HIP HOP GRAFFITI
The History of hip hop graffiti started in the early 1960’s. It was used by political activists to express their dismay. It was then followed by rival gangs throughout Philadelphia to mark their territory.
Around 1970 through 1971, hip hop graffiti taggers such as Top Cat, Cool Earl and Cornbread appeared and revolutionized the tagging world.
The art form then moved to New York where it was seen more frequently. Artists such as Taki 183 started adding their street number to their tags to make them more recognizable. Common surfaces included subway trains, brick buildings, advertisement billboards, playgrounds, and trains. Subways were the most common tagging grounds because their artwork could be carried all over the city as most of the New York Population uses the subway for transportation.
When the subway decided to clean up some of the “damage”, it cost them $300,000 dollars to remove all the graffiti. Once the project started, it was deemed unsuccessful because as soon as a surface was cleaned, within forty eight hours there would be something else that covered the cleaned surface. There were many different types of lettering styles that became significant to the area the artist was from. Bubble letters were frequent in the Bronx while a “wild style” came from Brooklyn. This style of lettering defined hip hop graffiti. Artists started to use this style as part of a guerrilla advertising.
The correlation between the graffiti and hip hop culture was due to the fact that the hip hop artists found graffiti to be the most attention getting form of advertising. They could display their group name or band in a kind of “in your face” way that drew a lot of attention from people because it was hard to avoid. Most artists were doing more than one kind of hip hop genre and used the tagging graffiti to blend the two together.