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The Dream Warriors stand in the backstage dressing room
of the Concert Hall, the former Masonic Temple on Yonge Street in Toronto.
King Lou is light-skinned, with an oval face and, despite a pair of dark
glasses with tiny round lenses, an air of casual amusement. His mother, for
whom the Dream Warriors’ song “Ludi” was written, sits quietly, beaming at
her son, who, true to his word, stays close to her side. Capital Q,
darker-skinned, looks more intense, or at least capable of greater
intensity. Right now, both Dream Warriors are contending with a large crowd
of journalists, record executives, well-wishers, fellow Toronto rap artists,
and just about everybody that Lou and Capital Q ever met in high school. The
concert is the Dream Warriors’ return to the Toronto stage after a seven-day
press tour in the US. and three months’ worth of performances in Germany,
Switzerland, France, Spain, Japan, Australia, and Great Britain, where they
became popular with the release of their first album, And Now The Legacy
Begins. “We should probably get our own place over there,” says Capital Q
wearily.
King Lou and Capital Q certainly don’t fit the image
most people have of rap stars. They’re not wearing black clothing emblazoned
with Los Angeles Raiders insignia. The fat gold chains sported by a large
segment of the rap contingent are absent. Neither one is wearing $200
sneakers. (The lone concession to theatricality, other than their names, is
Lou’s four-foot staff made of petrified sugarcane stalk, which has become
their talisman on stage.) There is very little in their music, their lyrics,
or their personalities that comfortably fits into any popular definition of
rap, except that the Dream Warriors, after only one album and a handful of
singles, have become Canada’s most eccentric and most inventive hip-hop
artists.
Rap seems new and unfamiliar, but the roots are deep.
The practice of serving up observation, commentary, and insult in rhyme runs
like a main-circuit cable through Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean oral
culture. Anyone who’s heard a few stanzas of Jesse Jackson’s oration will
recognize the cadences and constructions of rap.
One of the earliest forms of rhyming rhetoric in the
U.S. was called “playing the dozens,” a practice that has been traced back
to the turn of the century. Young black men would taunt each other in
sequential couplets, usually attacking economic standing — or lack thereof —
appearance, housing, or parentage. Each participant capped the preceding
couplet until one couldn’t think of a rhyming comeback sufficiently quick or
stinging for the game to continue. (Such contests were usually limited to a
set of twelve rhymes, hence the term “dozens.”)
In the Caribbean, the extemporaneous rhyming lyrics of
calypso songs were usually satirical observations on the politics of the
day. That same tradition found a slightly different expression in Jamaican
toasting. Dancehall DJs would play the “dub” or instrumental side of a
current single, and offer rhymes — everything from social commentary to
exhortation to the crowd — into a microphone at the same rhythm and pace as
the accompanying record.
The three strains hooked up in North America in the
late 1960s and early 1970s with the influx of Caribbean immigrants, many of
whom settled in the South Bronx, East New York, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and
other black neighborhoods in New York City. Dozening was already well
established as a rite of passage for young American black men, so melding
that with the rhyming oral culture of the West Indies was an obvious step.
Jamaican toasting helped turn the whole thing into entertainment. The only
difference now was that the backing music came not from reggae records but
from the B-sides of funk and rhythm-and-blues records. Thus rap — also known
as hip-hop — was created.
It wasn’t until the early eighties that rap found an
audience outside the confines of the South Bronx. By the mid-eighties, rap
was serving the same cultural purpose as punk had a decade earlier. It
stripped music down to the essentials, making it instantly accessible to
both audience and prospective practitioners. Like punk, it spoke in its own
blunt way about what mattered to its audience. And as with punk, the
prerequisites for becoming a hip-hop artist were minimal: wit, verbal
dexterity, some funky dance records, and a pair of turntables to keep that
beat going. With the rapid proliferation of rap crews, the form has expanded
to include everything from lightweight party music for suburban teenagers to
political dispatches that Chuck D. of the militant group Public Enemy calls
“black America’s CNN.”
Lou Robinson and Frank Allert grew up in the Jane-Finch
corridor, a grim, Soviet-style slab of public housing in northwest Toronto.
Both were part of the immigrant community there: Lou’s family arrived from
Jamaica, Frank’s from Trinidad. Jane-Finch has won notoriety as a nexus for
the drug trade and its accompanying violence. But that reputation is the
result of the mainstream media’s natural tendency to look for the
sensational. In Jane-Finch, as in any other community, there’s a lot more
going on.
When they were kids, neither Lou nor Frank cowered
indoors immobilized by fear. While they don’t deny that Jane Finch was a
tougher place to grow up in than a lot of Canadian neighborhoods, they’re
thankful for the way it tempered them, and toughened their resolve to
surmount the limited expectations of the people who lived there. A liner
note in And Now The Legacy Begins — “Thanks to the Jane & Finch massive for
making men out of us” — crystallizes their view.
“We met playing video games,” Frank says of the roots
of their partnership. “We got into an argument because I wanted to play and
Lou was taking too long. We saw each other around and, after a while, we
started hanging out. Our interests were the same - dancing, entertaining.”
Like many kids in Jane-Finch, they tried to amuse themselves and their
circle of friends with rhymes. Frank would pound out a beat on the cafeteria
table and Lou would start to rap. But unlike a lot of his friends, Lou
started committing his rhymes to paper. Their early experiments set up the
rough division of labor that persists today: Frank creates the music; Lou
writes the lyrics.
By 1987, Toronto’s tiny rap underground had grown into
a thriving creative community. “In Jane-Finch, there’s a lot of guys doing
different things, as opposed to everybody doing the same thing. We always
seem to be bringing in the new trends,” Lou remembers. “We were the first
ones to bust it out. A lot of people just look and think, ‘That’s just
Jane-Finch. They’re always coming up with something different, anyway.’”
As they began working on their own jams, Lou, now
redubbed King Lou, and Frank, who called himself Capital Q (Q for Quiet
Storm), soon abandoned the subjects and approaches of their American
counterparts. “Braggadocious” is the neologism they coined to describe the
blustery, macho style that dominated rap music then. Instead of just telling
a story or stacking boasts, Lou wrote rhymes that slyly dismantled
stereotypes and subverted assumptions with a deft stroke from an unexpected
angle. In “Wash Your Face in My Sink,” for example, Lou twists a
straightforward image into a strange metaphor for communication. The sink is
Lou’s rap; washing your face becomes learning from the rap without merely
imitating it. Lou stretches his metaphor almost to the breaking point before
coming back to this central image in much the same way as a jazz soloist
plays improvisations over a set of chords before returning to the melody.
What I just spoke to, a language called speech,
You try to catch it but you just can’t reach
When you leave a ring around the basin
When you wash your face in
My sink.
The Dream Warriors happily acknowledge the influences
of jazz lyricists on their rhymes. They were among the last artists to work
with Slim Gaillard before his death last year. Gaillard had enjoyed a long
career as a singer, composer, bebop guitarist and pianist, and leading man
in Hollywood-produced black movies in the 1940s (which earned him the
nickname Dark Gable), and he was a seminal part of the American expatriate
scene in Paris. He’s also credited with inventing a jazz-inflected rap
precursor called “vout” (rhymes with “out”), his own private language, for
which he published a dictionary. A lot of the verbal gymnastics and the
coinages that turn up in rap can be traced to Gaillard’s toying with
language. The Dream Warriors recorded a track with Gaillard called “Very
Easy To Assemble, But Hard To Take Apart,” and released it on the flip-side
of “Ludi.”
“A majority of rappers don’t understand,” Lou says of
their collaboration. “They come on like they’re the first person ever to do
what they’re doing. But you have to look back, look at what came before you.
He did this for you. He made you into what you are. You have to learn to put
back in what you take out. That’s why we did a song with Slim Gaillard: to
put back into the jazz what we took out of it. We did a song with Slim
Gaillard to say: this is our source. This is what we are speaking about.”
The Dream Warriors were also eager to use rap to
explore some of the intriguing elements of being Canadian, or, as they’re
quick to point out, of growing up West Indian in Canada. Radiant [their pun
on radio airplay] is my immigrant speech.
“Some rappers, if they’re from the West Indies, seem to
forget their heritage,” says Capital Q “They just adopt an American style
and say they’re American. But we stick to our roots.” The sugarcane staff
they carry on stage is the most obvious symbol. (The producer of Britain’s
“Top of the Pops” television show, mistaking the cane for a weapon, tried to
ban it from his program.) One track on their album celebrates their origins
using a scratchy ska record and the name of a West Indian board game, Ludi,
that gives the song its central image:
My mother
wanted me to make another song
Something
brand new that she could dance to, too
So this
one’s dedicated to no other than my mother,
My father,
my sisters, and my brother,
Or you could
say the family, or better yet, the families
Or wait a
sec, what the heck, this one’s for Jamaica,
Africa,
Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago...
The song’s verse continues, listing every other
possible country of origin in the Caribbean. It ends with the line, "but
truly, this one’s for my mother," probably the first time that word has been
used in a rap lyric without being followed by “fucker.”
Virtually every rap song is constructed the same way.
The relevant musical elements are lifted from previous recordings by means
of a digital sampler and reassembled into a sonic collage. It’s musical
pointillism: tiny brush strokes of noise lasting only seconds are layered on
top of one another until something entirely different emerges. The result
doesn’t resemble any of its sources, even though it’s composed of nothing
but second-hand sounds.
“Whatever idea you’ve got in your head, the music just
goes to that,” Capital Q says of the sonic backing for Lou’s lyrics. “You
try to make it fit, with a loud sound or a flowing tempo. It was hard when
we first got into the studio, saying, ‘I feel I want this there. Can you
make this sound?’ And then, we started being able to pick out the sounds we
wanted.” The Dream Warriors’ choice of sounds — the sources for the music —
proved every bit as idiosyncratic as their lyrics.
The place where these experiments in musical
recombinant DNA take shape for the Dream Warriors is Beat Factory
Productions, an unlikely recording studio in the basement of a house in
northeast Toronto. It belongs to one of the kingpins of the city’s rap
scene, a short, speedy man named Ivan Berry, who currently manages thirteen
rap acts. Lou met Berry completely by accident one night in a dance club.
Knowing that Berry was about the only Toronto manager with artists under
bona fide recording contracts, Lou cornered him in the washroom and fired
off rap lines a cappella from “Voyage Through the Multiverse,” a song that
eventually landed on the album. Berry was impressed, and hired Lou as a
writer for his successful woman rapper Michie Mee.
One room in the Beat Factory studio — scarcely larger
than a closet — is the vocal booth. It houses a single microphone on a
stand. This is where the rappers recite their rhymes. The guts of the
operation are in an adjacent room, crammed with digital samplers, a
Macintosh computer equipped with a magneto-optical disk drive (essentially a
big CD that can be erased and rewritten indefinitely), effects units, a
small keyboard, and box after box of diskettes. These contain the raw
material for a million potential hip-hop compositions. They are samples:
hooks from forgotten funk numbers, scraps of movie soundtracks, single-bar
bytes of rhythm, isolated bass lines, booming kick-drums, explosive snare
shots, free-floating, lush horn stabs, and countless other auditory bits and
pieces.
At its most basic, the rap-recording technique renders
nothing more than retreads of old records — Vanilla Ice’s “Ice, Ice, Baby,”
a transparent lift of “Under Pressure,” or MC Hammer’s “Can’t Touch This,” a
witless regurgitation of Rick James’s “Super Freak.” “People condemn
sampling,” Capital Q says. “But I want to see them sample and create a song
if they think it’s so simple and such a foolish thing to do. They call it
stealing, but it’s just another means of creation in music. It’s like
anything else: using a piece of the old to create the new. We call it
organization of sound. Organization of noise, really.”
The Dream Warriors, along with American hip-hop crews
such as De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, have proved it’s possible to
reassemble obscure old records into something that doesn’t bear the
distinguishing marks of any of its manifold sources. Take, for example, the
Dream Warriors’ track “Face in the Basin.” The opening bar is composed of
individual drum sounds lifted and rearranged from several rhythm tracks.
Then a repeating chord compiled from guitar, bass, and horns comes in,
followed by a loop from an early 1970s James Brown single, “I Know You Got
Soul.” Layered over the Dream Warriors’ own synthesized progression is a
four-bar burst from a jazz orchestra, and the “ooh” sound pulled from the
background vocals of another track. Midway through the song, where you might
expect a solo, there’s an ethereal, faintly Arabic flute melody. It’s almost
impossible to tell which elements are composed by Lou and Capital Q in the
studio and which are “found” and slid neatly into place.
What sets the Dream Warriors apart musically from all
other popular rap groups are the kinds of sources they’ve chosen to mine for
some of their funky audio landscapes. Their rhymes are delivered over a
bizarre amalgam of jazz instrumentals propelled by stomping, syncopated
rhythms. (They’ve fashioned another neologism, “boombastic,” to describe
their style.) This fusion of jazz and rap drives the best tracks on And Now
The Legacy Begins, and makes it possible to listen to the record while doing
any number of things other than dancing. But steering away from the rap
formula didn’t make the search for acceptance any easier. “I find that
Canadian people are into massive reaction,” Lou observes. “If the masses
like it, so do they.”
The Dream Warriors’ biggest hit illuminated the
unlikely places they look for the components of their work, as well as
pointing up the fun they have mashing together disparate musical and lyrical
material. “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style” has a butt-shifting,
impossible-to-ignore dance groove throbbing at its heart. But its melody is,
well, goofy. It had previously been used as the theme for a hopelessly
cheesy TV game show called “Definition,” once a staple of the CTV network’s
daytime programming. When Lou and Capital Q researched the song, they found
the composer was, of all people, Quincy Jones, who readily gave his approval
for them to use it as a backing track.
The opening bars of “My Definition” lope past propelled
by a funky syncopation welded to a smarmy Latin dance-band melody. Rather
than dismiss the original context of the television theme, Lou presses it to
his advantage in his rhymes:
Here we go.
Are you ready for one other?
Dream
Warriors’ noise as new discoverers
Once again
with a new blend, so telephone a friend
(Capital Q
interjects, Yo, Dream Warriors got this new song, it’s dope, man.)
Compact
disks to the prime as optimists
Fans and
friends, I’m universal and cosmic
Concrete
jungles abound. Stand by the speaker,
You’re
smothered and covered up in the sound.
You stand
strong as you pump your fist
I’m talking
all that jazz
Now what’s
my definition?
As with all the Dream Warriors’ songs, the lyrics here
are split between a philosophical view of the world at large and a witty
description of a loopy private universe. There are no references to cars,
guns, bitches, ho’s, drugs, shoot-outs, or the Evil White Blue-Eyed Devil
Oppressor: just a distant allusion to an all-too-local game show. That
association probably helped to sell the single in Toronto, but its
subsequent climb up the British charts proved it is more than just a
cleverly reworked bit of Canadian cultural flotsam.
And there’s
a warning here about the futility of matching the Dream Warriors and their
work with expectations, stereotypes, or preconceptions: Define if you will,
but I know so, Lou raps from the stage, there is no definition.
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