previous work, you’ll wait a long time before you see anything quite like Street Knowledge again. You’ll notice how lavish and vibrant both the text and illustrations are, and how comprehensive and off-the-wall the book is.
King Adz makes no distinction between so-called ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, nor between the backgrounds of the diverse artists he includes in this work. Whether their point of exhibition happens to be in the corporate world - in terms of advertising campaigns or products produced by multinationals - or resolutely ‘underground’ - written on the walls and bridges of our urban environments - makes absolutely no difference to him. The only thing that matters is impact and visibility on the street. Adz defines street culture as ‘an ever-evolving influence on daily life. It can’t be held, but it can be seen, everywhere. It cannot be bought but it is often used to sell everything from video games to haute couture.
King Adz sees ‘street’ art purely in terms of its aesthetics and the impact it has on the people who experience it. So in Street Knowledge you’ll see a variety of art originating from right across the globe, culture depicted not only by fêted individuals who have become world-famous stars and consequently treated very well by capitalism, but also by resolutely subterranean figures who are little known outside a small group of perhaps largely local cognoscenti (and in many cases that’s exactly how they like it)-and just about everyone else in between.
Of course, the growth of the information highway and the continuing development of our cyberspace lives force us to consider the question of whether anything can truly be considered underground. As Adz says himself, ‘it’s 2010 and we’re all down with the latest everything. Nothing is hidden; everything is instantly accessible.
Art is created to be seen and enjoyed, debated and discussed. But while it can be accessed, it’s becoming an increasing myth that the Internet necessarily throws everything that’s good up into the light. For one thing, there’s just far too much going on for most of us to be able to care or spend the time sorting out the wheat from the chaff. In a disposable culture, we experience things in different ways. As for music, a young kid in the seventies and eighties might typically have bought a single every week and an album every month. These items were cherished artifacts, played time and time again, whose artwork and sleeve notes were poured over. Their counterparts in 2010 can immerse themselves in tracks from the 1930s or music that has been made literally minutes ago. And there is so much more of it made now.
This is where someone like King Adz comes in; he travels the world, checking out everything and everyone he’s heard of, been referred to, or stumbled across on the net. I personally rack up plenty of airmiles per annum, but I’m a positively stay-at-home, carpet-slippers individual compared to him. Look at the diversity of locations in this publication, he’s been to them all - from my home town of Leith where we took a leisurely stroll down the Walk to the Docks on a sunny day, enjoying the banter of some of the more colourful locals, to the Cape Flats of South Africa and beyond to the backstreets of Tehran. Evidence of his globetrotting is apparent throughout the book; Adz in your town, hanging out, taking in the visuals and the pulse of life.
If I was trying to get in touch with someone who didn’t want to be got in touch with, Adz would be the first person I’d go to, just in order to work out how to go about it. One of his great talents as an artist, compiler, networker and individual is his resolute refusal to see barriers where the rest of us have been conditioned into doing so.
Street Knowledge will turn you onto stuff that you would never ordinarily encounter in years of websurfing. I repeatedly found myself fascinated by stuff within its pages I’d hitherto had zero interest in, precisely because I had only had limited exposure. I tend to order books online these days. In some ways, this breaks my heart, because one of the great pleasures in my life used to be browsing in a bookstore, coming across something I didn’t expect to see. That pleasure is all but gone now, as when we walk inside it’s hard to escape the feeling we’re being force fed increasingly dull, corporate fare by marketing people, pushing us into sterile consumerist boxes: art, literature, travel, cooking, crime, romance, thrillers, classics. It’s therefore uplifting to come across something that intrinsically says, ‘fuck all that nonsense’.
So have some Street Knowledge.
Irvine Welsh
The images, sounds and flavours of the street have always been paramount to me. Ever since the age of eleven when I left the safety of a laid-back hippy-bippy Rudolf Steiner school and signed on at the local comp, I’ve been down with all things street. Okay so I had to deal with my first real taste of culture shock, but once I got to grips with the law of the jungle (or is that the law of the tumble?) and learned how to keep my head down at the same time as holding it high, it was a real eye-opener. I was hook, lined and sinkered. Soon, I became a Casual: Farrah slacks, Patrick trainers and Lacoste shirts were what went down, with my girlfriend (when I could get one) wearing ski-pants and an Ellesse jumper. I spent my time and money at the Haven Hotel Junior Disco each Sunday evening getting down to ‘Dr Beat’ and ‘White Lines’ (the Grandmaster Flash song - the drugs came later) and then I discovered Philip Salon’s Mud Club in Charing Cross Road and the world was my lobster. I’d get a train into town every Friday and queue up with the rest of the kids, but I soon got to know Philip and my eyes were truly opened to the club world. The music went from pop to go-go to hip hop and then to Balearic beats, and it wasn’t long before I went to the legendary Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and became one of the resident artists at the Brain Club, the most happening, creative club in London at the end of the eighties.
I am an urbanist. Okay, so I’m from the green suburbs of London but that is just the point. It’s not about where you are from it’s about what you are in to. They call it ‘crate-digging’ (a reference to record buyers going through crates of vinyl), as we are all about what we choose to take from the many influences and references that circle in the cultural ether like a 747 in the stack above LHR. And it’s about what we choose to adopt as our own, to appropriate, just like the rise of the art of sampling (other people’s records). Some people said that it wasn’t music, but to me it was something that changed my life. DJ Shadow, DJ Cam, The KLF. Say no more. Most probably the same fuckers who said the Hip Hop was just a craze, that it would pass.
We are well into the twenty-first century and we’re all down with the latest in everything. Nothing is hidden, everything is instantly accessible. Urban street culture has influenced everything you can touch, see, smell, watch, buy, wear, listen to, download, upload, TIVO, record and burn. The concept of this book is to document the influences on urban culture over the last 30 years and chart its progression from its origins to where it is today; to pay respect and give the biggest props to those people, places, social situations, music, films and images that have made a difference and helped shape the ever-changing look and feel of the movement. And to look to where it is going.
What is street culture? It is an unconscious creative collective (in the fields of art, food, music, fashion etc) that is borne from the streets of the urban environment. It has its own visual language: a multi-ethnic, multi-disciplined, multi-media, stream of consciousness that has a unique look and feel which cannot be faked. The audio/visual is god in street knowledge. As is frequently suggested, sound and image is (almost) everything, and it is an integral part of its DNA. This visual language is an ever-changing montage of retro and futuristic images. The cyclic nature of the culture means that looking back is just as important as looking forward. But to see the future you’ve got to know the past.
TOOLS OF THE TRADE
To create this