Graffiti culture

“Graffiti art today is like the cave paintings of yesterday,” Rob says. “It is the only noncorrupted part of hip-hop. We don’t do it for the money, we do it for the art. We do it to present the culture.”

Graffiti was actually the first of the four main components of hip-hop to develop, says David Badagnani, a Kent State ethnomusicologist who teaches a class on the history of hip-hop. He says the first graffiti artists surfaced in the late 1960s and early ’70s in Philadelphia and New York.

At first, Badagnani says, graffiti “just involved writing your name everywhere.”

Then street parties with turntables and rapping began to appear in the Bronx, he says. Then breakdancing evolved. They all became inextricably tied to graffiti.

“It was all about representing yourself, your neighborhood and your status through your art form,” Badagnani says.

Rob’s photo album is his key to the past, to the days when he represented the area around Virginia Beach. It’s full of pictures of walls and trains he and his crew painted, or others they stumbled across that they admired. The pictures are grainy, hazy, most of them taken at night. Rob stands at the lower corner of one, shrouded in baggy jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, a can of spray paint in hand.

At first, he did it wrong, Rob says. He wasn’t a real graffiti artist. He was just some kid, some “toy” as the lingo goes, out there alone, painting because it seemed cool to be vandalizing something.

“You can either stay a toy and go out and vandalize ’cause it’s a rush and it’s illegal,” Rob says — or you can do it right, become a true graffiti artist who “goes out and does it because he wants to be known.”

Behind the tag

One night some of Rob’s friends brought a real graffiti artist with them to Rob’s apartment. The kid was 16. He did a quick tag on a piece of paper. Rob was mesmerized.

“Sweet — you do that stuff?” he asked.

Soon the kid, whom Rob would come to know as “Over,” was teaching him the ropes. Rob slowly became friends with other graffiti artists. He proved he was cool. He proved he wasn’t a rat — the most important component to being a member of a crew, he says. He gradually became accepted into the “fraternity.” He started to learn tricks.

He wanted to learn more. Soon, he was hooked on graffiti.

“It didn’t matter whether I slept,” Rob says. “It was the only thing in my life that I loved.”

He woke up at 7 a.m., often after only a few hours of sleep, and he thought about graffiti. All day long, while working in construction, he thought about graffiti. When he finally did go to bed, he thought about graffiti.

He stared at trains and walls in Virginia and elsewhere, scrutinizing the graffiti. He noted where it was from, noted each writer’s technique. Graffiti artists admire the work they see traveling the country on the sides of trains. They may recognize the writer’s tag, but most likely they’ll never meet or know each other’s names, Rob says.

Rob’s crew called itself the Area Kode Terrorists. It’s common for graffiti artists to paint their area code on any large piece, so anyone who looks at it knows immediately where the artists live.

There were two other crews in the Virginia Beach area: MC and MDS. All three had 10 to 15 members, Rob says. But if a writer was friendly enough with another crew, he could sign that crew’s name on his work.

Most people Rob painted with were white, he says. But in the hip-hop and graffiti worlds, there are painters of almost every race and creed, Badagnani says.

“Over” was a skateboarder. His standard uniform was baggy pants, skate shoes and T-shirts. “Vers,” another crew member, was about 16 when Rob went to Virginia Beach. “Phone” was a year younger than Rob.

“He was a character, man,” Rob recalls of Phone. “I never would’ve figured that he wrote. No offense to him, but he was kind of a dorky kid. Tall, lanky.”

“Cyke” was a friend of Phone and about a year younger. The two were childhood friends. They grew up down the street from each other. Cyke was of Mexican descent. The other painters used to tease Cyke, saying police would single him out before them. “At least we won’t get caught,” they’d say, “’cause Taco’ll get caught.”

Rob most frequently painted with Over and Vers. All three lived in Chesapeake, west of Virginia Beach. On a typical night, he’d call his crew to see who wanted to paint. Two to five of them would get together, smoke pot and usually draw up blueprints for what they wanted to paint. They then headed out to the train yards or a wall or rooftop somewhere. Sometimes they wouldn’t have blueprints. They’d just go out and paint what came to them.

The tags they painted didn’t mean anything. They were just letters that seemed to flow well together. But the tags attach to artists like nicknames. For a while, Rob painted the word “Bones” on walls and trains. Then he switched to “Lion.” He liked the way the letters fit.

Plus, he says, “I used to have blond dreadlocks, and in the morning, it looked like a lion’s mane.” There’s a Julian Marley song he liked called “Like a Lion in the Morning,” so the name fit.

Rob’s album has more than 90 photos. About a dozen of them are his work. Most of the pieces are on the sides of freight cars in letters at least three feet tall. The graffiti styles vary widely: easy-to-read bubble letters that overlap, futuristic-looking letters with jagged edges, letters that have almost ceased to become letters but instead morph into a maze of frenetic arrows. Some of the pieces bear “AKT” at the bottom. Colors leap out from the bland industrial surfaces — eye-catching blues, reds, yellows, oranges, greens and pastels. In one photo, a robin’s egg blue “Lion” is centered at the bottom of a grain car, the letters distorted slightly where the vertical ridges of the car slice through it. One “Phone” piece is adorned with a Mighty Mouse-like cartoon character giving the world the finger.

Most of the pieces are surrounded by a light-colored frame. That’s usually how pieces started, Rob says. They would lay down a basic frame of white or yellow on the car, then fill in the letters. Then they would accentuate the letters’ curves and lines with black or another dark color. They switched nozzles on their spray cans to achieve wide or narrow sprays. A good piece, a clean piece, Rob says, is drip-free and flows well.