Is Graffiti Really An Element Of Hip-Hop? book excerpt
Is Graffiti Really An Element Of Hip-Hop?
(Excerpt from the book, "The Concise Guide to Hip-Hop Music")

Although graffiti is often included as one of hip-hop's four elements, there are also people who have been heavily involved with the elements who don’t subscribe to grouping these art forms all under the heading of hip-hop.

Prominent 1970s graffiti artists such as BLADE and FARGO suggest that the media spread the idea of the elements, even though it did not accurately represent reality. Pioneering hip-hop DJ and icon Grandmaster Flash has also questioned graffiti’s inclusion as an element.

FARGO: I don’t see the correlation. The correlation between hip-hop and graffiti, that’s a media thing. And breakdancing—they put that all in one package, so they can identify it, put it in a box. There is no correlation between hip-hop and graffiti, one has nothing to do with the other.

BLADE: They put hip-hop, breakdancing, and rap music and graffiti and all this stuff together, because it’s something I guess they thought they could market [for] whatever the hell reason. But it has nothing to do with the original stuff, when [graffiti] writing came along in 1970. It’s got nothing to do with anything … that’s all ’80s stuff.

Grandmaster Flash: You know what bugs me, they put hip-hop with graffiti. How do they intertwine? Graffiti is one thing that is art, and music is another.

An example of the packaging of the elements can be seen in the classic 1983 hip-hop movie Wild Style. The film had a big influence on people’s perception of hip-hop and was one of the first places where all the elements were shown together. However, Charlie Ahearn, who directed the film, states that it did not represent reality.

Grandmaster Caz: I believe that Wild Style is the first time that all the elements of hip-hop were represented.

Fab 5 Freddy: I had read somewhere [that] for a culture to be a complete form, it had to have art, music, and dance. That was the grain of what became Wild Style. I felt that seeing breakdancing, graffiti, rapping, and DJing in a film would only make the culture stronger. I helped explain to people that graffiti was part of hip-hop. It was always something I saw as one cultural movement.

Charlie Ahearn: In the summer of 1980, I was making an art show in an abandoned massage parlor in Times Square. Fab 5 Freddy started talking to me about making a movie about graffiti and rap music [which became Wild Style]. Wild Style is like a fantasy, it’s not a documentary. Everything in Wild Style was made for the film, it was to project an image. And people saw that image and they carried it forward and built on that, but that wasn’t really happening, that was just happening for the film.
Ahearn suggests that the elements were a lot less integrated in reality than people may suggest in retrospect.

Charlie Ahearn: There were interconnections, but there were no visible signs of it. Like in the whole year that I was in the Bronx before the movie, I saw no b-boying—it simply wasn’t there. It was going on somewhere else. B-boying was considered passé and out of fashion in the Bronx. People remembered it, but when I mentioned that it would be in the movie people would go, “Aww, that’s been played out so long ago!” The MCs really were not into it. The bboys were not really on the scene at the parties and events except Frosty Freeze. Likewise the people who were down with the graf scene weren’t at those parties. The only one I saw was PHASE 2, because he did the flyers. Lee Quinones was a bboy when he was a kid bombing trains [with graffiti], but he never went to the parties.

Of particular contention is the specific inclusion of graffiti as an element of hip-hop. Graffiti icons such as LADY PINK (one of the stars of the film Wild Style) suggest that graffiti should be seen as an independent art in its own right and not just as an element of hip-hop.

LADY PINK: I don’t think graffiti is hip-hop. Frankly I grew up with disco music. There’s a long background of graffiti as an entity unto itself.

It is noted by many of the prominent early graffiti writers such as COCO 144, PHASE 2, BLADE, and FUZZ ONE, as well as others throughout graffiti’s history, that many graffiti writers did not and do not listen to hip-hop music. They also assert that modern graffiti’s history pre-dates hip-hop — while hip-hop is widely considered to have been created in 1973 with Kool Herc’s innovation in playing records, graffiti had been developing for a number of years prior to this.

STAY HIGH 149: I started [writing graffiti] in ’69, man, there was another guy out there, his name was TAKI 183, another guy from the Washington Heights area [of New York]. He was a Greek kid and he started a little bit before I did.

COCO 144: I was listening to jazz, Latin jazz, and rock. This was before hip-hop was created. Anybody that does their homework would know graffiti came first.

PHASE 2: Fact … there is no way in the world that aerosol [graffiti] culture was spawned from hip-hop … it was going on years before that. Aerosol culture was there before anyone even conceived of a thing called hip-hop. Many [graffiti] writers never listened to rap, many writers were more partial to headbanging than head-spinning and a huge amount of rappers, breakers [dancers], and so-called “hiphoppers” couldn’t tell you the first thing about [graffiti] writing.

FUZZ ONE: Graffiti came first, before everything else.… Before 1978, the graffiti soundtrack was more Led Zeppelin, Rolling Stones, Jethro Tull, Ted Nugent, Black Sabbath, [Bachman Turner Overdrive], the Eagles, and Lynryd Skynyrd.

BLADE: When I was writing [graffiti], there was no hiphop, there was no … there was none of that stuff. When we came along, we were listening to Sly & the Family Stone.

LADY PINK: Many of the white people who write graffiti listen to rock’n’roll and don’t know anything about hiphop.

A number of graffiti writers and scholars suggest that while graffiti and hip-hop have interacted with each other at various points, this does not necessarily mean that graffiti is an element of hip-hop.

Buddy Esquire: The only connection I could see is rap and graffiti are both from the ghetto, a lot of the original writers from back in the days came from the ghetto, so maybe that is why they can identify it as such. But also since every writer is not from the ghetto, not every writer is going to associate themselves with [hip-hop].
Joe Austin: The lack of a common hip-hop formation before the early to mid-1980s means that [graffiti] writing has more than a decade of history before rap broke onto the popular music scene, and their later development, while connected, is by no means determining.