Crimes of Style: Urban Graffiti and the Politics of Criminality.

• Date: 22 September 1993
• Author: Hamm, Mark S.
• Published date: 22 September 1993
• Author: Hamm, Mark S.

Where you going?

Denver.

Well, I can take you a hundred miles up the line.

"Grand, grand, you saved my life."

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

SO BEGINS THE REMARKABLE SAGA OF POST-WORLD WAR II AMERICAN YOUTH subcultures (1955: 21). Winding and weaving through the social and political contentions of postwar America, Kerouac's beats eventually gave rise to the hippies who, in turn, inflected the social construction of such youth subcultures as the cosmic cowboys and the superflys during the 1970s; to the punks, anarchists, grungers, hip hoppers, and -- by a creel twist of fate -- the neo-Nazi skinheads of the American 1980s and 1990s.

Along the way, contemporary music and its resultant subcultural styles have sometimes blended into exciting forms of progressive value consensus among youth; sometimes, these styles have been violently rejected by youth, leading to retrogressive forms of cognitive dissonance (witness the dramatic differences between American hippies of the 1960s, for example, and the skinheads of the 1980s). Yet today, more than anything else, American youth express themselves abstractly. This has led to the creation of an intricate mosaic of stylistic forms representing a wide diversity in subcultural values. This is now being expressed in the militant rap music of such popular groups as Niggers with Attitude and Public Enemy; the funeral metal of acts such as Ministry and Megadeth; to the integration of musical forms d la Living Colour, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and Ice-T's recent collaboration with Body Count. Alas, American youth subcultures have become so interleaved with one another, so immediately responsive to the ceaseless flux of fad and fashion, and so damnably complex that they seem to defy the sociological imagination necessary to define them.

Yet in the railroad yards of Denver, where Kerouac once stood and felt "the twilight sadness of a train whistle hooting in the wind" (in Jarvis, 1974: 152), things appear to be much simpler. There sits a silent monument to the old dharma bum himself. Amid the squalor of weeds, discarded beer cans, whiskey bottles, cigarette butts, paint cans, and rags, someone has spray-painted a richly textured portrait of Kerouac on an abandoned brick building facing the Southern Pacific railway, along with the words "Hit the Road Jack." It is, moreover, a deeply moving tribute to a literary genius who had a profound influence on postwar American youth subcultures. Yet there is a problem with all of this: "Hit the Road Jack" is illegal. Instead of recognizing the historic importance of this artwork, the Denver criminal justice system has made graffiti-writing a crime.

Crimes of Style

Through his analysis of the Denver hip hop graffiti scene, Jeff Ferrell offers a truly outstanding study of the tensions between youth subcultural style and criminal behavior. Crimes of Style is truly outstanding for several reasons. Most immediately, Ferrell's research methodology is extremely unique to modern criminology. Rather than squeezing data out of an existing government publication, or asking faceless would-be criminals to respond to anonymous questionnaires, Ferrell gathered data by entering the field, where he thoroughly immersed himself in a criminal subculture, committing more than a dozen crimes himself as he "participated time and again with graffiti writers in the process of doing graffiti" (26). Instead of statistical tables, Ferrell offers us insights into real people. Rather than discussions about career criminals, social science methodology, or empirically groundless polemics about raging collectives of adolescent males -- which now dominate the language of mainstream criminology (e.g., Gottfredson and Hirschi, 1990: 207-208) -- Ferrell invites us to lay all of this aside and...