::Writings of a Writer - Part 1: It’s OFFICIAL

Posted 5 years, 3 months, 1 week, 2 days, 2 hours, 29 minutes ago by PackFM

Long before I ever said my name in a rap, I was putting my name on walls. Even tho MCing is my calling, graffiti is my first passion in hiphop. I started writing my name on my desk when I was in junior high school so that whoever had the desk after me would see my name. Then people started getting nicknames. Mine was RAT. I got that name because dudes in my crew had a fight with some other cats and I snuck in and punched this dude like a little rat haha. So when I got home, I took a marker and wrote it on the door of some building on my block. Fast forward 2 years to high school, I had been practicing cool ways to write my name which changed about 3 times since. Now I was tagging up Gizmo (I have no clue why) and I started a crew called UTFO (Untouchable Fly Ones). I wrote it all over my locker and got in trouble for vandalizing school property. All my boys from around the way were getting into graf more serious and I started seeing that they were using spray paint to put their names up and to me that made them OFFICIAL. They would tell me about how they went out mad late and caught tags all over. My mother was strict as hell so they knew to not even bother askin if I could roll. They formed a crew called NUF (Niggas Using Force) and they said if I wanted to be down, I had to get a real tag, because by this time I took on the name False.

“I have a real tag”
“Nah man, that ‘False’ shit aint cuttin it”

“Psh man I been changed that, you didn’t know?”
“Ok, then whats the new tag?”
Since I was lying I had to think real fast, so I looked across the
street at a packaging warehouse and said
“Pack!”

PackFM tagging

Now I had an official name, but I still wasnt OFFICIAL. One day while I was walking to school past a construction site, I noticed a can of krylon unguarded and I instinctively just snatched it up. Now I had the name and the paint, all the tools I needed to be OFFICIAL. The only thing missing was opportunity. My mother would never let me, at the age of 14, go out at 2am for any reason, so I needed to find a way to get out in the streets while it was dark and empty. Somehow I convinced her that I needed to leave the house at 6am to go to school. That night I stayed up trying to make my own customized fat cap. Basically I took a razor blade and cut a wider opening into the stem of the cap and then I took a needle and widened the hole a bit, bootleg as fuck, but its all I had. At the crack of dawn I was out the door, and it was dark, cold and quiet. I felt like the world was mine! Nobody was around to stop me! My first stop was the alley around the corner from my house. I found a spot and waited 10 minutes for all the cars to stop passing by. Finally my time to be OFFICIAL had come, I took the bootleg cap, and put it on the can and shook it up until I heard the “click clack”. Now time to spray…

Pa….
WTF
The paint was this ugly ass neon green color. It never occured to me to read the label on the can. Fuck! this is ugly.
…ck.

I finished the tag, but there was no way in hell I was going to put my name around the neighborhood in THAT god awful color. I put the can in my bookbag and headed to school…2 hours early. But as I walked to the train and I heard the “click clack” in my bag, one thing was for sure, I was OFFICIAL.

PackFM tag