Graffiti
...reate a sense of intimidation and may increase the sense of within a neighborhood. Gang members use graffiti to mark their turf, declare their respect to the gang, advertise a gang’s status or power, and to challenge rival gangs. Graffiti is also used to communicate messages between gangs using codes with common meanings. Most gang graffiti contains a message to a rival gang or to fellow gang members. It almost never is a message for the general public. Graffiti artists work alone or work in groups called crews. A crew, according to T-Kid, “is a unit of dudes who work together to achieve a goal: to get up and to go all city”. Each artist in the crew has their own nickname called a tag. The writer can make up a name, inherit an established name from an old writer, become part of a series such as TAKE ONE, TAKE FIVE and so on. The crew is usually initialed but stands for something. For example: TCB stands for Tri City Bombers. Usually, all the crew names are three lettered. There is a strong sense of community within a crew and members will kick out writers who are only out for their own fame. A popular crew will attract a lot of beginners who want to have the privilege of tagging their name. Members jealously guard this privilege and will cross out the name of their crew where it has been used by someone who isn’t “down”. Hip-hop artists come together setting their imaginations ablaze as well as sometimes the buildings they occupy. They make such places their own, not by claiming them as territory but by using the space toward their own ends. People write hip-hop graffiti to represent themselves within a domain of hip-hop graffiti writers; they work to obtain a name and position within that domain for reasons that are additive and positive. Hip-hop graffiti seldom has to do with violence, and graffiti writers are rarely people who should be feared. Often, the places they tag raise assumptions of danger. Hip-hop artists mostly tag for pride and self-expression, they believe it’s a way of life or a way of hip-hop culture. Hip-hop graffiti and gang graffiti differ at few basic levels. First, hip-hop graffiti doesn’t have a lot of territorial or neighborhood relations. Taggers and writers use the whole city as their canvas, as opposed to gangs who only like to advertise in their neighborhoods or in rival gangs. There is rarely any violence involved with hip-hop graffiti, while in gang graffiti violence can occur fairly quickly. Hip-hop graffiti is way more artistic than gang graffiti because hip-hop graffiti comes in all shapes in sizes and colors and gang graffiti is just writing and not much thought is put into ...