Talking Loud & Saying Something

Rip It Up, Issue 136, 1 November 1988, Page 12

Talking Loud & Saying Something

THE WORD FROM RUN DMC & DEREK B

Fftl" I / “Well the first time you heard m y voice /You were Ilr®lf r® If rockin’/Yourhandsfingerpoppin’/Thesoundofbass IJI |\ I |\ and drum that kicks /With Derek Bon the decks /And other DJs get licked”

Yep, sure thing boyee, Derek Bis in the house, and not only has he got one of the hottest records in New York, but he's possibly the hottest thing hip-hop at the moment. Strange thing coming from a 22 year-old Englishman, ex Wag DJ, and A&R

man fora small record label called Music of Life. Now the world's his oyster, from club DJ to rolling with Rush Management, on the same stage as Run DMC and Public Enemy ("a dream come true for me"). That, as Kurtis Blow used to say, is the

breaks. Before Mr B got his name written in the hip-hop history books, he spent some time in the States, soaking up the atmosphere... "I was a fan forages, being a fan of something and then going to where it

was coming from—it's like being a fan of Roman history and going back to Rome. Like New York, Brooklyn, the Bronx, is like where rap has come from. It's not like in England or like it used to be, not just the music thing. It's a whole lifestyle in America, and it's so big you don't ever have to get out of it to see any other lifestyles. In England it's very small, in America you could eat, drink, sleep it." If you read The Face or any of those other cultural digests it would

look os though England has gone House crazy. Or rather, hooked on Acid, with everyone running around with Smiley-faced T-shirts grinding theirteeth and forming yet another sub-culture based on an American art-form. I wondered if the growing UK hip-hop scene had lost any ground to the new crazes. "The scene is really strong, it's got farstronger, unlike those otherforms of music, like rare groove and Acid House. You've got nobody to identify with those forms. You can't get a star of Acid House, you've gotthe music and that's it. With rare groove they're all guys who are probably dead now, you can'tsee any of them play, exceptfor James Brown. With rap you can, you can go and see the guys making the records and the whole lifestyle thing that's coming into it. Therefore it's bound to last longer and strong than those otherforms, which are more likely to be phases." There seems to be a whole heap of new crews yearning for rap success.

"I like this band Hi-Jack, who are very strong, they're going to go a. long way, they're with Music of Life, my old label. I like MC Duke, who used to be part of my crew, and the London Rhyme Syndicate, and Overlord X. This whole thing is growing all the time, which is healthy

and good to see." Like a lot of rappers, Derek B spent his early years as a DJ movin' the crowd in anyway necessary, and learning the techniques of deck control—mixing and scratching. Which is something Derek B doesn't do anymore—unfortunately. "I've given up DJ'ing, I'm concentrating on doing the rhymes. I've got a DJ whom I'm taking to Australia and that, goes by the name of DJ Scratch, from Brooklyn, he won

the world New York Championship scratching competition." This throwing in the turntable towel comes as a shock, as it would to anyone who's listened to Derek B's Bullet From A Gun album. "I did the scratching on the whole album. I was looking for an original sound, like the ditditdah, ditditdah scratch on 'Bad Young Brother 7 [one of the meanest transforming scratches known to man or beast] ’ that was funnily enough from Dr Who —the wowee in the end of Dr Who

from an old BBC record. 'Bullet From A Gun' is the beat from Phil Collins' 'Mama'. I won Sample Of The Year award, because people couldn't — believe the audacity I had, where I had got my samples." Derek B is in many ways an original, he don't fit the usual hip-hop

picture. He's neither old nor new school and doesn't want to fit into any of those categories. "I'm something completely different really, you can't categorise my music with a lot of the other rappers, my stuff doesn't sound American, it's not 100 percent rap. So

' therefore I try to carve a niche in music that can be appreciated by anybody without trying too hard." When you listen to Derek B, a little bit of confusion between who's the rapperand who's mixing appears. ~ Because he uses the persona of ESQ as the man on the mike and DJ Derek ; B on the Technic 1100's. But they're one and the same. . - 'Well, when I started out I didn't expect to get this far really. When I * did that first record 'Rock The Beat' it was only because Music Of Life had this compilation that was meant to . have ten tracks on it and they only had nine. So I said, I'll do one, I'll do

this record I wrote in New York. They said, What! Yeah, give me a go! They paid for the studio time and I did 'Rock The Beat' as ESQ. Profile > (numero uno rap label in the States) went mad when they heard that track, they went apeshit, loved it. So Derek B was bom and the voice of ESQ had to stay the same. "I still didn't know how far it would go, after I did 'Get Down' and 'Bad Younger Brotherl kept writing rhymes hoping one would break through. I didn't know a lot of them would. That's why they might seem a bit egotistical, because I was hoping

one would moke it, then every one I put out got bigger and bigger." The price of success is sometimes just as big as your last platinum disc, hence the words on the album jacket: "If you make it, people, mind your backs." *

"That's my little sarcastic look at this whole thing. In England we're first generation blacks so success is pretty new to us. People are in fact not proud of you, it's the old English disease, in fact they're jealous of you being successful. They'll be patting your back and saying 'Good on you son', then you'll go out and see your ►

“Most forms of music don’t really deal with reality, they deal mostly with love. You listen to 95% of the records in the chart and everybody is in love with everybody else.”

“You can’t have a star of Acid House. With rare groove, / they’re all guys who are dead. You can’t see any of them r play—except for James Brown.” — Derek B.