People always tell me, “Oh, you’re an artist,
you’re an artist, you’re an artist.”
And I will always stop them from saying that, and just...
I don’t believe that my graffiti is an art form.
My graffiti is vandalism.
Me being my age, when you’re out there, you still feel kind of young.
It’s crazy, you’re out there running the streets.
Copy, copy, copy, copy.
It’s a little bit, you know, risky, whatever.
It gives me a little bit of a thrill.
It’s cool to see your name here, there, there.
And then people are calling you up,
“Yo, I’ve seen you over here, I’ve seen you over here.”
It’s just like an addiction.
Just literally wanting to do it, and do it, and do it.
It’s like riding a motorcycle, you know?
You’re going 130 and the rest of the world is just gone.
You know, you’re doing a wall and you hear,
“Freeze, ****. I’ll shoot you from here.”
And you look back and there’s a cop with a gun.
I’ve seen people get shot, I’ve seen people get stabbed.
If you’ve got a problem with me, I will **** you up.
How far are you willing to go?
That’s the changing point.
Are you willing to take that risk...
to go to jail for what you believe in.
Writing your name on ****.
[The Last Vandals]
-Do you want me to set you up? -Yeah, if you can, please.
-Alright then. -Yeah, just five lines.
Yeah, something like right here would be cool.
[Crome was recently released from prison,]
[after spending 8 years incarcerated for drug related charges.]
The first time I went to county jail for graffiti, it was scary.
You go to Dade County jail and that ****’s crazy.
Dade County jail is a **** up **** jail, you know?
And when you’re there at that time, as a young kid,
18 years old, for graffiti.
It’s kind of a scary thing, you’re like “Damn,”
you don’t know what to expect.
And the people in jail, you know,
they’re there for drugs and for breaking into houses,
and for whatever it might be, and they’re like,
“Yo, Jet, what you here for?”
And I’m like, “I’m here for doing **** graffiti.”
But they’re like, “Why, why, why would you waste your time
you’re not getting any money from that ****.
What the **** you going around writing on people’s ****
and not getting nothing out of it. Like, what the...”
You know, it’s a concept the average person can’t understand.
Like, why would you do something and risk getting in trouble,
and get no money out of it?
MSG has been around since the very early 90s,
Crome started it.
Even though they’re just a little older than me,
they were just so far beyond.
There were other crews out there,
but nobody was doing what they were doing.
Is that my piece?
This is a legal gun, by the way.
Yeah, I just did that with my hood up, man.
We’ve got members spread out everywhere, all over the globe.
I’m Touch, born and raised in Miami.
I got some money. We got some cocaine.
I like making money.
Fast money is almost like ****, to me.
Alright. Abuse, MSG Crew.
I don’t really care to talk about my personal life at all,
what I do for a living.
I tattoo in trap houses where there’s people selling drugs.
You’ve got pit bulls,
you’ve got little kids running around in Pampers and ****.
Crome first and foremost, was a god.
But if you ask anybody in the graffiti world who Eson is,
they’ll be able to tell you who I am.
And what I do is street graffiti.
I just enjoy bombing.
Bombing is just getting up as much as possible.
Everywhere, all city, county walls, all that ****.
It’s all fair game and we want it all.
And it’s not because I have anything against the government.
It has nothing to do with **** trying to be an anarchist,
or yada, yada, yada.
I just like writing on other people’s ****.
Trackside is where you’ll see it if you’re riding the train,
you know, you might see a roof top.
Not people’s personal property, nothing like that.
I like to do **** that doesn’t offend too many people.
People always ask me, “What is graffiti to you?”
Graffiti to me, it’s like a sickness.
You know, I can’t drive down the street
without wanting to hit every curb, pole, sign, wall.
It’s just programed in my head that I got to get that ****.
I have done some really **** up ****,
painted some store fronts and stuff.
You know, sometimes I get a little loose, but...
I try not to do that too much, you know?
I do believe in karma. I know what goes around comes around.
The city leaves these holes in the sound walls.
The reason they do that is for emergencies, for fires,
things like that.
I was one of the first ones to find these holes and exploit them.
Right in the middle of the highway, where people wonder,
“How the hell did that get there?”
Other graffiti artists have followed me
and they started to seal them up, it’s become such a problem.
My claim to fame is highway signs,
because I’ve hit more than anyone, at least in this city, I can say.
For me I like it because it’s prime time.
People can choose to ignore graffiti on the side.
You know, they’ll drive by and not look at it.
With this one, it kind of just smacks you right in the face.
Most of us at some point have seen graffiti on the side of a building,
like this.
But to scale these metal poles while balancing on a beam,
holding a can of spray paint while hundreds of cars whiz by,
that’s a bit more shocking.
The first time I did that, it was like a dream,
like it wasn’t even real.
Like I was doing it, but I couldn’t believe I was doing it.
The majority of my bombing has been alone.
And the reason for that is any time, anything can happen.
A lot of times where I just got lucky,
like a cop pulling over and saying,
“Freeze, ****. I’ll shoot you from here.”
You look back and there’s a cop with a gun, you know,
“Get down! You’re under arrest.”
You jump down on the highway and you can hear him so close,
you hear him breathing behind you, like,
[panting]
and his keys moving.
So you know he’s right there behind you.
From there you go, you hide under a car,
you know, for hours you can see units going by.
So, I’ve come that close several times.
We’re very disappointed and, frankly, disgusted
to see this type of activity along the expressways,
especially on this road.
This is one of the first impressions tourists get.
Graffiti has become a deep-rooted social problem that has bubbled up
from the underground to consume public buildings.
And to me, street art is like,
what the 70s, it was a political statement.
We all had the same idea, just **** bombing **** up.
It’s just a general and pervasive
lack of consideration for other people.
I think that’s the bottom line, I think graffiti is--
To us, it’s art, you know? It’s not a crime but, you know,
if the government gave us some rights to do it,
we could make it look nice, you know what I’m saying?
You don’t live in this building, you’re coming in to your house,
you’re drawing on this guy’s house.
Is that art?
I don’t write on your house, your car, you know what I mean?
I wouldn’t do stupid **** like that.
But you put this big **** highway
and I decide to decorate the **** when I feel like it,
that’s my choice.
When it comes to commercial real estate and ****,
you know, your billboard, you want to advertise
some big profit company because you have more money.
You can put your big billboard and make the city look ugly
with your big **** whatever.
Then I can **** tag that ****, and that’s my opinion.
Two of the most notorious and prolific graffiti pros
were Crook and Crome.
Tagging walls, fences and poles all over Miami Dade County.
They were caught and arrested several years ago.
The clean up efforts continued well after.
You know, you ain’t really trying to hurt nobody.
You’re just trying to do something that someone can see
and think about and look at and just, you know,
it goes through their mind.
No one’s ever like, “Oh, you’re that horrible guy that **** did this.”
They’re like, “Oh man, you’re that guy
I’ve always seen since I was a young kid.”
I’ve had kids come up to me like,
“Man, I used to [not be able to] wait
until I was on the highway, man, with my mom.
It’d be nothing more fun to see that, you know?”
When I was young, rolling round with mom and dad,
I would see people like Crome.
So these are all, like, mini highway signs.
My main partner for a long time was Heat.
I put here ‘Crook’ and ‘Crome’ because they were
my major influences.
Like back in the day,
used to talk about what drew everybody to Crome.
Crome was doing legals, illegals.
He was just a man on a mission.
And he had a good group of people around him.
All these kids with extraordinary skills that you see their work
off the highway and you just wonder,
"How they did that, when did they do that?”
You know, it wasn’t there yesterday,
but just like a ghost, bam, it’s there.
And once I started doing it myself,
you know, like they all say, it’s addictive.
The more you see yourself up, the more you just want to keep going,
and keep going.
Tagging territory, spraying signs, graffiti art,
call it what you want.
Vandals are hitting South Florida signs, again.
This is by no means the first time this has happened.
There were two taggers, Crook and Crome.
You used to see their signs all over.
-Yeah, I remember them. -They caught them and they--
Crome was just one of those people where people are drawn to him.
You know, he makes everybody better.
Me being my age, when you’re out there,
you still feel kind of young.
It’s crazy, you’re out there running the streets.
Why do you wear this uniform?
Because it looks like I kind of work for the city, sort of.
I tried sneaking into concerts and ****.
And I’ll just like walk up and I’ll start lifting up the drains
and just looking at them, and being like “Oh, okay,”
and then putting them down, and then walking over
and getting closer to the entrance,
and be like, “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me.
Get out of my way.”
And they just let me walk right in.
You can get away with just about anything
if you play your cards right.
I do paint a lot by myself, though.
You don’t have to watch out for anybody else.
So, if you get busted, you get busted. And that’s it.
Try to park a little bit less conspicuous.
You know, if anything happens with somebody else, I’m like,
“Yo, get the **** out of here and I’ll take it”.
Some people get arrested one time and spend the day in Dade County jail
and they’re like “**** that ****. That **** was hell on Earth.
I’m never going to do illegal graffiti.”
I climbed up onto a roof
and the cops were there looking for us for so long.
You could see them with their flashlight, looking.
And they would come right here in front of me,
or right here on this side.
Like even lifting my head would've got me busted.
There’s lots of great graffiti artists out there
that never **** had the balls to ever **** do anything illegal,
or go out there and just...
Never payed their dues in the streets, they’re just too scared.
It’s like, you know, I love this ****.
I believe that I was lucky.
I came into the graffiti world right before the Internet was big.
So, I still kind of had to figure out how to make my own markers,
how to take a stock tip and melt the tip on it
and cut it to try to make it spray fatter.
These days, you could just go to almost any art store
and find graffiti spray paint there.
And a thing also with the Internet is,
you could paint something in the middle of nowhere
and then put it on Instagram.
And people have no clue that that could be just your backyard.
You painted it once, you did it again, you painted it again.
You know, people don’t know that you’re out there
doing spots and spots and spots.
You know, before you’d have to go out and look
and see what people are doing.
Now, you could just follow someone you like.
I'm not big on social media.
The bottom line is real recognizes real, so...
at the end of the day, you’re going to know the people
who are really out painting and bombing.
You’re going to see them.
And these people that are just,
you know, on the Internet, photoshopping
or whatever **** it may be,
They’ll get called out, and it is what it is.
But that’s definitely true,
there are a lot of younger cats that...
they don’t do it like we did it back in the day.
They got it easier.
This neighborhood, in Miami,
but it’s also a neighborhood called Wynwood,
which is obviously worldwide-known now.
It's like a mecca of graffiti now.
I can literally go paint any wall I want, right now,
the cops wouldn’t even say a word.
But before, you paint something with a spray can,
the cops would be pulling up on you, “What’s going on?”
But now you can just paint anywhere you **** feel like it.
And it’s all for all, you know?
It doesn’t even make no difference.
Miami for the longest time was...
it was such a bad thing, you know?
You were doing graffiti, you had gang unit out, tracking you down,
taking pictures, creating files.
Basically trying to get you.
At a certain point, they started Wynwood.
That's just like a free for all.
People go down there and paint all the time.
It's just become so acceptable.
They have golf cart tours, you can go see the graffiti.
Tourists come down here just to see the graffiti,
some of it’s so good.
Now, if you become a graffiti artist, and you do good,
you see opportunities to travel,
and you get sponsored by spray paint companies,
and people fly you out and pay for you.
It’s definitely going more commercial.
That's not where it started.
It started as just a bunch of people trying to be infamous
and create some dope ****.
So, it’s become a lot more acceptable.
Now what you see is all these condominiums and all this stuff here,
ten years ago, within the last ten years, man, it has been insane.
We’re talking about a house right here that I stay in
and now looks like an abandoned house full of graffiti, right?
But it’s worth $400,000.
Why is that?
Because everyone's buying up all the property on the outskirts
of Wynwood.
Because this could be a condominium soon.
You know, everyone’s waiting for that boom to start pushing outward,
outward, like in most cities, you know?
From a neighborhood known for crime and drugs, crack, heroin,
and now you’re seeing Gucci advertisements that look like
they’re street art and they’re being protected by security guards,
because now graffiti artist see it,
“Oh, ****. That’s a perfect opportunity to **** it up.”
Especially when corporate America used to look down upon us,
now they’re using the same thing against, you know,
to sell their products.
Do you think it’s like a death of an era?
Nah, I don’t think it’s the death of an era.
I think people are still going to do it.
It’s just...
who knows where it’s going to go.
**** comes in with AK-47, showing it off.
And he stands here, goes to say “What’s up” to his homie,
and the **** thing goes off right here dude, look at this ****.
Big **** hole in the floor.
-Declined. -Nah, come on. You **** kidding me?
Here, I got you.
Oh, that’s right, that’s right,
I don’t have any money on that **** card, hold on.
What in the hell are you trying to do, besides nothing?
I thought so. I rest my case.
In Miami, under all these bridges,
a lot of them don't have fences,
so you can just walk right up onto the highway and hit the sound wall.
There’s, kind of, no way for them to get you
because you could just jump right down and you’re gone, you know?
It’s like a “**** you,” in your face.
Now I do what I can, you know?
Every artist eventually slows down a little bit,
for one reason or another.
My condition is, I have stage 4 cancer,
and that took a lot out of me.
You know, before that I was invincible.
I can go out and do something right now
that’s going to be super likeable and I can make money off of it
and promote it.
And I tell people that all the time, I could do that, but like,
am I going to be happy at the end of the day?
Am I being true to myself? No.
And to me, if you don’t experience that illegal, middle of the night,
when no one else is **** out there, that rush you get.
That’s part of like, being who you are.
When you’re just this guy,
“Oh, can I paint your walls?”
There's no excitement in that.
You know, you should try to do all aspects.
For me, I’ll just always do it, I know that.
I love it enough that I’ll always risk it.
I think graffiti is only getting bigger.
It's tough to see where it's going.
You’re always going to have your leading bombers.
Always five or six in a state that just kill it.
So where the **** is that?
Are you guys still down for another one or what?