To celebrate the release of Going All City, semi-retired graffiti writer Stefano Bloch’s debut memoir, we put together a playlist that captures its fierce, poignant essence. Each track is hand-picked by the author—songs from his youth growing up on the streets in LA, songs that hold powerful meaning for him, and songs that he talks about in the book. Listen to it below or over at Spotify.

“We could have been called a lot of things: brazen vandals, scared kids, threats to social order, self-obsessed egomaniacs, marginalized youth, outsider artists, trend setters, and thrill seekers. But, to me, we were just regular kids growing up hard in America and making the city our own. Being ‘writers’ gave us something to live for and ‘going all city’ gave us something to strive for; and for some of my friends it was something to die for.”—from the introduction of Going All City