Out sick today and tomorrow, so here's a quick note:

This month's waxpoetics has a fairly comprehensive, provocative article on the history of graffiti called "Graffiti's not hip-hop" . . .

Children as young as seven and eight were racking paint and sneaking into yards, escaping danger at every turn just to make a mark on a society that had turned it's head.

Morgan Wells promotes the viewpoint that hip hop has, "grown out of its own shoes" . . . or gone wayward from its original embodiment of "defiance and creativity." Some of the clearest insights involve the effect of mass media on a grass-roots movement. He quotes one writer . . .

"You can even live your life thinking you're part of a culture without
knowing that it was created by someone in order to sell it to a network. That's how deep the control, the manipulation, and the creation of these false concepts goes."