole premise of this, it's a movie, like a fictional movie,
but the old premise is this guy's being hired to well,
(26:37):
I guess put up some graffiti by this. I can't
remember another dude or a company or something like that.
Speaker 3 (26:43):
All right, I'll check that out.
Speaker 2 (26:44):
Thanks.
Speaker 3 (26:45):
So, you know, we mentioned graffiti as art because graffiti
is art, but as far as being accepted into like
the legitimate art community, that sort of happened in fits
and starts over the years. There was an I guess
the first academic article about graffiti was in nineteen sixty
nine in The Urban Review by Herbert Coles called names
Graffiti and Culture, and then a few years later in
(27:08):
nineteen seventy two, a big deal happened when, or a
big deal for that culture at least Hugo Martinez as
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. And that
was sort of the first collective where he was like, hey,
(27:28):
do this stuff on canvas because this is art. 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 2 (27:39):
Right, Yeah, they became really influential. The next year, in
nineteen seventy three, choreographer Twyla Tharp, she had the United
Graffiti Artists do basically the scene decorations for her performance
in Chicago. I can't remember what was called, but weirdly,
the dance was choreographed two Beach Boys music with graffiti
(28:04):
in the background. It was a real mishmash when the
whole Beastie Boys music, no, I said, beach Boys, And
the whole time she just kept going Twila, Twila, Twila.
Well she danced, that's good, You're getting better. Yeah, it
comes and goes.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
We did mention. You know, obviously, the other side of
the coin is there is and still are people that
think this is just vandalism. They think it's just like
an urban decay happening before our very eyes. And in
the early seventies, New York got on board that line
of thinking, at least the government did, when Mayor John
Lindsay declared a war on graffiti. That following year, in
(28:44):
seventy two, the city Council said it's illegal to even
carry an aerosol can in a public facility. And then
in seventy five they created the Transit Police Graffiti Squad,
and you know, they're cleaning out subway cars. But like
I said, early all this, all this was was like
game on. Like there's not a single graffiti artist that
(29:04):
was intimidated or scared out of doing what they were
going to do because of this. If anything, it heightened it.
Speaker 2 (29:11):
Yeah. Another example of that is they outlawed selling spray
paint to teenagers in New York City. Yeah, and so
graffiti artists who were like, oh, okay, we'll just start
stealing it. That's cheaper anyway. So stealing your spray paint
became like just a part of graffiti and New York
in the in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, not condoning that.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents and I wasn't kidding.
Speaker 3 (29:35):
Ed Koch, famous New York mayor in the latest seventies
and seventy seven, was very anti graffiti and would razor
wire the subway yards, had guard dogs, he had cops
like staking out houses and following kids home from school.
That's nuts, man, Yeah, that's just nuts.
Speaker 2 (29:53):
So I think I don't know if Koch, Yeah, I
think Koch was still mayor at the time. They came
up with the Metro Transit Authority's Clean Car program, and
this one actually had an impact. This was beyond razor
wire and German shepherds.
Speaker 3 (30:07):
Like.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
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. Yeah, So
imagine like working all night or whatever and getting your
piece up and it just cleaned off before it even
leaves the transit station. So that actually worked him. By
nineteen eighty nine, apparently, like whole car graffiti was just
(30:33):
not around anymore in New York. Like you can still
see it on cars, but they used to use the
entire car. There's a really famous one by Futura two
thousand and Dondie which is called Break, and it's considered
one of the greatest full subway car masterpieces anyone's ever done.
(30:53):
It's beyond description. Just go look up Break by Dondee
in Future A two thousand.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
What did you think of it?
Speaker 2 (31:00):
I thought it was amazing because it just completely departed
from any kind of I know how just ridiculous I
sound right now. It departed from any kind of convention.
It used all sorts of new elements and stuff that
I hadn't seen anywhere else, and you really had to
kind of examine it in detail and then also stepping
back to kind of take the whole thing in. I
(31:21):
didn't love it, yeah, I mean I could see that
that's hard, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3 (31:26):
Or let's say this, I've seen a lot other stuff
that I thought was like, maybe it just appealed to me. Mohere.
I was about to say it was way better, but
that's again it's just in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 2 (31:34):
Man. That was a really great way to put it,
So thank you.
Speaker 3 (31:38):
I appreciate that again, I mentioned earlier that it was
a sort of a DIY community when how I like
figuring stuff out, sharing tips and tricks with one another.
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.
I know that you know when you spray that I
(31:58):
don't use the stuff, but that off oven cleaner. You know,
spray's that big, wide area. So they started using that
to achieve the same effect with paint. And they, I mean,
they were a real I guess when they were buying
the paint. Made a difference in the profits of Rustolium
and Crylon over the seventies, for sure.
Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah, but Rustolium and Cryon were Crylon were specifically avoiding
marketing or making their products attractive to graffiti artists. They
couldn't do no, this is no. You did not want
your brand being accused of catering to graffiti artists at
the time. But it was still pretty good. It was useful.
(32:42):
And one of the reasons why is because they were
both chuck full of lead up until the late seventies,
and lead does all sorts of great stuff for spray paint.
It makes it dry faster, it makes colors brighter, it's
more durable, it's moisture resistant. So when the leg got
taken out, that was a real bummer for griffist. Yes, yeah,
(33:02):
I mean I could see that having a huge impact.
Speaker 3 (33:05):
Yeah, you know, in Europe they did market There were
a couple in the nineties, 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. So they
embraced it and basically said, hey, come buy our stuff.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yes, but if you're a purist in America, you probably
are still using rustolium or cry line.
Speaker 3 (33:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (33:33):
One of the other things that really kind of evolved
that helped things along was not having to take the
spray nozzle off of easy off 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 3 (33:52):
Yeah, I mean, you know, fat lines and skinny lines,
different caps achieve those effects. They had clear calligraphy caps.
If you ever been at 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 2 (34:07):
Lucky.
Speaker 3 (34:08):
But you know, sometimes it's a little round pinhole, but
sometimes it's a slot. And those are calligraphy caps like
a horizontal line. I never knew that.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
I think those are big and solo graffiti too. Yeah,
needle caps they make splatters, 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, so you would use needle caps. They
also add texture to the lines because they there's like
a like a splattery haze that when you step back
(34:40):
just kind of softens the lines a little bit from
the needle caps. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3 (34:45):
Should we take our second break?
Speaker 2 (34:46):
I think we should.
Speaker 3 (34:48):
All right, we'll come back right after this purpose.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
I want to learn about a terris ORTA call it
red actol. How to take a perfect.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
Is gone.
Speaker 1 (35:07):
That's a little hunt the Lizzie word up, Jerry.
Speaker 2 (35:19):
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 and that is your own personal way of
writing your your tag essentially, and graffiti artists will come
up with their own entire alphabets that they just designed themselves.
(35:40):
And there's a really great website it's super useful if
you do want to get into graffiti called bombingscience dot com.
They have a post of sixty one different graffiti artists
and their alphabets essentially that they've created for their tags,
and it's really cool. Some of them you're like, I
have no idea what letter that is, but even still,
(36:01):
there'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. And
the way that you do that is by practicing it
to develop your own handstyle, and that is essentially step one.
And you do that not on a wall or any
public place or even with paint. You start out with
pens and markers figuring it out.
Speaker 3 (36:23):
That's right, And now we're going to give you some tips.
Speaker 2 (36:28):
Oh, okay, there we go.
Speaker 3 (36:30):
You're gonna want to shake that can up, guys, got
to shake it really really good. All kidding aside, You
do want to shake that can up because that's what
makes the paint flow really well. Don't short change that shake.
Speaker 2 (36:46):
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 point.
Speaker 3 (36:55):
All right, I'll keep going.
Speaker 2 (36:56):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Step two, guys can control. So this is how you're
gonna avoid those unwanted drips. Get a feel for that pressure.
It's gonna determine how quickly you're going to move that
hand to achieve that the end result that you're after.
Speaker 2 (37:11):
Very nice can control, it's called.
Speaker 3 (37:14):
And then finally, guys, you're really gonna want to adjust
that distance from the wall. If you're closer, it's gonna
be thinner, it's gonna be more saturated. It's gonna be
great for outlines. Step a little further away, it's going
to diffuse out it's gonna cover a wider area. It's
just science, guys, very nice man ah right, and scene.
Speaker 2 (37:35):
So yes, the upshot of all this is the figuring
out the nozzle pressure in the distance from the wall,
or 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 3 (37:50):
That's right. And some of the rules which I kind
of like to see. You don't tag churches. You don't
graffiti churches. You don't graffiti schools. You're not supposed to
at least hospitals. You're not supposed to do this to
someone's house or their car, or certainly headstone at a cemetery,
or nature like trees and rocks. You don't know, those
big rocks in Central Park, you don't tag those. That's
(38:13):
not what you're supposed to do. And of course you
don't snitch, because you know what they get.
Speaker 2 (38:19):
They get a stitch or two. From what I understand,
that's right. Yeah, there's a story of an an artist
named Cope two who was still considered legendary, but he
was accused of snitching and just like overnight, his reputation
just went into the gutter.
Speaker 3 (38:34):
Oh wow, yeah, I imagine.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
Yeah, they don't take snitching lightly for sure. And then
there's other things too, Like we've basically been focusing on
spray paint for a good reason. I mean, it's the
first medium, they're the most used medium, and then there's
markers and all that, But there's other stuff you can do.
That's considered graffiti too. You can get yourself some sort
of poster, get some wheat paste and stick it up
(38:58):
like an old timey hand bill that you might see. Yeah,
make stickers, sure, people make stickers. You can come up
with stencils like a real bank sye. 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, and then you can throw them up
pretty quickly and move on and not get caught. I
(39:22):
think that makes it a different form of graffiti in
that sense. But yeah, it's still I mean, it's still
street art at the very least.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
Yeah, I think so. And then Lyvia dug up this
thing called reverse graffiti, which I had never heard of. Yeah,
and she used a very good example, like when you
use your finger to write wash me on a dusty car,
you're using in, you know, an inverse of something to
create an image. So a lot of times it's like
(39:50):
it's like a political statement maybe or maybe to call
attention to like pollution or the environment or something like that. Yeah,
and it's also one where they're saying like, hey, I'm
cleaning a surface technically not defacing anything, so come at me.
Speaker 2 (40:04):
Yeah, and they'll still just come along and be like, oh, no,
we're going to now we're going to clean this wall.
Speaker 3 (40:08):
Now that you've done this, now you put something beautiful
up right. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:13):
So, over the years, some people have really kind of
made the jump into like mega Mondo fame, like art
world fame, who started out as graffiti artists. One of
them was Jean Michelle Basquiat. A lot of people point
to him as a wildly successful artist who started out
in graffiti. Same o was his tag. He started out
(40:36):
in the late seventies with a friend named al Diaz.
By the eighties his paintings were some of the most
expensive in the art world, and he was friends with
Andy Warhol and by nineteen eighty two we had a
solo exhibition. This is like a an art like a
graffiti artist. This is a huge leap for somebody to make.
And I think he might have been the first. I
(40:57):
think he came before Keith Hering.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
Yeah, Basquiat had a pretty good indie movie made about him.
I think it was Jeffrey Wright that played him back
in the maybe nineties. It was really good. But yeah,
you mentioned Keith Hearing too, they were friends. We were
just in New York for fall break and the family
went to MoMA and the Whitney and we saw Bosquillot's
and obviously Warhols and some Keith Haring stuff in person,
(41:21):
which is always a thrill. And Keith Hearing, I know
we've talked about before, but he started drawing in chalk
on the like when they would take a advertisement down
on the subway walls, there would be this 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. Yeah. And if you don't know
(41:44):
the Radiant Baby, like if you looked it up, you'd
probably seen it somewhere before. It's very famous.
Speaker 2 (41:48):
Yes, Yeah, it's like a crawling silhouette with like light
lines coming off of it.
Speaker 3 (41:54):
Yeah. And very sadly, Jean Michel Basquiat would pass from
a heroin to us in the late eighties, and Keith
Haring died from complications from AIDS and HIV. I believe
in nineteen ninety I read.
Speaker 2 (42:08):
An interview with Basquiat. It must have been in like
nineteen eighty eight because the interviewers it was like he
got up no less than two or three times to
go shoot Heroin in this rather short interview, like he
could not not do what he would have gotten sick
like that quickly. Jeez. There's also Shepherd Faerry is very
(42:28):
famous for his Andre the Giant has a posse stickers
that he made, and then also for his Hope poster
of Barack Obama during the two thousand and eight election.
Speaker 3 (42:39):
Yeah, Shepherd Fairy, good work, yep.
Speaker 2 (42:42):
And we mentioned Banksy, right.
Speaker 3 (42:45):
Yeah, I mean do we have to talk about Banksy?
Speaker 2 (42:47):
No, there's a couple other ones that I want to
call out that are still working today.
Speaker 3 (42:51):
Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2 (42:52):
So Dondie White, he's an overlooked one. He was the
one who with Future of two thousand did that full
car called Break. But he hung out with Keith Herring
and Bosquillacht and Kenny Sharf in Future of two thousand
like he was a he never really made the leap
to the major art world. He was like a old
school underground artist.
Speaker 3 (43:14):
Yeah, and did you mention Now you didn't mention Lady K.
Who'd you mention earlier?
Speaker 2 (43:19):
Lady Pink?
Speaker 3 (43:20):
Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different lady Kay is French.
I believe, right in Paris.
Speaker 2 (43:25):
I believe that's where she was born, and she might
be working there still, either Paris or New York.
Speaker 3 (43:30):
Yeah, very cool stuff there too.
Speaker 2 (43:31):
Yeah. And then also so check out her stuff, and
then check out Wren's R. E. N. S. Who's working
in Copenhagen. It is mind numbing how amazing this work is.
Like it just can't even imagine conceiving a lot of
a lot of it, let alone being good at it.
Speaker 3 (43:49):
Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. It's really like I'm looking
at some of them now, man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2 (43:56):
And then there's one called kid Olt who as a
vandal actually like purposefully vandalizes luxury brand stores who have
collaborated with graffiti artists for their brands. They don't like that,
so they will like it's not really like pieces that
they're putting up. It's more like huge, huge vandalizations of
(44:20):
these stores.
Speaker 3 (44:21):
Oh wow, yeah, Oh that's is that the one that's
like like stores that are kind of co opting graffiti
is like the cool thing. He'll go hit them. Yeah, okay,
kid Old, Yeah, but they're probably like great.
Speaker 2 (44:32):
Oh yeah, I'm sure. Oh wait, you mean the stores. Yeah,
I don't know. I've heard that they don't like Kiddle
very much really, OK. And then lastly, the I want
to call out Apothecary, who never really got off the ground.
That's Umi's tag from when she got into this. She's
always been interested in bee boy culture, so of course
(44:53):
she came up with graffiti a graffiti tag, and I
think she realized, like fairly early on, this is way
too long Apothecary to use as a tag, So I
don't think I think it kind of petered out fairly
early on.
Speaker 3 (45:06):
I'm gonna have to tell Emily that because uh, I mean,
obviously Apothecary is right at par ally, so yeah, for sure,
that's funny.
Speaker 2 (45:13):
Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 3 (45:15):
I got nothing else. I'm gonna work on my my tag.
I'm gonna come up with a tag and a font.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
Nice. Yeah. Get busy on your handstyle yo. Yeah, since
uh we were just talking about handstyle again, I think
that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (45:32):
Yeah. This is from Ben in Connecticut, who's been listening
for quite a while and recently heard our Selects episode
The Great Finger in the Wendy's Chili Caper. That's kind
that one that was incredible. We were commenting about the
way Letterman and Lenno covered that, and that Letterman was
was funnier. You know, no surprise there for me, at
(45:55):
least I assume you as well. Yeah uh, And then
Josh mentioned Leno's well known of cars to differentiate the
late night hosts. However, guys, David Letterman is well known
within the Indy car racing world as one of the
owners of Rahal Letterman Lanagan Racing. The team won the
Kart Indie Championship in nineteen ninety two, the year the
team was founded, and has won the Indy five hundred
(46:17):
twice with drivers Buddy Rice in two thousand and four
and Takuma Sato in twenty twenty. So while Leno 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. And that is from Ben, Connecticut.
So I think the takeaway there is a Letterman owns
(46:38):
Leno once again.
Speaker 2 (46:39):
Yeah, what was who was that? Ben?
Speaker 3 (46:43):
Yeah? And it's so low hanging through to bag on Lino.
So I don't think I'm original or cool for doing so.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Oh no, but it's I mean you still mean it? Yeah, Yeah,
thanks a lot, Ben. That was in a very arcane
fact that I definitely hadn't heard. And I also just
realized that Arkane would be a great tag too. R Kane.
Speaker 3 (47:06):
Well, you and you and you me went out together
and did this like Arcane and Apothecary together. They'd be like,
who is this new power couple in DVD?
Speaker 2 (47:15):
This crew is amazing?
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Wow?
Speaker 2 (47:17):
What handstyle?
Speaker 3 (47:18):
I know? And that'd say, guys, you got it just right.
Speaker 2 (47:22):
Yeah, thank you for doing that voice. You really sure
think you saved the episode.
Speaker 3 (47:27):
I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he
used to do the White Boys.
Speaker 2 (47:31):
Is that who that was?
Speaker 3 (47:33):
Yeah, just a little bit.
Speaker 2 (47:34):
I was gonna guess Johnny Carson on Helium doing George W.
Speaker 3 (47:38):
Bush.
Speaker 2 (47:40):
Yeah, go back and listen, you'll be there. Oh my god,
Well I think that's it. Yes, Ben, Thank you very
much for that email. Ben, And if you want to
be like Ben and get in touch with us, we
love that kind of thing. You can send it off
to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (47:59):
Stuff Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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