For the longest time, Samo© was thought to be the nickname of the iconic artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. After all, he did spray paint the tag all across New York City. But often forgotten is the story of Samo©'s co-creator and graffiti artist Al Diaz, also known as Bomb One in graffiti scenes. The artist just recently opened his debut UK show Transatlantication at London’s D’Stassi gallery in Hoxton, and some would say that it’s long overdue, considering he began his practice all the way in the mid to late 70s, when Al met Basquiat in their teenage years. Together they created Samo© (meaning ‘same old shit’). A graffiti idea more than a tag, the punky duo imbued it with political meaning and promptly scrawled it across the city, turning graffiti into a conceptual practice rather than a technical one. But then Samo© ‘died’ – literally – as one day Basquiat sprayed upon a wall in the Big Apple: “Samo© is dead.” What Al has done since 2016 is bring Samo© back to life because, after all, it’s equally his to revive.
What is Samo© anyway? Appearing like a gang, a fictional product, a parody religion, a drug, a myth, Samo© appeared to mock everything and anything with quippy slogans that took the language of branding communication and turned it inside out, diluting billboard advertising tropes into its most primitive painted form. The tag was stark, funny and in-your-face, but most of all it was different to the graffiti then and now, with exceptions such as the brilliant Richard Hambleton and Rammellzee, who pushed the boundaries of graffiti beyond what Al calls ‘ego-graffiti’. “There’s ego graffiti (simply wanting to spray paint your name) and then there’s what I did with Basquiat with the Samo© graffiti, which was more of an experiment in hype. It was an opposition to branding through branding, we were trying to sell an imaginary product,” Al tells It’s Nice That.
“Mostly, I think you can say consumerism and the idea of mass-produced individuality is what Samo© was making fun of. Thinking that you’re so unique when you’re just wearing a hip uniform kind of thing,” Al says. Al saw Basquiat elevate to a fine art world while Al remained on a street level, continuing his individual practice of tagging Bomb One across the city (a nickname he had gotten from “blowing up” on someone in a game of tag). “I worked for artists. I was around art from a very young age, but I wasn’t trying to be friends with Andy Warhol. I had no desire for that.”
Graffiti in many ways is similar to branding and identity making. The process of tagging is a kind of mark making, in an artistic and territorial sense, and tagging can be a way of creating a persona, an alias, an identity – one that can hold significant ideas. It’s also important in the way that citizens can sew something into the fabric of a city, to make private property feel more public. “I think it often is a way of claiming some sort of ownership: ’This is my area.’ For us New York graffiti artists, it was definitely that,” says Al. “It’s accessible in terms of adventure, camaraderie – delinquent, sneaky, risky behaviour. It gives you a sense of pride.”
10 years after Samo©’s resurrection from the dead, Al has switched his painting material from hype to legacy, especially in the shadow of Basquiat’s death, which has annoyingly followed Al his entire career. With news of a film titled Samo Lives coming out, which will chronicle the youth of Basquiat and Al (who will be played by Top Gun: Maverick’s Danny Ramirez), hopefully Al will get his long-due flowers, but nevertheless, he is doing it on his own terms. “This is a new era. It’s a more adult era, it’s more articulated, it’s an older voice,” says Al. “I felt it was my obligation to tell that story. And I can do it with authority, because there’s no other person on planet Earth that can tell you that story.”