Rapping With the Man
Norml News 1994 Winter
"Did I hear you right? You can't work when you smoke? I can't work when I don't smoke!" DLT laughs.
Looking around the Auckland inner city room, though, it is clear that a lot more influences than ganja affect his work. Maori and Black American imagery mix in the colourful bombing across walls. His music, too, combines hip hop beats with something that comes straight from the heart. This is one urban Maori who can't be accused of 'trying to be Black'.
Yet DLT has probably got closer to the heart of the Black American experience than most New Zealanders, Maori or otherwise. As DJ with Upper Hutt Posse he spent four weeks of 1991 travelling the States as a guest of the Nation of Islam, among other things rapping with Eric B. and Rakim, and visiting the mosque that Malcolm X had been minister for until his split with the Nation of Islam in 1964.
Today DLT deejays with MC OJ and the Rhythm Slave and bombs walls for a living. A strong supporter of NORML, he is critical of those rappers who are suddenly queuing up to rhyme lyrics about dope.
"I think it comes down to the record companies sitting around their board tables looking for another direction to sell records. There's been ganja in every musical form, it's just time for hip hop to have its turn. Next year it'll be something completely different. Next year they'll all be rapping about smart drugs.
"There have been crews that have rapped about herb since they started and they still are. They're the real shit. These ones who were anti-ganja last year, and are pro-herb this year, rapping about the big fat blunt, it's bullshit. It's record companies telling them to do that. The group fronts up with five demos and they say 'we'll have the dope one'. It's the flavour.
"The scary reality is that in America right now it's probably all over. They're probably on to the new flavour. But it'll hang around. It's opened the door and let everyone speak openly about it. Before it was tapu in the sense that if you say "dope", that then they won't like the record. No one will buy it."
DLT is also cautious about the new breed of Polynesian rappers.
"Maybe I'm just a nutter, but there's no Polynesian attitude. It's all rhyming for the sake of it. I've learned nothing from these Polynesian rappers about Polynesia. I know they can rhyme and all of that, but so can two and a half million of us. Once you stand on stage, if you're not saying conscious lyrics then get the fuck off."
DLT is Ngati Kuhungunu but grew up in Upper Hutt. He credits the racism he encountered there for helping steer him towards a conscious musical lifestyle, but claims Bob Marley as his first inspiration. He discovered Huey Newton and the Black Panther Party through the writings of Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver, and remembers reading and talking about them with good friend Dean Hapeta as a teenager. The Black Panthers led him to Malcolm X, but he sees the effect of those writings as more "morale boosting" than anything.
Understanding the system and learning to stand up proud found an outlet when the pair formed Upper Hutt Posse along with Matthew Hapeta and Aaron Thomson.
The Posse attracted a lot of criticism because of their up-front lyrics and radical stance. But DLT doesn't see their position as an essentially political one.
"Politics in this country doesn't even concern us, basically. Whenever we're involved in politics in this country we're always against the government. When you're talking about pro-government politics, we're not even in the picture bro. It's one white crew talking to another.
"There's no hope my man. Damn! There is no hope.
"I know for a fact that my ancestors, from day one when they met the Pakeha, knew exactly what was up. There was a prophecy they were going to come, and they came. The prophecy said that they would never leave (laughs). More and more would just keep coming and coming. That's OK. My people, where I am from, says "we realise this, and we're going to get on with it". But we NEVER, EVER burned them. No way, never have in 154 years. And they're not coming to the party.
"We can't go home-this is home. They can go home. They can. They have the option to leave if they fuck up. Like in South Africa. But no one wants them."
DLT sees revolution as the most likely future for this country. "The only other way, well it's like buying a lotto ticket. One in a million. I don't think it's going to happen. Chances of a revolution happening are closer than the chance of total equality and justice for all in Aotearoa. "
One way he does see to avoid a total explosion is to get more women into positions. "Women are fairer. We need some women in parliament, just like we need some brown faces. It needs to be real.
"Sometimes I see the women that are in parliament now, they do good things. They're just judged because they are women in a man's world. That sucks."
And after a revolution?
"Oh, we'd be gone (laughs). If we removed all the European people who did not want to live equally in this land, if we removed them, more would come. You know, they'd be gone and their relatives would come. Just like that. And then we'd have to play the game all over again.
"Do you want to be fair or do you want to be an asshole? What do we do? We need total control, so that we, we can screen people." He runs through the scene:
"What are you coming here for?"
"Oh, I want to buy Queen St."
"Get the fuck out"
or
"Oh, I'm here because I love Aotearoa."
'You're welcome. Come and stay. '.
"I'm speaking on a large scale." DLT continues. "I'm not saying that we're going to stand at the door at the airport and say that to them. We say it as a whole. Just like now how our government stand at the doorway of the airport and say:
"How much money have you got?"
"Seven hundred thousand"
"Come on in. How much money you got?"
"Four grand"
"Oh. What do you want, what do you want here?"
"I want to try and get a life"
"Sorry. Go away"
"Yeah. Just need to be fair. Just true, proper, fair: good stuff that our parents, and their parents before that, taught us. The real shit. Like what those old people in those big chairs and those fake wigs are trying to impersonate. We need the real deal up there."
Upper Hutt Posse reached even greater notoriety after they toured the States as guests of the Nation of Islam with Moana and the Moahunters. New Zealand media carried pictures of them sporting star and crescent T-shirts and getting down with some of the most militant Blacks in the US.
The tour came about when senior members of the Nation of Islam came to New Zealand for the 1990 Waitangi celebrations. Upper Hutt Posse and Moana and the Moahunters put on a gig for Minister Rasul Hakim Muhammad son of the late Elijah Muhammad.
"He was sitting there and we just gave it the best," remembers Darryl. "He came back stage afterwards and I remember him saying in his full-on American style, "Yo, homeys" or something. You know, we were freaking out. Here was this Muslim minister, and he's my age, or just a bit older, and he says' 'well, to tell you the truth man, I was going to come back here and say 'oh yeah you guys were great' and all that, but DAMN, you guys were DOPE". He just honestly did not believe that hip hop was like that - lyrically, what Dean was saying, how we done the music and all that. He was a true hip hop guy, you know.
"He gave us the ultimate prop. He said 'I'm gonna get you to come over and play'. He went home to America, and then a month later this letter arrived, a real formal letter, inviting us to go and celebrate Saviour's Day in Detroit. Rasul and Louis Farrakhan were going to be speaking. They were having a big rap concert with Eric B. & Rakim, Douggie Fresh - all these conscious rappers that we were into big time."
The Nation of Islam said that if the crew could get the fare over they would be provided for while they were there.
"I got harassed all the way by Customs people. But we got to Detroit on our own backs. Saw Louis Farrakhan (the spiritual leader of the Nation of Islam) speak before 20 000 people. He did a mega two and a half hour speech on killing, black on black killing, especially among the young people. He talks a lot about Babylon, always dissing it. It's good. That's what you have to do to people who're brain-dead.
"Everything about it is religious and spiritual. And true. It's just not in a White God sense. God was a Black man, that's what they have to say. Even though we all know that God is all of us. Islam knows that as well, but like I say, to raise the dead, punch it at them, you say God isn't white. God is BLACK."
It was these kind of words that made the Nation of Islam, and their most famous minister, Malcolm X, hated throughout White America. But the Black Muslims have a different image among Black Americans, especially among the youth.
"Black Islam in America," says DLT, "they're working really hard for the struggle. Excellent people man, excellent. There's hope. All we see on our televisions, all we hear on our radios is the urban black male is dying at an amazing rate. We think we've got it hard here, which we have in our own sense. But they have it really hard.
"Islam teaches people to believe. True love, true feelings. Islam works from the heart, seriously. Starts from the heart. The test is to walk out the door into it. If you are Islam and you walk out the front door it's... flames, it's hell. And they're out there putting out the fires.
"The Muslim people are fighting, since Farard Muhammad, for those guys there. They listen to Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X and they live it, hard core. Incredible. They practise what they preach to the max. In a country of no discipline, no spirit, no wairua. America has nothing, none of that.
"But then I didn't see any American Indian people when I was there. The closest thing that reminded me of Indian people was the Mexicans. They're sort of our brothers. We look alike, act alike, all like the same things."
DLT applauds the links being forged between Maori and American Indians at cultural and political levels.
"Traditionally our paths were parallel to the max. I've been a carver, in bone and stone and stuff like that, and you'd see carvings that had been done half the world apart and they are almost identical. The styles are the same. We're inspired by the same things, see the same things."
DLT makes his living now painting murals in a hip hop style. His inspiration comes from the music, from what he sees around him, and from his roots. Maori themes seem to dominate more and more.
"Started out more the hip hop thing. Doing it in the true sense, two in the morning, down the railway station. For years. None of this talk about it, we were doing it. Every Tuesday night. Tuesday night was like the quietest night on the line, don't know why.
"I could hit four railway stations in the one night, and use ten cans of paint on each one. And if you were walking round at one in the morning down the railway station then you're just as dodgy as me so I don't give a fuck, you know. I just carry on.
"People would come down and stop and have a cigarette, and talk about paint. We'd wear masks in those days too, because you'd be in a confined box and there'd be paint everywhere. Sometimes I'd stop and have a cigarette or smoke a joint. A lot of the time, late at night, they'd always have joints. If there was a Maori dude coming down the subway your chances of getting stoned were good because they'd see you painting a picture of Bob Marley. I'd love doing big paintings of Bob.
"When 'Beat Street' came out then every Tom, Dick, and Harry was doing rank stick figure bombs. It just got out of hand so I stopped. But I never gave it up. I drew, got an airbrush, started doing miniature bombs on clothes and stuff. They sold like hot cakes."
But plans for a proper business development fell through, due to prejudice and lack of imagination in the Employment Service.
"Me and a friend, who is a real good artist, approached the Employment Service to give us funding to start a business printing T-shirts. This is in 1992. Printing T-shirts with graffiti designs on them. They were right into it right up until they met us and saw our designs that we'd already done, and they turned us down. They just said 'no way'. And now, if you go down the shops downtown right now, the most expensive T-shirts that're selling like hot cakes are these T-shirts from LA with graffiti on them."
A major issue for DLT is to see that hip hop stays conscious. His radio show on BFM, the True School Hip Hop Show on Thursday nights, pushes lyrical rap to the max.
"Rap is the mega medium. That's why I play that stuff, like Gil Scott Heron, Last Poets, Boogie Down Productions, Public Enemy. My show is totally for the conscious. And I know there are a lot of people out there, don't matter if they're black or brown. It's all sorts, its women, it's men, it's other people, it's white people, they want to hear it too.
"Hip hop is here for ever. It's here. We can't stop anyone who's not conscious from doing it, but we can make them look like what they really are by just being us."
nandor.net.nz is not responsible for the content of external links.
