Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
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.
Okay, I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.
Okay, I'll see me. You'll probably know when I go into my voice.
Okay, is it that old witch voice that you like to do?
No, no, no, no, you'll know the voice.
All right. Is it an Italian thing?
No? Not Italian?
All right, I'll figure it out. Then we're talking graffiti obviously, Chuck, I don't know if everybody knows that.
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, but I'm not even going to talk about that, sure because I was like, come on, Olivia.
But.
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 what we know is modern graffiti.
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
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.
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.
I had to look really hard, yes, but I found it Bonnie. Isn't it a love of name?
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 works on a lot of different kinds of surfaces. So all of a sudden, spray cans, you know, really paved the way.
Yeah. Pazzi from Happy Days famously was a Clandestinian artist using spray paint.
Oh really, no, I remember that one I could Hey, I could have seen that be in a Happy Day's episode.
Yeah, but I wouldn't have been yeah, exactly. Maybe Ralph Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then.
Just fade out, but probably would have been Richie.
Yeah, I guess so. Man, that was such a good.
Show, like a real Lesson Learner episode.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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, 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.
That makes sense because that's became sort of the proprietary eponem in a way.
Exactly. Yeah, for sure, not.
So much anymore, I feel like, but in our era, for sure.
Yeah, because it's fun to say.
Yeah, it's a marker that creates magic.
Exactly.
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.
All marker.
Yeah it is.
It's very important for what's called handstyle, as we'll see.
That's right. But we need to talk about cornbread, right.
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, starting in nineteen sixty five.
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.
I don't think he got the corn bread though.
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.
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.
Eat, Yeah, like Oliver Twist style.
Yeah, no requests please, no more.
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.
Sometimes running alongside the bus.
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, 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.
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 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 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.
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 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.
Yeah or else they hated Taki one a three for disraacing New York all over the place.
Good point.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, and more often than not, it's the not so great ones, right, kind of like watching adults skateboard.
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.
That's exactly like junkie tags, which is I think called toy in the the graffiti world.
Oh really, toy If your tag is just sort of not great.
Yeah, if it's just junkie amateurish graffiti, it's toy graffiti.
Well, what if these people are like, hey man, I'm not such a great artist. Lay off, I'm trying.
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.
Not toys.
Right.
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
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 sort of challenging and risky.
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.
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.
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.
Totally.
Do you want to take an early break or you want to keep talking and get into some different kinds and styles.
Yeah, maybe let's break down the styles first.
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.
There's tags, yeah.
Which Olivia calls very sterily basic identifying signs.
I love that well, tags didn't comelong until nineteen ninety the word, right.
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. That's one of the three kinds of graffiti.
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 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.
Yeah, and they're almost always like bubbly letters from what I can tell.
Yeah, unless it's the block style, which I like.
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.
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.
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 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
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 a wall somewhere, having to go back like night after night to do this and not get caught, that's it's rather thrilling.
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.
I thought about that too. Man, that's kind of hurt.
That would really suck.
What about wild style I referred to it early on.
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.
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 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 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.
You know.
I thought it'd be added piece by piece over the decades, but no, they figured it out pretty much right out of the gate.
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 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.
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 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 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.
All right, should we take that break?
I do want to take that break, Chuck, all right.
Let's go get our spray hands, check him up, and we'll be right back.
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.
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 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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
Right.
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.
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. 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.
Well, graffiti and the book covers of math books of gen X Kids. Yep, I was big into the bubble lettering.
Yeah, using those those pins with like the five different colors that you can click.
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.
Those were hard, but I tried. How was your out of bubble Q?
Oh God, is that a thing? It is now possible.
I think I just laid down the gauntlet for somebody to come up with that.
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 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.
It's one of those ones where you're like, I feel cooler just watching this thing.
Yeah.
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 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.
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 the film version of that, I can't remember the name.
Of it, The Fiberio of Fambus.
Yeah, oh wow.
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 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,
James Prigoff called spray cant Art. So Henry Chaufont had a real impact on like documenting this stuff that still is important today.
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.
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
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, I guess put up some graffiti by this. I can't remember another dude or a company or something like that.
All right, I'll check that out.
Thanks.
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 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, 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.
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 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.
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 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 was intimidated or scared out of doing what they were going to do because of this. If anything, it heightened it.
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.
Yeah, not condoning that.
Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents and I wasn't kidding.
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.
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.
Like.
This was if we find a train car has been hit overnight with graffiti, it's not going to go back out there until that graffiti is cleaned off. 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 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. It's beyond description. Just go look up Break by Dondee in Future A two thousand.
What did you think of it?
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 didn't love it, yeah, I mean I could see that that's hard, you know, yeah, exactly.
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.
Man. That was a really great way to put it, So thank you.
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 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.
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. 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, I mean I could see that having a huge impact.
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.
Yes, but if you're a purist in America, you probably are still using rustolium or cry line.
Yeah.
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.
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.
Lucky.
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.
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 just kind of softens the lines a little bit from the needle caps. It's pretty cool.
Should we take our second break?
I think we should.
All right, we'll come back right after this purpose.
I want to learn about a terris ORTA call it red actol. How to take a perfect.
Is gone.
That's a little hunt the Lizzie word up, Jerry.
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. 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, 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.
That's right, And now we're going to give you some tips.
Oh, okay, there we go.
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.
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.
All right, I'll keep going.
Okay.
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.
Very nice can control, it's called.
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.
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.
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 not what you're supposed to do. And of course you don't snitch, because you know what they get.
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.
Oh wow, yeah, I imagine.
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 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 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.
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 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.
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.
Now that you've done this, now you put something beautiful up right. Yeah.
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 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 think he came before Keith Hering.
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,
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 the Radiant Baby, like if you looked it up, you'd probably seen it somewhere before. It's very famous.
Yes, Yeah, it's like a crawling silhouette with like light lines coming off of it.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, Shepherd Fairy, good work, yep.
And we mentioned Banksy, right.
Yeah, I mean do we have to talk about Banksy?
No, there's a couple other ones that I want to call out that are still working today.
Yeah, let's do that.
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.
Yeah, and did you mention Now you didn't mention Lady K. Who'd you mention earlier?
Lady Pink?
Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different lady Kay is French. I believe, right in Paris.
I believe that's where she was born, and she might be working there still, either Paris or New York.
Yeah, very cool stuff there too.
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.
Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. It's really like I'm looking at some of them now, man, that's amazing.
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 these stores.
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.
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 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.
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.
Uh, you got anything else?
I got nothing else. I'm gonna work on my my tag. I'm gonna come up with a tag and a font.
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.
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 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 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 Leno once again.
Yeah, what was who was that? Ben?
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.
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.
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?
This crew is amazing?
Wow?
What handstyle?
I know? And that'd say, guys, you got it just right.
Yeah, thank you for doing that voice. You really sure think you saved the episode.
I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he used to do the White Boys.
Is that who that was?
Yeah, just a little bit.
I was gonna guess Johnny Carson on Helium doing George W.
Bush.
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.
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