Classic New York graffiti (click for more)

Sebastian Ingrosso reminisced fondly about the pop dance trio’s delinquent childhood growing up together in Sweden this week, boasting that they ‘maybe’ stole teachers’ cars and crashed them into walls in between terrorizing local graffiti taggers.

“We were very rowdy, doing stuff kids shouldn’t do,” Ingrosso told the Sunday Mirror.

“We had a blast doing it,” he continued, “We would hunt down the guys doing graffiti and throw stones at them to protect our neighbourhood.” (Mirror; http://bit.ly/xnBJsr )

Their merciless targeting of local graffiti artists contrasted markedly with the youthful experiences of numerous international DJs including Richard Bronx Dogs Sen, Abe Duque, Sandy Rivera, Roger Sanchez and Laidback Luke, all of whom sprayed and all of whom got caught.

Chatting to Skrufff in 2007 about his brushes with the law, Dutch star Laidback Luke was philosophical.

“I was 17 years old when I got arrested. It was actually the first piece I did outdoors and the artwork itself went great,” he recalled.

“But we did it as a group and one sorry guy was really picky so he worked on it for three days in a row. He was the one who got caught in the act and then he told our names to the police.”

“Looking back I’m glad it happened though, because after getting caught I decided to focus more on music.”

New York techno type Abe Duque was caught painting on walls in the then gang infested neighbourhood of Jamaica, Queens when he was just 14, and was convicted of ‘criminal mischief and vandalism’, he told Skrufff in a separate earlier interview.

“Gang violence was inescapable at that time. Either you knew how to deal with that situation or you were in a lot of trouble,” the nowadays Berlin based producer told Skrufff in an interview several years ago.

“Though the gangs were more important in the 70s, with gangs such as the Latin Kings. In the 80s they started to become crews and became more about artistic expression, such as graffiti and break dancing,” he said.

Roger Sanchez endured similarly tough rites of passage to Duque, growing up in notorious Queens housing project Lefrak City in the early 80s. (Lefrak City, Youtube )

“Living in New York then it was difficult to avoid gang culture, there were gang wars in my area around Queens and at one point I was hanging out with the cats from Zulu Nation,” Roger recalled.

“I was fortunate not to have gone to jail, at least not for any length of time. I got locked up once for writing graffiti and was charged with juvenile delinquency but I was never a stick-up kid,” Roger told Skrufff.

http://masquerademotel.com (Swedish House Mafia return to Miami in March; click here for more details)

Jonty Skrufff: http://listn.to/JontySkrufff

Barry White grew up in South Central, LA and was a teenage gangbanger before discovering Elvis . . .

.

Wiki: “During his teenage years, White and his brother got involved with crime and gang activity. At age 17, he was jailed for four months for stealing $30,000 worth of Cadillac tires.^[4]“

also on wiki:

White, who had been clinically obese for much of his adult life, suffered kidney failure in the fall of 2002 as a result of chronic high blood pressure. He suffered a stroke in May 2003, after which he was forced to retire from public life. On July 4, 2003, he died at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles after suffering from total renal failure.^[7] His remains were cremated, and the ashes were scattered by his family off the California coast.^[8] His last words were,”Leave me alone, I’m fine”.^[9]