Know the Language

Tag

A writer's signature — their name, written fast, usually in one color. The simplest and most personal thing in graffiti. Everything else grows out of it.

Hand style

The personal handwriting of a tag. Two writers can spell the same name and you'd still know instantly who wrote which. Floe's hand style leans and curves like it's moving.

Throw-up

A step up from a tag: bubble letters, usually two colors — one outline, one quick fill. Built for speed. You can put up a lot of them in a night.

Piece

Short for masterpiece. Large, multi-color, carefully planned. Takes real time, which is exactly what makes it risky.

Burner

A piece so good it burns — the ones people photograph, remember and talk about years later. The crew leaves one on the wrong gate in the Pilot.

Wildstyle

Letters twisted, interlocked and layered until outsiders can't read them at all. That's the point — it's written for other writers. The Grafscals logo is wildstyle.

Whole car

A single piece covering an entire subway car, end to end, top to bottom. The big one. A whole train means the entire train — mostly legend, rarely done.

Outline & fill-in

The two halves of a piece: the outline is the shape of the letters, the fill-in is the color inside them. Writers often outline first, fill second, then re-outline to sharpen it.

Blackbook

A writer's sketchbook. Where letters get worked out before they ever hit a wall, and where other writers sign each other's pages. Nobody touches your blackbook without asking.

Cap

The nozzle on a spray can. A skinny cap gives you a thin, precise line; a fat cap covers wide area fast. Writers carry a pocketful and swap them constantly.

Getting up

Getting your name seen — everywhere, by everybody. The whole engine of graffiti culture. Somebody who's up all over the city is a king.

Toy

A beginner, or somebody whose work isn't there yet. Not a compliment. It's also a verb — to "toy" someone's piece is to deface it, which starts wars.

Biting

Copying another writer's letters or style. The one unforgivable sin. Everyone learns by studying — but you're expected to come out the other side sounding like yourself.

The buff

When the city cleans it all off — chemical wash, paint roller, gone. The thing every writer is racing. It's why photographs mattered so much in the era.

Racking

Period slang for stealing supplies, usually paint. It was common in the culture and it's still theft — Boost has been banned from Pearl Paint more times than anyone can count, and the series doesn't pretend that's heroic.

Crew

A group of writers who paint together and share a name. Bigger than friendship, smaller than a gang — a crew backs each other up, and everything you put up carries their name too.

MC

Master of ceremonies — the one on the mic. Originally the person hyping the crowd for the DJ; by this era, the rapper. That's Floe.

Cypher

A circle of MCs trading verses, taking turns, feeding off each other. No stage, no audience but each other. Floe found out what his voice could do in one of these.

Freestyle

Rapping off the top of your head, unwritten, in the moment. The purest test of an MC and the fastest way to lose a cypher.

Breaks

The stripped-down, drums-only section of a record. DJs learned to loop it between two copies to make it last — and that loop is the foundation the entire genre was built on.

Digging in the crates

Hunting through old records for a break nobody's used yet. Hours in dusty bins for four seconds of drums. Ambidextrous grew up in her grandmother's crates.

Scratching

Moving a record back and forth under the needle to turn it into a percussion instrument. One hand on the record, one on the crossfader — unless you're Ambi, in which case both hands are doing their own thing.

B-boy / b-girl

A break dancer — literally someone who dances on the break. One of the four original pillars of hip-hop, alongside DJing, MCing and graffiti writing.

Boombox

The portable stereo you carried on your shoulder. Before headphones were the default, your music was everybody's music — and how loud it was said something about you.

Fat laces

Wide, flat shoelaces threaded loose through shell-toe sneakers, often color-matched to your outfit. Pure era signature. The sneakers in this series are drawn with as much care as the faces for a reason.