Obey

Those fantastic black and white sticker/stencils/posters of Andre the Giant started popping up in Philadelphia ca. 1997. Due to some urban legend or something, I believed the artist who created this phenomenon had his studio at 1026 Arch St., which was a bit of a creative hotspot at the time. Ha. I couldn’t have been more wrong about the origins of the artist, Shepard Fairey.

My apologies to the artist, but the internet wasn’t so comprehensive back then and it was so much easier to believe a drunken game of “whisper down the lane” than to do any research. Crazy to say, but the cultural phenom of Obey keeps popping up. Two incidents particularly stand out: The first was a sales person I met in Las Vegas last year who was/is an Obey devotee. She was obviously impressed that anyone at the end of cool and over 30 knew of Obey, too. The other incident was a signpost.

For the record, I love signposts. They do a thankless job, and since I tend not to know where I’m at, let alone where I’m going, I pay attention to them. Take for instance, this signpost at the intersection of Grønlandleiret and Tøyenbekken in downtown Oslo. (You’re technically looking at the backside of the signpost, but bear with me.)The photo on the left was taken about 10 years ago and the photo on the right was taken just last year. It may not be easy to see, but a lot has come and gone since these pictures were taken. For starters, the one-storey, 100 year old wooden buildings were torn down to make way for a five-storey shopping center and apartment complex. A whole lotta inner-city garbage, graffiti, empty lots and history got moved and was not so gently put back. Oddly enough, the very ordinary signpost wasn’t touched. In fact, it acquired at some point between 1997 and 2007 this little addition:







I’ll be schnooked, yo. Obey is a 100% global phenomenon and I was the last to know.