Graffiti is at once ancient and postmodern, as old as Pompeii and as new as Shepard Fairey's Obey. Its association with the history of Hip-hop is but one aspect of its history, and yet it's a crucial one. Those credited with being the "first" -- Taki 183 and Cornbread (pictured), were at first lonely voices in the wilderness. Taki was a Greek-American bike messenger who threw up his tag to mark the outposts of his daily journeys; Cornbread was just a shy guy who hoped to impress his girlfriend. The ubiquity of their tags was what got people thinking: maybe this was a kind of fame, a kind of immortality. In that sense, its aims and those of the rappers, b-boys, and b-girls was the same, as was its method: to cut, to scratch, to re-arrange the lexicon of the urban landscape.
There were stylistic parallels as well; the early "Wild Style" of lettering coincided with innovations in breakdancing and the era of "parties in the park," and the continuing movement toward cryptic or "hieroglyphic" pieces that defied deciphering was an inspiration for the loosely-allied Hieroglyphics crew. Yet the conjunction of Hip-hop's holy trinity of rapping, writing, and breaking has proved, over time, to be like a conjunction of the planets -- the planets are still out there, but some have grown dimmer, and are no longer in close alignment. KRS-ONE might be the only old-school rapper/writer left, and NYC subway cars are (mostly) plain old metal; breakdancing has mutated into a hundred different forms, but the old school throwdowns are a thing of the past. Graffiti itself, of course, will never die -- but it does come and go, and mutate, and may never be as tightly styled as it was in the late 1970's and '80's.
Still, Providence will always remember the Temple of Junerism -- even if now it costs $200 a night to book a room there.
