I first came upon hip hop culture probably around 1984 while ridin my bmx bike around my neighborhood like all the other kids did where I grew up in South Medford.  Directly behind my house were the train trax - Boston to Maine freight trains would come lurchin through at all hours of the night, while durin the day there was a steady stream of commuter rail trains wizzin past like a bat outta hell, luggin workaday assholes to and from the city where people worked in high rises and what have you.  A lot of fun was  had by all the kids on my street throwin shit at the trains, all them lil ankle twistin rocks around the tracks where excellent for hurling at the passing  trains.  The best was hittin the windows as hard as you could, they were shatter proof, and for good reason.  If I had made a dollar for every rock I hummed at them trains in hopes of scarin the shit outta some commuter, I wouldn't need to rap for a living.

But all us kids in South Medford were always lookin for something bigger, someplace else to go and do something cool.  We'd ride our bikes as far as we could in every direction, and then some of us started doing tricks.  We didn't have ramps for jumps so it was all what was called "flatland", just spins and stops and wheelies and shit like jumping off the seat and onto the front pegs.  I ended up working on my tricks all the time and got really good.  I heard rap music go by in some cars, and I used to breakdance here and there, but flatlanding was my real passion.  It wasn't until another bmx guy named Sweeney played me some RUN-DMC and LL Cool J and shit like that, that I ended up really likin the music and buying tapes and eventually records.  I remember the Mantronix "Music Madness" album really blew me away, I turned all my friends into fans, and I rode to "Who Is It" at flatland shows.  So I was winning awards for the bike shit, but the music started to take over.  I hung out with this kid Herbie from South Medford, who had all the newest rap shit from New York and whatnot.  I got a shitty little turntable, a Radio Shack mixer and started being a DJ.  Rapping was the furthest thing from my mind.

But then in 1987, BDP's "Criminal Minded" dropped, I was 13 years old and it all became an obsession with me.  The rappers I looked up to were like super heroes, only they didn't wear capes.  They battled like super heroes, and everyone rooted for their favorite.  I remember tuning in to shitty little college radio stations to pick up rap shows in the wee hours of the night, there in the blackness of my bedroom.  I got my tape recorder out and got all the latest shit down on tape for me to pump into my head until next weekend when I would repeat the ritual again.  In the dark alone is where I got my education in rap.  I say "rap" cuz hip hop contains a few other elements, and by this time I had been through the breakdancing thing, I'd had turntables and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage all over Boston in the wee hours with my spray paint.  Early tags of mine, like "Leo-T" or "Sleepy" and eventually "Slack" could be seen all over Boston.  Once I formed my own rap crew by the decade's close, I was out taggin up Type4 and T4's wherever there were bricks that hadn't already been hit.

Like I said, those early years were the years that would shape my own rap sounds, the same that I crank out till this day.  I'm a student, as is my musical partner Matt, the man behind all the music of TYPE 4.   Though we lived miles and miles apart we were part of the same hip hop school, and in 1992 we met and T4 took off.

So here I am, 14 years later, an underground superhero in my own right.  If you passed me on the street you would never take me for a rapper, but if ya caught a TYPE 4 show you'd leave thinking I was nothing but a full blooded rapper.  I may not fit the current mold of hip hop, and I don't know what crunk means, but im hip on through and though.  In reality I'm just a broke ass bum, but on CD I'm a super hero like the heroes of my past.  This ain't my own big head telling me this, I get it from strangers from all over the planet.  People we don't know from all over the fuckin world tell us daily that our music's the real deal.  I may be tooting my own horn, but so be it, blow daddy blow!!!!  I am a hero, be it a broke one, I'm a northeast atlantic super hero who will breathe and live the rap in its purest form till there isn't any more air in my cigarette-charred lungs.  If your old school stays that way, if you're you, do what you feel you gotta do, just be true to the form and this thing we all love will NEVER DIE.  Trust me, the Ring-Ding-eatin, illegal-drivin dirtstar from Boston, where the weather is cold and the traffic always a pain in the asshole….

- Tommy Williams