because "the hip hop elders" sold it to them

graf is def a response to social conditions of inner cities in NY, LA, and later SF, but it was also within the cultural circumference of metal and punk, and had a good number of middle class kids aiding in its aesthetic development

it was as much about youth culture, and drugs, and spaces of social racial integration, as it was about poverty and the post-civil rights years, as it was about aesthetic changes in relation to new technologies