Graffiti is a song you write on a wall. The city is the paper. The spray can is the instrument. And the audience is everybody who walks past it on the way to work. Graffiti does not ask for your attention. Graffiti takes your attention. You cannot not see it. A song on the radio you can turn off. Graffiti on a wall you have to walk around.

TAKI 183 wrote his name on every subway car in New York City in nineteen seventy-one. He was a kid from Washington Heights. A messenger. He wrote TAKI 183 everywhere he went and the New York Times put him on the front page and the city could not figure out why a kid writing his name on a wall was news. It was news because the city had spent a hundred years telling people like TAKI that they did not exist. TAKI wrote his name on the wall to prove that he did.

Basquiat started as SAMO. Same old thing. He wrote riddles on the walls of SoHo and the art world could not stop looking. SAMO IS DEAD he wrote and then he put down the spray can and picked up a paintbrush and became the most expensive American painter of his generation. But the work on the walls was better. The work on the walls was free. The work on the walls did not need a gallery or a dealer or a collector. The work on the walls needed a wall and a can and the nerve to say something in a place where somebody would have to see it.

On the corner I was graffiti. My guitar was the spray can. My voice was the paint. I put my song on the wall of the city and the city could not wash it off. Every busker is graffiti. You stand in a place where nobody invited you and you make your mark and then you leave and the mark stays in the ears of everybody who walked past. You cannot power-wash a song out of somebody's memory.

They call graffiti vandalism. They called rock and roll noise. They called street music loitering. The establishment has a word for everything it does not control and the word is always a crime. Graffiti is a crime. Busking is a crime. Being young and loud and visible in a city that wants you quiet and invisible is a crime. The best art is always a little bit illegal. Because legal art is art that somebody approved and approved art has already had the danger removed. The danger is the point.