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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 here 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 going to say when.
Maybe you can guess, but there's one portion of this that it'll be the most middle-aged white dude thing ever.
Okay.
I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.
Okay.
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 60s East Coast thing.
And this isn't one of those things.
I do see where Libby is. 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 1930s, where mural art and sort of public art during the Mexican Revolution was a big thing.
And so Chicano kids in the 1930s sort of brought that same style to L.A. and other cities.
Right.
In the 1930s and 40s before the spray can was invented.
But I feel like that is a genuine sort of precursor to what we know as modern graffiti.
Yeah, because they were – well, they were writing on walls.
Sometimes they were using paint and brushes.
Markers didn't exist.
Spray cans didn't exist yet.
But they were using what they had.
A lot of times just to tag their neighborhood is like 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 invented in 1949 by a paint owner in illinois, a paint company owner named ed seymour and his wife, and i tried to find her name.
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 that a lovely 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 artists 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.
Patsy from Happy Days famously was a clandestine artist using spray paint.
Oh, really?
No.
I don't remember that one.
Hey, I could have seen that being a Happy Days episode.
Yeah, but I don't know.
It wouldn't have been Patsy.
Yeah, exactly.
Maybe Ralph Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then just freaked out.
Probably would have been Richie.
Yeah, I guess so.
Man, that was such a good show.
Like a real lesson learner episode.
Yep.
Yeah, and the Fonz, who you'd think would be like a spray paint graffiti artist, like Vandal, is the one who talks to Richie'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 1950s.
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 1953.
That makes sense because that became sort of the proprietary eponym in a way.
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 hand style, as we'll see.
That's right.
But we need to talk about cornbread, right?
Yeah.
So there's a guy named Daryl McRae who will tell anybody who sits still long enough that he was the person who invented graffiti.
Yeah.
And he makes a really good case.
Unfortunately, there's some other people who are doing...
The same thing at the same time.
But you could still say cornbread, which was his handle.
His tag was one of the very first people who took up graffiti, starting in 1965.
Yeah, he was but a 12-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 cornbread.
My grandmother made cornbread, and I love that stuff.
So he got the nickname cornbread.
I don't think he got the cornbread, though.
I doubt if he got the cornbread.
That's very labor-intensive to make cornbread.
For sure.
I mean, compared to just 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.
They give you what you're going to eat.
Yeah.
Like Oliver Twist style.
Yeah.
No requests, please.
No more.
So he took that nickname, started writing it on the walls there at his institution that he was in.
And then when he got out in 1967...
He would take to the streets of Philly writing his name Cornbread, especially like if he knew that his sweetie pie was on the bus.
He would write it along the bus route so she could see that and be impressed.
Sometimes running alongside the 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 with in the 30s 40s 50s, 60s 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 60s and 70s 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 And then a number like Turk 182.
And Turk would be your nickname.
182 would be the street you hailed from.
I think Turk 182 is entirely made up.
I don't think it was a docudrama.
But one of the first two was Julio 204 and Taki 183.
Yeah, Taki 183.
Taki was a nickname, a Greek nickname for Demetrius, still is.
But Taki was a, this was in like 69 or 70, was a delivery worker.
So Taki went all over the city.
So it was a really good way to get the Taki 183 tag all over the place.
And it got so far and wide that Taki was actually part of a New York Times article in 1971.
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 183 for displacing people.
New York all over the place.
Good point.
That same year that the article on Taki 183 came out, there was the first graffiti crew kind of came together.
Writer's Corner 188.
They met at the corner of Audubon and 188th Street, 188th Street, as they say in New York.
And the crew was called WC 188.
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.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
I mean, man, Atlanta just doesn'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 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.
Well, they would say stop doing what you're doing and go do something else then, because the streets are made for good graffiti.
Not toys.
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 to more people, because that subway is going all over the place.
Right.
It's also risky.
And, as we'll see, like risk is a big thing, you know I mentioned like the wall in front of 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 70s and 80s 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.
Ethos I could never remember.
And to be clear, 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 70s, early 80s 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 do you want to keep talking and get into some different kinds and styles?
Maybe let's break down the styles first.
All right, let's do it.
So it turns out there's three categories of of graffiti in order of easiness to increasing hardness.
There's got to be a better way to put it, but I'm leaving it there.
There's tags, which Livia calls very sterilely basic identifying signs.
I love that one.
Well, tags didn't come along until 1990, 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 hand style 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 1990, 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 of.
It can incorporate your tag as 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 simply 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.
It's a different style.
They're not throw-ups.
It's kind of a style that could be used in throw-ups.
And they're 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 this thing 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 or 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.
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.
It can take 15 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 rather thrilling, if you ask me.
Well, and the...
Just the time investment for something that a third of the way through, or halfway through or toward the end, could go away.
I thought about that too, man.
That's got to hurt.
That would really suck.
What about wild style?
I referred to it early on.
Wild style is obviously super stylized.
It'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 3D 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 mishmash of colors.
It's kind of like how metal bands' logos have kind of evolved to where you'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.
That probably came around in maybe the 90s at the earliest.
It's from the 70s too.
Like all of this stuff is from the 70s.
So in the 70s in New York City, The general guidelines for what constitutes graffiti still today were laid out and established by those people.
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 Cholo style, a word that you know is 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 Cholo style than say, like New York graffiti.
There was one more style that I ran across called anti-style or ignorant style.
And essentially it's like what most people would call toy.
It's just primitive.
It's amateurish, but it's done on purpose because it's done by graffiti artists.
A lot of whom are actually really good who are like, this has gotten totally out of control.
Have you seen this wild style stuff?
We need to like, get back to basics and just have fun with this again.
And so they're kind of trying to recapture what the earliest graffiti artists from like the 70s were doing 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.
Let's go get our spray cans, shake them up, and we'll be right back.
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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 a wall or something,
Yeah.
You could use a marker.
And in the early days, Pilot marks a lot.
And Drymark, DRI, and Sanford King Size, 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 felt was just sort of the instrument.
And you could put whatever color or mix colors if you wanted to.
For sure.
And they would also 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 Bambaataa is concerned.
And that would be knowledge, is 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 a part of hip hop culture.
I don't know if we said the other ones, emceeing and DJing and breaking.
Yeah.
And graffiti and knowledge.
Those are the five pillars of hip hop.
And like the other stuff, like emceeing and DJing 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 not, 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 2024.
Yeah, for sure.
It has also intersected with other art forms over the years.
In the 1980s, there was a comic artist named Vaughn Bode who was very influential to this culture.
He had a couple of characters, Puck and Cheech Wizard.
He came up with, think he came up with these characters like in the 1950s, wow.
But then in the 60s they were in like self-published comics and then went a little more.
I want to say mainstream.
Obviously not mainstream mainstream, but like 72 to 75 they're in the national lampoon, so a little more mainstream, right uh?
And if you think you've heard that name before, that sounds familiar.
Uh, you might have heard the song sure, shot by the beastie boys.
Uh, i'm like von bode, i'm a cheech 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 Cheech Wizard is essentially like a giant wizard hat with some legs coming out of it.
That's Cheech Wizard.
And he's like a wise, smart-ass kind of, well, wizard hat.
And I didn't see why, but for some reason, graffiti culture just loved that stuff.
So Cheech Wizard shows up.
And Puck the Lizard show up in a lot of graffiti from the 70s and 80s.
And then one of the other influences I saw that...
Cheech Wizard or Vaughn Bode had, his lettering for his comics.
From what I can tell, he came up with bubble letters and that that made its way into graffiti directly from Vaughn Bode's comics.
Graffiti and the book covers of math books of Gen X kids.
I was big into the bubble lettering.
Yeah, using those pens with like the five different colors that you can click down.
Yeah, I was okay at it.
I definitely used those pins.
I remember G's giving me a lot of trouble and S's giving me a lot of trouble.
Those were hard.
But I tried.
How was your cursive bubble cue?
Oh, God.
Is that a thing?
It is now.
That doesn't sound 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 70s.
Amsterdam, in particular in the Netherlands, and their punk scenes.
In the late 70s they started doing some of this stuff 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 like news report that had a scathing report.
But there was a photographer named Henry Chalfant who did a few projects, one of which I highly recommend watching on YouTube a documentary from 1983 called Style Wars, which is a really good watch.
It's one of those ones where you're like I feel cooler just watching this thing.
Yeah.
He just 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 breakdancing from the Rocksteady crew when they were just starting out.
Like, it's just super cool.
Like this captured time capsule, like moment in time where this is all starting.
Uh they, they totally.
Henry chow font like got it.
He was like we need to document this 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 and sort of a burgeoning 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 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 Fiberiophombus?
Yeah.
Wow.
I know that deserved a wow.
I'm really scraping the bottom of the barrel here in year 17.
Oh, so you said that it was like a document, right?
Yeah.
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 will refer them to is Style Wars.
Because again, these like essential guidelines were laid down at this time.
So you can still learn a ton from watching Style Wars or Henry Chalfant 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 Can Art.
So Henry Chalfant 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.
Right.
Yeah, for sure.
Good stuff.
Two other things to call out.
There's a photographer named Gordon Matta-Clark who documented in photographs just like tags all around New York City.
Has a pretty cool, I think they make showings of his photographs sometimes.
And then the movie Wild Style actually came out a year before Style Wars, 1982.
It's considered the first hip hop movie ever.
I think it was a Fab Five Freddie project.
But it has the Rocksteady crew, One of the rare early woman graffiti artists, Lady Pink, she's in it.
And then King Ed Rock is in it.
Before he was called King Ed 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 whole 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.
I guess the first academic article about graffiti was in 1969 in the Urban Review by Herbert Cole.
It was called Names, Graffiti, and Culture.
And then, a few years later, in 1972, a big deal happened when, Or a big deal for that culture at least.
Hugo Martinez is a student activist at City College in New York.
And he helped start a collective called United Graffiti Artists with a bunch of Puerto Rican teen graffiti artists.
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 1973, choreographer Twyla Tharp.
She had the United Graffiti Artists do basically the scene decorations for her performance in Chicago.
I can't remember what it was called, but weirdly the dance was choreographed to Beach Boys music, with graffiti in the background.
It was a real mishmash.
Wait, did you say Beastie Boys music?
No, I said Beach Boys.
And the whole time she just kept going Twyla, Twyla, Twyla while 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 urban decay happening before our very eyes.
And in the early 70s 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 72, the city council said it's illegal to even carry an aerosol can in a public facility.
And then in 75, they created the Transit Police Graffiti Squad.
And, you know, they're cleaning up subway cars.
But, like I said earlier, 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 were like, OK, we'll just start stealing it.
That's cheaper anyway.
So stealing your spray paint became like just a part of graffiti in New York in the 70s and 80s.
Yeah.
Not condoning that.
Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents, and I wasn't kidding.
Ed Koch, famous New York mayor in the late-ish 70s and 77, 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 your piece up and it gets cleaned off before it even leaves the transit station.
So, um, that actually worked.
And by 1989, apparently like whole car, um, 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 2000 and Dondi, which is called Brake.
And it's considered one of the greatest full subway car masterpieces anyone's ever done.
It's beyond description.
Just go look up Brake by Dondi and Futura 2000.
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.
But that's art, 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 more.
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 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 Easy Off Oven Cleaner you know, sprays 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 Rust-Oleum and Krylon over the 70s.
For sure.
Yeah, but Rust-Oleum and Krylon were specifically avoiding marketing products Or making their products attractive to graffiti artists.
They couldn't do that.
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 chock full of lead. up until the late 70s.
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 lead got taken out, that was a real bummer for graffiti artists.
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 90s, the Montana and Molotov brands of spray paint that 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 Rust-Oleum or Krylon.
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 calligraphy caps.
If you've ever been in a paint store and looked at, You know sometimes you can even spray a little piece of cardboard they have there on the wall.
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 in Cholo 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 there's 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.
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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 tag, essentially.
And graffiti artists will come up with, like their own entire alphabets that they just design themselves.
And there's a really great website that's super useful if you do want to get into graffiti called bombingsciencecom.
They have a post of 61 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 to develop your own hand style.
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 going to 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 shortchange 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 voice.
All right, I'll keep going.
Okay.
Step two, guys.
Can control.
Can control.
So this is how you're going to avoid those unwanted drips.
Get a feel for that pressure.
It's going to determine how quickly you're going to move that hand to achieve the end result that you're after.
Very nice.
Can control, it's called.
And then finally, guys, you're really going to want to adjust that distance from the wall.
If you're closer, it's going to be thinner.
It's going to be more saturated.
It's going to be great for outlines.
Step a little further away, it's going to diffuse out.
It's going to cover a wider area.
It's just science, guys.
Very nice, man.
All right.
And scene.
So yes, the upshot of all this is figuring out.
The nozzle pressure and the distance from the wall are basically the two most basic things that you can understand and learn about graffiti, but it's also the things that come up the most.
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.
Mm-hmm.
Hospitals.
You're not supposed to do this to someone's house or their car, or certainly a headstone at a cemetery or nature like trees and rocks.
You don't, 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 artist named Cope 2 who is 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 good reason.
I mean, it's the first medium, 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 a old timey handbill that you might see.
Yeah.
You can make stickers.
A lot of people make stickers.
You can come up with stencils like a real Banksy.
And um, 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, and move on and not get caught.
Um, I think that makes it a different form of graffiti in that sense, but it's still.
I mean it's still street art, at the very least.
Yeah, I think so.
Uh, and then Livia dug up this thing called reverse graffiti, which I had never heard of.
And, uh, she used a very good example.
Like when you?
Um use your finger to write wash me on a dusty car uh, you're.
You're using an uh you know, an inverse of something to create an image.
So um, a lot of times it's like um, 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-Michel Basquiat.
A lot of people point to him as a wildly successful artist who started out in graffiti.
Samo was his tag.
He started out in the late 70s with a friend named Al Diaz.
By the 80s.
His paintings were some of the most expensive in the art world and he was friends with Andy Warhol.
And by 1982, he had a solo exhibition.
This is 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 Haring.
Yeah, Basquiat had a pretty good indie movie made about him.
I think it was Jeffrey Wright that played him back in the maybe 90s.
It was really good.
But yeah, you mentioned Keith Haring 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 Basquiat's and obviously Warhol's and some Keith Haring stuff in person, which is always a thrill.
And Keith Haring.
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 like backboard there and he would put his art up there.
And was very famous initially, at least for the Radiant Baby was kind of his tag.
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 overdose in the late 80s.
Keith Haring died from complications from AIDS and HIV, I believe, in 1990.
I read an interview with Basquiat.
It must have been in like 1988, because the interviewer it was like he got up no less than two or three times to go shoot heroin.
In this rather short interview.
Like he could not not do it.
He would have gotten sick like that quickly.
Jeez.
There's also Shepard.
Fairey 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 2008 election.
Yeah, Shepard Fairey, good work.
Yep.
And we've 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 Dondi White, he's an overlooked one.
He was the one who, with Futura 2000, did that full car called Brake.
But he hung out with Keith Haring and Basquiat and Kenny Scharf.
And Futura 2000, 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, no, you didn't mention Lady K. Who'd you mention earlier?
Lady Pink.
Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different.
Lady K 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 Renz R-E-N-Z, who's working in Copenhagen.
It is mind-numbing how amazing this work is.
Like, I just can't even imagine conceiving 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.
It's amazing.
And then there's one called Kidult, who is 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, of these stores.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Oh, that's.
Is that the one that's like, uh Like stores that are kind of co-opting?
Graffiti as like the cool thing?
Yeah.
He'll go hit them?
Yeah.
Kidult.
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 Kidult very much.
Oh, really?
Okay.
And then lastly, I want to call out Apothecary, who never really got off the ground.
That's Yumi's tag.
Yeah.
From when she got into this, she's always been interested in b-boy culture.
So of course she came up with graffiti, a graffiti tag.
And I think she realized like fairly early on, this is way too long apothecary to, to use as a tag.
So I don't think, I think it kind of petered out fairly early on.
I'm going to have to tell Emily that because I mean, obviously apothecary is right up her alley.
Yeah, for sure.
That's funny.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
I'm going to work on my, my tag.
I'm going to come up with a, A tag and a font.
Nice.
Yeah, get busy on your hand style, yo.
Yeah.
Since we were just talking about hand style 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.
I remember that one.
It was incredible.
We were commenting about... the way Letterman and Leno covered that and that Letterman was funnier.
No surprise there for me at least.
I assume you as well.
And then Josh mentioned Leno's well-known love 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 Lanigan Racing.
The team won the Kart Indy Championship in 1992, the year the team was founded, and has won the Indy 500 twice with drivers Buddy Rice in 2004 and Takuma Sato in 2020.
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 in Connecticut.
So I think the takeaway there is Letterman owns Leno once again.
Yeah.
Who was that, Ben?
Yeah, and it's so low-hanging fruit to back up Leno, so I don't think I'm original or cool for doing so.
I don't know, but it's, I mean, you still mean it.
Yeah.
Yeah, thanks a lot, Ben.
That was a very arcane fact that I definitely hadn't heard, and I also just realized that arcane would be a great tag too.
Arcane.
Well, you and Yumi went out together and did this, like, arcane and apothecary together.
They'd be like, Who is this new power couple in graffiti?
This crew is amazing.
Wow.
What hand style.
I know.
And I'd say, guys, you got it just right.
Yeah, thank you for doing that voice.
You really, I think you saved the episode.
I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he used to do the white voice.
Oh, is that who that was?
Yeah, just a little bit.
I was going to guess Johnny Carson on helium doing George W. Bush.
Yeah, go back and listen.
You'll be like, 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 Podcast at iHeartRadio.com.
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