Crimes of Style

Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality

Jeff Ferrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000370720
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

First published in 1993, Crimes of Style investigates the politics of culture and crime through an in-depth case study of graffiti in Denver and the official response to it.

Focusing on the most prevalent form of graffiti writing in Denver, the book provides a detailed consideration of the social and cultural circumstances that surround its creation. It explores the national and international development and reception of hip hop graffiti that provided the context in which Denver's hip hop graffiti emerged. It also examines the reaction of Denver's corporate and political community, highlighting the establishment of campaigns to criminalise it and identifying both Denver's graffiti scene and the response to it as interwoven with broader cultural processes. Most significantly, the book puts forward the circumstances surrounding the phenomenal growth of, and subsequent attempts to suppress, hip hop graffiti as indicative of injustice and inequality within the United States.

CHAPTER ONEIntroduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003160731-1

Graffiti marks and illuminates contemporary urban culture, decorating the daily life of the city with varieties of color, meaning, and style. In Denver, Colorado, as in other cities throughout the United States, Europe, and beyond, particular forms of graffiti incorporate particularly different styles and meanings. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, for example, Denver and its suburbs have seen the markings of racism and reaction. Near a suburban city hall, a blank billboard is painted with a “W/P” (for “white power”) and a swastika. Students at two suburban high schools confront graffiti attacking blacks and other ethnic minorities, and promoting the Ku Klux Klan. And graffiti sprayed on a Greek Orthodox Cathedral—adjacent to the Allied Jewish Federation and Jewish Community Center—features, along with swastikas, the phrases “Skinheads USA,” “Hitler Reborn,” “White Power,” and “Die Jews.”¹

Using both spray paint and brush paint, others during this same period block-letter “Christ Jesus,” “Trust Jesus,” and similar phrases on back walls and park walkways in and around Denver. In central Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, the young followers of Genesis P. Orridge’s Temple of Psychic Youth—a sort of international, post-punk performance cult—declare a different faith, writing the Temple’s distinctive triple crosses and slogans on garage doors and alley walls. These same alleys reveal, during the war in the Persian Gulf, both spray painted criticisms of U.S. imperialism and jingoistic attacks on Saddam Hussein. In nearby Longmont, Colorado, residents debate the fate of “Cheaper Charley’s shed,” an abandoned, graffiti-covered gas station which one city councilwoman describes as a landmark that “represents a lot of history for Longmont” (in O’Keeffe, 1990: 6). In the end, the shed is dismantled, cleaned, and resurrected as part of a charity campaign—with Longmont residents now donating two dollars for each spray-painted birthday or anniversary message. And, especially in Denver’s northeast, northwest and west neighborhoods, young members of the Bloods, Crips, North Side Mafia (NSM), and other street gangs define themselves and their territories through an array of letters and symbols.²

Though a case study in Denver graffiti and the official response to it during this time, this book examines none of these forms of graffiti. Instead, it investigates a wholly different type of graffiti writing—one which dominates both the street production of graffiti in Denver and the concerns of those who campaign against it. One local press report notes, in regard to this predominant form of graffiti, that “most of the graffiti that covers the city is the work of so-called ‘taggers’… A much smaller percentage of graffiti is gang-related” (Gottlieb, 1989: 1B). Another explains that

Graffiti has grown increasingly evident in Denver as an underground subculture of artists has matured…. “Serious” graffiti artists, believed to be responsible for about 50% of the graffiti in Denver, are known as “writers.” … Taggers are believed responsible for about 30%, according to estimates from the mayor’s office. Gang members get credit for another 15%, with the remaining 5% attributed to “independents” … (Newcomer, 1988: 8).

While these reports manifest a certain confusion about graffiti writing in Denver—due in part, as we will see, to their reliance on information “from the mayor’s office”—they do accurately capture the sense that the great majority of Denver graffiti originates somewhere outside of Bloods and Crips, neo-Nazi groups, and unaffiliated individuals.

To focus the present study squarely on this most prevalent and visible sort of graffiti is not to deny the importance of other graffiti forms. Certainly gang graffiti, and the gangs themselves, merit something more than the usual knee-jerk condemnations by business and political authorities. If we bother to look beyond carefully cultivated anti-gang hysteria, we can surely read in the gangs and their graffiti the experience of being young, poor, and of color in a culture which increasingly marginalizes this configuration. The spray-painted swastikas and scrawled death threats of neo-Nazis and skinheads likewise merit our attention, and our fear. They also reveal, from a different angle, the ugly edge of a culture organized around economic and ethnic inequality. Research into these and other forms of graffiti writing can expose not only the dynamics of crime and culture, but the lived inequities within which both evolve.

This study focuses tightly on Denver’s dominant form of graffiti writing—and thereby omits street gang, neo-Nazi, and other sorts of graffiti—not because these other types are unimportant, but simply because they are distinctly different. Those who shape public perceptions of urban graffiti—local and national media, anti-graffiti campaigners, and others—intentionally and unintentionally muddy the boundaries between types of graffiti and graffiti writing, confusing one with the other in their condemnations of all graffiti as vandalism and crime. In so doing, they distort public debates about graffiti (in their favor, of course), and obscure our understanding of the specific social and cultural contexts in which particular forms of graffiti evolve. This study stands as a corrective to this constructed confusion—or at least as a counterpoint to it—in two ways. First, it isolates the single most prevalent form of Denver graffiti writing. Second, it investigates with some care the social and cultural circumstances of this graffiti, the actualities of its production.

To undertake a case study of this dominant form of Denver graffiti, though, is also to study a national and international phenomenon. The type of graffiti under investigation here is that which Denver newspaper reporters identify as “tagger” or “writer” graffiti, but which we can more accurately label “hip hop” graffiti. For the past two decades or so, the majority of urban graffiti in the United States and beyond has been shaped by a set of cultural that have come to be called “hip hop.”

Emerging out of the Black neighborhood and street gang cultures of New York City—and especially the Bronx—hip hop from the first incorporated new styles of music, dance, and graffiti. During the mid-1970s, neighborhood “Dis” like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmaster Flash, and Grand Wizard Theodore provided the music for house parties, on-the-street block parties, and other neighborhood gatherings. In the process, they created new sounds—not with synthesizers, guitars, and recording equipment, but by reworking old sounds on their portable turntables. Cueing records on two turntables simultaneously allowed the DJs to replay and mix the best “breaks” from each into a swirl of dance music. Manipulating the record back and forth produced a sort of “scratching” effect which accentuated the mixed beat of the music. At the same time, those who fronted for the Dis—their “emcees”—drew on black cultural traditions of “the dozens” and “toasting” to entertain the crowds, and developed a new style of verbal play: “rapping.” And the hard dancing “B-boys” who danced the breaks which the Dis spun together came to be known as “break dancers,” and began to organize themselves into crews like the Zulu Kings and the Rockwell Association.³

As even this very brief introduction shows, young urban blacks (and later, Puerto Ricans and others) developed hip hop as a sort of integrated cultural process which both tapped into and transcended their environment. As Max Roach notes,

These kids were never exposed to poets or playwrights in school. They had all this talent, and they had no instruments. So they started rap music. They rhymed on their own. They made their own sounds and their own movements (Allen, 1989: 117, 119).

Though fractured to some degree as they have been selectively transformed into marketable commodities, these various dimensions of hip hop—mixing and scratching, rapping, break dancing—began as innovations interwoven in an emerging subculture. Locating these innovations among the pastiches of postmodern popular culture, McRobbie (1986: 57) thus asks

What else has black urban culture in the last few years been, but an assertive re-assembling of bits and pieces, “whatever comes to hand,” noises, debris, technology, tape, image, rapping, scratching, and other hand me downs?

Atlanta and Alexander (1989: 156) answer that, indeed, hip hop constitutes an “expansive ever-proliferating synthesis of word, sound and image in a subculture which embraces painting, poetry, music, dance and fashion.”

The “painting” to which Atlanta and Alexander refer is, of course, graffiti. The collective process which produced new styles of music and movement also opened up new avenues of urban art and visual communication. Kool Herc, for example, recalls that even before he became a DJ, “I was known as a graffiti writer. I wrote ‘KOOL HERC” (in Hager, 1984: 32). The hip hop graffiti of Kool Herc and others emerged out of New York City graffiti writing of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Using spray paint and newly available felt-tipped markers, early writers like Taki 183 and Julio 204 “tagged” or “hit” back walls, subway stations and trains, and other movable and immovable objects with their nicknames. As the “fame” of these early writers spread—in part due to their innumerable tags, in part due to a 1971 New York Times article on Taki 183 and his “imitators”—other kids decided to become writers, and a subculture began to take shape. With the influx of so many new writers, though, simply “getting up”—that is, repeatedly tagging walls and trains around the city—was no longer enough to distinguish a writer. Writers now began to decorate and redesign their tags, and within the subculture, “new emphasis began to be placed on style, on ‘making your name sing’ among all those other names” (Castleman, 1982: 53).

Now, as “style became the most important aspect of graffiti” (Hager, 1984: 19), distinctive hip hop graffiti started to emerge. During the early 1970s, Bronx writers like Super Kool and Phase II began to write their tags in “bubble letters”—larger, twodimensional, two-color letters which set their tags apart from those of other writers. Innovations such as these pushed hip hop graffiti writing away from simple tagging and towards the creation of still larger, more complex “masterpieces.” Now known in the subculture simply as “pieces,” these murals constituted a new form of graffiti writing; in comparison to tags, they required far greater amounts of planning, paint, and style. Other writers also began to experiment, increasing the size and color complexity of their pieces, and developing 3-D effects and other design features. By the mid-1970s, New York writers were executing spectacular “whole car” or ‘‘top-to-bottom” pieces—intricate, colorful murals that covered the entire sides of subway cars, and often incorporated cartoon figures and other embellishments. They were also increasingly organizing themselves into writers’ “crews”—groups of writers who collaboratively designed and painted the elaborate pieces for which hip hop graffiti was now known.⁴

As the young practitioners of hip hop were constructing their own music and dance, then, they were at the same time inventing in their graffiti a new vocabulary of street imagery and visual style. Like much else in hip hop, this new graffiti writing developed from a richness of daring and innovation, but a poverty of technical resources; in the same way that the music emanated from simple turntables and speakers, the graffiti flowed from spray cans and markers. These new styles of graffiti defined the look of hip hop, the visual texture of an emerging subculture. The slashing tags and wildly colored murals mirrored the rapid-fire exuberance of rap; the complex blend of images and styles in graffiti “masterpieces” caught the dense, intricate interplay of sounds and scratches in the DJs’ music. Hip hop graffiti became a kind of spray can rap, a series of subcultural markers painted on the surface of the city.

Needless to say, these markers did not go unnoticed by those outside the subculture. In 1972, Hugo Martinez—a City College sociology major and graffiti aficionado—organized a number of top New York City graffiti writers into United Graffiti Artists, and held a graffiti art show at the college. Mainstream media coverage followed, and in the next few years, shows in a variety of New York City galleries. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, top graffiti artists were exhibiting in shows which integrated their works with those of other young and alternative artists, enjoying recruitment into established New York City galleries, and receiving increasingly positive media attention—including in-depth articles in the Village Voice and other publications, and a cover story in Art Forum. As Hager (1984: 77) says, hip hop graffiti “may have been started by a hodge-podge of impoverished art school dropouts and unschooled graffiti writers, but by 1982 they had turned it into the hottest art movement in America.”⁵

By this time, hip hop graffiti was beginning to heat up not only New York City art galleries, but a variety of other cultural venues as well. Along with increasing dissemination through U.S. art worlds, and coverage in the mainstream and alternative press, came exposure in video and film. Pseudo-documentary films like Style Wars! (1985) and Wild Style (1983) spread the imagery and style of hip hop graffiti outside New York City, as did a variety of music videos which utilized graffiti murals as part of their background and setting. Even Hollywood produced a hip hop film, Beat Street (1984), which, despite its various inauthenticities, also popularized the look of hip hop graffiti. Interwoven with this increasing visibility was the remarkable popularity during this period of hip hop’s other dimensions, especially what had come to be called “rap music.” As Chalfant and Prigoff (1987: 8) argue, “probably the greatest agent for spreading this [hip hop graffiti] beyond inner-city America was the Hip Hop explosion of the early eighties.” As rap began to change the sound and style of popular music, it carried with it—through concert performances and backdrops, album and tape covers, music videos, and other avenues—the larger hip hop culture, and the graffiti which was its visual parallel.

By the mid-1980s, then, hip hop graffiti writing had spread not only through the boroughs of New York City, but to cities throughout the United States—among t...