I’m not very good at self-marketing. It’s never been my thing. If it were, it would surely not have taken me 30+ years to actually get my shit together and release an album’s worth of material and, shock/horror, actually blog about it. A blog!
And while I am a fan of a good pun and find that I can really get my creative juices flowing with that sort of thing, if I have to name something I really struggle. I get tied up in knots, one moment thinking “If I call it that, people will think I am a pretentious knob” and the next: “Nobody actually cares!”.
So, how did I end up with ‘KZ1’? What does this peculiar moniker mean? Does it mean anything at all? Well, it’s a pretty shitty origin story, truth be told. No really … actually related to shit!
But before we get to that point, we need to take a step a bit further back. To 1987, in fact.
Back to the old skool
I was 15 years old, skinny as a pencil (hard to believe, now), and probably still wet behind the ears. I was into the early hip hop scene. Think Run DMC, Boogie Down Productions, Roxanne Shanté, NWA, Eric B & Rakim … the list could go on (and it would all be golden). Related to the music was the whole B-Boy movement, in particular the graffiti scene. I had a copy of Subway Art, a sketch book, and a fairly poor level of can control. Yes, I did some illegal graffiti, and no, it was not very good. Regardless, I was working out my own style as I went along.
The thing about graffiti is that, like any hobby/sport/skill, there are certain ‘moves’ that you feel are more your forté. In this case, it’s letter styles. Some letters I really struggled to do anything with, others just flowed from the pen on to the sketchpad. What were those letters? Well, whaddayaknow, they were: K, A, Z, H, E. But that doesn’t spell anything cool. Also, as seen in the Subway Art book, one of the kings of wildstyle was a writer who went by the name Kase 2, and my letter choices just seemed a little too close to that.
If you ever saw the film Style Wars, you’ll remember him as the one-armed, bad-ass dude with a don’t-fuck-with-me expression.
I mean, that’s a lot to live up to. Also … this was me, then:
Yeah. So …
Anyway, I still thought that graffiti was for me. So I conjured up a word that included some of my favourite letters, was sufficiently different to Kase 2 so I didn’t find myself on the receiving end of an ass-kicking (just in case I happened to find myself in the Bronx, as one does).
You might want to sit down for this one …
My tag name was, drum roll please …
Khazi.
Cool.
So I started my path down my graffiti ‘career’ (heh, career … that’s funny), did a few pieces, including one on the side of a local school’s sports hall that resulted in a visit from Mr Plod.
I just wish that I had known before I did those pieces that the ‘made-up’ word I had created was an actual slang word for ‘toilet’.
Seems I had to make a few changes. Just drop a few letters, leave my absolute faves in there and … oh ‘KZ’ by itself just seemed a little too short. Like so many other writers (hello again, Kase 2!), chucking a number at the end was a common thing. So, ‘KZ1’ was what I settled for.
Recycling is good, right?
Fast forward 5 years to 1992, and I had created a rave track that got a white label release. And while it may have not had a printed label, it still needed to be called something. So, erm … KZ1? Will that do? Yeah, that should do.
Marketing genius strikes again.
In subsequent years, on the rare occassions when I got DJ gigs, I actually used my real name. But any time it comes to music production, I just seem to take the lazy approach: “Oh, I guess I’ll just use that thing that I used before.”
And so here we are in 2024, 32 years since that white label 12″ was released, and 37 (ish) years since I realised that marketing yourself as a toilet was maybe not the best strategy.
KZ1: now you know!
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