Street Art Vocabulary Throwdown

Dedicating a big portion of my life to graffiti and street art, I appreciate the fact that it has come to popularity enough that the Oxygen Channel chose to pitch it to mass audiences worldwide.  Unfortunately, tuning in to see the dilution of street art by corporations, to convert it for soccer mom entertainment is kind of a let-down. They really made very little attempt to stay true to the graffiti culture and that’s what brings us here today!

In a recent Street Art Throwdown episode titled “Going All-City”, the term “Bombing” was used by Bua and the definition: “Bombing: Painting over someone else’s piece with your own piece” flashed in the lower left corner. Maybe when Bua was working the streets that was a correct usage of the term, but today it has a much different definition. To do our part to help out the crew over at Oxygen, we will have a little vocabulary refresher.

To “bomb” means to hit up your piece all over an area. To keep things quick, a bomb is usually either a tag or a throw-up (or throwie). Picture the most prolific west coast (LA) writer: Chaka. California authorities accused Daniel Ramos of between ten and fifty thousand unique incidents of him tagging the word CHAKA. That’s BOMBING!

In the show, the term Bombing was introduced to during the challenge, to get the contestants to paint over each other’s work. For most of the artists this was considered “illegal” in the graffiti world or “the ultimate sign of disrespect”. There were a couple graffers who did take the bait and went up on top of their co-competitors artwork.

For the record: The correct terminology for this is “Going Over”. To go over a piece of graffiti simply means to paint on top of it. While most writers respect one another's artwork, to intentionally and disrespectfully paint on top of another's work is akin to a graffiti declaration of war. However (due partially to the limited amount of desirable wall-space) most graffiti writers maintain a hierarchy of sorts;

A tag can legitimately be covered by a throw-up, and a throw-up by a piece, and this is commonly done without incident. If a piece has previously been slashed (or "dissed"), it is also acceptable for another writer to go over it. To violate these guidelines, or to simply paint lower-quality graffiti on top of a higher-quality artist's work will quickly characterize a writer as an annoyance, or "toy."

Surprise! You cannot believe everything you hear on TV...

For more Street Art terms check out our Blog article titled: Street Art: From Tags to Riches