Graffiti and Tagging

Hip-Hop Graffiti and Tagging

The most widely dispersed and publicly visible form of graffiti in the United States today, hip-hop graffiti, emerged out of the minority and immigrant boroughs of New York City during the 1970s as part of a larger, homegrown hip-hop youth subculture built around rap music, break dancing, and other do-it-yourself cultural innovations. Significantly, hip-hop graffiti, like the larger hip-hop subculture, came into existence as a stylized, street-hip alternative to gang-oriented or interpersonally violent means of resolving conflict or acquiring status. Decades later, hip-hop graffiti “writers” and the “crews” to which they belong still follow the subcultural codes of status, respect, and disrespect established during the early years of hip-hop graffiti. Writing, or “tagging,” their own subcultural nicknames and the names of their crews in public places, spray painting quick two-color “throw-ups,” designing and spray painting larger multicolored murals, or “pieces,” they operate within a highly stylized system of interpersonal honor and subcultural communication. Inscribing complimentary commentary next to a sophisticated piece executed by another writer, at other times “dissin'” or “going over”—that is, marking through or painting over—graffiti judged to be below subcultural standards, writers make this status system explicit, at least to those who can understand its codes. As such, they continue to recall and reinvent, in the public spaces of contemporary life, an elaborate form of symbolic interaction distinctive to the youthful world they occupy.

Undergirding this growing youth subculture are not only the tags, throw-ups, and pieces left behind in public places, but a key experiential dynamic involved in their production. Time and again, hip-hop graffiti writers describe their experience of writing graffiti in terms of a powerfully seductive “adrenalin rush,” a rush so powerful that they regularly liken it to encounters with sex or drugs. Yet for the writers, this rush constitutes something more than the sort of indiscriminate lust for illicit kicks often ascribed to young [Page 186]people. Instead, as the writers make clear, the rush results from the opportunity to accomplish their stylized, and often long-practiced, subcultural artistry in situations necessarily fraught with immediate physical and legal danger. In this way, the experiential adrenalin rush of writing hip-hop graffiti embodies the twin dynamics that define the larger hip-hop graffiti subculture today: the organization of the subculture around artistry, image, and style, and the emergence of the subculture as a world of youthful disobedience and outlaw identities.

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