A loud multiracial student movement greeted these developments. They organized their parents and peers. They disrupted board meetings, chaining themselves to the chairs in the council chambers. They mounted street protests and set up spaces to study their histories. They knew that Tucson was a possible vector of national battles to come. “We want an educational system, not just in Arizona, but beyond, where many cultures fit in,” said Leilani Clark, a student organizer with UNIDOS, the scrappy group of young activists at the heart of the fight.25
With a few exceptions the new front lines broke out where the largest percentages of young people of color lived, along an arc stretching from the Atlantic through the South and Southwest to the Pacific. Prison growth was exploding the fastest in cultural generation gap states like Arizona, Texas, Florida, and New Mexico.26 Texas, Georgia, and Arizona had the largest populations in private prisons. By the end of 2011, SB 1070 copycat laws had passed from Utah to Indiana to Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina.
Brown and Proud/Todos Somos Arizona by Melanie Cervantes of Dignidad Rebelde. 2011.
The gap states began in Florida, leaped across the Gulf to the Texas coastline, and swung up into California.27 In between were the states that African Americans had long called the “Black Belt,” stretching through the former Confederacy from Virginia down through the Carolinas around to Louisiana. Nixon and his advisors had once seen this region as the foundation of the Southern strategy and a Republican majority. Front lines of wars past were those of the present.
Rice University sociologist Stephen Klineberg told Ron Brownstein, “The future of America is in this question: Will the baby boomers recognize that they have a responsibility and a personal stake in ensuring that this generation of largely Latino and African American kids are prepared to succeed?”28
THIS AIN’T NO PARTY
But there was another potential future, one welling up from the dusty streets and the far corners of the Internet, advanced not by top-down, divide-and-conquer elites, but by the multitude—potentially, a new cultural majority. It believed, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri had written, “Empire can only isolate, divide, and segregate.”29 Its energy was youthful, self-organizing, and inclusive. It had appeared in the streets in 1999 in Seattle. It became the multitude in the streets against the wars.
This generation had been disaffected by politics, particularly the electoral kind. Ever since Bill Clinton’s 1992 election turned out a record number of young people to vote, civic engagement among under-thirties plunged to new lows each election season. The Democratic president had, with welfare reform, pushed thousands into subsistence-level conditions, and presided over unprecedented growth in the incarceration of youths of color, not the substance of hope. Young people weren’t apathetic. They were militantly skeptical.
“During our lifetime, the political system hasn’t often shown and proved it can be a viable force for change,” said James Bernard, former editor of The Source, who had become executive director of the National Hip Hop Civic Engagement Project in 2004. “That’s what we’re working against.”
The fact that “hip-hop” could be juxtaposed with “civic engagement” was a sign of something new. The concerns were political: militarism abroad and at home, profiling and incarceration and deportation, educational opportunity, health care, media justice, environmental justice, poverty, and inequality. But culture was the force through which the multitude was gathering.
In a 2009 Atlantic article entitled “The End of White America?,” Hua Hsu wrote:
As a purely demographic matter … the “white America” that Lothrop Stoddard believed in so fervently may cease to exist in 2040, 2050, or 2060, or later still. But where the culture is concerned, it’s already all but finished. Instead of the long-standing model of assimilation toward a common center, the culture is being remade in the image of white America’s multiethnic, multicolored heirs.30
He added, “[E]very child born in the United States from here on out will belong to the first post-white generation.”31
Hip-hop activism, in particular, had become a refuge for true believers of cultural change. During the 1980s, the hip-hop arts movement had drawn in multiculturalist renegades like filmmaker Carmen Ashhurst, who went to work for Russell Simmons because, she said, “Getting control of our images was my idea of what I would be doing in the movement.” By 2000, when the rap industry was peaking with ninety million albums sold, the idealists were no longer in the industry. They were in local collectives and youth-focused nonprofits.
They felt, as the spoken-word poet Jerry Quickley said, that “99 percent of what is foisted on us as ‘hip-hop culture’ is produced by less than 1 percent of the artists involved in the culture—those who have massive commercial support.” But they still trusted in the power of hip-hop as a grassroots movement to make social change. What if, they asked, we could leverage the cultural power of hip-hop into political power?
So in 2003, young visionaries—including author Bakari Kitwana, organizer Angela Woodson, community leader Ras Baraka, future Green Party vice presidential candidate Rosa Clemente—began to map out what they called a National Hip-Hop Political Convention. Inspired by the 1972 National Black Political Assembly, out of which a generation of new Black elected officials had emerged, they could connect strong local networks from the San Francisco Bay Area to the Twin Cities to Atlanta to New York. Delegates would qualify by registering fifty people to vote, and would fashion the hip-hop generation’s first national political agenda. On Tupac Shakur’s birthday in 2004, the convention opened in Newark to 6,000 attendees, including some 400 delegates from 25 states and 10 countries.
In the hallways outside crowded workshops, radio personalities and rappers like Jim Jones mingled with basketball jersey–sporting b-boys, headwrapped sisters with baby carriages, Discman-carrying high school students, and iPod-wearing businessmen. All week in Newark, freestyle ciphers spilled out onto the sidewalks. Thousands attended the free all-night park jams, featuring performers like dead prez, Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick, Wyclef Jean, and Busta Rhymes. Organizer Ras Baraka noted, “This Convention is not a construct of the Republican or Democratic Party.” He received loud applause.
The convention ended chaotically, with a patience-testing general assembly platform vote that dissipated in the gathering dusk. But the impact of the event rippled. That fall, the Hip-Hop Civic Engagement Project, Sean P-Diddy Combs’s Citizen Change, and Russell Simmons’s Hip-Hop Summit Action Network registered hundreds of thousands of new young voters of color across the United States.
On Election Day, more than four million new voters under the age of thirty showed up, the biggest youth surge since the voting age had been lowered to eighteen. Over half of them were African American or Latino, precisely the group that the journalist Farai Chideya had called “the most discouraged voters.” Turnout rates for youths of color even exceeded that of whites.
In Milwaukee, the newly formed organization Campaign Against Violence returned from Newark to register and turn out enough first-time young people of color to swing Wisconsin back in favor of Democratic candidate John Kerry. They soon parlayed this effort into blocking the passage of an anti-loitering ordinance. In Ohio young activists forced Congress to hold hearings over voting irregularities.
By the turn of the decade, half the of children under the age of three would be of color—a fact that already seemed equally banal and convulsive.32 Demographobia had led to the return of the culture wars. But the same changes that had raised so many irrational fears might also carry the new hopes of an emerging population into the mainstream. This time the stage would be national.
Original art of Wee Pals strip, published November 19, 1979. Courtesy of Morrie Turner.
Obama Unity by Marlena Buczek Smith. 2008. Courtesy the artist and Creative Action Network.
CHAPTER 13
THE WAVE
THE HOPE OF A NEW CULTURAL MAJORITY
We thought this was an election
with one big macrotrend—change.… Or so we hoped.
—David Plouffe, The Audacity To Win
Colorization was in the streets. After the turn of the millennium, millions were marching, protesting the wars or demanding immigration reform. The signs were everywhere: hand-size stickers, wheatpaste posters, “liberated” billboards, spray-painted murals or stencils covering urban surfaces of gray.
Graffiti, hip-hop and skateboard street marketing, guerrilla postering, and subvertising had long been DIY things. The 2000s became the decade of street art in part because the kids raised on these movements had reached critical mass. But what would they have to say?
Shepard Fairey, the biggest American street artist of all, had grown up during the early 1980s in Charleston, South Carolina, a mischievous skateboarder in a Clash T-shirt he had hand-stenciled, zipping through town on a board he had customized with handmade stickers of punk bands and skate companies.
When he arrived at the Rhode Island School of Design, he underwent a minor identity crisis. He had always stuck out in Charleston. How could he make his mark here among classrooms full of creative, competitive kids eager to enter their names in the annals of art history? Perhaps by avoiding the question entirely.
Fairey’s inspiration came from the street. He began photographing stickers he saw, and designing T-shirts for the skate shop he worked at in Providence. When he went with his class to New York City on a museum-hopping field trip, he didn’t care about the art he saw in the galleries. He was mesmerized by the graf tags on the way.
“From outside the city going in, there was a number of tags and it became more frequent, larger, more daring as you went into the city,” Fairey told the street artist and curator Aaron Rose. “People were taking great risks to do these works that they would be doing anonymously other than the nom de guerre of the piece itself, and that inspired me.”1
Back at the skate shop, he showed his boss how to make stenciled stickers using a picture of French pro wrestler Andre the Giant. His boss gave up in frustration. But Fairey, who had joked to his boss that Andre would accumulate crew bigger than the shop’s, needed to finish the punch line. His finished stickers read “Andre the Giant Has a Posse,” and on the back, baseball card–style, listed his weight and height: 7’ 4”, 520 lb.
Fairey got such a laugh that he printed more at the local copy store, then even more, and spent the rest of the summer on a one-person bombing mission, covering Providence with “Andre the Giant” stickers like a NYC tagger. Soon the local alt-weekly offered a reward to anyone who could identify the perpetrator behind the sticker. Fairey was giddy. He decided to seek, he said, “world domination through stickers.”2
Posters, T-shirts, and skate-mag ads quickly followed. Then he defaced a political billboard trumpeting the return bid of the infamous Providence politician Buddy Cianci, a former mayor whose first term in office had ended when he pled guilty to beating and torturing a building contractor. Fairey replaced Cianci’s face with Andre’s, altered the billboard text to read “Andre never stopped caring about Providence” and affixed a sign reading “Join the Posse.” Suddenly the small town was abuzz with conspiracy theories. Fairey realized people thought he had made some kind of agitprop.
FUN-ISM
His private joke had gone public in a big way. Over the next seven years, he made over a million stickers. He started selling T-shirts and posters through his own company. Inspired by They Live, John Carpenter’s 1988 antiauthoritarianism/anticonsumerism horror flick, he called it Obey.
He cast the logo in the stark Barbara Kruger red, white, and black. Andre the Giant’s newly stylized face—reportedly reworked to dodge a lawsuit from the sports company who owned the trademark—appeared above the word “Obey” or “Giant.”3 The real Andre the Giant died in 1993, but by then, thanks to Fairey, he was known more as a meme than as a wrestler.
In the nineties, no one went bigger than Fairey. Through his tireless labor, his wheatpasted posters suddenly seemed ubiquitous, not just on the buildings, billboards, water towers, and highways of the east, but all around the world. He was on more streets than the most up taggers. He was winning more impressions than big corporations armed with street teams and marketing budgets.
He told Rose:
When I was in school and people said to me, “You know what, this Andre the Giant thing, I read your manifesto about phenomenology, it’s well-written, I think if you expanded upon that you could get a grant, and you could continue to pursue this project.” What I said was, “This project is about connecting with people who are not already familiar with the fine art world, or even the conceptual art world, and maybe even the politics of graffiti.”… I’m just making my work democratic.4
Fairey didn’t aspire to be a fine artist, he wanted to be a known artist. Perhaps all his talk about democracy and McLuhan and Heidegger and the rest was ex post facto left-brain justification for the insane adrenaline rush of getting up along the city skyline after midnight.
He had contracts with Pepsi, Honda, Dewar’s, and Sprite. He was selling a lot of Obey gear. He was being seen. It was all fun. That was what distinguished this as-yet-unnamed street art from art-school art. It wasn’t about formalism. It was about fun-ism. If shit was fun that was reason enough to do it. If it was risky and controversial, it would probably be even more fun.
Fairey was attracted to radical art the way some DJs were to Eastern Bloc psychrock 45s. He sampled poster art from Cuba, Mexico, and China; the work of American social realists, Russian Constructivists, and German Expressionists; the designs of Black Panthers and the American Third World movement.
But then he stripped the images of their political content and dropped in the words “Obey” or “Giant.” He would put Fidel Castro, fist raised, in bold strokes of red, yellow, orange, and black, above a tagline like “Power to the Posse.” After he did Lenin, Che, and Mao, he did Nixon, Saddam Hussein, and Ming the Merciless the same way just for kicks. Some called his posters Orwellian, some Warholian. Others saluted them as effective branding. Fairey called them “a Rorschach test,” and he had everyone taking it.5
That meant, of course, that he was also amassing haters. There were angry municipalities and businesses, police and anti-graffiti ideologues. There were art critics who laughed off Fairey’s claims that he was trying to undermine authoritarianism and advertising. (One called Obey Giant “Hello Kitty with pretensions.”6) Those types didn’t seem to bother him. But then there was the community of artists and activists with whose early support he had built his rep and who were now questioning his very intentions.
Some called Fairey a culture vulture. In a Web broadside, artist Mark Vallen revealed Fairey’s sources, putting originals side-by-side with the Obey posters to show how they had been emptied of meaning. Fairey was not a real artist, Vallen charged, just a plagiarist trafficking in radical chic. “I am outraged that anyone could make a career out of the consistent, secretive and wholesale copying of other people’s artworks,” Vallen wrote.7
To others, appropriation was just a technique and not the problem. Stencilist and printmaker Josh MacPhee, who had with the artist Favianna Rodriguez coproduced Reproduce & Revolt, a highly popular clip-art book, asked, “Does Fairey have less right to the social imaginary of revolution than the rest of us?”
Artists, he wrote, “had reached the terrible point that what is important to us is trying to rip our identity from the jaws of Fairey (capitalism), rather than fighting capitalism itself. Fairey is simply an obvious visual example of the process that goes on around us each and every day. Is there any image we can create that isn’t going to be immediately absorbed by advertising, and thus capitalism?”
MacPhee wrote, “His work will only be successful (at more than making money) when he cites his source materials and tries to cut through the amnesiac haze of our society instead of adding to it. When a Fairey wheatpaste on the street becomes not an advertisement for his clothing site but a site for arguing over how we fight an
d struggle in this world today, I’ll be the first one to send people out to look at it and argue about it.”8
At an exhibition opening in Los Angeles, Pacifica Radio journalist Aura Bogado confronted him over a poster in which he had altered Alberto Korda’s famous portrait of Che by replacing the icon’s face with Andre the Giant’s. Fairey replied that he wasn’t commenting on Che, but on the fact that Korda’s picture had become a cliché. His work, he seemed to be arguing, was post-Post.
“Many of these so-called ‘radicals’ have adopted the politically correct doctrine that says white people have no right to try to relate to, or comment on, other cultures,” he retorted to her and his critics in Tokion magazine. “I use figures in my work who I feel are used and abused as symbols, but without telling the viewer how to feel about them.”9 Bogado replied that she was not making a point about white appropriation but about misappropriation. “I will write now what I said then: your work disrespects icons of color,” she wrote. “That is what I remember about our conversation, I was trying (and obviously failed) to explain the way in which you culturally appropriate the images of icons of color, like Che and others, for capitalist gain.”10
Fairey defended himself by declaring himself apolitical. “There is no specific political affiliation behind what I do, only the philosophy ‘question everything,’ which is why I can use Jesse Jackson and Joseph Stalin in the same body of work,” he wrote. “As disconcerting as the word ‘Obey’ may be, when not attached to any further command, it poses no threat beyond forcing viewers to face their feelings about obedience.”11
This sounded evasive. Up until then, Fairey had been less a provocateur than an artist who admired the style of provocation. But to what end? Most street artists were too busy having fun to think about such a question. And now he had to.
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