“Coming from Iowa, we sometimes have a bit of a chip on our shoulder,” the Des Moines hip-hop artist ASPHATE told me, “but, you know, magic can occur anywhere.”
“When it comes to graffiti right now, we’re rocking,” he continued. “I think the [Iowa] scene is energized in the street, both legally and underground. These days, I’m happy to see and hear people taking more pride and more ownership in the scene and representing our own history and our own development in it.”
ASPHATE dove headfirst into graffiti writing after his first clandestine bombing mission one snowy night in 2007, when he was 25. It was a relatively late age to embrace an illicit artform that occasionally requires running from railyard dogs or security officers assigned to guard freight trains, which often serve as canvases for writers, but he didn’t care.
“I went really hard at it,” ASPHATE recalled. “I wanted to cut my teeth, to pay my dues, and so I was bombing every other night, even though I’m getting up early in the morning and working at a corporate job. But I went so hard at it that, somewhere within the first two years, I had a slew of photos of myself, rival crews, neighboring crews, things of that sort. I ended up reaching out to a lot of OGs and said, ‘Man, if you got any old photos, send them to me because I want to preserve the history.’”
One way ASPHATE achieves this is with Innocent Display, a new magazine produced in partnership with Mayday Collective, that is bursting with eye-popping color photos documenting and celebrating the work of Iowa’s finest crews and individual writers. The first issue sports a laundry list of (often abbreviated) crew names and artist nom de plumes — crews like NTC, LKD, Scarce Elements and TKO; graff heads like GAGE1, SINZTER, WOLF and MONE.
You’re forgiven if these names don’t ring a bell. Part of the point of the art of graffiti is maintaining anonymity to the masses while creating in ways that other writers will appreciate. Real recognize real, and Innocent Display makes no attempt to hold the hands of pedestrians. This is a graff magazine for graff writers and others already steeped in Iowa’s hip-hop scene.
Which speaks to ASPHATE’s embodiment of hip hop’s four founding elements — DJing, breaking, graffiti writing and rhyming — and the responsibility he feels representing Iowa, his adopted home.
“If someone were to ask me where I’m from when I travel abroad,” he said, “I’ll say that I am from Iowa with pride. At this point, I’ve lived here longer than I have anywhere else.”
He and his mother moved to Fort Dodge in 1999. After receiving a basketball scholarship to attend Grand View High School, he wound up in Des Moines. ASPHATE had already cut his teeth battling other emcees in cyphers, and he also had some experience on the turntables, but it wasn’t until he moved to Iowa that hip hop’s four elements came into focus for him.
Real recognize real, and Innocent Display makes no attempt to hold the hands of pedestrians. This is a graff magazine for graff writers and others already steeped in Iowa’s hip-hop scene.
ASPHATE’s love of music was stoked early on by his mother, who had a massive CD collection and was into everything from Nina Simone and Tracy Chapman to Simon & Garfunkel. His uncle was just a few years older than him and was a kind of big brother who also happened to be a party-rockin’ DJ well versed in hip-hop history.
“My uncle would always come around with vinyl,” ASPHATE said, “and when De La Soul Is Dead came out, he dropped it on me one day, which imprinted upon me this love for De La and that sort of vibe that comes from the whole Native Tongues era.”
“So, between my uncle being a DJ and playing music for people and always bringing home vinyl, and my mother’s musical tastes, I started to develop my own eclectic love for music in general. Later on, when I started to get into rhyming, it was just natural. I loved hip hop because I loved the music that was being sampled, because it sounded like all that stuff that I’d been turned onto earlier.”
ASPHATE got his start as an emcee in 10th grade at Indianapolis’s North Central High School, where dozens of kids gathered in the gym to go head-to-head in cyphers. Emcees were chewed up and spit out if they didn’t bring their A-game, so he began approaching hip hop from a place of aggressive competition. By the time he was in his early 20s and settled in Des Moines, ASPHATE had become well known around town for his rhyme skills.
“Around 2006, my group Maxilla Blue came together,” he said. “There was a producer here named Aeon Grey, and one day, Aeon said, ‘Man, we should just do a project where it’s all my beats, all your rhymes, and we just come up with a name for it.’
“We eventually added DJ TouchNice, because both of us were big about having turntablism involved in what we were doing,” he continued. “2007-08 is when we released the first Maxilla Blue album, and that’s when we go on our first little mini tour.”
A couple years earlier, ASPHATE had connected with the Floor Spiders Crew, where he met his future wife, known as ESNCE. During this time, he began to master the fundamentals of breaking, something he loved because it reminded him of the in-your-face competition of emcee battles. Meanwhile, he also got an education from the OG hip-hop heads, who taught him the rules of the game and held discipline over him, whether it was the flow of his floor technique, his rhymes or the lines he sprayed on walls — all the while inspiring him to connect the dots between the four core elements.
“At the time, people would show up in my house to break every week, and eventually graffiti writers around the town would show up for what we called Writers Anonymous, like a writer’s bench sort of thing.
The Innocent Display photo above, according to PHATE, is a rare action shot of the late SUREM7 wrapping up his contribution to what’s known in the graff world as a “production.” This production from VETO, PROSE and SUREM7 was finished before all three of them were chased out of an abandoned slaughterhouse by security patrolling the adjacent property.
PHATE goes on to define a production “as an artistic effort where there are multiple graffiti writers involved. Quite often there is background and characters. At the very least there are multiple pieces from multiple graff writers, all with matching colors and schemes. Everything is cohesive. That’s why you see all three of the pieces, from VETO, PROSE and SUREM7, and you see SUREM7 still in action. That’s why all their colors are matching, because they approached it that day thinking to themselves, ‘Hey, we’re about to rock a production.’ They just ended up getting chased out of there before they could add any additional elements.”
So, suffice it to say, I started to get really deep into all of the elements. By this point, my wife got me my own turntables and I’m deep into that. I am now involved in graffiti writing. I’m a b-boy, and my first love, emceeing, is what’s taken me in and out of state, setting up different shows.”
Some youth organizations in Des Moines such as Run-DSM and Minorities On the Move had been doing a lot of progressive programming, and one day ASPHATE was contacted by a teacher who wanted to incorporate hip hop into classes. Versing someone in the art of 16 bars is hard to do in an afternoon workshop, especially given how much skill goes into spitting rhymes: language, cadence, flow, and so on. It’s tricky to rock a rhyme that’s right on time, but putting a can of paint in a kid’s hand can make the uninitiated feel a sense of visual triumph after just a couple hours.
This inspired ASPHATE to begin throwing events around Des Moines known as Color Codes, where writers painted and exhibited their work. He also launched what he called Mentor Mashups, where he’d take an established graffiti writer and pair them with one of his students to create a wall.
In addition to the workshops and other events he does for youth organizations, the most recent way that ASPHATE has contributed to the regional hip-hop scene is by documenting graffiti writing.
“I had been wanting to do something like a magazine,” he said, “and long story short, it’s been over 10 years in the making, but here we are now. We just dropped issue one of Innocent Display on Halloween. The first 12 issues will focus on work that was produced by Iowan graffiti writers, so it can be in or out of state, as long as they’re from Iowa or it’s something that’s occurred on our soil.”
A call for photo submissions for the second issue reinforces quality control with a disclaimer that “we are not accepting backyard practice pieces or street art with no ties or background in actual WRITING…Your penis painted in public will be p-p-prohibited.”
On top of having a civilian occupation that pays the rent, being a hip-hop artist who needs to stay sharp and on-point is a full-time job. With limited hours in the day, what keeps ASPHATE going?
“One day I realized, ‘Damn dude, out of all my life experiences, it was little ole’ Iowa that taught me all the elements.’ So now I kind of owe it to the scene to keep pushing and help younger heads that might be interested in it and let them know that they can find it here without having to go elsewhere because, you know, I didn’t start putting the other elements together until I was in Des Moines.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s December 2024 issue.
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