HipHop Zurich style
Yesterday, my gangsta friend Aziz and I spontaneously went to Zurich city to check out the local HipHop scene. Since the time I did grafitti dates back as far as 1986-1989 and as Aziz is still a little bit too young for it [he will celebrate his 3rd birthday next week and is still in the state of practising grafitti sketches on paper], at the moment, both of us are not part of the grafitti movement.
Because the weather was very nice, we first hang around at the lakeside near the 'Rote Fabrik' [=red factory]. On the way back downtown, we noticed the familar sound of someone nervously shaking aerosol cans... we went closer and caught two teenage girls in action:
the girls were quite cool and took their time to finish even small details that can not be seen from a normal viewer's distance.
what Aziz and I found surprising is that the style of grafitti is again very old-school and simple. All the really great and complicated pieces with character figures that we found were already a couple of years old. Today's writers seem to go back to wildstyle and even throwup bubble letters.
Most of the pieces I did are already gone or overpainted by now. But recently, I discovered that an old one of mine is still visible. It's from 1987 and the colours are already bleached by the sunlight... I will not disclose the location here, but I will take a picture of it soon. In the same year 1987, some friends and I did the first grafittis that were legal and even paid by the local government. One of those is still partly visible. We all felt like traitors... We were supposed to spray several pieces (first they wanted to see drafts) on a wall near the main station. Someone painted a 50 meter long penis and wrote the name of a famous politician on it. All trains entering the main station stopped exactly at that place and soon, everone knew this wall and made fun of the politician. They paid us the cans and even provided us with two railway workers in orange overalls and with lights who made sure no one would disturb our nightly activities (although it was legal, we had to do it at night time for safety reasons because the rails close to the wall were not in use at this time).
Later, Aziz and I had Chinese dinner with shl, Güvengül and Daniela.
Something else I should remember for today?.... what was it? something of no importance... ah, yeah... I recall... It's weirdkoreangirl's birthday. har har ;-)