Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Can't Stop, Won't Stop

"Homely letters grew outlines, colours, patterns, highlights, depth, shadows, arrows. Names were bubblized, gangsterized, mechanized. Letters dissected, bisected, cross-sected, fused, bulged, curved, dipped, clipped, chipped and disintegrated. They filled with shooting stars, blood drips, energy fields, polygons. They floated on clouds, zipped with motion lines, shot forward on flames. And they got bigger and bigger. Expanding from window-downs to top-to-bottom to end-to-ends, the pieces began appearing as dazzling thematic murals by 1974, covering entire sides of twelve-foot-high, sixty-foot-long cars. They were imposing themselves in bigger, more unavoidable ways. This was style as confrontation."

- My favorite passage from "Can't stop, won't stop", a book which documents the rise of hip-hop culture.

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