Can't Stop Won't Stop (20 page)

“Everybody wrote,” he says, “but no one was all that serious about it, it was just a rite-of-passage type thing. Like you fuckin' rob a marker, and you fuckin' mark shit up for six months, then you throw that shit away and get into some other shit.” But for him and his peers, graffiti was a permanent outlet for their fizzy reckless energy, a legacy to maintain and a future to enter. He says, “We knew it wasn't starting with us and it wasn't ending with us, that it was already an eight-year-old tradition, that we were stepping to it, and that we were trying to bring some of our vibe to it.”

There were rebel codes to follow, and as one of a tiny number of girl writers among the ten thousand boys getting up, LADY PINK had to break through all of them. In 1979, she had begun tagging her boyfriend's name, KOKE, after he was sent back to Puerto Rico by his parents, she chuckles, “for being naughty.” After being accepted into the High School of Art and Design soon afterward, she found a core group of ambitious teens intent on making an impact on the graffiti scene. They were all well aware that famous writers like TRACY 168, DAZE and Lee Quiñones had already come through the very same halls.

“I was studying with guys like ERNI, SEEN TC5, DOZE TC5, FABEL, MARE 139, LADY HEART,” she says. “We specifically had a Writer's Table. So for years and years whoever was the best automatically got the best table. Anyone who was worthy would sit, anyone else who wasn't worthy would just stand around. And that would go on for at least four periods of lunch! No one would go to class, we would just sit at the writer's table.”

She wanted badly to be down, she says, but “I was getting sexism from ten-, twelve-year-olds saying that you can't do that, you're a girl. It took me months to convince my old homeboys from high school to take me to a train yard. They were not having it. They were not taking some silly little girl into danger like that. So I had to harp on them and convince them and finally they said, ‘Fine. Okay. Meet us inside the Ghost Yard.' They left it to me to find my way in there and meet them inside.”

The Ghost Yard was a vast train depot perched on the northern tip of Manhattan on the Harlem River at 207th Street, a servicing shop for cars from many different lines. It had been built on a graveyard, and at night a howling wind often rose from the River. Because of its wealth of cars, a number of graffiti crews turned the Ghost Yard into violently contested ground.

PINK recalls, “I walked around the entire yard, couldn't find my way in. So I just climbed the nearest ten-foot fence. They tell me it was in sight of the guard tower, but no one stopped me. So I was inside the train yard and I waited for them. I see my friends coming through the bushes, and then they just come up to the fence and they just peel back a whole section of it like a big doorway.”

She was down, but the trials would not end. “I had to prove that I painted my own pieces. Because whenever a female enters the boy's club, the world of graffiti, immediately it's thought that she's just somebody's girlfriend and the guy is putting it up. But they're not gonna believe that some girl is strong enough and brave enough to stand there for that period of time and do something big and massive and colorful. They just think that she's on her knees and bending over for the guys. And that's the kind of word that went out about me and goes out about every single girl that starts to write,” she says. “So you have to stand strong against that kind of adversity and that kind of prejudice or you're just a little bitch slut.”

But PINK also knew that all toys had to prove themselves. Graffiti was not for the weak-hearted. “You've gotta be strong, carry your own point, have a lot of endurance, a lot of nerve. You can't go hysterical and run screaming. You also have to be strong in character that if you get grabbed and they put the squeeze on you and they're beating you silly and they have you upside down and they're painting your balls purple, will you stay shut or will you sing and tell them all your friends and phone numbers and everything that they want?” she says. “ ‘Cause this is a serious game. We might have been playing cops and robbers but it was some serious shit.”

Graffiti is, PINK says, “an outlaw art. When we train other graffiti writers, we're not training fine artists to exhibit in a museum. We're training criminals. We're training kids how to take life in their own hands and go out there and hopelessly paint on some wall or some train that will do nothing for you except get you fame with other vandals and criminals.”

In the spring of 1973, journalist Richard Goldstein famously made the case for graffiti in a
New York Magazine
cover story: “It just may be that the kids who write graffiti are the healthiest and most assertive people in their neighborhood. Each of these people has to ‘invent' his life—his language, his culture are lifted, remodeled and transformed. In that ferocious application of energy to style lies
the source of all flash . . .” To Goldstein, graffiti was “the first genuine teenage street culture since the fifties.”
⁶

New York's spraycan writers presented their own stunning defense. “If Art like this is a crime,” they wrote, “may God forgive me.”
⁷
Graffiti writers had claimed a modern symbol of efficiency and progress and made it into a moving violation. As their mini-riots spilled all-city all day every day, authorities took their work as a guerilla war on civility. They were right. Ivor Miller has written that northbound trains had once been a symbol of freedom, and in decaying postindustrial cities, subway trains were merely the beginning of the daily circuit of alienating labor. Quiñones told Miller, “Subways are corporate America's way of getting its people to work. It's used as an object of transporting corporate clones. And the trains were clones themselves, they were all supposed to be silver blue, a form of imperialism and control, and we took that and completely changed it.”
⁸
The writers replaced the circular logic of trains with their own.

From the primacy of the name, subway graffiti evolved spectacularly under innovators like PHASE 2, RIFF, TRACY 168 and BLADE, and into another generation of stylists including DONDI, KASE 2 and SEEN. Homely letters grew outlines, colors, patterns, highlights, depth, shadows, arrows. Names were bubblized, gangsterized, mechanized. Letters dissected, bisected, cross-sected, fused, bulged, curved, dipped, clipped, chipped and disintegrated. They filled with shooting stars, blood drips, energy fields, polygons. They floated on clouds, zipped with motion lines, shot forward on flames. And they got bigger and bigger. Expanding from window-downs to top-to-bottom to end-to-ends, the pieces began appearing as dazzling thematic murals by 1974, covering entire sides of twelve-foot-high, sixty-foot-long cars. They were imposing themselves, to use Goldstein's words, in bigger, more unavoidable ways.
⁹
This was style as confrontation.

Politicians and bureaucrats played an unwitting role in the development of style. The first major anti-graffiti campaign began in 1972. But graffiti's inherent risk and its perpetual removal catalyzed innovation and ingenuity; its countless deaths generated countless, more magnificent rebirths. When the Metropolitan Transit Authority completed repainting its 6,800-car fleet in November of 1973, writers were temporarily relieved of the problem of having to cover another writer's existing piece when executing a new one, and they began a golden age of style.
¹⁰

Space on the subway car exteriors was a resource made even more limited by their limited access, the exploding numbers of painters vying for them, and the risk entailed in their painting. So in these early years, graf writers refined the finer points of their hierarchy. You became the king of a subway line by being more inescapable than anyone else—either through sheer ubiquity or ferocious displays of style. Toy writers might have their pieces covered by a cloud or written over with a HOT 110 tag by an established writer. The masters did not have to respect wack writing; they were concerned with the advancement of style.

But by 1975, MTA efforts to stop graffiti were all but shackled by the city's impending bankruptcy, and tags and pieces covered virtually every imaginable space. Writers like IN, VAMM and AJAX began getting up with quick, easy “throw-ups”—essentially two-color tags on steroids, sometimes done side-by-side to cover a whole car, and mainly meant to cover over other writers' work. The advent of throw-ups shifted the kinging system from quality to quantity.

Graffiti historian Jack Stewart wrote, “The graffiti problem on the tracks became so bad in 1976 that many of the graffitiists even believed the whole thing was going to come to an end, a victim of its own excess. The only way a writer could hit the trains was to cross out someone else's work and this practice became so common that it began to demoralize many of the writers.”
¹¹

At the bottom of its economic torpor, city officials rallied to attack the problem again, unleashing a new creative spirit among the writers. Subway graffiti's most influential period of style began. These writers dreamed and painted big, and this was the era of some of the most legendary cars. The biggest were two 10-car, whole-train productions—CAINE 1, MAD 103 and FLAME ONE's “Freedom Train” Bicentennial tribute and the FABULOUS FIVE's 1977 “Christmas Train.” BLADE's 1980 nuclear blast whole-car sampled the expressionist ghost of Edvard Munch's “The Scream.” FAB 5 FREDDY painted a 1979 whole-car tribute to Warhol's famous Campbell's soup cans, offering a “Pop Soup,” “Da-Da Soup,” and “Futurist Soup,” next to a “Fred Soup.” His writing partner, Lee Quiñones, seared feverish statements about war and violence into unsuspecting subway riders' heads. He called the 5 line, where they bombed, “a rolling MOMA.”
¹²

Graf developed a wide range of style. Although it represented only a small part of what they did, DONDI and SEEN were best known for their large, precise, readable words, and their bold, elegant designs. In particular, DONDI's
1980 “Children of the Grave” whole-car series, in which his name appeared in huge stylized letters against subtly shifting color fields and which photographer Martha Cooper shot during its execution, would become an artistic blueprint for the hundreds of youths jumping into the graffiti scene. PHASE 2 and one-armed KASE 2 moved toward deconstructing the word and the name in less readable forms, encoding their names and letters in theory, dimension, and abstraction. The word was now growing armaments, curling like vines, whipping like boomerangs, penetrating with arrowheads. This was the form that, after TRACY 168's groundbreaking crew, would come to be known as “wildstyle.” Its energy seemed to shatter concrete, burst through steel. FUTURA's 1980 “Break” car exploded the bounds of the word completely, a crackling fission of orange-and-burgundy spilling across the exterior like visual dub music or an electro-Bronx encounter between Wassily Kandinsky and Jack Kirby.

The graffiti writers epitomized the extreme alienation of a generation coming of age under the long shadow of the baby boom. They were artists, individualists, stylists who had become comfortable in the cut, out of the glare of the media. In a time of diminishing returns and vaporizing expectations, they freed no one but themselves. They came out to make their word and stake their flags, then they slipped back into the darkness. Continual destruction only stoked their creative fires. Style was a way to defy a hostile world.

“I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like,” says LADY PINK. “Excuse the French, we're not a bunch of pussy artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we're a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.”

A 1981 piece by NOC 167 summed up the graffitiist's mission. On the left-hand side, between an ominous guard-tower and a gleaming new train lay the deadly third rail. A seething “STYLE WARS” rose out of mists of white, pink and blue. At the right, a cool, top-hatted cat rode an angry, blue-jacketed, fire-breathing dragon next to a portrait of the writer as a young rebel—staring nonchalant from behind his ski goggles like he'd already beaten the transit cops and the toys.
No matter how hard you try, you can't stop me now.

Style absorbed technology, accepted method and technique, aspired to science. It spun self-defense into skill, skill into art. It invented itself, violently,
enclosed itself in outlaw codes and attacked normality. Out of ruin, it pulled beauty.

Style would make you friends, inspire loyalty and devotion, spawn a hundred imitators. It would make you enemies, unleash jealousy and fear, bring down the brute force of authority. The one thing style would never leave you was neutral. As King KASE 2 would say in the movie
Style Wars
, “When they see you got a vicious style, they wanna get loose about it. And that's what keeps it going.”
¹³

In every generation, radicals nurture scorn for authority and the old. They tap into a desire to destroy convention and induce shock. They demand tribal commitment and discipline. They risk everything to bring the new into being.

By the beginning of 1979, this desire had matured and outgrown the seven-mile world. In each of these youth movements, there might be a sense of possibility, an inkling of many possible directions, many possible futures, like arrows jumping through and out of a PHASE 2 piece. Or the movements might simply decline. They were youth movements after all, and youth is a passing condition.

The next shocks came not from within, but from the outside.