Graffiti A. The word ‘graffiti’ derives from the Greek word graphein, meaning to write. This evolved into the Latin word graffito. Graffiti is the plural form of graffito. Simply put, graffiti is a drawing, scribbling or writing on a flat surface. Today, we equate graffiti with the ‘New York’ or ‘Hip Hop’ style which emerged from New York City in the 1970s. Hip Hop was originally an inner-city concept. It evolved from the rap music made in Brooklyn and Harlem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Donald Clarke, a music historian, has written that rap music was a reaction to the disco music of the period. Disco was centred in the rich, elitist clubs of Manhattan and rap emerged on street corners as an alternative. Using lyrical rhythms and ‘beat boxing’, the music was a way to express feelings about inner-city life. Hip Hop emerged as turntables began to be used to form part of the rhythm by ‘scratching’ (the sound created by running the stylus over the grooves of an LP). As Hip Hop music emerged so did a new outlet for artistic visibility. Keith Haring began using posters to place his uniquely drawn figures and characters in public places. Soon he began to draw directly on subway walls and transit posters. The uniqueness of his drawings eventually led to their being shown in galleries and published in books and his art became ‘legitimate’. B. At about the same time as Keith Haring, a delivery messenger began writing ‘Taki 183’ whenever he delivered documents. Soon his name was all over the city. Newspapers and magazines wrote articles about him and Keith Haring, and soon both became celebrities. This claim to fame attracted many young people, especially those involved with rapping, and they began to imitate ‘Taki 183’, as a means to indicate the writer’s presence, i.e. the age-old statement of I was here. Graffiti was soon incorporated into the Hip Hop culture and became a sort of triad with rapping and breakdancing. Breakdancing has since lost much of its initial popularity, while rapping has emerged as a major style in American music. New York City was inundated with graffiti during the late seventies and early eighties, but as media coverage faded so did the graffiti. Then, in the mid-eighties, a national TV programme did a graffiti story and set off a graffiti wildfire which has since gone global. C. In the past, graffiti artists usually worked alone, but the size and complexity of pieces, as well as safety concerns, motivated artists to work together in crews, which are groups of graffitists that vary in membership from 3 to 10 or more persons. A member of a crew can be ‘down with’ (affiliated with) more than one crew. To join a crew, one must have produced stylish pieces and show potential for developing one’s own, unique style. A crew is headed by a king or queen who is usually that person recognised as having the best artistic ability among the members of the crew. One early crew wrote TAG as their crew name, an acronym for Tuff Artists Group. Tag has since come to mean both graffiti writing, ‘tagging’ and graffiti, a ‘tag’. Crews often tag together, writing both the crew tag and their own personal tags. Graffiti has its own language with terms such as piece, toy, wild-style, and racking. D. At first pens and markers were used, but these were limited as to what types of surfaces they worked on, so very quickly everyone started using spray paint. Spray paint could mark all types of surfaces and be quick and easy to use. However, the spray nozzles on the spray cans proved inadequate to create more colourful pieces. Caps from deodorant, insecticide, and other aerosol cans were substituted to allow for a finer or thicker stream of paint. As municipalities began passing graffiti ordinances outlawing graffiti implements, clever ways of disguising paint implements were devised. Shoe polish, deodorant roll-ons and other seemingly innocent containers were emptied and filled with paint. Markers, art pens and grease pens obtained from art supply stores were also used. In fact, nearly any object which can leave a mark on most surfaces is used by taggers, though the spray can is the medium of choice for most taggers. E. As graffiti has grown, so too has its character. What began as an urban lower-income protest, graffiti now spans all racial and economic groups. While many inner-city kids are still heavily involved in the graffiti culture, taggers range from the ultra-rich to the ultra-poor. There is no general classification of graffitists. They range in age from 12-30 years old, and there are male and female artists. One tagger recently caught in Philadelphia was a 27-year-old stockbroker who drove to tagging sites in his BMW. Styles have dramatically evolved from the simple cursory style, which is still the most prevalent, to intricate interlocking letter graphic designs with multiple colours called ‘pieces’ (from master-pieces). Gang markings of territory also fit the definition of graffiti, and they mainly consist of tags and messages that provide ‘news’ of happenings in the neighbourhood. F. Graffiti shops, both retail and on-line, sell a wide variety of items to taggers. Caps, markers, magazines, T-shirts, backpacks, shorts with hidden pockets, even drawing books with templates of different railroad cars can be purchased. Over 25,000 graffiti sites exist on the world wide web; the majority of these are pro-graffiti. Graffiti vandalism is a problem in nearly every urban area in the world. Pro-graffiti web sites post photos of graffiti from Europe, South America, the Philippines, Australia, South Africa, China and Japan. Billions of dollars worldwide are spent each year in an effort to curb graffiti. G. While most taggers are simply interested in seeing their name in as many places as possible and as visibly as possible, some taggers are more content to find secluded warehouse walls where they can practise their pieces. Some of these taggers are able to sell twelve-foot canvases of their work for upwards of $10 – $12,000. As graffiti was introduced to the art world, two trends happened. One, the art world of collectors, dealers, curators, artists and the like helped graffitists evolve in style, presumably by sharing their artistic knowledge with the newcomers. Two, the exposure helped to expand graffiti into all parts of the world. Furthermore, more progressive cities have recognised the talent of graffitists by providing a means for them to do legal graffiti art, which has helped to foster the art form and lessen the amount of graffiti art that appears in the city as vandalism. Likewise, organisations who support graffiti artists seek out places to do legal graffiti such as abandoned buildings, businesses, or community walls in parks. What this shows is that some graffiti, particularly in the form of a spray can art, is recognised as art by the conventional art world.

When people are deaf to music A. Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people’s musical competence. For every brilliant pianist in the world, there are several people we refer to as “tone deaf”. It is not simply that people with tone deafness (or ‘amusia’) are unable to sing in tune, they are also unable to discriminate between tones or recognize familiar melodies. Such a “disorder” can occur after some sort of brain damage, but recently research has been undertaken in an attempt to discover the cause of congenital amusia (when people are born with the condition), which is not associated with any brain damage, hearing problems, or lack of exposure to music. B. According to the research of Dr. Isabelle Peretz of the University of Montreal, amusia is more complicated than the inability to distinguish pitches. An amusic (a person who has the condition of amusia) can distinguish between two pitches that are far apart but cannot tell the difference between intervals smaller than a half step on the Western diatonic scale, while most people can easily distinguish differences smaller than that. When listening to melodies which have had a single note altered so that it is out of key with the rest of the melody, amusics do not notice a problem. As would be expected, amusics perform significantly worse at singing and tapping a rhythm along with a melody than do non-amusics. C. The most fascinating aspect of amusia is how specific to music it is. Because of music’s close ties to language, it might be expected that a musical impairment may be caused by a language impairment. Studies suggest, however, that language and music ability are independent of one another. People with brain damage in areas critical to language are often still able to sing, despite being unable to communicate through speech. Moreover, while amusics show deficiencies in their recognition of pitch differences in melodies, they show no difficulties recognizing pitch differences in speech. Speakers of tonal languages, such as Chinese, do not report having any difficulty discriminating between words that differ only in their intonation. The linguistic cues inherent in speech make discrimination of meaning much easier for amusics. Amusics are also successful most of the time at detecting the mood of a melody, can identify a speaker based on his or her voice, and can discriminate and identify environmental sounds. D. Recent work has been focused on locating the part of the brain that is responsible for amusia. The temporal lobes of the brain, the location of the primary auditory cortex, have been considered. It has long been believed that the temporal lobes, especially the right temporal lobe, are most active when processing musical activity, so any musical disability should logically stem from here as well. Because it has been shown that there is no hearing deficit in amusia, researchers moved on to the temporal neocortex, which is where more sophisticated processing of musical cues was thought to take place. New studies, however, have suggested that the deficits in amusics are located outside the auditory cortex. Brain scans of amusics do not show any reaction at all to differences smaller than a half step, but when changes in tones are large, their brains overreact, showing twice as much activity on the right side of the brain as a normal brain hearing the same thing. These differences do not occur in the auditory cortex, indicating again that the deficits of amusia lie mostly in higher processing of melodies. E. So what does this all mean? Looking only at the research of Peretz in the field of neuropsychology of music, it would appear that amusia is some sort of disorder. As a student of neurobiology, however, I am skeptical. Certainly the studies by Peretz that have found significant differences between the brains of so-called amusics and normal brains are legitimate. The more important question now becomes one of normality. Every trait from skin color to intelligence to mood exists on a continuum—there is a great deal of variation from one extreme to the other. Just because we recognize that basic musical ability is something that the vast majority of people have, this doesn’t mean that the lack of it is abnormal. F. What makes an amusic worse off than a musical prodigy? Musical ability is culturally valued, and may have been a factor in survival at one point in human history, but it does not seem likely that it is being selected for on an evolutionary scale any longer. Darwin believed that music was adaptive as a way of finding a mate, but who needs to be able to sing to find a partner in an age when it is possible to express your emotions through a song on your iPod? G. While the idea of amusia is interesting, it seems to be just one end of the continuum of innate musical ability. Comparing this ‘disorder’ to learning disorders like a specific language impairment seems to be going too far. Before amusia can be declared a disability, further research must be done to determine whether lack of musical ability is actually detrimental in any way. If no disadvantages can be found of having amusia, then it is no more a disability than having poor fashion sense or bad handwriting.