Graffiti,The Hague
Also in the Hague you can find some of the important branches of Hiphop. There is a large rap community over here producing, performing and distributing their own music. The rap music is mostly spit in Dutch, but it has the same raw feeling as when I heard NWA or Public Enemy at the start of the nineties.
You can also find a lot of graffiti pieces or tags.
When I was a teenager I thought that every piece or tag was cool, but yes, age has also turned me into a more critical man and I can’t really appreciatie graffiti on clean trains or houses, especially since I’m a house-owner myself. But when I see it as a decoration on furniture, on walls at a party or club, it really enhances the party mood with its colour and forms.
I don’t know any hiphop artist that got big and famous with graffiti pieces that still look like urban graffiti. I know I was struck by the movie Basquiat I saw in the nineties about the Haitian-American graffiti /street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
I did’t heard of him before and after I saw the movie. I always kept him in mind everytime I saw something about other graffiti/ street visual artists (like Keith Haring) or the urban hiphop culture.
The movie was released in 1996 and I just discovered a documentary The Radiant Child about Basquiat from 2010. I still haven’t watched the documentary (but I will) and here’s the trailer of the movie (note the bebop tune Salt Peanuts of Dizzy Gillespie on the background):
