How do you see graffiti and breakdancing continuing to evolve?
It’s respected and it’s going to transform all these different things. Now you can look at painters bringing this Italian Renaissance form to paint portraits of young, black men. That’s hip-hop. Critics might call that “urban outsider art,” but it’s hip-hop! It’s transformed all these genres but people don’t want to recognize it. Maybe they don’t have the language. I don’t know. Sometimes it’s an issue of not wanting to connect it to the larger movement or it’s ignorance to establish it to other art forms created by young folks of color. People come up with crazy names to describe this stuff and there are a lot of mislabels for what is hip-hop. It’s like that for everything that’s not in the “four elements” of hip-hop. There’s a great chapter in the book by Bill Adler about whether or not photography is an element. A lot of mainline critics look at that and try to come up with all these analyses and analogies for what they’re doing with their camera. It’s one of those things where over
