HOW YOU GOT YOUR NAME

DEBT

“It was 1995, when I started writing debt. I got interested in 93 and started getting paint and going into abandoned spots and ditches by the house to spray, first name was pharaoh.” Pharaoh was a good tag, but waaay too many letters to paint, I had sketched out a debt...while watching tv, a debt relief commercial was on, my buddy Marka had come over and saw the sketch “debt? Is that your new name? I like it! So, you’re debt now?!” Marka is the kinda guy that calls you by your graff name, so within the same sentence he went from “yo Pharaoh this you now? You’re Debt?” to “Yo Debt let’s go to that fr8 spot” “I was there like the guy in glasses on office space uhhhhh but that’s uhhhh ummm my red stapler... but saying uhhhh I ahhhh haven’t really uhhh ok…”

HUMOR: Made in 2007

“I have a sketch, you want to see it? Well so this is how it happened. I was driving to school and that same week, I fuckin see one of my friends FNES, in like 6th grade. He has this jumbo Montana marker and he does his tag and outlines it with a blue crayon and I was like damn how the fuck did you do that, it looks tight. He was like oh I did it with this. I started noticing everything and I saw a Pizza floater, you remember Pizza he would fade his top. One day I was walking home from school and I see him catching a tag on my block and I look, and I go up to him and he was probably 5-6 years older than me, and he shows me this paint stick he used and baby silver Montana marker. And I was like that’s tight I want to get into that, can you show me? And he was like yea, we gotta get you a name a first and then we came up with this name BLISK, I don’t know I was young as shit and I went with it. Then eventually, 2-3 months later, I was like fuck this name. I had this one notebook, it was full of 50 pages straight of different names, words, trying to figure some shit out. Then I was in my living room and asked my brother how to spell Humor and he spelled it out, that’s when this shit happens (shows tag). Look at the double arrows, that was literally when I was 12 years old.”

OPTEK

“I have always written names with an O, and liked the letter O. It’s one of the hardest letters to do. But I think before that, I was writing Opus. I guess you could call that my first name, but never did that in the streets. Then it was Optimus, I’m a big Optimus Prime fan, but it was way too fucking long. And my boy was like “what do you envision when you paint graff?” At first, I was like man I don’t know, but then “optical” came to me since I would see these optical centers, but it was still too long. So that’s how I came up with Optek with a “tek”