Tagging with my Brother

by Chelsey Lyles

Once, when I was little, my brother took me with him to go tagging (painting graffiti). He called it “a field trip to reality”. I was about six and we lived very close to this over-pass that the city had just repainted. It was about 1:30 in the morning and raining but he promised me it would be fun.  He sat me down on an upturned crate and began to work and I was amazed. Let me tell you, my brother was not a gangster, he didn’t sell crack, and he wasn’t a trouble maker. He was a bag boy in the local grocery store and he helped old ladies across the street, he had no gang affiliations. My brother was/is an artist. When I saw him spray paint something across that concrete it was almost like seeing a child born, like a miracle. It wasn’t what he painted, it was his expression. It was wonder with anger bordering on pain and I loved it.

            The thing that struck me most about the things we read and watched was that it all happened at the same time, all this art (break dancing, hip-hop, and graffiti) grew out of the same culture. When people tell me that hip-hop has no place in society,  I point that all of these art forms spawned from the same environment.

            Another thing I loved about this week’s assignments is that the movies we watched were set in the time that it was talking about. They were movies made in the early eighties about the early eighties. It made everything we read seem more real less like a regular text book. I was an illustration of what we read and a very good one at that.  I would love to see more contemporary movies discussing the later hip-hop generation, especially in the words of the artists themselves. I think it would serve as context.