The more you wrote your name, the more the name became yours. He had admired the big boys’ signatures around the city. Bye-bye, dull, ordinary Anders, hello tagger. The name was supposed to express something of who you wanted to be, mark you out from the crowd.
He chose a character from Marvel Comics. The Marvel universe was ruled over by the all-powerful Galactus. One of his henchmen had betrayed his race by executing his own people. This executioner was fearless and unscrupulous, filled with defiance and greed – qualities that appealed to the mighty Galactus after several of his henchmen had fallen prey to pangs of conscience on being obliged to kill their own. Galactus entrusted him with the job of head executioner and gave him a double-edged axe to carry out the death raid. The executioner’s name was Morg.
M and O flowed nicely across the sheet of paper, the R was hypercool but the G was tricky.
Anders left the narrow footpath between the apartment blocks in Silkestrå, looking for flat surfaces. In place of a double-edged axe, the thirteen-year-old had equipped himself with marker pens and aerosol cans. He had bought them with the money he’d earned delivering papers in the neighbourhood. The world beyond the blue garden and the copse lay before him, waiting. He discarded his childhood like an old rag. Suddenly there were lots of identities he could choose from.
He was a tagger,
a writer,
an artist,
a hooligan,
an executioner.
It was 1992. He changed schools when he went up to secondary level. In his new form at Ris, the pupils came from a variety of different primary schools and only a few of them already knew him, so he could create himself all over again. The insecurity and hesitation of his childhood years were less evident. He was still quiet and cautious during lesson time, not one to put up his hand or try to speak, but outside the classroom he knew what he wanted.
Four boys in the form found each other. One called himself Wick, another Spok, and then there were Morg and Ahmed. Spok was new in town and didn’t know anybody at the start of the school year. He had a round, childish face with freckles and his hair parted in the middle, and he thought Anders seemed nice, a bit shy. Wick was tall and lanky with a distinctly square chin and forehead. Both lived near by. Ahmed was Anders’s Pakistani friend from primary. At secondary school, he was still the only immigrant in the class.
The four classmates found each other through a shared obsession.
They entered their teens in the golden age of hip hop, and lapped it up. They listened to rap at home, on their Walkmans on the way to school, and they went to concerts at the punk club Blitz. Anders practised his breakdance spins in the blue garden. He overcame his previous reluctance to join in the dancing competitions in the basement, throwing shyness to the wind.
The music originally created in the Bronx in the late 1970s took Oslo by storm. The breakbeat loops of funk, disco and electronica were scratched over and over again, with rhythms marked by drums, bass and guitar. ‘Hip hop, don’t stop’. DJs were the new heroes, and with the needle in the groove they moved the vinyl records back and forth; there was cutting and phasing, crossfading and sampling. The turntable had become an instrument in its own right, and local Oslo rappers gradually emerged, singing about their own reality of teen life in the city.
The music was raw and fast, and frequently aggressive. The first rappers in the Bronx had an anti-violence, anti-drugs, anti-racism message, and hoped that hip hop would replace street violence. People would meet to party, not to fight. Later on, the music often came to validate and glorify street violence and gangsta rap was often sexist and racist in nature, its words riddled with references to drugs. Hip hop was a lifestyle with seemingly simple rules, as explained by KRS-One and Marley Marl, among the first rappers from the South Bronx: ‘Hip is the knowledge. Hop is the movement. Hip and Hop is an intelligent movement.’
Anders strove to be both the hip and the hop. Hip meant being up-to-date and relevant. Keeping up, getting it, being shown respect. As for the hop part, he practised hard on the paved path that crossed the grass outside his block of flats. He tried breaks and spins but never pulled off a headspin or backspin. He hadn’t enough rhythm or body control to be a good dancer.
Perhaps he could be a rapper? After all, he kept a diary, writing down his thoughts and experiences like the rappers did. But he hadn’t got the right sort of voice for rap; it was high and soft, like a girl’s.
So he opted for hip hop’s third form of expression: graffiti.
If breaking was visual rap in three dimensions, then graffiti was frozen breaking. The letters twisted, just as the dancing body did. To produce fine lines you had to let your body sway, readying yourself so the rhythm travelled from your body to your hand as it directed the aerosol paint can at the wall.
Graffiti tapped into the pulse of growing bodies. The lines on the wall were like them: angular, hard, insistent. The motifs had to involve speed and movement, be tough yet playful. But it was also a culture of performance and achievement. Everything was judged and then approved or rejected. If you had a good style and some original designs, you could mark yourself out from all the anonymous urban youths and shine a little.
In the area where Anders grew up, the young people’s aspirations were strictly divided between tagging and tennis. It wasn’t here, in the land of nice villas set among old apple trees and peonies, that Morg’s role models hung out.
Ris was a secondary school on the well-to-do west side of Oslo, with pupils from an area stretching from the ski jump at Holmenkollen to the lower ground at Skøyen. Most of them grew up with the self-confidence that goes with a big garden, and they spent their time outside school on the ski tracks, the football pitches and the tennis courts. At weekends they got together at home-alone parties or watched films in each other’s basement TV rooms. It was important to have the right logos on your shirt or padded jacket, like Polo, Phoenix or Peak Performance. Anders’s classmates were aiming for careers in law or finance. In the 8A class photo of 1993, most of them were wearing white polo shirts with the necks rolled down, under shirts or woollen sweaters.
One boy in the middle of the back row stands out from the rest. In an outsized check shirt and a hoodie, Anders stands there smiling with earphones in his ears. The pose and the plugged ears marks his distance from the others.
The class could broadly be divided into four groups. There was the contingent with the polo-necked shirts, the straights. They were the majority. Anders was never with them. Then there were a few with shaved heads who went round in flying jackets, turned-up camouflage trousers and black boots. They flirted with neo-Nazism and liked heavy metal. Anders was on nodding terms with them. They didn’t bother anybody, and nobody bothered them. They were against immigration, and since Anders had some foreign friends he didn’t hang out with them. Anyway, he couldn’t stand heavy metal. Then there were the hip-hoppers. They did a bit of tagging and were on the rebellious side, would-be gangsters. If the hip-hop movement once had a political message, it had got lost on the way to Ris. Ideologically, tagging had no particular aim other than to serve as a marker of freedom; it was essentially anarchic. That left the losers. There were a couple of them. They kept a low profile.