Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Speaker 2: Chuck and we are doing a wild style today. You're
Speaker 2: on Stuff you Should Know, one of those episodes where
Speaker 2: it's like this topic is cooler than we are, but
Speaker 2: we're going to give it our best to try to
Speaker 2: get across how neat it really is.
Speaker 3: Oh man, I'm not gonna say when. Maybe you can guess,
Speaker 3: but there's one portion of this that it'll be the
Speaker 3: most like middle aged white dude thing ever.
Speaker 2: Okay, I'm looking forward to it because I can't guess.
Speaker 3: Okay, I'll see me. You'll probably know when I go
Speaker 3: into my voice.
Speaker 2: Okay, is it that old witch voice that you like
Speaker 2: to do?
Speaker 3: No, no, no, no, you'll know the voice.
Speaker 2: All right. Is it an Italian thing?
Speaker 3: No? Not Italian?
Speaker 2: All right, I'll figure it out. Then we're talking graffiti obviously, Chuck,
Speaker 2: I don't know if everybody knows that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, we covered some of this in our
Speaker 3: hip hop episode for sure, but this is one of
Speaker 3: the pillars of hip hop culture, as we'll see. But
Speaker 3: graffiti needed its own thing, and graffiti in the United States,
Speaker 3: we basically think of as sort of the late sixties
Speaker 3: East Coast thing, and this isn't one of those things.
Speaker 3: I do see where Livia put in like cave drawings,
Speaker 3: but I'm not even going to talk about that, sure
Speaker 3: because I was like, come on, Olivia.
Speaker 2: But.
Speaker 3: Very good point here in Mexico and like the nineteen
Speaker 3: thirties where mural art and sort of public art during
Speaker 3: the Mexican Revolution was a big thing, and so Chicano
Speaker 3: kids in the nineteen thirties sort of brought that same
Speaker 3: style to La and other cities in the nineteen thirties
Speaker 3: and forties before the spray can was invented. But I
Speaker 3: feel like that is a genuine sort of precursor to
Speaker 3: what we know is modern graffiti.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because they were, well, they were writing on walls sometimes,
Speaker 2: they were using paint and brushes. Markers didn't exist, spray
Speaker 2: can didn't exist yet, but they were using what they
Speaker 2: had a lot of times just to tag their neighborhood
Speaker 2: as like this, this turf belongs to this gang. But
Speaker 2: they added flourishes that kind of gave rise to some
Speaker 2: of the details and touches that are still around in
Speaker 2: graffiti today. So it is definitely a valid river that
Speaker 2: flowed into this larger river that flows into the ocean
Speaker 2: of graffiti that's on planet Earth, which would be the
Speaker 2: hip hop culture.
Speaker 3: I mentioned the spray can that's obviously a vital part
Speaker 3: of graffiti. That was in nineteen forty nine by a
Speaker 3: paint owner in Illinois, a paint company owner named ed
Speaker 3: Seymour and his wife. And I tried to find her name.
Speaker 3: What's her name, Bonnie? Oh, I couldn't find it. You
Speaker 3: found Bonnie.
Speaker 2: I had to look really hard, yes, but I found
Speaker 2: it Bonnie. Isn't it a love of name?
Speaker 3: Nice work? Yeah? I do love the name Bonnie. But
Speaker 3: they said they were trying to coat radiators with an
Speaker 3: aluminum coating, so they invented the spray can, and right away,
Speaker 3: like you know, people that were protesting or maybe artist
Speaker 3: on the down low, because you can hide a can
Speaker 3: pretty easily, you can work with it very quickly. It
Speaker 3: works on a lot of different kinds of surfaces. So
Speaker 3: all of a sudden, spray cans, you know, really paved
Speaker 3: the way.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Pazzi from Happy Days famously was a Clandestinian artist
Speaker 2: using spray paint.
Speaker 3: Oh really, no, I remember that one I could Hey,
Speaker 3: I could have seen that be in a Happy Day's episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I wouldn't have been yeah, exactly. Maybe Ralph
Speaker 2: Mouth might have gotten talked into trying it and then.
Speaker 3: Just fade out, but probably would have been Richie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess so. Man, that was such a good.
Speaker 3: Show, like a real Lesson Learner episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And the fond who you'd think would be like a
Speaker 2: spray paint graffiti artist, like Van Doll, that's the one
Speaker 2: who talks to Richie's like, that's not cool. So there's
Speaker 2: a lot of advantages to using spray paint. That's why
Speaker 2: graffiti really kind of started. This is like where its
Speaker 2: roots really took root. Markers are another thing that people use,
Speaker 2: and most people think of spray paint with graffiti, but
Speaker 2: markers are important and they didn't come around until the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties. So you had spray paint before you had markers,
Speaker 2: which is surprising to me. And if you want a
Speaker 2: nice little trivia question, magic marker was the first marker
Speaker 2: for commercial sale starting in nineteen fifty three.
Speaker 3: That makes sense because that's became sort of the proprietary
Speaker 3: eponem in a way.
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, for sure, not.
Speaker 3: So much anymore, I feel like, but in our era,
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, because it's fun to say.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a marker that creates magic.
Speaker 2: Exactly.
Speaker 3: I didn't really consider markers as graffiti, but then I
Speaker 3: was like, yeah, like everything like on the inside of
Speaker 3: a marta train or a New York subway car, like
Speaker 3: that's all marker.
Speaker 2: All marker.
Speaker 3: Yeah it is.
Speaker 2: It's very important for what's called handstyle, as we'll see.
Speaker 3: That's right. But we need to talk about cornbread, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So there's a guy named Darryl McCrae who will
Speaker 2: tell anybody who sits long enough that he was the
Speaker 2: person who invented graffiti. Yeah, and he makes a really
Speaker 2: good case. Unfortunately, there's some other people who were doing
Speaker 2: the same thing at the same time, but you could
Speaker 2: still say corn bread, which was his handle his tag.
Speaker 2: Was one of the very first people who took up graffiti,
Speaker 2: starting in nineteen sixty five.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he was but a twelve year old. He's a
Speaker 3: Philly guy, and he was in Juvie, and in Juvie
Speaker 3: he said, I don't want this white bread. I want
Speaker 3: corn bread. My grandmother made cornbread and I love that stuff.
Speaker 3: So he got the nickname Cornbread.
Speaker 2: I don't think he got the corn bread though.
Speaker 3: I doubt if he got the corn bread. It's very
Speaker 3: labor intensive to make cornbread for sure, I mean compared
Speaker 3: to this opening up a bag of white bread. You know.
Speaker 2: Also, though, I think at places called youth development center,
Speaker 2: they don't give you your preferred food day, give you
Speaker 2: what you're going to.
Speaker 3: Eat, Yeah, like Oliver Twist style.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no requests please, no more.
Speaker 3: So he took that nickname, start riding it on the
Speaker 3: walls there at his institution that he was in, and
Speaker 3: then when he got out in nineteen sixty seven, he
Speaker 3: would take to the streets of Philly writing his name Cornbread,
Speaker 3: especially like if he knew that his sweetie Pie was
Speaker 3: on the bus, he would ride it along the bus
Speaker 3: route so she could see that and be impressed.
Speaker 2: Sometimes running alongside the bus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, like while it was going other bus lines. And
Speaker 3: that was sort of the you know, the beginning along
Speaker 3: as we'll see and you know, which was already happening
Speaker 3: in Spanish Harlem of sort of the early point of graffiti,
Speaker 3: which is like a name, you know, later on they
Speaker 3: would call it a tag, and the point was to
Speaker 3: get that out in as many places as you could,
Speaker 3: and and like you were super cool if you did
Speaker 3: it in like a very risky or hard to reach
Speaker 3: place like the wall in front of the cop shop
Speaker 3: or the top of a water tower or something like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and so you add in the flourishes that Chicano
Speaker 2: kids came up within the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties and
Speaker 2: in la with getting your tag out there as many
Speaker 2: places as you can. That's the That is definitely the
Speaker 2: beginning of graffiti. And this is where most people point
Speaker 2: to as the start of the whole thing. In the
Speaker 2: sixties and seventies in New York City, all of this
Speaker 2: started to blossom. All these things kind of came together
Speaker 2: and just the right hands and graffiti became a thing,
Speaker 2: just slowly but surely. Like you said, some of the
Speaker 2: first people were just writing their names and they would
Speaker 2: come up with this tag. And some of the earliest
Speaker 2: tags came from Spanish Harlem, where you would have your
Speaker 2: nickname and then in number like Turk one eighty two,
Speaker 2: and Turk would be your nickname, one eighty two would
Speaker 2: be the street you hailed from. I think Turk one
Speaker 2: eighty two is entirely made up. I don't think it
Speaker 2: was a docu drama. But one of the first two
Speaker 2: was Julio two to four and Taki one eighty three.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Taki one eighty three. Taki was the nickname, a
Speaker 3: Greek nickname for Dmitri. It still is. But Taki was
Speaker 3: a this is in like sixty nine or seventy was
Speaker 3: a delivery worker. So Taki went all over the city.
Speaker 3: So it was a really good way to get the
Speaker 3: Taki one eighty three tag all over the place, and
Speaker 3: it got so far and wide that Taki was actually
Speaker 3: part of a New York Times article in nineteen seventy one,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden it inspired people saying, hey,
Speaker 3: like this is the cool new thing to do on
Speaker 3: the street.
Speaker 2: Yeah or else they hated Taki one a three for
Speaker 2: disraacing New York all over the place.
Speaker 3: Good point.
Speaker 2: That same year that the article on takiy three came out,
Speaker 2: there was the first graffiti crew kind of came together
Speaker 2: Writer's Corner one eighty eight. They met at the corner
Speaker 2: of Audubon and one eighty eighth Street, one hundred and
Speaker 2: eighty eighth Street, as they say in New York and
Speaker 2: the crew was called WC one eighty eight, and it
Speaker 2: was like one of the first ways that people started
Speaker 2: sharing different style tips and kinds of markers that did
Speaker 2: different things. It was just the first way that different
Speaker 2: people doing the same thing came together and figured out
Speaker 2: how to do it better.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And like I said, it was sort of a
Speaker 3: quantity over quality thing for a while. I think that's
Speaker 3: sadly kind of part of it now a little bit.
Speaker 3: When I see graffiti around Atlanta, there's some really good
Speaker 3: stuff and also some really kind of not so great
Speaker 3: tags that I see a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and more often than not, it's the not so
Speaker 2: great ones, right, kind of like watching adults skateboard.
Speaker 3: Yeah, god yeah, I mean, man, Atlanta just didn't have
Speaker 3: the skateboarders. That's a West Coast thing I never see.
Speaker 3: I always see those guys trying to do the tricks,
Speaker 3: but they never land the tricks exactly.
Speaker 2: That's exactly like junkie tags, which is I think called
Speaker 2: toy in the the graffiti world.
Speaker 3: Oh really, toy If your tag is just sort of
Speaker 3: not great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, if it's just junkie amateurish graffiti, it's toy graffiti.
Speaker 3: Well, what if these people are like, hey man, I'm
Speaker 3: not such a great artist. Lay off, I'm trying.
Speaker 2: Will they I would say, stop doing what you're doing
Speaker 2: and go do something else then, because the streets are
Speaker 2: made for good graffiti.
Speaker 3: Not toys.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: The subway was where things got really a little more
Speaker 3: like artistic. I guess, riding on a subway train in
Speaker 3: New York you could obviously get your name out, you know,
Speaker 3: to more people, because that subway's going all over the place. Right,
Speaker 3: It's also risky, and as we'll see, like risk is
Speaker 3: a big you know, I mentioned like the wall and
Speaker 3: from the police station, Like risk is a big, big
Speaker 3: part of it. Because like as you'll see, like when
Speaker 3: they made great efforts in the in the seventies and
Speaker 3: eighties in New York to stop this stuff, it wasn't
Speaker 3: like they were like, oh boy, we better stop doing
Speaker 3: this graffiti. It was sort of like game on man,
Speaker 3: like this is what we're looking for. Like now we
Speaker 3: know they're after us, so it makes it even more
Speaker 3: sort of challenging and risky.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean these early graffiti artists were by definition
Speaker 2: juvenile delinquents to a person, So the idea of adding
Speaker 2: more challenges to them just played exactly into their whole
Speaker 2: ethos etho, Yes, I could never remember.
Speaker 3: And to be clear that with this, I just want
Speaker 3: to if you don't understand, they're not spray painting the
Speaker 3: moving subway cars. They would break into the rail yards
Speaker 3: at night, and all of a sudden, you have this
Speaker 3: huge canvas just sitting there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, And like you said, a lot of people
Speaker 2: would see it because that subway car the next day
Speaker 2: would be traveling all over New York. So that was
Speaker 2: a big deal. And that's kind of what you think
Speaker 2: of when you think of late seventies early eighties graffiti
Speaker 2: in New York subway cars is kind of traveling all
Speaker 2: over the place with really cool, colorful graffiti on them.
Speaker 3: Totally.
Speaker 2: Do you want to take an early break or you
Speaker 2: want to keep talking and get into some different kinds
Speaker 2: and styles.
Speaker 3: Yeah, maybe let's break down the styles first.
Speaker 2: All right, let's see it. So it turns out there's
Speaker 2: three categories of graffiti in order of easiness to increasing hardness.
Speaker 2: It's got to be a better way to put it,
Speaker 2: but I'm leaving it there.
Speaker 3: There's tags, yeah.
Speaker 2: Which Olivia calls very sterily basic identifying signs.
Speaker 3: I love that well, tags didn't comelong until nineteen ninety
Speaker 3: the word, right.
Speaker 2: But essentially it's your signature. It's your nickname spelled out
Speaker 2: in a very stylized way specific to you. That's what
Speaker 2: handstyle is. And then when you use your hand style
Speaker 2: to put up that nickname in a certain stylized way
Speaker 2: on the wall that today, at least, that's a tag.
Speaker 2: That's one of the three kinds of graffiti.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and before they called it tagging in nineteen ninety,
Speaker 3: back in the day, as they say, they would call
Speaker 3: it hitting maybe or bombing or just writing yep, throw ups.
Speaker 3: Terrible name is the next kind. It can incorporate your tag.
Speaker 3: It's like your signature, but it's usually more than that.
Speaker 3: It's tag plus a lot of times it's multicolor, like
Speaker 3: two or three colors, maybe even more if you've got
Speaker 3: the time. It's you know, it's more. It's just said,
Speaker 3: it's kind of more artistic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they're almost always like bubbly letters from what
Speaker 2: I can tell.
Speaker 3: Yeah, unless it's the block style, which I like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, blockbuster, Yeah, I like those as well. Those are
Speaker 2: it's a different style. They're not throw ups. It's kind
Speaker 2: of a style that could be used in throw ups,
Speaker 2: and there are a lot of times used using rollers,
Speaker 2: but they're really large letters. A lot of times they're
Speaker 2: more straight than bubbly, which is the differentiation. Like you
Speaker 2: were saying, I like Blockbuster too, Chuck.
Speaker 3: Yeah, me too. And then you've got the best kind
Speaker 3: when you might get a whole subway car and many
Speaker 3: hours to decorate the saying, or a whole wall. And
Speaker 3: those are called pieces, just like you would call an
Speaker 3: art piece a piece, because it is an art piece
Speaker 3: for sure.
Speaker 2: They're way more detailed, way more colors. They have all
Speaker 2: sorts of crazy cool effects, like fades from one color another.
Speaker 2: They might have sparkles on them, they might somehow have
Speaker 2: like a chrome effect. There's a lot more decoration to them.
Speaker 2: They're just amazing. That's probably what most people think of
Speaker 2: when they think of graffiti or pieces. Yeah, and these
Speaker 2: all are. They get They start out easy, like you
Speaker 2: just practice doing tags, then you move on to throw ups,
Speaker 2: and then you move on to pieces eventually, and so
Speaker 2: they also take different amounts of time. Like once you
Speaker 2: get good at tagging, you can do this in like
Speaker 2: less than a minute, maybe five. If you're just starting out,
Speaker 2: it can take a minute if you're really really good
Speaker 2: and have been doing it a long time. To put
Speaker 2: a throw up up can take fifteen minutes if you're
Speaker 2: still figuring out your way those pieces. This surprised me.
Speaker 2: They can take days to do. With multiple crews working
Speaker 2: on the same thing, it can still take days. And
Speaker 2: if you're just one dude making a piece a masterpiece,
Speaker 2: it can take months, weeks and months to get it done.
Speaker 2: Which I mean if you're doing this illicitly, like on
Speaker 2: a wall somewhere, having to go back like night after
Speaker 2: night to do this and not get caught, that's it's
Speaker 2: rather thrilling.
Speaker 3: If you asked me, well, and the just the time
Speaker 3: investment for something that a third of the way through
Speaker 3: or halfway through or towards the end could get could
Speaker 3: go away.
Speaker 2: I thought about that too. Man, that's kind of hurt.
Speaker 3: That would really suck.
Speaker 2: What about wild style I referred to it early on.
Speaker 3: Wild style is obviously Superstylized's where you get sort of
Speaker 3: the overlapping letter patterns. It's usually fairly bright and like
Speaker 3: you mentioned, like a lot of shading, maybe a three
Speaker 3: D effect. A lot of times these pieces have wild
Speaker 3: style involved, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's kind of like the most advanced form, I guess,
Speaker 2: just because it's so it's just it's really hard to
Speaker 2: do and it's the most intricate usually, But it's also
Speaker 2: kind of like gone beyond what most people appreciate as graffiti,
Speaker 2: where they have no idea what this thing says. Like
Speaker 2: other graffiti artists can read it, but the average person
Speaker 2: is just like, oh, look at that of colors. It's
Speaker 2: kind of like how metal bands logos have kind of
Speaker 2: evolved to where they're like, I have no idea whose
Speaker 2: album this is. It's very much similar that wild style is.
Speaker 2: But one thing that stuck out to me Chuck wild style.
Speaker 2: I'm like that probably came around in maybe the nineties
Speaker 2: at the earliest. It's from the seventies too, Like all
Speaker 2: of this stuff is from the seventies. So in the
Speaker 2: seventies in New York City, the general guidelines for what
Speaker 2: constitutes graffiti's still today were laid out and established by
Speaker 2: those people, Like it's still followed today. I think that's amazing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: I thought it'd be added piece by piece over the decades,
Speaker 2: but no, they figured it out pretty much right out
Speaker 2: of the gate.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's cool. I love it. And then if you've
Speaker 3: ever seen like and this is a little more West coast,
Speaker 3: like the old English style or like the western saloon
Speaker 3: lettering that's known as solo style, a word that you know,
Speaker 3: sort of associated with like gang culture, like Mexican gang culture,
Speaker 3: but that developed from that Chicano writing culture on the
Speaker 3: West coast and then spread around, like you can see
Speaker 3: that on the East coast. But it's definitely I feel
Speaker 3: like more West Coast thing. And that looks super cool.
Speaker 2: Too, No, it definitely does. There's also they use a
Speaker 2: lot of characters, cartoonish characters of like gangbangers with bandanas
Speaker 2: like almost over their eyes, that kind of dude. Yeah,
Speaker 2: they show up a lot. It just seems like there's
Speaker 2: a lot more cartoon figures in Tolo style than say
Speaker 2: that New York graffiti. There was one more style that
Speaker 2: I ran across called anti style or ignorant style, and
Speaker 2: essentially it's like what most people would call toy it's
Speaker 2: just primitive. It's amateurish, but it's done on purpose because
Speaker 2: it's done by graffiti artists, a lot of whom are
Speaker 2: actually really good, who are like this has gotten totally
Speaker 2: out of control. If you've seen this wild style stuff.
Speaker 2: We need to like get back to basics and just
Speaker 2: have fun with us again. And so they're kind of
Speaker 2: trying to recapture what the earliest graffiti artists from, like
Speaker 2: the seventies. We're doing as they when they figured it
Speaker 2: out as they went along. A lot of people hate it,
Speaker 2: can't stand it. They think it's just a dumb idea.
Speaker 2: But from what I can tell, if you're a good
Speaker 2: artist doing purposefully primitive work, it's actually pretty cool looking.
Speaker 3: All right, should we take that break?
Speaker 2: I do want to take that break, Chuck, all right.
Speaker 3: Let's go get our spray hands, check him up, and
Speaker 3: we'll be right back.
Speaker 1: I want to learn about a terris or call it
Speaker 1: red actol, how to take a bank is gone. That's
Speaker 1: a little hunt the word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3: All right. So we mentioned markers early on, and obviously,
Speaker 3: like I said, inside, like on the wall of a
Speaker 3: subway car. A lot of times maybe not even inside,
Speaker 3: but if you just want to provide detail for a
Speaker 3: larger piece on like the exterior of a subway car
Speaker 3: or wall or something, yeah, you could use a marker.
Speaker 3: And in the early days, pilot marks a lot and
Speaker 3: dry mark dri and Sandford King size were they were
Speaker 3: very broad tip markers. So those were some of the
Speaker 3: early markers that were the most popular. And you could
Speaker 3: also refill a lot of those with different kinds of ink.
Speaker 3: So the you know, the felt was just sort of
Speaker 3: the instrument and you could put whatever color or mixed
Speaker 3: colors if you wanted to, for sure. And they would
Speaker 3: also like make their own stuff. It's a very sort
Speaker 3: of DIY style of art where they were making their
Speaker 3: own tools and components maybe like shoe polish bottles and
Speaker 3: stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you also mentioned that it's one of the four
Speaker 2: pillars of hip hop. There's technically five as far as
Speaker 2: Africa Bombarda is concerned, and that would be knowledge as
Speaker 2: the fifth pillar, like knowledge of self, knowledge of where
Speaker 2: you come from, your history, real KRS one stuff, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and so as being part of hip hop culture, I
Speaker 2: don't know if we said the other onesing and DJing
Speaker 2: and breaking, Yeah, and graffiti and knowledge, those are the
Speaker 2: five pillars of hip hop. And like the other stuff
Speaker 2: like mceing and djaying and all that, and breaking in particular,
Speaker 2: there's a real competitive element to graffiti, like where you
Speaker 2: can go so far as you end up in a
Speaker 2: war with other artists where you're spraying over their stuff. Yeah,
Speaker 2: spraying over your stuff, and that is you're not supposed
Speaker 2: to do that. Like, if you spray over somebody's stuff,
Speaker 2: it better be terrible work and you better be really
Speaker 2: good at it, because that's a huge flex. I guess
Speaker 2: you would say if it was twenty twenty four.
Speaker 3: Yeah, for sure. It is also intersected with other art
Speaker 3: forms over the years. In the nineteen eighties and there's
Speaker 3: a comic artist named von Bode who was very influential
Speaker 3: to this culture. He had a couple of characters, Puck
Speaker 3: and Cheech Wizard he came up with. I think he
Speaker 3: came up with these characters like in the nineteen fifties wow.
Speaker 3: But then in the sixties they were in like self
Speaker 3: published comics and then went a little more and want
Speaker 3: to say mainstream obviously not mainstream mainstream, but like seventy
Speaker 3: two to seventy five they're in the National Lampoon, so
Speaker 3: a little more mainstream.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: And if you think you've heard that name before, that
Speaker 3: sounds familiar, you might have heard the song sure Shot
Speaker 3: by the Beastie Boys. I'm like von Bode I'm a
Speaker 3: cheach Wizard, never quitting, so you won't listen very nice
Speaker 3: Well said, yeah, I knew I had heard that before.
Speaker 3: I was like, that's been in a song, I know it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And cheach Wizard is essentially like a giant wizard
Speaker 2: hat with some legs coming out of it. It's cheech
Speaker 2: Wizard and he's like a wise, smart ass kind of
Speaker 2: well wizard hat. And I don't know, I didn't see why,
Speaker 2: but for some reason, graffiti culture just loved that stuff.
Speaker 2: So cheach Wizard shows up and Puck the Lizard show
Speaker 2: up in a lot of graffiti from the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 2: And then one of the other influences, I saw that
Speaker 2: that cheech Wizard or von Bode had his lettering for
Speaker 2: his comics. He like, from what I can tell, he
Speaker 2: came up with bubble letters, and that that made its
Speaker 2: way into graffiti directly from von Bode's comics.
Speaker 3: Well, graffiti and the book covers of math books of
Speaker 3: gen X Kids. Yep, I was big into the bubble lettering.
Speaker 2: Yeah, using those those pins with like the five different
Speaker 2: colors that you can click.
Speaker 3: Down, Yeah, I was okay at it. I definitely use
Speaker 3: those pins. I remember G's giving me a lot of
Speaker 3: trouble and S has given me a lot of trouble.
Speaker 2: Those were hard, but I tried. How was your out
Speaker 2: of bubble Q?
Speaker 3: Oh God, is that a thing? It is now possible.
Speaker 2: I think I just laid down the gauntlet for somebody
Speaker 2: to come up with that.
Speaker 3: Oh wow. So graffiti starts to spread around the world,
Speaker 3: Britain in the late seven and amster Amsterdam in particular.
Speaker 3: In the Netherlands and their punk scenes in the late seventies,
Speaker 3: they started doing some of this stuff. Yeah, and then
Speaker 3: it also helped spread because of media a little bit.
Speaker 3: I mean, most of it was fairly underground media at
Speaker 3: the time, unless it was some news report that had
Speaker 3: a scathing report. But there was a photographer named Henry Chalfont, Yeah,
Speaker 3: who did a few projects, one of which I highly
Speaker 3: recommend watching on YouTube, a documentary from nineteen eighty three
Speaker 3: called Style Wars, which is a really good watch.
Speaker 2: It's one of those ones where you're like, I feel
Speaker 2: cooler just watching this thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He just turned the he turned the camera. He and
Speaker 2: the director Tony Silver, who worked together, they turned the
Speaker 2: camera on these graffiti artists and just had them talk
Speaker 2: and show what they were doing and explain why they
Speaker 2: were doing this, and then interspersed is like break dancing
Speaker 2: from the rock Steady Crew when they were just starting out.
Speaker 2: Like it's just super cool, like this captured time capsule
Speaker 2: like moment into yeah, where this is all starting. They
Speaker 2: totally Henry Chaufont like got it. He was like, we
Speaker 2: need to document this is because this is going to
Speaker 2: be important.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's amazing. I mean there's there's other things like
Speaker 3: photographs and this and that. But when you look at
Speaker 3: the birth of a of a new art form in
Speaker 3: sort of a urgeon in culture to have this this
Speaker 3: sort of one document so like perfectly capture this moment
Speaker 3: in time like you were talking about. It's I mean
Speaker 3: that that should be in like the Library of Congress
Speaker 3: like that kind of stuff for sure or whatever. What's
Speaker 3: the film version of that, I can't remember the name.
Speaker 2: Of it, The Fiberio of Fambus.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh wow.
Speaker 2: I know that deserved a while. I'm really screeping the
Speaker 2: bottom of the barrel here in year seventeen. Oh so
Speaker 2: you said that it was it was like a document, right.
Speaker 2: It actually is kind of referred to in in graffiti
Speaker 2: culture still today, Like if somebody's starting out and they're like,
Speaker 2: what should I go? What can I learn from? One
Speaker 2: of the things that people refer them to Style Wars
Speaker 2: because again, these these like essential guidelines were laid down
Speaker 2: at this time, so you can still learn a ton
Speaker 2: from watching Style Wars or Henry Chaufont got into a
Speaker 2: couple of other projects too, one with a photographer named
Speaker 2: Martha Cooper called Subway Art. I've also seen newbies referred
Speaker 2: to that book too, and then another one with another photographer,
Speaker 2: James Prigoff called spray cant Art. So Henry Chaufont had
Speaker 2: a real impact on like documenting this stuff that still
Speaker 2: is important today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was kind of like it made me think
Speaker 3: of the guy I can't remember his name, but the
Speaker 3: famous photographer who captured the southern California skateboard culture early on,
Speaker 3: because they seem like kind of the only people doing
Speaker 3: that in such a sort of artistic and profound way,
Speaker 3: you know, right, you know, yeah, good stuff.
Speaker 2: Two other things to call out. There's a photographer named
Speaker 2: Gordon Matta Clark who documented photograph in photographs just like
Speaker 2: tags all around New York City. Has a pretty cool
Speaker 2: I think they'd make showings of his photographs sometimes. And
Speaker 2: then the movie Wild Style actually came out a year
Speaker 2: before Style Wars nineteen eighty two. It's considered the first
Speaker 2: hip hop movie ever. I think it was a Fab
Speaker 2: five Freddie project. But it has the Rock City Crew,
Speaker 2: one of the rare early woman graffiti artists, Lady Pink,
Speaker 2: she's in it, and then King ad Rock is in
Speaker 2: it before he was called King ad Rock before the
Speaker 2: Beastie Boys. Yeah, but there's a ton of like the
Speaker 2: whole premise of this, it's a movie, like a fictional movie,
Speaker 2: but the old premise is this guy's being hired to well,
Speaker 2: I guess put up some graffiti by this. I can't
Speaker 2: remember another dude or a company or something like that.
Speaker 3: All right, I'll check that out.
Speaker 2: Thanks.
Speaker 3: So, you know, we mentioned graffiti as art because graffiti
Speaker 3: is art, but as far as being accepted into like
Speaker 3: the legitimate art community, that sort of happened in fits
Speaker 3: and starts over the years. There was an I guess
Speaker 3: the first academic article about graffiti was in nineteen sixty
Speaker 3: nine in The Urban Review by Herbert Coles called names
Speaker 3: Graffiti and Culture, and then a few years later in
Speaker 3: nineteen seventy two, a big deal happened when, or a
Speaker 3: big deal for that culture at least Hugo Martinez as
Speaker 3: a student activist at City College in New York, and
Speaker 3: he helped start a collective called United Graffiti Artists with
Speaker 3: a bunch of Puerto Rican teen graffiti artists. And that
Speaker 3: was sort of the first collective where he was like, hey,
Speaker 3: do this stuff on canvas because this is art. And
Speaker 3: they had an exhibition at City College and then the
Speaker 3: very first graffiti art gallery show at the Razor Gallery
Speaker 3: in Soho that same year.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, they became really influential. The next year, in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy three, choreographer Twyla Tharp, she had the United
Speaker 2: Graffiti Artists do basically the scene decorations for her performance
Speaker 2: in Chicago. I can't remember what was called, but weirdly,
Speaker 2: the dance was choreographed two Beach Boys music with graffiti
Speaker 2: in the background. It was a real mishmash when the
Speaker 2: whole Beastie Boys music, no, I said, beach Boys, And
Speaker 2: the whole time she just kept going Twila, Twila, Twila.
Speaker 2: Well she danced, that's good, You're getting better. Yeah, it
Speaker 2: comes and goes.
Speaker 3: We did mention. You know, obviously, the other side of
Speaker 3: the coin is there is and still are people that
Speaker 3: think this is just vandalism. They think it's just like
Speaker 3: an urban decay happening before our very eyes. And in
Speaker 3: the early seventies, New York got on board that line
Speaker 3: of thinking, at least the government did, when Mayor John
Speaker 3: Lindsay declared a war on graffiti. That following year, in
Speaker 3: seventy two, the city Council said it's illegal to even
Speaker 3: carry an aerosol can in a public facility. And then
Speaker 3: in seventy five they created the Transit Police Graffiti Squad,
Speaker 3: and you know, they're cleaning out subway cars. But like
Speaker 3: I said, early all this, all this was was like
Speaker 3: game on. Like there's not a single graffiti artist that
Speaker 3: was intimidated or scared out of doing what they were
Speaker 3: going to do because of this. If anything, it heightened it.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Another example of that is they outlawed selling spray
Speaker 2: paint to teenagers in New York City. Yeah, and so
Speaker 2: graffiti artists who were like, oh, okay, we'll just start
Speaker 2: stealing it. That's cheaper anyway. So stealing your spray paint
Speaker 2: became like just a part of graffiti and New York
Speaker 2: in the in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not condoning that.
Speaker 2: Well, I said they were juvenile delinquents and I wasn't kidding.
Speaker 3: Ed Koch, famous New York mayor in the latest seventies
Speaker 3: and seventy seven, was very anti graffiti and would razor
Speaker 3: wire the subway yards, had guard dogs, he had cops
Speaker 3: like staking out houses and following kids home from school.
Speaker 3: That's nuts, man, Yeah, that's just nuts.
Speaker 2: So I think I don't know if Koch, Yeah, I
Speaker 2: think Koch was still mayor at the time. They came
Speaker 2: up with the Metro Transit Authority's Clean Car program, and
Speaker 2: this one actually had an impact. This was beyond razor
Speaker 2: wire and German shepherds.
Speaker 3: Like.
Speaker 2: This was if we find a train car has been
Speaker 2: hit overnight with graffiti, it's not going to go back
Speaker 2: out there until that graffiti is cleaned off. Yeah, So
Speaker 2: imagine like working all night or whatever and getting your
Speaker 2: piece up and it just cleaned off before it even
Speaker 2: leaves the transit station. So that actually worked him. By
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty nine, apparently, like whole car graffiti was just
Speaker 2: not around anymore in New York. Like you can still
Speaker 2: see it on cars, but they used to use the
Speaker 2: entire car. There's a really famous one by Futura two
Speaker 2: thousand and Dondie which is called Break, and it's considered
Speaker 2: one of the greatest full subway car masterpieces anyone's ever done.
Speaker 2: It's beyond description. Just go look up Break by Dondee
Speaker 2: in Future A two thousand.
Speaker 3: What did you think of it?
Speaker 2: I thought it was amazing because it just completely departed
Speaker 2: from any kind of I know how just ridiculous I
Speaker 2: sound right now. It departed from any kind of convention.
Speaker 2: It used all sorts of new elements and stuff that
Speaker 2: I hadn't seen anywhere else, and you really had to
Speaker 2: kind of examine it in detail and then also stepping
Speaker 2: back to kind of take the whole thing in. I
Speaker 2: didn't love it, yeah, I mean I could see that
Speaker 2: that's hard, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: Or let's say this, I've seen a lot other stuff
Speaker 3: that I thought was like, maybe it just appealed to me. Mohere.
Speaker 3: I was about to say it was way better, but
Speaker 3: that's again it's just in the eye of the beholder.
Speaker 2: Man. That was a really great way to put it,
Speaker 2: So thank you.
Speaker 3: I appreciate that again, I mentioned earlier that it was
Speaker 3: a sort of a DIY community when how I like
Speaker 3: figuring stuff out, sharing tips and tricks with one another.
Speaker 3: And from the beginning they would use various nozzles from
Speaker 3: other types of cans or you know caps. They would
Speaker 3: call them from different products to provide different ways of painting.
Speaker 3: I know that you know when you spray that I
Speaker 3: don't use the stuff, but that off oven cleaner. You know,
Speaker 3: spray's that big, wide area. So they started using that
Speaker 3: to achieve the same effect with paint. And they, I mean,
Speaker 3: they were a real I guess when they were buying
Speaker 3: the paint. Made a difference in the profits of Rustolium
Speaker 3: and Crylon over the seventies, for sure.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Rustolium and Cryon were Crylon were specifically avoiding
Speaker 2: marketing or making their products attractive to graffiti artists. They
Speaker 2: couldn't do no, this is no. You did not want
Speaker 2: your brand being accused of catering to graffiti artists at
Speaker 2: the time. But it was still pretty good. It was useful.
Speaker 2: And one of the reasons why is because they were
Speaker 2: both chuck full of lead up until the late seventies,
Speaker 2: and lead does all sorts of great stuff for spray paint.
Speaker 2: It makes it dry faster, it makes colors brighter, it's
Speaker 2: more durable, it's moisture resistant. So when the leg got
Speaker 2: taken out, that was a real bummer for griffist. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean I could see that having a huge impact.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, in Europe they did market There were
Speaker 3: a couple in the nineties, the Montana and Molotov brands
Speaker 3: of spray paint actually target street art markets and have
Speaker 3: all kinds of like you know, weather resistant paints and
Speaker 3: crazy colors and different effects with their caps. So they
Speaker 3: embraced it and basically said, hey, come buy our stuff.
Speaker 2: Yes, but if you're a purist in America, you probably
Speaker 2: are still using rustolium or cry line.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: One of the other things that really kind of evolved
Speaker 2: that helped things along was not having to take the
Speaker 2: spray nozzle off of easy off anymore, and having nozzles
Speaker 2: that were designed and sold for graffiti art, like all
Speaker 2: sorts of different kinds of nozzles that do all sorts
Speaker 2: of different kinds of things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean, you know, fat lines and skinny lines,
Speaker 3: different caps achieve those effects. They had clear calligraphy caps.
Speaker 3: If you ever been at a paint store and looked
Speaker 3: at you know, sometimes you can even spray a little
Speaker 3: piece of cardboard they have there on the wall.
Speaker 2: Lucky.
Speaker 3: But you know, sometimes it's a little round pinhole, but
Speaker 3: sometimes it's a slot. And those are calligraphy caps like
Speaker 3: a horizontal line. I never knew that.
Speaker 2: I think those are big and solo graffiti too. Yeah,
Speaker 2: needle caps they make splatters, so if you want like
Speaker 2: controlled drips, you don't want uncontrolled drips or unintentional drips,
Speaker 2: but you might want your piece to have some drip
Speaker 2: look to it, so you would use needle caps. They
Speaker 2: also add texture to the lines because they there's like
Speaker 2: a like a splattery haze that when you step back
Speaker 2: just kind of softens the lines a little bit from
Speaker 2: the needle caps. It's pretty cool.
Speaker 3: Should we take our second break?
Speaker 2: I think we should.
Speaker 3: All right, we'll come back right after this purpose.
Speaker 1: I want to learn about a terris ORTA call it
Speaker 1: red actol. How to take a perfect.
Speaker 2: Is gone.
Speaker 1: That's a little hunt the Lizzie word up, Jerry.
Speaker 2: So if you wanted to get into this kind of thing,
Speaker 2: there's a place to start, and it's called developing your
Speaker 2: hand style and that is your own personal way of
Speaker 2: writing your your tag essentially, and graffiti artists will come
Speaker 2: up with their own entire alphabets that they just designed themselves.
Speaker 2: And there's a really great website it's super useful if
Speaker 2: you do want to get into graffiti called bombingscience dot com.
Speaker 2: They have a post of sixty one different graffiti artists
Speaker 2: and their alphabets essentially that they've created for their tags,
Speaker 2: and it's really cool. Some of them you're like, I
Speaker 2: have no idea what letter that is, but even still,
Speaker 2: there's just super neat that people have put this much
Speaker 2: thought into it and come up with a font essentially
Speaker 2: their own personal font that they use for graffiti. And
Speaker 2: the way that you do that is by practicing it
Speaker 2: to develop your own handstyle, and that is essentially step one.
Speaker 2: And you do that not on a wall or any
Speaker 2: public place or even with paint. You start out with
Speaker 2: pens and markers figuring it out.
Speaker 3: That's right, And now we're going to give you some tips.
Speaker 2: Oh, okay, there we go.
Speaker 3: You're gonna want to shake that can up, guys, got
Speaker 3: to shake it really really good. All kidding aside, You
Speaker 3: do want to shake that can up because that's what
Speaker 3: makes the paint flow really well. Don't short change that shake.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm speaking for a lot of listeners
Speaker 2: and saying that I can't help but feel a little
Speaker 2: forlorn that you're not doing this whole list in that point.
Speaker 3: All right, I'll keep going.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: Step two, guys can control. So this is how you're
Speaker 3: gonna avoid those unwanted drips. Get a feel for that pressure.
Speaker 3: It's gonna determine how quickly you're going to move that
Speaker 3: hand to achieve that the end result that you're after.
Speaker 2: Very nice can control, it's called.
Speaker 3: And then finally, guys, you're really gonna want to adjust
Speaker 3: that distance from the wall. If you're closer, it's gonna
Speaker 3: be thinner, it's gonna be more saturated. It's gonna be
Speaker 3: great for outlines. Step a little further away, it's going
Speaker 3: to diffuse out it's gonna cover a wider area. It's
Speaker 3: just science, guys, very nice man ah right, and scene.
Speaker 2: So yes, the upshot of all this is the figuring
Speaker 2: out the nozzle pressure in the distance from the wall,
Speaker 2: or basically the two most basic things that you can
Speaker 2: understand and learn about graffiti. But it's also the things
Speaker 2: that come up the most.
Speaker 3: That's right. And some of the rules which I kind
Speaker 3: of like to see. You don't tag churches. You don't
Speaker 3: graffiti churches. You don't graffiti schools. You're not supposed to
Speaker 3: at least hospitals. You're not supposed to do this to
Speaker 3: someone's house or their car, or certainly headstone at a cemetery,
Speaker 3: or nature like trees and rocks. You don't know, those
Speaker 3: big rocks in Central Park, you don't tag those. That's
Speaker 3: not what you're supposed to do. And of course you
Speaker 3: don't snitch, because you know what they get.
Speaker 2: They get a stitch or two. From what I understand,
Speaker 2: that's right. Yeah, there's a story of an an artist
Speaker 2: named Cope two who was still considered legendary, but he
Speaker 2: was accused of snitching and just like overnight, his reputation
Speaker 2: just went into the gutter.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, yeah, I imagine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they don't take snitching lightly for sure. And then
Speaker 2: there's other things too, Like we've basically been focusing on
Speaker 2: spray paint for a good reason. I mean, it's the
Speaker 2: first medium, they're the most used medium, and then there's
Speaker 2: markers and all that, But there's other stuff you can do.
Speaker 2: That's considered graffiti too. You can get yourself some sort
Speaker 2: of poster, get some wheat paste and stick it up
Speaker 2: like an old timey hand bill that you might see. Yeah,
Speaker 2: make stickers, sure, people make stickers. You can come up
Speaker 2: with stencils like a real bank sye. And all of
Speaker 2: these things have like the advantage of most of the
Speaker 2: work being done at home in a studio, out of sight,
Speaker 2: not in public, and then you can throw them up
Speaker 2: pretty quickly and move on and not get caught. I
Speaker 2: think that makes it a different form of graffiti in
Speaker 2: that sense. But yeah, it's still I mean, it's still
Speaker 2: street art at the very least.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think so. And then Lyvia dug up this
Speaker 3: thing called reverse graffiti, which I had never heard of. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and she used a very good example, like when you
Speaker 3: use your finger to write wash me on a dusty car,
Speaker 3: you're using in, you know, an inverse of something to
Speaker 3: create an image. So a lot of times it's like
Speaker 3: it's like a political statement maybe or maybe to call
Speaker 3: attention to like pollution or the environment or something like that. Yeah,
Speaker 3: and it's also one where they're saying like, hey, I'm
Speaker 3: cleaning a surface technically not defacing anything, so come at me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they'll still just come along and be like, oh, no,
Speaker 2: we're going to now we're going to clean this wall.
Speaker 3: Now that you've done this, now you put something beautiful
Speaker 3: up right. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, over the years, some people have really kind of
Speaker 2: made the jump into like mega Mondo fame, like art
Speaker 2: world fame, who started out as graffiti artists. One of
Speaker 2: them was Jean Michelle Basquiat. A lot of people point
Speaker 2: to him as a wildly successful artist who started out
Speaker 2: in graffiti. Same o was his tag. He started out
Speaker 2: in the late seventies with a friend named al Diaz.
Speaker 2: By the eighties his paintings were some of the most
Speaker 2: expensive in the art world, and he was friends with
Speaker 2: Andy Warhol and by nineteen eighty two we had a
Speaker 2: solo exhibition. This is like a an art like a
Speaker 2: graffiti artist. This is a huge leap for somebody to make.
Speaker 2: And I think he might have been the first. I
Speaker 2: think he came before Keith Hering.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Basquiat had a pretty good indie movie made about him.
Speaker 3: I think it was Jeffrey Wright that played him back
Speaker 3: in the maybe nineties. It was really good. But yeah,
Speaker 3: you mentioned Keith Hearing too, they were friends. We were
Speaker 3: just in New York for fall break and the family
Speaker 3: went to MoMA and the Whitney and we saw Bosquillot's
Speaker 3: and obviously Warhols and some Keith Haring stuff in person,
Speaker 3: which is always a thrill. And Keith Hearing, I know
Speaker 3: we've talked about before, but he started drawing in chalk
Speaker 3: on the like when they would take a advertisement down
Speaker 3: on the subway walls, there would be this backboard there
Speaker 3: and he would put his art up there and was
Speaker 3: very famous initially, at least for the Radiant Baby was
Speaker 3: kind of his tag. Yeah. And if you don't know
Speaker 3: the Radiant Baby, like if you looked it up, you'd
Speaker 3: probably seen it somewhere before. It's very famous.
Speaker 2: Yes, Yeah, it's like a crawling silhouette with like light
Speaker 2: lines coming off of it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. And very sadly, Jean Michel Basquiat would pass from
Speaker 3: a heroin to us in the late eighties, and Keith
Speaker 3: Haring died from complications from AIDS and HIV. I believe
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety I read.
Speaker 2: An interview with Basquiat. It must have been in like
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight because the interviewers it was like he
Speaker 2: got up no less than two or three times to
Speaker 2: go shoot Heroin in this rather short interview, like he
Speaker 2: could not not do what he would have gotten sick
Speaker 2: like that quickly. Jeez. There's also Shepherd Faerry is very
Speaker 2: famous for his Andre the Giant has a posse stickers
Speaker 2: that he made, and then also for his Hope poster
Speaker 2: of Barack Obama during the two thousand and eight election.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Shepherd Fairy, good work, yep.
Speaker 2: And we mentioned Banksy, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean do we have to talk about Banksy?
Speaker 2: No, there's a couple other ones that I want to
Speaker 2: call out that are still working today.
Speaker 3: Yeah, let's do that.
Speaker 2: So Dondie White, he's an overlooked one. He was the
Speaker 2: one who with Future of two thousand did that full
Speaker 2: car called Break. But he hung out with Keith Herring
Speaker 2: and Bosquillacht and Kenny Sharf in Future of two thousand
Speaker 2: like he was a he never really made the leap
Speaker 2: to the major art world. He was like a old
Speaker 2: school underground artist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and did you mention Now you didn't mention Lady K.
Speaker 3: Who'd you mention earlier?
Speaker 2: Lady Pink?
Speaker 3: Oh, Lady K. Lady K is different lady Kay is French.
Speaker 3: I believe, right in Paris.
Speaker 2: I believe that's where she was born, and she might
Speaker 2: be working there still, either Paris or New York.
Speaker 3: Yeah, very cool stuff there too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then also so check out her stuff, and
Speaker 2: then check out Wren's R. E. N. S. Who's working
Speaker 2: in Copenhagen. It is mind numbing how amazing this work is.
Speaker 2: Like it just can't even imagine conceiving a lot of
Speaker 2: a lot of it, let alone being good at it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's beautiful, beautiful stuff. It's really like I'm looking
Speaker 3: at some of them now, man, that's amazing.
Speaker 2: And then there's one called kid Olt who as a
Speaker 2: vandal actually like purposefully vandalizes luxury brand stores who have
Speaker 2: collaborated with graffiti artists for their brands. They don't like that,
Speaker 2: so they will like it's not really like pieces that
Speaker 2: they're putting up. It's more like huge, huge vandalizations of
Speaker 2: these stores.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, yeah, Oh that's is that the one that's
Speaker 3: like like stores that are kind of co opting graffiti
Speaker 3: is like the cool thing. He'll go hit them. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: kid Old, Yeah, but they're probably like great.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm sure. Oh wait, you mean the stores. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I don't know. I've heard that they don't like Kiddle
Speaker 2: very much really, OK. And then lastly, the I want
Speaker 2: to call out Apothecary, who never really got off the ground.
Speaker 2: That's Umi's tag from when she got into this. She's
Speaker 2: always been interested in bee boy culture, so of course
Speaker 2: she came up with graffiti a graffiti tag, and I
Speaker 2: think she realized, like fairly early on, this is way
Speaker 2: too long Apothecary to use as a tag, So I
Speaker 2: don't think I think it kind of petered out fairly
Speaker 2: early on.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna have to tell Emily that because uh, I mean,
Speaker 3: obviously Apothecary is right at par ally, so yeah, for sure,
Speaker 3: that's funny.
Speaker 2: Uh, you got anything else?
Speaker 3: I got nothing else. I'm gonna work on my my tag.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna come up with a tag and a font.
Speaker 2: Nice. Yeah. Get busy on your handstyle yo. Yeah, since
Speaker 2: uh we were just talking about handstyle again, I think
Speaker 2: that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3: Yeah. This is from Ben in Connecticut, who's been listening
Speaker 3: for quite a while and recently heard our Selects episode
Speaker 3: The Great Finger in the Wendy's Chili Caper. That's kind
Speaker 3: that one that was incredible. We were commenting about the
Speaker 3: way Letterman and Lenno covered that, and that Letterman was
Speaker 3: was funnier. You know, no surprise there for me, at
Speaker 3: least I assume you as well. Yeah uh, And then
Speaker 3: Josh mentioned Leno's well known of cars to differentiate the
Speaker 3: late night hosts. However, guys, David Letterman is well known
Speaker 3: within the Indy car racing world as one of the
Speaker 3: owners of Rahal Letterman Lanagan Racing. The team won the
Speaker 3: Kart Indie Championship in nineteen ninety two, the year the
Speaker 3: team was founded, and has won the Indy five hundred
Speaker 3: twice with drivers Buddy Rice in two thousand and four
Speaker 3: and Takuma Sato in twenty twenty. So while Leno may
Speaker 3: be more well known for his love of automotive history
Speaker 3: and tinkering with race cars, David Letterman is also well
Speaker 3: known within the automotive world. And that is from Ben, Connecticut.
Speaker 3: So I think the takeaway there is a Letterman owns
Speaker 3: Leno once again.
Speaker 2: Yeah, what was who was that? Ben?
Speaker 3: Yeah? And it's so low hanging through to bag on Lino.
Speaker 3: So I don't think I'm original or cool for doing so.
Speaker 2: Oh no, but it's I mean you still mean it? Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 2: thanks a lot, Ben. That was in a very arcane
Speaker 2: fact that I definitely hadn't heard. And I also just
Speaker 2: realized that Arkane would be a great tag too. R Kane.
Speaker 3: Well, you and you and you me went out together
Speaker 3: and did this like Arcane and Apothecary together. They'd be like,
Speaker 3: who is this new power couple in DVD?
Speaker 2: This crew is amazing?
Speaker 3: Wow?
Speaker 2: What handstyle?
Speaker 3: I know? And that'd say, guys, you got it just right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, thank you for doing that voice. You really sure
Speaker 2: think you saved the episode.
Speaker 3: I kind of stole that from Eddie Murphy when he
Speaker 3: used to do the White Boys.
Speaker 2: Is that who that was?
Speaker 3: Yeah, just a little bit.
Speaker 2: I was gonna guess Johnny Carson on Helium doing George W.
Speaker 3: Bush.
Speaker 2: Yeah, go back and listen, you'll be there. Oh my god,
Speaker 2: Well I think that's it. Yes, Ben, Thank you very
Speaker 2: much for that email. Ben, And if you want to
Speaker 2: be like Ben and get in touch with us, we
Speaker 2: love that kind of thing. You can send it off
Speaker 2: to stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3: Stuff Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts, my Heart radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.