Hip Hop Learning: Graffiti as an Educator of Urban Teenagers

Educational Foundations, Fall 2003 by Christen, Richard S

Graffiti writing is as ancient as human communication, but in the United States, it gained widespread attention only with its proliferation in urban neighborhoods in the late 1960s and 1970s.1 Most Americans have come to associate this graffiti explosion with urban gangs, regarding its markings and murals as visible, invasive challenges to middle class and elite aesthetics, property concepts, and sense of security. Although gangs have produced a portion of urban graffiti during the last three decades, most is more accurately linked to hip hop, a mix of cultural practices that appeared in the neighborhoods of New York and other U.S. cities during the mid-1970s.2 Anthropologist Susan Phillips and other scholars argue that hip hop graffiti has actually functioned as an alternative to gangs, with "writers" organizing themselves in crews that spar with each other "through style and production as opposed to violence." Over the years, graffiti crews have focused urban adolescents on putting their art up around the city, inventing new styles, organizing nocturnal visits to the subway yards, and other experiences that, although often illicit, are far less destructive than most gang activities.3 The writer expression "graffiti saved my life" is no exaggeration; without it, many more urban kids would have become entangled in violence and crime.4

Although seldom recognized as such, graffiti crews are also educational organizations that promote valuable learning among their members. This paper will examine the ways in which crews and other graffiti groups have educated urban youth since the early 1970s, comparing their pedagogy to that of more acknowledged learning institutions such as schools and art societies. Using the comments of graffiti writers from a range of time periods and places to reconstruct this experience, it will argue that graffiti education both parallels and diverges from the teaching of these traditional institutions, functioning paradoxically as both a status quo and transgressive organization.5 Graffiti provides poor and disadvantaged adolescents with knowledge, skills, and values important for success in the mainstream. At the same time, it bonds young people to their urban neighborhoods, empowering them to challenge the dominant society and to transform rather than escape their communities.

The Beginnings of Hip Hop Graffiti

Hip hop graffiti began in New York City during the late 1960s when a small number of teenagers from Washington Heights, the South Bronx, and other impoverished neighborhoods began blanketing the city with their "tags" - stylized signatures of names they had invented for themselves.6 The marking of names, slogans, and images in shared spaces was not new to the city, but limited in size, number, and to certain neighborhoods or sites, the earlier inscriptions of gangs, activists, and other scribes had attracted little public notice.7 In contrast, new writers like Taki 183, Julio 204, and Frank 207 were primarily concerned with visibility and recognition - "getting up" their names often and in places where they could be seen by as many others as possible - and they used the city's walls, bridges, monuments, subway stations, and other public places as their billboards. They quickly gained the admiration of their peers as well as many in or associated with the art scene; but public officials and the mainstream press, despite some early indications of neutrality, regularly excoriated graffiti as "one of the worst forms of pollution we have to combat."8 Meanwhile, in the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, hundreds if not thousands of mostly Black and Puerto Rican adolescents ignored these attacks and began saturating public places with their tags.9

As the numbers of New York City taggers multiplied during the early 1970s, simply getting up one's name in large numbers was no longer sufficient for recognition. Writers began to seek out even more risky and conspicuous tagging spots to enhance their reputations, and the exteriors of subway trains, with their combination of danger and visibility across large sections of the city, rapidly became their most prized canvasses.10 Inspired by the long, thin, tightly packed letters of Top Cat 126, some writers began to enlarge and embellish their tags.11 Soon originality in design and color - what the writers called style - was the primary source of status among writers, the thing, according to pioneering writer Vulcan, that "defines who you are [and] separates the men from the toys [unskilled beginners]."12 New spray paint technologies and the introduction of ultra wide markers made bigger proportions, new hues, and more complex techniques possible, and writers responded with a rapid succession of innovations. Stay High added images to his stretched letters. Super Kool used the wide nozzle from a can of spray starch to decorate a car with thick pink letters silhouetted by a band of yellow, a technique that Phase 2 further developed in his "bubble letters" and other styles. One of the most inventive and respected of the early "style masters," Phase 2 recalls this flurry of creativity as a time when "I'd develop some ideas and a few styles and other styles were feeding and bouncing off of them, transforming, or just going in other directions . . . then these styles and maybe a few others would go through the same process."13