Burners

It’s almost impossible to figure out, when the term “burners” was first used; could it really go back to the first flame piece by TRACY 168 and RC 162? Probably not. Were writers burning each other back then? Absolutely! Even when writers from the sub-culture had signature pieces to offer, some writers still absolutely burned! STAYHIGH 149 burned everyone, because his signature was so tight. Some people were just geniuses. PHASE 2 has never been burned, and he has written with all of the best writers.

Years later DONDI’s scrap pieces, done with half empty cans, could take out most of a ten car train. The term, really gained momentum in the late 70’s when it became more defined. For example: a “burner” is almost exclusively, a “window-down burner”. Why was this so, when there were so many beautiful whole cars done at that time? The answer is simple, burning is almost the exclusive provenance of those with style. Furthermore, it’s extremely difficult to pull off a whole-car using wild style letters. But what about “Style Wars”? One of the greatest trains ever done was in the video. There were always exceptions to the rules, but we could also argue that most of NOC 167’s incredible lettering in that piece was from the window down; Is it a burner? We say yes! The reason we say yes, is that we believe he put as much time into the background illustrations, as he did the lettering. In most whole cars, you get the “window-down burners”, and then someone throws up some color over the rest of the car.

Are there other whole car burners? Absolutely! “Style Wars” is just the most famous of the bunch. “Throw-ups” rarely burn. Two that might be exceptions are the double decker IN whole cars and the JON 1 “softies”, that were also whole cars. Another exception is a ten car train that had just been cleaned. IZ did about 8 heavily filled throw-ups per car (80 in all), and punctuated the last half of the final cars with IZ THE WIZ. (If you have photos of these, please send them to us, we’d like to post them.)

So now you have a checklist of what doesn’t burn; So what burns? You know what......we’re going to leave that up to you. And while we're at it .....were going to post some of our favorites.

Enjoy!

NEXT....

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