Website log 1

 

How I chose the name: Jaws 

...then evolved it to JawsAtak47

 

    Freshman year... Humboldt, Live from a life of skateboarding. The community has truly shaped and helped my life so much, but those stories will be saved for the future. We are her today to answer the question of : Whats with the name!? Id say most of my friends at this time were skateboarders. All I did was skateboard and the only people I regularly interacted with were skateboarders, however I cant say my many of my classmate at the time were, so the skatepark crew were the group I spent the most time with. We skated all the local community took skate trips out of town a lot fell hard and learned hard tricks together. Every single day was a unique adventure.

    One night after a long day of skating in the next town over, the crew detoured to a mobil park about half the way back home; not really drug dealer style tho, we weren't there to meet people or nothing. Soon I realized it was because of a certain billboard that was accessible. That to me at the time was more confusing then anything cause up to this point, I had no real idea of the graffiti scene, but here we were, on my first mission! Sorta... I just sat in the car and waited! Lol!!

From that point on I knew I had some things to learn! From that point on I was intrigued with this new found community! My friends gave me material to read, books to work in, spots to check out and all the info they could teach me. My name is Anthony, never really had a “nickname” with classmates and such that stuck more than the class year, but I thought the name Twon was cool, and was a common abbreviation of my real name, so that was whaat I chose to write as my 1st graffiti name, and I was off to the races!!

    I had probably been “writing” Twon for about a year +/-, learning the ropes in black books and on walls throughout the city, being inspired by the people before me and seeing more of my peers cup on board in their own unique ways, when one day while going to the skatepark I saw a artfully hand drawn sticker, signed by what looked to say “JAH JAH” being in Humboldt this is not an odd thing to see at all, but right then and there is all I needed! My instant thought was: “I’m gonna write ‘JAWS’. No-one at the time of my beginning “had” that name yet so it was all game for me to work with that. I love the energy and feeling of the name! The fun letter structures and simplicity all and more kept me hooked since day one. And my friends seemed to approved it too! So it stuck. Fun fact: few graffiti writers keep their early names, most the people ive met through out the years have had several names for many different reasons.

    Now for my first life overlap, ill back up a lil bit. I have been writing hiphop music for about a year prior to this time also using the name Twon as my rap name so when ‘JAWS’ came to life I knew this was a good choice. With the evolution of my growth in hiphop at the time, I had told myself I'd wanted to be a “fast rapper” like Twista to BoneThugs, so I added the “at AK47” representing a fully automatic machine gun to the back of my new found graffiti name JAWS, and JawsAtak47 was born! From that point on I have distinguished the 2 entities in their own disciplines and overlapping em where and when necessary. JAWS the graphic artist and JawsAtak47 the hiphop artist. Both of these world treat me well and I know Ill be working on doing my best to keep the passion and drive alive for the communities that have truly saved, helped and taught me so much and so long and continue to do so!

 

-Anthony-JawsAtak47-Vella