Police are investigating an incident in which Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian graffiti was discovered on a wall of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.
Police are investigating an incident in which Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian graffiti was discovered on a wall of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland.
The message, which contained hateful rhetoric directed at Muslim and Palestinian communities, was discovered early Friday morning.
Hate speech toward Muslim and Palestinian communities found Friday, Jan. 16, 2026, on a wall at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Maryland. (Credit CAIR)
In a letter home to the school community, Whitman Principal Gregory Miller said the graffiti was “profoundly offensive” and that type of “hate speech is completely unacceptable, hurtful, and will not be tolerated at Walt Whitman High School or any school in Montgomery County.”
Miller added that school officials are working with police to review security camera footage and meet with students.
Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich said in a statement that the hateful act “does not reflect who we are as a County and will not be tolerated,” adding that the county police department is working with the school system to “find the perpetrators.”
At-Large Council member Will Jawando said in a post on social media the message is a “direct threat to the safety and well-being of our students.”
“As a parent of MCPS students and as Chair of the Education and Culture Committee, I find it unacceptable for any child to walk into a place of learning and be met with calls for the obliteration of their people or their faith,” Jawando said.
He added that his team is working with MCPS and local law enforcement to monitor the situation.
“It’s on each of us in Montgomery County to ensure that hate has no place here,” Council member Andrew Friedson added in a post.
The graffiti was quickly painted over Friday morning.
Anyone with information in the case is asked to contact the school administration, the police non-emergency line at 301-279-8000, or anonymously through the Maryland Safe Schools Tip-Line at 1-833-632-7233.
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People remove a new artwork by Banksy, depicting a howling wolf painted on a satellite dish that was placed on a shop roof in Peckham, south London. Photo: Jordan Pettitt/PA Images via Getty Images
The trio of art thieves descended on their target with precision, audacity and insouciance. They wore dark hoodies, masks and gloves. They brought with them everything they would need: a ladder to gain access and tools to dislodge the art from its moorings. And within a minute, they were done, vanishing along with their prize.
It wasn’t exactly the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist, but last August’s brazen daylight plunder on Rye Lane in South London netted the thieves an hours-old work by street art legend Banksy, a depiction of a howling wolf rendered on a satellite dish that was part of his London Zoo series. There were dozens of eyewitnesses, and the theft was captured in photographs and video, yet a year later, there has been no sign of the stolen artwork, and no arrests have been made.
Over the decades, as the value of street art has climbed dramatically, works created in the wild by some of the genre’s greats—Banksy, Ron English, Kenny Scharf, Invader and many others—have increasingly come into private hands. When legitimate ownership can be proven, they are sold in galleries and auction houses. Sometimes, as in the case of the stolen Banksy, they disappear into a black market abyss.
Street art gets diverted from its urban habitat in a variety of ways. There’s the perplexing set of circumstances described above in which thieves illegally make off with something of value that has no clear owner and that was created illegally. Then there’s the more common and more legitimate means, which usually involves a building owner deciding to sell a piece of brick wall that has been enriched by a work of art. Either way, the diversion of street art into private hands angers both art lovers and artists.
A Banksy in the wild on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Photo: Jamie Lubetkin
“I am vehemently against it,” Ken Harman, whose Harman Projects galleries in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles feature studio work by prominent street artists, told Observer. “The intention of the artist in these scenarios is that the artwork lives on as part of the public conversation. To remove the art and keep it for private use goes against what the work was made for and why it was made.”
What happens to stolen street art after it is removed from public spaces is sometimes a mystery. Police rarely recover stolen works, at least in part, because it can be unclear whether a crime has been committed, as establishing ownership is not always easy. And because legitimate galleries and auction houses won’t go near stolen stuff, a less lucrative black market may be thieves’ only option to dispose of their loot.
When building owners decide to sell work committed on their property, legitimate galleries and auctions sometimes get involved, but interest in such work has been spotty and prices have not approached those of studio-created work by the same artists. While artists frown on any form of diversion of their public work, it’s theft that really lights their fuses.
“I had my mural at Woodstock stolen, and they literally removed the façade of Fashion Moda in the Bronx with my mural on it,” Ron English, the graffiti art pioneer who is often referred to as the Godfather of Street Art, told Observer. He then quipped, sarcastically, how nice it is that people are so passionate about art before acknowledging that the motive for these thefts is the potential sale value.
“They don’t like or respect art, they want money and are willing to steal a piece of art from all of us to line their pockets. If I wanted a thief to own a piece of my art I would drop it off at their house,” added the loquacious English, whose POPaganda art practice includes street art, fine art, sculpture, toys, film, music and NFTs.
The question of ownership is vexing to law enforcement when street art vanishes and to dealers when they are presented with suspect works by prospective sellers. Peter N. Salib, a law professor at the University of Houston who wrote the seminal 2016 legal paper The Law of Banksy: Who Owns Street Art?, said property owners have the strongest ownership rights when it comes to street art, but the public also has at least a tangential interest. Artists, not so much.
“I don’t have a strong view on whether artists or the public have an interest in street art,” he told Observer. “I’m inclined to think that artists mostly don’t. Both because they’re often putting their art on somebody else’s property, and because by choosing to do so, they have, in a sense, relinquished control. As for the public, I do think the public has an interest in the art existing and being seen.”
For his paper, Salib looked at a pair of cases, including one involving a piece called Slave Labor that was painted by Banksy on the wall of a store in Haringey, London, in 2012. The owner of the building attempted to sell the piece at auction, but residents of Haringey claimed they had an interest in the work and were successful in blocking an initial attempt to sell it. Later, however, the building owner was successful in selling the piece, reportedly for around $730,000.
The purchaser? Ron English, who vowed to whitewash the piece in a statement against removing street art from the wild. He suggested that whitewashing the piece would create a new work of art, a la Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing, which Rauschenberg created by erasing a Willem de Kooning work in 1953. English said he planned to do the whitewashing at Art Basel Hong Kong in 2020, but the show was canceled because of COVID-19. He still has the piece, but its future has not been determined.
Guernsey’s President Arlan Ettinger with the Banksy work he brought to auction for a Brooklyn property owner. Photo courtesy Guernsey’s
In May, a Brooklyn family sought to sell a 7,500-pound piece of concrete wall they removed from a warehouse they owned after Banksy painted a version of his iconic balloon heart on it. They brought it to market via the auction house Guernsey’s, which is known for selling offbeat auction items like doors from the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.
Guernsey’s president Arlan Ettinger said his staff first set out to verify that the family actually owned the piece. Once ownership was established, the piece was offered with the starting price of $500,000. There were no bids.
“It’s a commanding piece, an attention getter, but it’s more than 7,000 pounds. Where are you going to put that? We got some offers right after the auction, but the family—lovely, working-class people—are holding out for what they believe it’s worth,” Ettinger told Observer.
Brian Swarts, president and director of Tagliatella Galleries, a leading global dealer in the work of street artists, said street art that is removed from the wild legitimately can have significant value, but it does not approach that of a work created for private markets. “There’s been a lot of debate over that over the years,” he explained. “With Banksy and some of the other leading street artists that have a lot of money attached to their work, even if it’s not a signed, numbered, studio-issued piece of artwork, there’s still some value there.”
Like the other gallery representatives, Swarts said he demands proof of ownership and other documentation demonstrating the work’s provenance before he will consider getting involved. “The only time I’ve ever sold works like that is if there’s some sort of documentation of it. Even though it’s unique, it’s not the same as selling a signed original from the studio,” he added.
While there is clearly a black market for work that doesn’t pass the galleries’ smell tests, little is known about it, even by those closest to the street art scene. Alan Ket, who owns Miami’s Museum of Graffiti with co-founder Allison Freidin, said he has not encountered black marketeers, but he noted that stolen and fake street art is sold openly on online markets like eBay. “There is a segment of the population that is unscrupulous and that wants stuff for free and who are OK with theft.”
Banksy’s work is undoubtedly the most frequently diverted; not only is it the most valuable, but it’s also among the most accessible, turning up regularly on streets around the world. One example is the rendering of a boy swinging a hammer that has graced Manhattan’s Upper West Side for years. Another is in London’s Shoreditch neighborhood and depicts a cop with a poodle on a leash. Both are protected by nothing more than plexiglass.
An Invader work in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, Paris. Photo: J. Scott Orr
Invader, the French mosaic master who draws inspiration from early video games, is probably number two on thieves’ hit list. Rather than spray paint, Invader’s work is made of colorful tiles that thieves commonly try to remove in the hope of reassembling them elsewhere.
“Shame on them!” Invader has written of street art thieves. “Street art belongs to the street… Buyers should think twice about what they do; not only are they being duped but they are also depriving other people of enjoying free art on the street.”
Lori Zimmer, author of Art Hiding in New York, Art Hiding in Paris and the recently released I’m Not Your Muse, said the unprecedented increase in value of work by street artists has led to a commodification of a product that was once simply a source of public enjoyment. “The sale of pieces meant for the street to private hands, done by removing, or cutting, or destroying the walls they are painted on, is in some ways pretty gross,” she added, “but feels very on brand for the perversion of late-stage capitalism we are currently living in.”
A famed architect to the stars designed it. A renowned Hollywood producer occupied it. A relative of a reviled international terrorist abandoned it. And now a Mediterranean villa on a hillside in genteel Bel-Air has become the latest target of mysterious graffiti vandals.
Sometime late last week, spray-paint-wielding intruders turned the pink walls of this seven-bedroom mansion into a helter-skelter canvas of pop art, obscure quotations and political insinuations — the third hillside home in Los Angeles to be defaced in recent days.
Police detained one man at the two-acre property on Stone Canyon Road late Friday, but the real estate agent who oversees the property said a security guard believed the uninvited visitor was only taking pictures of the home. She declined to press charges.
Police and the private security firm that patrols the verdant neighborhood near the Hotel Bel-Air said they had no further clues about who vandalized the house, with missives and sketches filling most of the walls both inside and outside the once luxurious residence.
Graffiti covers interior walls of the home, and on the floors are empty cans of spray paint and beer.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
On Sunday morning, emptied paint cans and beer bottles littered many of the rooms and a front patio. Windows above the front door had been shattered. Others had been rendered opaque with black and red paint. An elegant stone archway had been emblazoned with “Hopes” in black paint.
“They really completely destroyed everything. There is broken glass everywhere. It’s been defamed, vandalized,” said the agent who is selling the property and spoke on condition that she would not be named. “It’s so horrible. Horrible.”
Two large homes in the Hollywood Hills got a similar treatment recently. The property crimes follow the much-publicized defacing of downtown high-rises with graffiti.
A guard who has patrolled the neighborhood for years said he had chased others off the property, most recently three young men who were also shooting video Saturday night.
“They asked me, ‘Can we stay and take pictures?’ “ recalled the guard. “I said to them, ‘Can I just come into your house without an invitation and then stay?’“
The guard, who also requested anonymity, wondered whether the intruders wanted photos “as part of some kind of competition or something.” He said that, several months ago, squatters backed a moving truck up to the home, apparently ready to take up residence. He told them they had five minutes to get lost. They did.
The Bel-Air mansion sits at the end of a long driveway, shielded from the street by tall stands of trees and bamboo. Three Bel-Air neighbors said they had not heard about the vandalism until a reporter told them about it Sunday.
Police and private security said they had no clues about who was responsible for the vandalism.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The vandalism marks a low point for a home born in Hollywood splendor.
Architect John Elgin Woolf designed the villa, one of many he helped create for luminaries including Bob Hope, Cary Grant, Judy Garland and Errol Flynn.
Producer Arthur Freed lived there for years. He made classics including “Brigadoon,” “Showboat,” “An American in Paris,” “Gigi” and “Singin’ in the Rain.” He also co-wrote the song “Singin’ in the Rain” with Nacio Herb Brown.
Freed also served as an associate producer (uncredited) on “The Wizard of Oz” and, by one account, was among those who fought to keep the song “Over the Rainbow” in the film after some of the filmmakers wanted to cut it.
Freed served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He died in 1973 in Los Angeles.
Ibrahim bin Laden, a member of the wealthy Saudi construction dynasty, bought the Bel-Air home in the 1980s. He is the half-brother of Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Bin Laden brother and his family used the Bel-Air property as a vacation home, but they have not lived there for more than 25 years, the real estate agent said. For a time, a manager lived in a guest house and tended to the property, but he fell ill and moved out several years ago.
The family considered leasing the home and hired a contractor to improve the bathrooms and kitchen. But work crews only tore out walls and never completed the work, the agent said.
Architect John Elgin Woolf designed the villa that sits behind tall trees on the two-acre property on Stone Canyon Road.
(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
The house has been listed for sale since 2021, with the asking price as high as $28 million. It’s currently listed for $21.5 million. One buyer who had placed an offer is deciding what to do, after being apprised of the graffiti damage, the agent said.
Among the messages scrawled on the interior walls are an expletive and “Osama!” Nearby, another message reads: “G.W. Bush Helped You.”
The agent said she sent a video of the damage to her clients, who maintain several other homes around the world. “They are very, very upset,” she said. “I mean, it is really devastating.” She also pleaded for the public to understand that the owners had nothing to do with the faults of their famous relative.
At one massive home nearby, a man who answered via intercom said he had not heard anything about the vandalism. At another gated mansion, a housekeeper came on the speaker phone and said she did not want to talk.
One prominent Bel-Air resident had no doubt whom he blamed for the crime — the city’s political leaders.
“L.A.’s woke. It’s also broke,” said Fred Rosen, the onetime chief executive of Ticketmaster, the computer ticketing giant. “The city’s broken. There’s crime, people leaving and politicians lying more than usual.”
Rosen, who lives not far from the graffitied mansion, blamed L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón, in particular, for what he said was a lack of accountability for wrongdoing.
“We’ve had a basic breakdown of consequences for bad behavior,” Rosen said. “I don’t know anybody — from the Valley, to the Westside, to Compton — who’s not afraid, or isn’t concerned.”
It took a barrage of news about his graffiti-slathered mansions to compel producer John Powers Middleton to pipe up about their slow demise in the Hollywood Hills .
The son of the billionaire owner of the Philadelphia Phillies issued a formal apology to his neighbors and the City of Los Angeles after complaints surfaced about the seemingly abandoned properties, the Los Angeles Times and NBC4 reported.
The homes a few miles apart have been vacant for years, drawing squatters and vandals with spray paint. In recent weeks, residents said they’ve noticed graffiti on the walls of the homes on the 1700 block of Mulholland Drive and on North Sunset Plaza Drive.
Both home addresses were not disclosed.
Middleton said both mansions had security in place and had been overseen by a property manager. He said that now there’s 24/7 armed security at both locations.
“What’s happened to the two properties I own is unacceptable, and no matter what caused it, I own the houses,” Middleton said in his first statement since his homes gained national attention. “Given the persistence of the numerous trespassers, it’s a struggle.
“I’m disappointed to note that even as I have worked this week to paint over the graffiti, vandals still managed to break in and paint over the newly cleaned walls.”
The 40-year-old TV and film producer didn’t say why he let the homes, empty for years, deteriorate for so long.
“It’s just insane,” a woman who has lived near one of the homes since 2008 told the Times. “There was once a gorgeous home there. I mean, who does that? Who walks away from a $10-million house like that and just lets it go to squatters?”
City workers placed a fence in front of the Mullholland property this week and police officers were at the site. City crews boarded up its windows and whitewashed graffiti covering much of the four-story home.
Police arrested a man and a woman on suspicion of breaking into the house and possessing a firearm.
Middleton promised to repay the city any taxpayer funds used to protect the property.
The absent owner bought the four-story mansion on Sunset Plaza in 2013 for $7 million. Police records show officers responded to the home 17 times this year, including calls about burglars, prowlers and vandalism.
Middleton bought the six-bedroom Mulholland Drive mansion in 2012 for $4.7 million. After it was declared a public nuisance a decade later, the Department of Building and Safety ordered Middleton to build a fence and secure the property. When he didn’t, the city built the fence.
Property taxes have not been paid on the Mulholland home since 2022, according to the Los Angeles County Assessor’s Office.
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Middleton, whose film credits as an executive producer include “Death Note,” “Nimona” and “Good Boys,” comes from a family whose tobacco firm, John Middleton, launched the Black & Mild stogie in the 1980s and popularized rolling pipe tobacco into cigars, according to the Times.
In 2007, his father John S. Middleton sold the business to the parent company of Philip Morris for $2.9 billion, according to Forbes. The elder Middleton is also the CEO and co-owner of the Philadelphia Phillies, which has disavowed having anything to do with the nuisance homes.
As D.C.’s Department of Public Works tries to clean up graffiti off some city buildings, parts of the District embrace it as art.
Mural artist Eric B. Ricks poses for a portrait in front of a mural that he oversaw and instructed young artist to paint in 2017 , Monday, Sept. 16, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)(AP/John McDonnell)
Mural artist Eric B. Ricks poses for a portrait in front of a mural that he oversaw and instructed young artist to paint in 2017 , Monday, Sept. 16, 2024, in Washington. (AP Photo/John McDonnell)(AP/John McDonnell)
WASHINGTON (AP) — U Street is mostly deserted when Aceba Broadus and his three-person crew from the District of Columbia’s Department of Public Works start setting up shop before 8 a.m. at one of D.C.’s perennial graffiti hot spots.
They tap a hydrant to fill the 275-gallon tank in their truck and get to work — coating graffiti-covered walls with a special chemical and then blasting them with high-pressure water. The work progresses quickly, but Broadus holds few illusions that their efforts will last long.
“Come back on Friday and it will be all retagged again,” he said on a Tuesday. “It’s definitely a bit frustrating.”
Across town, Eric B. Ricks is engaged in his own graffiti project, far different from the tags and protest slogans often found on buildings and monuments across the nation’s capital. Using a scissor lift, Ricks applies a coat of primer to the wall of Savoy Elementary School in preparation for what will become a city-sponsored mural of geometric patterns and multicolored birds.
“Graffiti is different for every practitioner of the craft. It’s like a hydra, this multiheaded thing that’s many things to many people,” said Ricks, a longtime graffiti artist. “Graffiti in its purest form is like a flower growing out of filth and muck.”
This eye-of-the-beholder dynamic between vandalism and urban art form has been a reality since the earliest days of graffiti. One person’s artistic expression is another’s problematic eyesore. At any given time, there are three DPW removal teams working, and the city budgets $550,000 per year for the task.
Those teams use a variety of methods, depending on the type of paint and material of the wall — limestone is the hardest to clean. Sometimes, they use gray paint to simply cover the graffiti on metal security doors. Some types of stone get a special chemical and the water hose. And occasionally, they need to call in outside contractors with a sandblaster.
The district also has to contend with political graffiti often left by the frequent mass protests that are drawn to the nation’s capital.
Most recently, the large July protest against the Israel-Gaza war peaked with a takeover of Columbus Circle in front of Union Station, the Amtrak and commuter rail station. The protesters left graffiti throughout the area, including on a replica of the Liberty Bell.
One protester sprayed pro-Hamas slogans on the statue of Christopher Columbus. That protest actually produced a rare graffiti-related arrest as authorities later charged a 20-year-old Maryland woman.
But mostly it’s tagging, the distinctive stylized bubble-letter signatures that can be seen on hundreds of buildings and all along the Metro train lines.
A 21-year DPW veteran, Broadus has become intimately familiar with some of the regular taggers. Three different times, young graffiti artists have been sentenced to community service on his crew; he has occasionally tasked a tagger with covering over their own work.
“I ask them why they do it, and they usually say something like, ‘We want to promote our name,’” Broadus said with a shrug.
For Ricks, that inability to grasp the motivation has been there since the earliest days of the modern graffiti movement — something he tracks to the early 1980s in New York City. “Most people don’t understand why these kids are doing this,” he said. “Not everybody with a spray can has the same motivations and goals.”
Now 49, Ricks became entranced by graffiti shortly after his family moved from the African nation of Liberia to Hyattsville, Maryland, when he was 13. He speaks like an unofficial historian of the art form — tracing it to cave paintings, the depression-era “hobo code” that transients would use to communicate and the painted symbols that guided enslaved people to freedom on the Underground Railroad.
“The urge to scribble and leave a mark somewhere is deep in the psyche of the human animal,” he said.
The local scene produced some homegrown graffiti stars like Cool “Disco” Dan, who scrawled his moniker hundreds of times across the city, and eventually received mainstream media writeups and became an icon of pre-gentrification Chocolate City.
The DPW crews almost exclusively work in response to requests from property owners, but their job changed dramatically during George Floyd protests in summer 2020 over police violence and historic racial iniquities. Several days of demonstrations near the White House devolved multiple times into mass vandalism throughout downtown.
Broadus recalls his crews “working 4 a.m. to 4 p.m., seven days a week” — often operating under police protection from protesters “who definitely would have tried to do some bodily harm to us.”
In true district fashion, the city with more than 20 separate police forces also houses multiple graffiti-removal crews. In addition to the DPW, the city’s Department of General Services removes graffiti from city government buildings and schools.
The National Park Service handles anything on NPS land — which includes the Columbus Circle cleanup. And Metro has its own crews working along the train lines, while graffiti on federal government buildings is handled by the General Services Administration and the different federal landholding agencies.
Local efforts to honor and preserve D.C.’s graffiti history have been hit-and-miss. Longtime local artist Corey Stowers founded the 14th Street Graffiti Museum in 2020, in an unused open-air courtyard in the 16th Street Heights neighborhood. Stowers hoped to draw tourist buses and school field trips at $15 per ticket. But the museum struggled financially and is now mostly padlocked.
“There was just no funding. I couldn’t be there all the time and I couldn’t pay someone to be there,” said Stowers, who wants the D.C. government to do more to support the art form.
The city’s primary official vehicle for supporting graffiti is the Murals D.C. program, which has sponsored 165 murals around the city and pays artists like Ricks between $30 and $40 per square foot for their work.
“In time, you can become as precise with a spray can as a surgeon with a scalpel,” Ricks said. “This thing is by the people for the people. You can’t put it in a box.”
Culpeper’s famed Graffiti House has been added to the multi-state Civil War Trails program.
The site at 19484 Brandy Road in Brandy Station has been popular with travelers interested in history but will get an extra boost as part of the program which connects over 1,500 sites across six states.
The project was a partnership between the Brandy Station Foundation, Culpeper Tourism, Civil War Trails, Inc. and Virginia Tourism Corporation.
The Graffiti House showcases what is believed to be one of the most extensive collections of Civil War era graffiti discovered in recent decades.
Each Civil War Trails site offers a sign to help visitors get a sense of what happened where they are standing and is marketed to guests internationally in a variety of ways.
Virginia Tourism Corporation supports the program through the printing and distribution of the popular Civil War Trails map-guides which help drive the visitation to sites like Graffiti House.
Last year the Civil War Trails program and its partners shipped just a hair under 200,000 map-guides to travelers. The exposure aims to drive new visitors to the Graffiti House and the community.
“Culpeper Tourism is proud to bring this new site onboard,” said Paige Read, Director of Culpeper Tourism. “Promoting our historic sites is important as heritage and history are primary drivers for the Culpeper tourism economy, drawing thousands of visitors each year to our community. In 2024 alone, heritage tourism represented 33% of leisure travel to the county,” added Read.
If a visitor arrives at the Graffiti House after hours the new Civil War Trails marker will be there to entice them to book a tour.
“This gives visitors a sample of the great story inside the house,” said Greg Mertz, Vice President of the Brandy Station Foundation.
To find out more about the Graffiti House or book a tour for your group ahead of time visit BrandyStationFoundation.com.
A prominent sign that welcomes students to Wayne State University’s campus was splattered in red paint on Wednesday to symbolize “the blood of innocent Palestinians” after the school refused to divest from companies linked to Israel, a popular activist group said Thursday morning.
Wayne State’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJPWSU), an activist group that is calling on universities nationwide to divest from corporations that deal with Israel, posted a photo and video of the vandalized sign on Instagram and sent the university a message.
“Whether you like it or not you will be held accountable – because the university is the PEOPLE’S university,” the group wrote Thursday morning. “BOG we see you, you have blood on your hands. The blood of Palestinians won’t wash off as easy as the W. From the belly of the beast – no justice, no peace.”
“Wayne State is stained with the blood of innocent Palestinians with their refusal to divest from genocide,” the group wrote. “The admin would rather brutalize students, community members, and faculty that are the lifeblood of the school. By having their lOF trained pigs rip off hijabs, attempting to fire faculty for speaking up, and moving its meetings online to silence us, Wayne State has made it clear it is no more than a glorified hedge fund.”
Wayne State spokesman Matt Lockwood tells Metro Times that the university removed the graffiti “first thing this morning” and that campus police hope to track down the culprits.
“WSUPD is reviewing surveillance video to try and identify who did it,” Lockwood says.
During the encampment, university officials promised that the Board of Governors would listen to activists and consider their proposal to divest. Instead, the elected board dodged activists by moving its public meeting to virtual on Wednesday, once again drawing condemnation. The university also moved the public comment period from the beginning of the meeting to the end, making it impossible for students and others to address issues on the agenda, including the budget, before they were voted on.
Acker condemned the graffiti as “antisemitic” because he was the only member of the Board of Regents to be targeted. The graffiti messages read “Free Palestine,” “Divest Now,” “UM Kills,” and “Fuck You Acker.” Red handprints were also left on the office’s doors.
Deputies: 2 vandals spray-paint graffiti on walls, sidewalks of Deltona high school
Updated: 3:20 PM EDT Jun 6, 2024
The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office is looking for two suspects who were caught on surveillance cameras vandalizing the walls and sidewalks of a high school in Deltona on Monday.In a social media post, deputies said two individuals were seen entering Pine Ridge High School in Deltona and spray-painted graffiti on the walls and sidewalks of the campus. Volusia County deputies are asking the public for help in identifying the two suspects. If you recognize the two individuals, deputies said to reach out to them by emailing dbarrett@volusiasheriff.gov or calling 386-860-7030.
VOLUSIA COUNTY, Fla. —
The Volusia County Sheriff’s Office is looking for two suspects who were caught on surveillance cameras vandalizing the walls and sidewalks of a high school in Deltona on Monday.
In a social media post, deputies said two individuals were seen entering Pine Ridge High School in Deltona and spray-painted graffiti on the walls and sidewalks of the campus.
Volusia County deputies are asking the public for help in identifying the two suspects.
If you recognize the two individuals, deputies said to reach out to them by emailing dbarrett@volusiasheriff.gov or calling 386-860-7030.
Vandalism at the Goodman Acker law offices in Southfield.
A long-standing and prominent Palestinian-American organization in Michigan denounced “deeply hurtful and offensive” graffiti scrawled across the Southfield law firm of a Jewish member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
In an open letter to Jordan Acker of the Goodman Acker law firm on Wednesday, leaders from the American Federation of Ramallah, Palestine (AFRP), a Westland-based group that calls itself the largest and oldest pro-Palestinian group in the U.S, said the vandalism on Monday morning was hateful and did nothing to advance calls for peace.
“Such actions are not only unlawful but deeply hurtful and offensive to all,” AFRP President Chuck Farah wrote on behalf of the group’s directors and members. “This action not only hurts our local Jewish community, but it also hurts our Palestinian cause. As Palestinians, we are committed to working on exposing and stopping Israel’s crimes against our people and families.”
Acker condemned the graffiti as “antisemitic” because he was the only member of the Board of Regents to be targeted. The graffiti read, “Free Palestine,” “Divest Now,” “UM Kills,” and “Fuck You Acker.” Red handprints were also left on the office’s doors.
AFRP, which strongly opposes Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinians, said it’s committed to “a peaceful solution to all.”
“We are cognizant that our stance on Israel/Palestine is sharply different; however, we would be remiss if we didn’t rebuke this despicable act,” the letter states. “Those who committed this repugnant act are trying to distract us from our mission and put a wedge between our communities. Hate for the sake of hate has no room in our midst. This act of vandalism is meant to discredit the legitimate protests led by our students who are fighting for genuine peace and justice.”
Police are searching for four suspects who were caught on surveillance video, three of whom were shown spray-painting the building. A fourth person drove a getaway car.
Southfield police are investigating the vandalism as a hate crime. The FBI is assisting.
AFRP said it hopes the suspects are captured.
“As a community who faces daily hate, we understand your fear,” the letter states. “We must stand together and fight for peace and justice. We must stand united against all forms of hatred and bigotry. We are confident that, together, we can foster a safe, inclusive, and respectful environment for everyone.”
Acker expressed his gratitude.
“There is so much hope in this world, and seeing things like this gives me even more,” Acker wrote on X. “We may not agree on everything, but I am so heartened to hear from my Palestinian brothers and sisters in Southeast Michigan. Hate has no home here.”
Pro-Palestinian activists have targeted Acker and other members of the U-M Board of Regents for refusing to divest from companies linked to Israel.
Jordan Acker, a Jewish member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, quickly condemned the vandalism of his office early Monday as “antisemitism” because the graffiti messages criticized Israel’s attacks on Palestinians.
Elected officials, along with CNN and other corporate media outlets, repeated the same claims.
For reasons that aren’t difficult to understand, Palestinian sympathizers are tired of watching innocent civilians getting slaughtered by the thousands. At university campuses, students are doing what they can to oppose the brutality: They are calling on colleges to divest from companies connected to Israel.
But the graffiti contained no anti-Jewish messages. It read, “Free Palestine,” “Divest Now,” “UM Kills,” and “Fuck You Acker.” Red handprints were also left on the office’s doors.
Law enforcement officials adopted similar rhetoric. Southfield police Chief Elvin Barren called the graffiti “a hate crime.” The FBI also joined the investigation.
Dawud Walid, director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-MI), says supporters of Israel’s war are trying to silence dissent by labeling anti-genocide messages as antisemitism.
“It’s a very disturbing trend that people who are calling for a ceasefire are being equated to antisemites and Hamas supporters,” Walid tells Metro Times. “This is a very troubling trend. It’s as if Americans can’t hold two ideas at once. We can say that Hamas committed an atrocity, and at the same time, say the Israeli government is committing crimes against humanity.”
“Another unfortunate aspect of this is that there are Jewish voices who are being silenced by this narrative,” Walid says. “That’s the irony of this. Their voices are being silenced. It’s bizarre.”
“Call it vandalism, call it criminal, but I don’t see how ‘Free Palestine’ is antisemitic,” @WolverLion wrote.
Another X user chimed in, “What about this is antisemitic, exactly Jordan? We can’t keep throwing words around like this, they’ll lose their meaning.”
“This is not antisemitism,” @alex_k99999 tweeted. “If you want to end petty vandalism, stop aiding genocide.”
At a news conference on Monday, Acker repeated the antisemitism claims, saying he was targeted because he’s Jewish.
“Make no mistake that targeting individual Jewish elected officials is antisemitism,” Acker told reporters.
“This has nothing to do with Palestine or the war in Gaza or anything else,” Acker continued. “This is done as a message to scare Jews. I was not targeted here today because I am a regent. I am a target of this because I am Jewish.”
To anyone who disagrees with him, Acker wrote on X, “it might be a good time to check yourself as to why.”
Pro-Palestinians disagreed.
“It’s vandalism and that’s wrong,” @yourauntifa responded. “Is supporting divestment antisemitic? You assume you were targeted because you’re Jewish. Might you have been targeted because you’re very vocal and visible and the culprits knew it would get this level of attention, which they crave?”
Meanwhile at Wayne State University, pro-Palestinian activists, along with staff and faculty members, are holding a news conference and rally at the corner of Warren and Second to protest campus police’s handling of an encampment last week.
The other message reads, “America First,” which is one of Donald Trump’s favorite slogans. The phrase became a popular racist, antisemitic slogan after World War I and was frequently used by the KKK.
These slogans have been increasingly popping up in metro Detroit. One of the groups spreading the hateful messages is the Great Lakes Active Club, a Michigan-based neofascist group whose members are committed to becoming “white warriors.” The group is increasing its presence in metro Detroit by holding mixed-martial arts training, burning anti-fascist flags, and spreading hateful propaganda in the form of banners, stickers, and graffiti.
In October, the group posted photos on social media showing its members placing a banner above a freeway in Commerce Township that read, “America First.”
In May 2023, the Great Lakes Active Club held a “joint training session” with Patriot Front.
The water tower, which is owned by Highland Park but is located in Detroit, hovers over I-75 and the Davison freeway, with tens of thousands of cars passing it every day.
Highland Park Mayor Glenda McDonald says Detroit usually removes graffiti from the water tower, but she plans to ensure the messages are cleared, saying she won’t tolerate hate.
“It will be taken care of,” McDonald tells Metro Times. “We are going to try to put some cameras up to see if we can catch the people doing it.”
Highland Park Councilman Khursheed Ash-Shafii says the vandals picked the wrong city to provoke with hatred.
“The city of Highland Park is committed to diversity and inclusiveness, but there is no place in this city whatsoever for bigotry, hatred, and racism,” Ash-Shafii tells Metro Times. “These outdated terms have no place in America; thus they have no place in the great city of Highland Park.”
Lee Quiñones always wanted to be an artist. Growing up in the Alfred E. Smith projects in New York City’s Lower East Side in the 1960s and early 1970s, he was surrounded by inspiring art—bold, colorful graffiti emblazoned on walls, storefronts, and subway cars—but he never saw anyone creating it. “This particular inscribing…was done in secret, covertly,” Quiñones says. Such stealth was necessary, since spray-painting public property was not only seen as a misdemeanor but as a sign of the municipal apocalypse. In a tumultuous era when New York City nearly declared bankruptcy, graffiti was frequently scapegoated as a social ill that was destroying the city.
Quiñones knew better. He saw a coded conversation among young people, most of them Black and brown, expressing their identity and what he calls “an urgency for a sense of our belonging.” Quiñones wanted to be a part of the dialogue. He found his voice when, at age 13, a local graffiti artist named Flea led him into the subway tunnels, where artists were creating vibrant, mobile murals on the city’s transit system. “Being introduced to that scene, and the movement in the trains, was a sort of freedom,” Quiñones says. “It was really, truly the Underground Railroad for me.”
What a ride it’s been. A gorgeous new artistic monograph has just been published celebrating the pioneering 63-year-old Puerto Rico–born artist’s five-decade career. Titled Lee Quiñones: Fifty Years of New York Graffiti Art and Beyond and edited by the journalist, writer, and entrepreneur Tamara Warren—who is also Lee’s wife—the book features essays and contributions from art world luminaries Franklin Sirmans (director of the Pérez Art Museum in Miami) and Isolde Brielmaier (deputy director of the New Museum in New York City); tributes from artistic colleagues including FUTURA, Debbie Harry, Jenny Holzer, William Cordova, Bisa Butler, Barry McGee, and Odili Donald Odita; and period photos by a roster of 1970s and 80s NYC scenesters including Charlie Ahearn, Martha Cooper, Sue Kwon, Edo Bertoglio, and Henry Chalfant.
But mainly, the book documents Lee’s work. Starting in the mid-70s, Quiñones produced scores of car-length and train-length rolling paintings. He developed his own signature style and text. Like the Pop artists, he appropriated characters, phrases, and symbology from comics, films, and consumer messaging. And he added commentary on contemporary social and civil rights movements. “The struggles that I witnessed and experienced personally was the friction around race,” Quiñones says. “The art was my escape. And it was also my voice, to voice about those issues in a way that I could not in society.”
Quiñones took it as his mission to disseminate this work as broadly as possible. “The trains were the vessel, literally, to get my work across town—from the northeast Bronx to the southeastern parts of Brooklyn, blighted areas,” he says. And he found, in the flourishing discord of that era, a catalyzing petri dish. “You had punk music, alternative rock, alternative films, and poetry. You had writing on the walls turning into mural-making. None of that stuff was scripted. It was just a moment, a flash moment,” he says.
Some acquaintances from Ireland were in town, and we were having lunch in their 20th-floor downtown hotel suite. I was being an armchair tour guide — out the windows, there’s L.A. Live, and back behind those skyscrapers, City Hall, by fiat once our tallest building.
One of them pointed and said, “What’s THAT?”
I didn’t even have to look.
“THAT” is Oceanwide Plaza, the Chinese-owned skyscraper project, dead in the water and half-finished for five years, its floors like unfrosted cake layers, inviting trespass and vandalism and all that vivid graffiti frosting. Any nimble-bodied person with sturdy legs and maybe a bail bondsman’s phone number could make the climb to join in turning the building into L.A.’s largest, brashest outdoor look-at-me canvas — like that Norman Mailer book title says, “Advertisements for Myself.”
Hard to make all of that make sense to the Irish visitors. But it’s L.A. in a nutshell.
Los Angeles is a complex place. Luckily, there’s someone who can provide context, history and culture.
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This city, supposedly the mural capital of the world, flaunts the title, fears it, is worthy and unworthy of it. And now we find ourselves wrangling again: Is art outside always outsider art? Or art at all?
One camp believes nothing can be art if it doesn’t have a nice frame around it and a price tag on it. Another camp believes that almost any spray-can concerto is art, and the sprayer an embryo Rembrandt. And there’s everyone else, somewhere in the middle.
At the beginning of this century, the city had a 10-year mural moratorium to sort out the chessboard mess of interests and counter-interests: how to keep murals thriving while keeping them from intruding illicitly into neighborhoods, how to keep businesses from simply ginning up wall-sized ads and calling them art, how to distinguish legal from illegal handiwork, and, frankly, good from bad. It’s a seesaw we’re still riding.
In two years, the world comes knocking at our door for the World Cup; then in another two, it’s the Olympics. Can we really not get our act together and dazzle them with something else world-class?
Next, I was thrilled by “Old Woman of the Freeway,” enormous and brilliant on a highway-facing wall, the presiding saint of the 101, painted by the master muralist Kent Twitchell. If traffic was moving well, she was the reason; if it wasn’t, she shared your stationary misery.
She was partly obscured by construction, then whitewashed for advertising space, restored by decree and killed off again by ugly graffiti. She was to have been revived in Sherman Oaks, but a property owner wouldn’t give Twitchell access — and one random local wildly claimed to see something “evil and satanic” in her blue eyes. She’s been restored to grandeur and safety on a wall at L.A. Valley College, her crocheted afghan flying like a kite.
Until the Whittier earthquake and a landlord put an end to it in 1987, the south wall of an 1880s building on Fair Oaks in Pasadena used to read: “ ‘My people are the people of the dessert,’ said T.E. Lawrence, picking up his fork.”
T.E. Lawrence was “Lawrence of Arabia,” the British officer and writer who took a vital role among the Arabs in World War I. So dessert/desert. A happenstance glance at it always made me laugh, and even now, I see the building and smile at its ghost.
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1.The Pink Lady of Malibu was controversial in her day. This photo appeared in the Nov. 1, 1966, Los Angeles Times.(George Fry / Los Angeles Times)2.Lynne Westmore Bloom poses with a sketch she used as a model for the Pink Lady. This photo appeared in the Oct. 27, 1991, Los Angeles Times.(George Wilhelm / Los Angeles Times )
The one I wish I had seen was there and gone before I lived here: the Pink Lady of Malibu, exuberant, whimsical, utterly joyous. Hers is a tale of pink paint, bluenoses and brown coverup. She stood 60 feet tall above the tunnel on Malibu Canyon Road, and for nine months in the happening year of 1966, the Northridge artist Lynne Westmore Bloom slung on nylon ropes and climbed the rockface by full moonlight to erase the old graffiti, then to sketch and paint the lady. She was magnificent, pink-fleshed and naked, holding a nosegay of flowers, dark hair streaming as she strode across the cliff.
The bluenoses of L.A. County harrumphed. A traffic hazard! The earlier graffiti hadn’t seemed to bother them overmuch, but this? It took six days and 14 gallons of brown paint to obliterate the Pink Lady. Westmore got fired from her job, got death threats, got marriage proposals, and, along with her painted lady, got a permanent place in L.A. lore.
First California and then the federal government passed laws protecting murals and muralists, with complicated exceptions and requirements. California’s Art Preservation Act, in 1979, mandates “recognized quality,” a case-by-case judgment of experts. The federal Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 has its own regulations. Kent Twitchell invoked both of these laws in a lawsuit after his mural of fellow artist Ed Ruscha was painted over in 2006. The matter was settled for $11 million.
Even these protections do nothing if the people who should be enforcing them don’t, or don’t even know about them. In 1999, an Eastside mural, “The Wall That Cracked Open,” was almost completely covered over in flat gray, evidently by a county anti-graffiti program. Artist Willie Herron had painted it on the wall of his uncle’s building in 1972 to memorialize his murdered little brother, John.
Multiply that incident by the hundreds. The supervisor of the county’s graffiti abatement program told The Times back then that she was unaware that the mural protection laws even existed. The city of L.A.’s anti-graffiti program chief said that her people have “very clear instructions not to paint over any murals. We find the artist and then we have the mural restored,” and often coated with a protective concoction so graffiti can be wiped off. Gang graffiti, it turns out, is as much a danger to mural art as overzealous, underinformed civic enforcers.
The credit as L.A.’s first known muralist goes to Einar Petersen, who ornamented mostly inside walls with historic, storytelling murals ordered up and paid for. He painted hundreds, murals of a jungle and of the Garden of Gethsemane at the old Clifton’s cafeteria, five panels of L.A. history at the Rosslyn Hotel — now, predictably, covered up, damaged, destroyed.
A conservator for the Getty Conservation Institute works on David Alfaro Siqueiros’ “América Tropical” at El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument in 2017. Painted in 1932, the mural was quickly whitewashed for depicting a dead Indigenous peasant tied to a cross.
(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)
The present-day mural wars arguably began in 1932, over “América Tropical,” on Olvera Street, a work commissioned for L.A.’s Olympic year and painted by the renowned Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros.
Once the sponsors got an eyeful, they ordered the mural painted over. Its message was in its subtitle, and it was not subtle: “Oppressed and Destroyed by Imperialism,” a panorama not of contented campesinos but of tortured and tormented Latinos and Native Americans laboring under the policing eye of the U.S.
For decades after, the whitewashed wall carried its own kind of power, and Siqueiros knew it; it’s said that when its restoration was suggested in the 1960s, he was against it, because the force of censorship was maybe even more potent than the mural itself. It was at last conserved and displayed in 2012.
“América Tropical’s” spiritual child is Noni Olabisi’s relentless mural “To Protect and Serve.” The prolific Black muralist, who died a couple of years ago, painted the Jefferson Park work in 1997 and filled space with Black Panthers and celebrated Black radicals, helmeted police and hooded Klansmen. Its funding sidestepped public coffers to keep clear of the kind of censorship that had blotted out “América Tropical.”
SPARC helped to pay for Olabisi’s mural and is working to keep it spruced. The Social and Public Art Resource Center has spent almost five decades battering down the barricades between street art and what Siqueiros called “easel art,” standing up for “activist and socially relevant artwork.”
One of its co-founders is Judith Baca, whose monumental horizontal mural along the Tujunga Wash in the San Fernando Valley changed many Angelenos’ POV about graffiti art. Over more than a half-mile, “The Great Wall of Los Angeles” shows the histories of Californians whose stories are rarely told, and scores of young people turn out to join professionals to keep the 1978 mural perpetually refreshed.
Not far from there, around Pacoima’s city hall, you’ll find Mural Mile, block after block of artworks done with color, ingenuity, humor, passion and meaning, and changing all the time.
A fellow named Banksy changed some minds about graffiti art too. The anonymous British artist chooses public spaces for his guerrilla work, and inadvertently created a paradox: His works can sell for millions, and people have been caught trying to get them off public walls to take to auction houses.
Banksy’s L.A. mural, 2010’s “Swing Girl,” is downtown, visible only from a deep alley between buildings — which is the point it makes about overbuilt places. The word painted on the wall is PARKING. Banksy almost whitewashed out the last three letters, and hanging from the first part, PARK, he painted a swing with a little girl perched on it.
It’s arguably graffiti, but not the kind that generates a gut-punch reaction among some Angelenos. For them, graffiti is a synonym for defacement and vandalism — and gangs marking out turf and messaging their enemies with menacing scribbles. Who wants to see those sinister scrawls creep into their neighborhoods?
Two incidents, both in the 1990s, caught the tone of Angelenos’ sentiments. One was the 1991 arrest of “Chaka,” who had written that name over and over, literally 10,000 times, on freeway bridges and signposts from Orange County to San Francisco. Then, 24 hours after he was let out of jail, he was caught in the downtown courthouse. He’d written CHAKA on an elevator door — on his way to see his probation officer. In 1996, after college scholarship and work offers, finding God and taking a job painting church buses for a Christian camp, he was arrested for tagging again.
A year later, a Woodland Hills teenager who’d been tagging above the San Diego Freeway fell 100 feet, fracturing his spine, both ankles and his left arm. Not everyone felt sorry for him. One Times letter writer summed up the sentiments of no small number of people: “I do not see the artistic expression involved in scrawling your street name across a piece of concrete like an animal marking its territory.”
This Skid Row mural was completed in 2014. Its message was urgent then, and is no less so 10 years later.
(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)
The best graffiti has something to teach, something to say, and that something is more than “my tagging crew is bad-assier than yours.” On Julian Street in Skid Row is the phenomenal Skid Row mural, paid for and painted by locals.
It is poignant and pointed.
It’s a mock-official, green and white sign, bearing the city seal, the words “SKID ROW CITY LIMIT” and at the bottom, “POP Too Many.”
A man — a writer named Charles Bukowski — who used to work up the road from Skid Row, sorting mail at the Terminal Annex, once wrote something that suits that image quite aptly. “An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”
Explaining L.A. With Patt Morrison
Los Angeles is a complex place. In this weekly feature, Patt Morrison is explaining how it works, its history and its culture.
After six trespassing arrests were made in less than a week related to a heavily tagged unfinished skyscraper in downtown Los Angeles, the City Council will consider ordering the property owners to clean up the site.
Councilmember Kevin de León introduced a motion Feb. 2 that would instruct the Department of Building and Safety, the Bureau of Street Services and the Bureau of Engineering to order the Oceanwide Plaza owners to secure the property and clear debris from the public right of way. The council will vote on the motion Friday.
“Our residents and businesses deserve safe and vibrant neighborhoods, which is why I’ve taken action to ensure the Oceanwide property is cleaned and made safe,” De León.
If the owners do not comply by Feb. 17, the city will begin its own cleanup process, the motion said. There is currently scaffolding, plastic barriers and other debris on the sidewalks and in the bus lane adjacent to the building.
The Department of Building and Safety issued an order to the property owners on Jan. 31 requesting they remove all graffiti and debris and securely fence the building.
Oceanwide Plaza was slated to be a mixed-use development including luxury apartments and hotel and retail space, but construction was halted in 2019 when the Beijing-based developers ran out of money.
The incomplete high-rise has attracted many taggers and graffiti artists in recent weeks, who have collectively tagged at least 27 stories of the building. De León’s motion described the development as “a blight on downtown Los Angeles” and “a black eye on an otherwise vibrant part of DTLA.”
The development faces Crypto.com Arena, which hosted the Grammys last weekend, and is near the popular L.A. Live complex among shops and restaurants. De León represents Council District 14, which includes downtown Los Angeles.
De León’s motion orders the owners of Oceanwide Plaza to “restore the public right of way to its original condition,” and instructs various city organizations to step in if the job is not completed by the deadline. The motion also asks the city administrative officer to identify funding for the cleanup and securing of the site.
The building attracts criminal activity and has become a hazard for surrounding residents and businesses, the motion said. Los Angeles Police Department officers are also investigating a report of shots fired near the development last week.
When I was in high school and university, every Wednesday afternoon required to the Rexall drug store in my small prairie hometown. That was the day any new music magazines appeared in the racks. Using money I earned stocking shelves in the local grocery store, I’d grab the latest editions of Rolling Stone (which came out every two weeks), and monthlies like CREEM, Trouser Press, and Circus for international news, and Music Express to learn about what was happening in Canada.
My parents were appalled, of course, at what they considered a waste of money. And when I brought home the infamous Rolling Stone issue — “Rock is Sick and Living in London” — featuring the Sex Pistols on the cover (a newsstand sales disaster for the magazine in October 1978), my parents openly wondered if I needed to be institutionalized for my own good.
Rolling Stone Cover 17 Oct 1978.
My music magazine habit only got worse over the decades. Occasionally, I’d see a copy of Melody Maker or The NME — horribly outdated by the time they arrived in Canada — in a specialty bookstore and grab them for a look at the oh-so-exotic scene in the UK. When Chapters and Indigo arrived with their giant selection, my spending on music magazines grew to several thousand dollars a year.
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By this time, there was also Alternative Press, Raygun, Option, Shift, Maximum RocknRoll, and Modern Drummer all from the U.S. with domestic backfill from Canadian Musician, Chart Attack, and Graffiti. I bought them all, all the time. But most of my cash went to British publications.
There were so many great magazines from the U.K., especially in the late 1990s — Q, Select, Vox, Mojo, Record Collector, Uncut, The Word, The Face, Smash Hits, Sounds, Kerrang — and a bunch of others I know I’m missing. I hoovered them up every month, storing back issues carefully on shelves in the basement. This formed an indispensable research archive for my Ongoing History of New Music radio show.
How could the British support so much music journalism? A lot had to do with the role the music press had carved out for itself since at least the 1950s. With BBC radio refusing to play or cover popular music beyond a few hours a week — too lowbrow for the Beeb — print was the only place to learn about The Beatles, The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Eric Clapton, and all the great U.K. stars. Yes, there were private broadcasts from Radio Luxemburg and pirate stations like Radio Caroline, but if you wanted your music to be covered in-depth, you needed the weeklies and monthlies.
British publications became not just information sources, but arbiters of taste, anointers of stars, and laid waste to acts that bored them. They also believed it was their solemn duty to push music culture forward by identifying (and often inventing or outright fabricating) new scenes and sounds. The weeklies, NME and Melody Maker, were very good at this, each in its own way. Folk, trad jazz, folk, psych, glam, punk, ska, rockabilly, New Romantics, C-86, acid house, rave, shoegaze, Madchester, Britpop — none would have flourished as they did had it not been for the coverage and occasional fictions created by British music magazines.
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Alas, though, the golden age for music magazines has passed. With the rise of the internet, it was no longer necessary to wait for a magazine to tell you what was happening. Circulation dropped precipitously. Meanwhile, declining physical record sales meant a fatal drop in advertising by record labels. Margins shrank and then disappeared. Experienced staff saw story commissions dry up and were eventually laid off. Ownership was consolidated and razor-sharp focus on writing and interviews suffered. Bloggers and streamers became the new influencers.
Outside of Mojo and Record Collector, there are precious few physical publications I still buy, although often with misgivings. Don’t the publishers realize that those of us who still buy physical magazines don’t have the eyesight we once did? Why is so much of each issue in six-point fonts?
So many once-great and bloody essential magazines have gone out of business. Graffiti was gone by 1986. Sounds became extinct in 1991. It became impossible to get Music Express after Christmas 1996. Vox disappeared in the summer of 1998. Having stood on its own since 1926, Melody Maker was folded into rival NME in 2001 with Select ceasing publication around the same time. Smash Hits died in 2006. Q, which underwent at least half a dozen re-launches in a bid to survive, finally gave up the ghost in 2020.
Some have transitioned to online. There might still be physical editions of Rolling Stone and Alternative Press — that will tell you how long it’s been since I’ve looked at a magazine rack — so I dip in from time to time whilst browsing.
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But there are a couple of reasons to be optimistic. Online subscriptions are far cheaper than having issues mailed to you, especially from overseas. Information arrives regularly and promptly, not two or three months out of date. And it can be immeasurably more convenient to take a bunch of reading material on an iPad for a long flight.
And there are signs of physical life. Kerrang keeps the faith as a quarterly. CREEM magazine is also back as a four-times-a-year publication that, boy howdy, is as irreverent as issues of old. Meanwhile, after five years of being online-only, The NME has returned as a print publication this summer with a promise of six issues a year. And Mojo and Record Collector seem to be in it for the long haul.
Oh, and that archive of old magazines in my basement? They became a fire hazard and a potential city for rodents, so I pawned them all off on a guy who ran a used record store. I see now that was a mistake because many issues are now coveted by collectors. That includes my old “Rock is Sick” edition of Rolling Stone. I just saw it up for auction with an asking price of US$770.
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Alan Cross is a broadcaster with Q107 and 102.1 the Edge and a commentator for Global News.
