TKO Interview in Clout #8 | Click here to purchase this issue!
Clout Online Exclusive: In-depth interview with Toomer TKO

Breakdown TKO. How it started and how it came to be what it is and where you guys are going.
Well it started in South Los Angeles around ’88. Right now it’s at a point where motherfuckers wake up in Alaska and put themselves in, so we spend a good, big portion of our time looking for fucking suckers that are claiming TKO and telling them that they’re not. Like on MySpace or whatever I’ll get different e-mails from fools that say they’re from TKO but they’ve never met me in my life. It’s fuckin’ ridiculous. but you know last year or the year before that I used to get really pissed off and be all ‘I’m gonna beat the fuckin’ crap out of this motherfucker, shoot him when I see him. A couple of my homies, like Cartoon and them, told me you can’t really do nothing to stop these kids from mimicking your shit or claiming your shit. There’s just so many of them. And every year it just adds twenty or thirty other heads and that’s just here in the United States. I’m talking about in Mexico, there’s people claiming TKO and I guess it’s been like that in graffiti forever ‘cause I remember as a youngster people were claiming FC here in LA. They don’t know anybody from FC you know what I’m saying. It’s flattering in a way that people do that but at the same time it’s really fuckin’ annoying because people in the streets see these kids putting up TKO and they think, aw this crew’s letting in anybody. They have all these fools that are from TKO and they suck or whatever but I don’t look at it like that no more. I can’t really even elaborate on why I allow that to happen. One of the big reasons why is because I understand graffiti more now than ever. What I mean by that, I don’t mean graffiti for us as writers, I mean graffiti in the eyes of the law, because my house has been raided and I have been through the fuckin’ system a couple of times. I understand that if tomorrow, all the writers got their wish – you know how a lot of writers say ‘Oh, I wish all toys would disappear from Earth’ – but if that happened, you know how easy it would be for the police to arrest a handful of people that are really doing dirt. It’s because of the hundreds of stupid lames and morons out there writing insignificant graffiti that the writers that actually do the real good stuff or the stuff that counts, something that stands out, bold risky moves with skill on it, they wouldn’t even be around, they would just get us man. If they had one task force to chase after twenty people, they’d arrest all twenty people. There has to be a cloud of mystery. It has to be foggy. Oh, TKO has these dudes, they’ll be chasing their tails because they’re over there, in Oregon chasing a clique over there or they’re in LA chasing a click over there, but they can’t pinpoint the five real members or the seven real members or the twenty real members. If they do that, they’ll just chase after them and it’s over. There always got to be a mystery of who’s in TKO and who’s not in TKO, blah, blah, blah you know what I’m saying, that’s why I don’t really do anything about it. I know who’s in TKO, the varsity members of TKO know who’s from TKO. I could really give a fuck what crew in the nation cares or feels about TKO. I’ve painted with almost every graffiti writer worth anything from the United States. I know them, even if I didn’t paint with them, I know them, like I met them and I know who they are. And I’m talking about old school writers to new school writers. I’m talking about old New York writers, I’ve met them, I’ve talked to them, I’ve picked their brain, they’ve picked my brain. There’s not a crew in the United States or the planet that…they’re gonna tell me about graffiti. I don’t need to hear anything about graffiti. I know graffiti’s just vandalism and that’s what I do everyday. I don’t even consider TKO a graffiti crew anymore. I’m not down with pushing the quote unquote scene. I don’t push the scene. Fuck the scene. It’s like hip-hop. Fuck hip-hop. I like hip-hop, I listen to hip-hop but you know and I know that hip-hop has absolutely nothing to do with graffiti. Maybe they stole the visuals but they don’t put any type of respect back to it. You watch MTV Cribs and they show you all kinds of shit but they don’t yshow you graffiti paintings on the wall that they bought off of graffiti writers. Rappers don’t fuckin’ back us up with shit. When they want us to do their fuckin’ video, yeah, that’s why I fuckin’ charge them up the ass. They have hip-hop awards, the Source awards or whatever and you know they’ll give an award to Crazy Legs, not to say Crazy Legs doesn’t deserve an award or anything, I’m just saying how come they don’t put any graffiti writers up in that shit. Give them some awards. Really, hip-hop doesn’t have anything to do with graffiti and I have nothing to do with the graffiti scene in that way of pushing the graffiti scene. I don’t feel like we want anything to do with the graffiti scene. There’s art shows…I don’t go to them. I don’t have art shows. There’s never going to be a time that you can go buy one of my paintings. You want to buy a painting, I don’t know you. You’re either a sucker I’m gonna rip off for some shit I did real quick or you’re a homeboy that I’m gonna give a painting too. I’m not gonna have a gay ass art show and shit. To me, I feel that art shows are one of the stupidest things you can do is because a lot of the art shows are graffiti writers that don’t even write graffiti. So you shouldn’t call them graffiti shows, you should just call them, I just got out of college and I can do some shit on a canvas show. So I don’t consider TKO a graffiti crew…I guess it would almost be like a terrorist crew, but instead of blowing shit up, we bombing shit and you know I got tired…I seen a pattern when I was younger and the pattern was this. I bombed the shit out of South Central LA and other hoods around where I lived – South LA and shit like that – and the cops never really gave a fuck about me. And they only started giving a fuck about me when I started tearing up the Hollywood, West LA area. Then they really started giving a fuck. I knew that back in the day that all my graffiti would last in the hood but all the stuff in Hollywood and Westwood and places like that would get buffed. So I said fuck it, I’m gonna take it to even further. We started going deeper into the interior of the United States, you know, instead of just hitting LA and hitting like the hoods, we started venturing out to San Francisco, Las Vegas, Denver, Saint Louis, Miami, New York, Cleveland, fuck we’re in Virginia. I’ve been wanting to do the American thing, I want to go to Mexico and fuckin’ tear it up, so I went out there, fuckin’ destroying Tijuana and shit. Actually, Tijuana is the first place I practiced hitting a different city. If you really spend time in Tijuana, you know how fuckin’ big that motherfucker is.

We sort of developed a formula for killing a city. Have somebody there in that city that is a native. Put them down with the crew. Use their house, apartment or whatever and start landing troops…like sending more and more heads. Stay for the weekend, stay for a week or stay for a month and start fuckin’ hitting all the freeways, the landmarks, all the piecing spots, all the streets. There’s always gonna be haters in the city. You try to make peace, but it’s always funny like when we went to Mexico…I’m a Chicano, I’m was born in LA, but my parents are Mexican. It’s funny to go to Mexico and have Mexicans be racist against you because you’re an American. It’s so fucking crazy that I went out to Mexico. Mexicans are telling me that I’m a fuckin’ American and they don’t want American graffiti in Tijuana. What we did was that we totally ignore those fuck heads, and we bombed the fuck out of it, and at the end, all the fuck heads want to get down with TKO. The same thing is with Las Vegas. I lived there a long time ago for a couple months. Motherfuckers don’t know nothing about graffiti man, but they call themselves kings, you know what I’m saying, and they never left their city. Any crew now, especially in 2005, that’s never left their city can’t call themselves kings – that’s fuckin’ retarded. They never left their five block area radius. There’s old school New York graffiti writers that don’t even leave their boroughs man. They stay in the Bronx, they never come out of the Bronx to go to Brooklyn or to go to Manhattan. I think that’s pretty fuckin’ cheesy.

When someone comes to LA I don’t automatically hate on them and start bombing. We went to Vegas and the local idiots over there just started crossing us out because they wanted to keep it ‘Vegas’. Like that means anything. Like every fucking city we go to, there’s always some static crew there because we’re getting up. That’s why TKO is structured the way it is. We have fools that will break your fuckin’ neck, or need to be, there are motherfuckers that will shoot your ass. Fools like that, are the ones that we send first. Send the knuckleheads there first. Let all the knuckleheads do the damage and then fuckin’ send the bombers in to cover all the good spots. A city like Las Vegas, for instance, that we just took from the crews out there, they started busting Las Vegas Pride and trying to get this armada together to kick us out, are retarded because I could send members from Denver to hit them. I could send members from Vegas to hit them. I could send LA members to hit them. I could have the San Francisco members to hit them. San Diego to hit them…anywhere around Las Vegas, I could send in people and then they’ll come back home and those fools will be there stuck. Stabbed, shot, fucked up. Their graffiti will be dead and they’ll leave. They don’t get it. When we go into a city, we intend to take it no matter what the fuck it costs and I’ll send a hundred motherfuckers if I have to, to ensure that we take a fuckin’ city. At first, I mean KENR was there when I talked to one of them and I told them, I go, “I intend to bomb the city and I think you should get the fuck out of the way so we can do this and don’t worry about what we’re painting. And some moron there which ends up calling us later on talking about let’s have peace, tells me, “Yeah, we’ll see about that.” You know? Like I have to ask permission to take a city. I told him, “Dude, I could take it nicely. We’ll just paint it and we stay away from your graff or I’ll just take it from you.” And he started laughing and now half his crew’s in jail, the other ones got stabbed, beat up and shot at, and they’re fuckin’ crying like little bitches trying to get along with us. But now it’s too late. Now I don’t want to get along with them. Now it’s irrelevant. Fuck, why should I get along with you, I already took your city. So I mean, it’s just stupid. Right now we’re fighting in New York with some bitch ass YKKs and the gay ass fuckin’…JA’s crew, XTC, which fuckin’ don’t come out one of the boroughs and shit. The only reason why they diss us is because we’re in their city. They don’t come to LA to diss us. They’re not dissing us in Saint Louis. They ain’t dissing us in Chicago. They ain’t dissing us in anywhere else but New York. So the only way they can diss us, even though they’re proud that they’re dissing us, is because we’re in their backyard. They already lost, they just don’t know it. A lot of crews already lost, but don’t know it. They don’t see that we’re already in their backyard.

Like I said Tijuana was basically the practice. We had a lot of people hating. We had to find our way block by block by block. And we took that bitch. I mean, I haven’t been over there in years and we’re still talked about. The thing about graffiti is, in every city you hit, and I’m sure it’s going to be like that when we go to Japan and Europe, you know. That’s our futures, to go global. We always try to get locals though man. Like, KOES is a good example. KOES, he’s a local Denver head and now he’s like the king of Denver. That motherfucker destroyed all of Denver. It’s ridiculous, when you go to Denver, you can see KOES going over KOES, you know. When you go to Saint Louis, all you fuckin’ see is GUER. We got ADEK; ADEK’s a fuckin’ killer. He destroyed San Francisco. He gets way respect in the fuckin’ Bay. COLT .45 is in fuckin’ New York. HAELER’s in New York. If we don’t have any locals, we at least move to the city and try to take it as much as possible. When I get a chance, me and GUER will fuckin’ show up to New York with COLT .45 and HAEL and us four together will send that motherfucker into the ‘70s.

But there’s always going to be jealousy and hatred. Like New York right now. Not all of them, not the ones that count, not the old school heads, not the ones that put in work, but just a bunch of lame ass kids that used to write graffiti. The only reason why they write graffiti now is to just diss us. They’re trying to persuade 80% of the city there to say ‘Fuck LA. Fuck the West Coast.’ Like some Biggie and Tupac shit. I love New York, man. I’ve been in New York a couple of times and I think New York is dope. I have respect for a lot of writers in New York. I have respect for the city but there’s a little handful of fuckin’ morons in New York that just think that they’re going to say some gay shit like ‘Fuck the West Coast’ and think that we’re not going to see them over there. Or even if they come to LA. These fools…they’re kind of like burning their bridge. One day they might want to come to LA and when they do, it’s not like New York. In New York, you shoot somebody or you shoot at somebody, the entire New York Police Department will be on your ass in a couple of fuckin’ minutes. In LA, I blast in my yard in the air every other time I’m kicking it and cops don’t show up – ever. LA’s a gun city. Everybody has a gun. I know ten year olds that have fuckin’ guns you know. When these clowns come to LA with the mentality of Hollywood, like everything looks like Hollywood, and when they try to paint some of the hoods out here in LA, they’re gonna get their ass smoked. And it’s only going to take one writer from New York to get smoked out here for everybody in New York to be like, ‘Oh shit. These kids ain’t fuckin’ around.’ As far as I’m concerned, as far as graffiti is, I’m like a felon. I have felony graffiti shit. Whatever I can do to you, like physically harm you will be the same as I have to fix my spot. So if someone disses my graffiti and I have to risk to fix it, ‘cause I’m gonna fix it, that’s like I’m risking more felonies. So I might as well shoot your ass. I might as well break your fuckin’ neck. Because then it will prevent you from dissing my shit again and me risking more felonies. That’s the way I look at graffiti. I’m not fucking around. I don’t go over peoples’ shit. If people go over my shit, I’m gonna fuckin’ hurt ‘em. I mean, as it is, I go painting with my strap, so if anybody catches me slipping, good luck. I hope you have a better aim than me, you know. That’s just LA life, I don’t do that in graffiti, but that’s LA life. A lot of stupid motherfuckers are running around with guns and they’ll just blast at you if you’re in their hood.

Your question was where did it start. It started in South Los Angeles and where it’s going, it’s going global hopefully. One thing I am proud of is, no matter what the fuck happens to me, whether I go to prison or get fuckin’ killed, it’s still gonna go. It’s too late to stop it. There’s too many motherfuckers that are continuing, and so in a way, it’s like I vandalized the future. Because I’ll be dead, there’ll still be fools vandalizing Mexico, there’ll still be fools vandalizing somewhere in the world or in the United States. It’s like a took a time machine in a way. It’s gonna keep on going, there’s other leaders, there’s other cliques; it’s gonna keep on evolving. And that’s just the way graffiti is. Cavemen were writing graffiti. They were fuckin’ marking up their caves. In the future, when we colonize Mars or something I guarantee you man, I guarantee you, there’s going to be one motherfucker that’s gonna walk down the street or down a moon rock,  and he’s gonna fuckin’ scribe on fuckin’ Mars. And another asshole walks by and looks at it, and he’s gonna do it and then boom, you know. The second they get real freedom in Iraq, some asshole is going to vandalize something and then another asshole is going to say, wow, that’s cool and he’s going to do it too and that’s how it starts. Graffiti will continue no matter what; no matter what laws they make, no matter what’s going on in the world, one thing you can always count on is that humans are assholes. It takes one asshole, whether right now or 2028 to scribe something and leave a little mark or whatever. ‘Fuck Mars’ and another fool, ‘Yeah, Mars Sucks.’ You know what I mean, it’s always going to continue, no matter what society turns into in the future, somebody’s gonna tag on something. There’s no stopping it. That’s the way I look at TKO now. There’s crews that die out. There’s crews that are older than us that have been around way longer and have way more people, they’ve died out. The reason why they die out is because they don’t look to the future, the future of young writers from other cities. If it’s too hot in LA, make it happen in Alabama. If it’s too hot in Alabama, then move it to Texas. If it’s too hot in Texas, move it to…you know what I mean? We always got moves somewhere. The laws haven’t caught up to Mexico. Mexico graffiti writers from TKO are fucking shit up in Mexico. And then they’ll fuckin’ jump the fence and come over to the United States and start fuckin’ shit up over here. It’s a revolving, ongoing thing. No matter what’s going on. Like I said, we’re kind of like a terrorist crew. It’s like cells, there are leaders of different cells that don’t always communicate with each other but they know the purpose is to write graffiti. If anything, we’re learning by watching our examples of the world. Graffiti is like the world, it’s like society in a way. There’s beef, there’s jealousy, there’s anger, there’s businesses, there’s everything you know. People get mad at graffiti; people get mad at the real world. You can get socked over graffiti, you can get socked for sitting on somebody’s car and denting it.

We’ve pissed off so many graffiti writers, it’s ridiculous. We’ve pissed off so many graffiti writers. I don’t know a crew in LA that I haven’t pissed off. I pissed off my own homeboys from AWR and MSK you know. I pissed off my own members from TKO you know what I mean. You know you’re doing a good job when you have people on the computer every fuckin’ day talking shit about you. Every day. Any given day of the week, if you go to any fuckin’ high school, half of the kids are saying ‘Fuck TKO’ and the other half are saying ‘Damn, I want to be in TKO.’ One thing about TKO is that it always keeps on going man. I was talking to one of my homegirls earlier…like Thanksgiving right, everybody around Thanksgiving starts getting with their family, and getting together, you know Christmas is coming, people are shopping for gifts, getting ready for Christmas…we’re fucking’ racking paint, we’re cutting fences to write graffiti at night. We’re fuckin’ worried about damn, we gotta get this spot and that spot. Instead of worrying about Christmas gifts and family, we’re worried about what spot we’re gonna hit. And it just continues no matter what the fuck is going on in the world. When the September 11th attacks happened, me and KENR and RESQ were on our way to Mexico to write graffiti and we were pissed because they closed the borders. We were like man, you guys needed to close the borders after these attacks. Shit, we got graffiti to write, open the fuckin’ border. For the last fifteen years, I can’t remember a week, unless I was in jail, and even in there I was scribing on something, that I didn’t write graffiti on something. And if I get three or four, or even just one other person to think like me, TKO will continue on forever man. That was your long ass answer to your one little question. (Laughs)