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“Imagine if a blue collar or middle-class sitcom dad … was cool enough to make rap music, that’s what I would be,” Tyrone Thomas, aka Klazik, told The Gazette. It’s a fitting description for the 43-year-old Cleveland native who is a vocal Iowa player in the growing musical genre Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop.
Thomas, who is based in Des Moines, balances a full plate: being a father and husband, working a 9 to 5 and pursuing his career as a professional rapper and hip-hop artist.
His career took off in 2022. Since then, he’s racked up accolades at the Iowa Music Awards, an annual event that recognizes the growing music industry within the Hawkeye State. This year, he took home the inaugural Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop Artist Award.
Thomas defines the genre as representing an “underserved market of people who grew up in the culture of hip-hop” but face stigma for being older hip-hop fans. He said that hip-hop being made today doesn’t speak to the older generation. He creates music with a traditional hip-hop sound that will speak to seasoned fans.
“You deserve something for you, you don’t have to listen to 10-, 20-, 30-year-old albums … life doesn’t stop after a certain age,” Thomas said. “You still have a life to live, and you deserve some quality entertainment.”
While the Iowa Music Awards have embraced it, the hip- hop community has had a mixed reception to calls for the new subgenre. Despite this, there is momentum across the country for the creation of an Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop category at award shows. Ol Skool Ice-Gre, of Abstract Mindstate, has been on the front lines of these efforts. Ice-Gre has submitted a proposal to The Recording Academy to expand the Rap/Hip-Hop category at the Grammy Awards.
In an Instagram reel, Ice-Gre said ACH is about the traditional sound of hip-hop, not the age or the artist who creates it.
“I refer to the Adult Contemporary space as like a community that was built amongst the outcasts … I want Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop to be a reset of the culture as a whole and an umbrella for all the outcasts to merge under,” Thomas said.
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Becoming Klazik
For many, art is an escape and that’s what music provided Thomas as he grew up in Cleveland. His parents struggled with substance use issues, and he was a loner. He expressed himself through drawing until he started writing songs and rapping.
Klazik’s rapper origin story starts with the Notorious B.I.G. song “One More Chance/Stay With Me (Remix).”
“The line where he says, ‘Heart throb, never, Black and ugly as ever, however,’ that reached me at a place where I was very insecure and not confident in my looks and my appearance of who I was as a person, and that line just presented a way of thinking that I never had been exposed to and opened my mind up to, you know, we can defy what we think we are or even though we know we don’t have what it takes to be chosen or to be successful, and that was the beginning of everything for me,” Thomas said.
Thomas is a wordsmith, skillfully spinning together messages about love, life and growing through adversity. His music tells his life story.
His 2021 release “Meant for Me” is a vulnerable reflection of his career to that point.
He starts the song with, “If a master has ten thousand hours, then with rapping I’ve mastered mastery. I’m not famous so I’m the best but with an asterisk. There’s not many that’s more passionate, my pen and heart are one.”
“It’s just expressing my frustrations and how I still want everything that I was intended to have as part of my purpose,” Thomas said. “And that song has been like a beacon for me.”
“Never Lose” invites you into Klazik’s Ted Talk. His personal story is woven into the song. “And I look at where I came from, most people don’t hit the target I hit from while aiming from where I aim from.” And he delivers the motivational message with a smooth flow.
Thomas served in the Navy from 2003-2012, an experience that informed his discipline as a musician.
“After over nine years of that and making sure that you have to perform within regulations on and a certain schedule with a certain expectation … it definitely helps with something as chaotic as the music industry,” Thomas said.
During his Navy years, he continued writing music and rapping, and recording in studios in Virginia. He participated in a few talent shows while on deployment, winning one and taking second in another.
“It was a labor of love or a passion project,” Thomas said. “So I just kept on doing it over the years, kept writing and getting better.”
In 2017, Thomas moved to Iowa to be closer to his wife’s family. He connected with the Iowa music scene through Iowa Summer Jam, an annual music festival that showcases Midwestern artists from a variety of musical genres. That’s how he connected with T1 Entertainment, the company that hosts the festival, and its CEO Antonio “Tone Da Boss” Chalmers.
“Hooking up with T1 Entertainment is when things really accelerated for me here in Iowa, and not just in Iowa,” Thomas said. “All the things started gaining traction.”
In 2022, the accolades began rolling in.
That year, he won the Best Performance at the Iowa Music Awards. He returned to the IMAs the next year and took home Lyricist of the Year.
The music video for his song “Never Lose” won first place in the Professional Freestyle category at the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival.
He said he’s most proud of winning the inaugural Adult Contemporary Hip-Hop Artist Award at the IMAs.
“It declares something. It declares the start of something new, and it represents a type of hope for people like me, and people being cast aside and underrepresented,” Thomas said.
In June 2024, T1 Entertainment dropped its “T1 All Stars” album, which featured Klazik along with Iowa-based hip-hop artists and rappers Tone Da Boss, Silence, and Ike Midas. That album has surpassed 500,000 streams on Spotify, earning the T1 All Stars coveted plaques.
“It reassures you that you’re on the right path and you’re doing the right thing,” Thomas said of the milestone. “And I hope that we can take that album further, and I hope that’s just signals of what’s to come for me as well.”
Comments: bailey.cichon@thegazette.com
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