WHAT CAN THEY SAY?

Rip It Up, Issue 173, 1 December 1991, Page 16

WHAT CAN THEY SAY?

“Hey! Rhythm Slave! Yo!” - The new single may not be in the charts (or even, it seems, in the shops) but the eight-year old brown skinned kid waiting for his Mum in Wellington’s Willis Street knows a star when he sees one. The Rhythm Slave grins back, doffs his Stussy and carries on crossing the street.

“Wellington’s our second home,” he smiles; “Its a hip-hop town.”

On the other side of the road he enters a cafe and buys what presumably passes for the evening meal — a slab of cake, heart-attack special. The Slave (aka Mark) and his buddy MC OJ (aka Otis) are still - young and fit enough to eat that kind of thing on tour. The headlining Headless Chickens, feeling the creak in their bones, have been feeding from a trough of designer nutrients and vitamins, but MC OJ and Rhythm Slave are made for touring. They're tight, they're compact (they carry their backing band on a DA tape), they play hackeysack and they're indefatigably happy chappies. Give ‘'em a microphone and a lickle spliff and they'll go anywhere. This is the best tour they've ever been on. “Every gig's been great!” says Otis, back at the non-salubrious Wellington venue, the New Carpark. “The only bummer was the guy we met in Dunedin, who told us we were shit and the Headless Chickens were even more shit. | asked him why and he said ‘because you are’, which was very creative. | told him he was assilly old man and he should go home.” When it comes fo playing to strange crowds, the potential for grisly death for a rap crew ranks

only slightly below that for a stand-up comic. But, it seems, the crowd has not yet been assembled that can't find room in its heart for . MC OJ & Rhythm Slave. They show quite clearly why at the Carpark that night. They're tight, incredibly so, and the gaps between tracks, showdown time for most technology users, are just an opportunity fo get to know the audience. Even the cynics — or most of them — have no choice but to admit that there’s original style going: on here. : : The raps — where all the content is— are snappy, witty, cleverly built. It's the vocal chemistry rather than the backing tracks which drives the performance. If there’s bags of raggamuffin in the way the words are structured and the way they swoop from chat into melody, there’s bugger-all of it in the vocabulary. They're kind of the great kiwi home handymen of rap — a point driven home by the show-stopping ‘Doc Martens’, where Mark, the one-time apprentice drummer, goes back to some old fashioned human beatboxing. The room booms. And for the whole time they're on stage, they work: “Man,” says Cosmo from the opening act, Rough Opinion, to Otis afterwards, “You guys do hip-hop aerobics.”

Two days later, they're home in Auckland for the tour finale at the Power Station. While the Chickens work up a big soundcheck noise we refire to the back lot of the venue, the time-honoured home of the sly lickle spliff. ; “Ah, we know this place well,” - grins Mark, “But you've gotta watch that you stay over here — that building over there’s got automatic security lights.” Freaky. Now about this not practising . ... j : 'lf’s just live performance,” avers Otis, “By the end of the year we'll have averaged one or two gigs a - week. And remember the band is always tight because it's on DAT. Buy yeah, we do it so often that we get pretty straight-up.” They're at home on the stage. But it wasn't always thus. When they started in 1988, Ofis rapping and Mark beatboxing (I sort of learned that from my drum teacher — he used to explain things by beatboxing because | couldn’t read music”), they'd both stand stock still behind mikestands. : A “But every time we went on stage for the first year it would get a little bit better,” explains Otis, “We'd discover something and think, ‘yeah, remember that one’. And also , seeing Public Enemy on stage, the way they performed, was a revelation.” : : : ~ Refusing to let the fact that they both reached the seventh form spoil their street cred, the two set about shattering ideas about white boys not being able to sing the raps. “Before ‘Positivity’ came out, | went fo a club in Wellington where there were a few big homeys

standing around the DJ box having little raps,” says Otis, “And this guy | knew took me up fo the box and said give this guy a rap. Everyone though it was a joke, this white guy doing a rap, but after | finished they were, yeah, cool. There was a bit of that to get over but we did. “Some people thought it was Vanilla Ice or something but | eventually they realised that we're just doing our own thing. Now it's gone from white rappers to just New Zealand rappers — whichisa completely beautiful thing.”” They are, indeed, New Zealand rappers right down to the bottoms of their Airwalks. ~Yeah,” Otis agrees, “Stuff like ‘Marijuana Song' is real New Zealand, and ‘10.55' is real Auckland city. Is where we're from.”. “That's part of the thing about rap music,” Mark adds. “You rap about what you do and what you know. And people find it really strange because no one does that — when you mention things like More ‘ magazine and takeaways and getting the munchies.” Their debut album, What Can We Say?, wasn't a project in ifself, rather the result of collaborations with a bunch of different Ak production teams, storming up songs and rhythm - tracks. ; “Each song’s a separate thing,” says Mark. “l don't think there’s a general sound to it. But if's us— and that's one good thing, that we have, over the past couple of years, developed our own style. People know who it is when they hear it.” So what if you went in, fully tooled up, with a crash-hot rap soundscape producer to work on something more ambitious than the clean, effective beats on the album? “I'think it'd just get bigger,” says

Ofis, “The beats we've used have been fuckin’ good, but it's a kind of intense simplicity ... ." “Which is different from a lot of records out at the moment, where the technology’s fuckin’ amazing,” adds Mark, “So in that respect the album’s not pushing any boundaries, but=: '3

“But,” Otis chimes in, “It would be fun to go into the studio with mega samples and DJs and go really crazy with samples and sirens and everything.” : Ah, a DJ. The duo’s lack of a DJ has made it just that little bit easier to do all the work they do — and tag on tours and go to Australia. After their support gig with De La Soul (where they performed the not - terribly difficult feat of putting the stars in the shade), rock mogul Benny Levin called them up and offered them a week’s work in Sunny Noumea.

“Yeah, we're taking DJ DLT and a couple of the dancers we had on stage at De La Soul,” explains Otis. “| rang up one of the dancers, this young Samoan guy and said, well, you'll get paid a bit, not much, but we'll be staying at this luxury hotel on the beach where we play and it's only one gig a night . . . and there was just this stunned silence. | said, well, do you wanna do it and he went ‘What? Me2 Uh .. . yeah!” MC OJ & Rhythm Slave will cope with the tourist crowds of Noumea as confidently as they cope with any crowd. They've played ‘em all. “We've played with everyone from Push Push to the Headless Chickens, Ngaire to Sperm Bank Five. From a Ngaire crowd at Grapes to Auckland’s assembled psycho-hippies at the Gluepot — it's wicked! With SBS we came outina pantomine horse while they did grunge version of the Black Beauty theme...” : Maybe it works becauseyou always look like you're enjoying yourselves. ; “We are!” declares Otis. “It's never a put-on thing. Even if | feel like complete shit before a gig, ; maybe the first couple of minutes will be a bit sluggish, but then you get the old blood pumping . .. and it keeps you buzzing for a while afterward. There's a lot of energy exerted on stage. “And | think we'll get better too. We can keep up with the whole rap thing, get bigger and better. The mega-fantasy would be to get a super-funk live band with a real mega DJ — and just see what happens..." What happens later that night is what you'd expect. The crowd jumps -around a packed dancefloor, Otis and Mark freestyle it over some cuts from DJ Roger Perry, Otis manages to work in some lines from ‘Donde Esta La Pollo’ in tribute to his spiritual brother Anthony ‘No Relation’ Nevison of the Chickens, and everyone has a whole lot of fun. A whole lot of fun — how could you notlove them? . RUSSELL BROWN