Piece by Piece Page #3

scratching, and hip-hop, and MCing and breaking,

is because..., it's just my roots.

They were all part of one culture.

Hip-hop, of which graffiti is one leg of the

four-legged stool, it's a major component,

it's a multi-million dollar business,

it's an art form that's in museums,

it's an art form that's everywhere. It's the

only art form that was ever created by youth,

I think, in all the history of art.

Back then was a pure time. Kids were

smiling; you look at those old pictures, man,

that's what they were doing.

You can see it on their faces, and

just out there to have a good time!

Graffiti. For some people the word conjures

images of illegibly scrawled messages

Spray-painted on the side of a

building.

Authorities say some of the kids

who are hooked on graffiti

may end up stealing to support their

habit. Stealing markers and paint cans.

Paul Biango and hisfriends do burners and

bombs. Those are really big graffiti's.

Eventuallythey are marred by throw-ups. Those

are initials of tags sprayed overthe burners.

The gangs call themselves crews.

Crews began to form.

A crew is a group of friends that

was working towards the same goal

of dominating the visual

landscape.

The Perfect Crime, OutTo Crush,

Can't Stop Us Now, Those Damn Kids,

Master Piece Creators, Together

With Styles.

But the ones who stood out above

the rest, were TMF.

I think when the whole break- dancing,

hip-hop movement came to California,

that's when I picked up on more

elaborate styles.

Like, oh sh*t, there are these guys that are

doing this big, BlG pieces, with color in it.

And it was nothing we had

seen before.

TMF, when it first started was in

school. Itwas me, BlSARO, and CYPHER,

and back then he wrote DlSK, and

it was three mellow fellows.

It was mellow, not so much because we

were mellow, but we were close friends,

we were the Mellows.

In school we weren't necessarily squares,

but we were kinda like this new pocket of kids

that were kinda half-cool because

we had something up on everybody.

We wanted to bethe biggest and

best, along with some style.

There wasn't that much outthere, so we

were always constantly evolving our own

style and working on what we

could come up with.

It's a trip, when we first started;

we thought we were the sh*t.

Well, actually, we knew we were

the sh*t.

It was kinda rolling out on whatever

kind of media commercials, backthen.

But they weren't really sure what it was

about, but we knew exactly what it was about!

It was about being down.

My cousin took me on this tour of San Francisco

and Daly City graffiti, and after that, man,

it just flipped me overto the

otherside. I wanted to be a writer,

and I want to be a badass writer

like those guys.

The important thing was just gettin'

up, gettin' noticed, gettin' recognized,

makin' noise, startin' sh*t.

It was more of a family though.

It wasn't something you had to be

good enough to be in,

it just happened that those guys

were dope.

Writers now began to innovate

their own particular styles,

branching away from the traditional

forms of graffiti, breaking all the rules.

When this happened a conflict arose

between the opposing schools of style.

The style back then, you had the

Funk, which was what TMF was doing,

which was kinda more of a New York

flavor to it, more of a funky feel to it.

Then you had the new

wave that TWS was doing.

TWS, they were a popular crew, a lot of people giving

them props for all the sh*t that they were doing,

Legal pieces, illegal pieces. Those

kids, they had skills,

I'll give them props, the sh*t was

tight.

I think TWS is the essence of the original San

Francisco flavor, where, they mastered that form,

they were innovative, they were executing sh*t

that had never been done in the f***ing world.

We created this crew called TWS,

with me, RAEVN,

STYLES, RlSKE, NORM,

PlCCASO.

Our concept was, every guy could pretty

much handle the whole ball of wax.

We could do characters, we could

do letters,

we could do straight letters, wild

styles, whatever.

And then you took that and you

amplified it.

We hooked up with Jim Prigoff when

he was doing the book, "Spraycan Art,"

and he was showing me things

from Paris, or from London.

That influenced us to do what they

were doing, and try to top that,

so our stuff looked different, you

know what I'm saying?

Before I met those guys, I had style

and I was doing full color burners.

But as soon as we started hanging

out, started painting together,

they kind of showed

me how it's done, so to speak.

It was like, check it out, my pieces

got longer, they got bigger,

taller, more wild, the style became

more complex.

We started doing Ferraris up on

the wall, crazy Robotek characters,

stuff that normal people wouldn't

get influenced on.

So, we started doing different stuff,

you know? It was a badass crew, man.

The two dominant styles at the time were traditional

Funk, based on New York style subway graffiti,

and New wave which stretched

the boundaries,

pushed the limits on what had

been done previously.

These two opposite schools of style

battled forthe visual supremacy of the city.

A battle is settled on the walls by crossing each

other out, basically taking over an opponent's work.

People here are strong in the art of letterform.

Toys who come up, are grounded in letterform.

You know, everybody down with

the Funk could not even fathom

how those kids could

claim to be kings in graffiti.

You know, because they didn't

have no letters... No letters!

I think he called it "slice and shift," and

it had a lot of thick bars going to thin bars,

and to me it just didn't make of

sense,

it was too artsy and there was

no structure to the letters.

Letters; that's graffiti. You know

what I'm saying?

That's the foundation of graffiti. If you don't

have letters, you're not a dope graf writer.

It was like, a lot of politics going on

with what side of the city chose what crew.

If you were in the Richmond you

kind of went with CRAYONE,

and if you were in the Mission, you

went with TMF.

A lot of people hated on Roger,

man.

And all he was doing was just

pushing the boundary on graffiti,

and not saying that it's gotta look

this one way, or whatever.

Either you understand how to rock

styles, or you don't,

and it can't really always

be explained to people.

And backthen, it was just like, we

weren't really feelin' their style

and to kind of back that up we

would just start beef about it.

There was a lot of animosity, man, other

than the fact that, we were the two top crews.

I didn't want to beef with anybody;

you know what I'm saying?

But I wasn't going to back down to

anything.

We'd do a few pieces, but a lot of the Mission was

like, "F*** them, we'll just go write in theirs."

At that point, when you're beefin' with somebody,

yeah, it's just fun destroying somebody's stuff.

I believe battles is like a double edged sword.

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