MY STYLE JOURNEY PART 4: IT’S ABOUT IDENTITY

I apologise in advance for the roller coaster, which is this post. The reoccurring theme through this series has been how geographical isolation has played so intrinsically into the shaping of popular culture in New Zealand society – in particular our Hip Hop music and our graffiti style.  Our determination to feel a sense of international ‘inclusion’ has been both a gift and a curse in many ways.

Thanks to Peter McClennan for digging out this image – I was searching for it for so long!

When I travel abroad, especially within the United States, it still startles me how many people assume New Zealand is part of Australia. Generally the conversation goes:

“This is Askew from New Zealand.”

“Oh you’re from New Zealand?”

“Yeah.”

”Oh man, I’ve always wanted to go out there to Australia.”

To which I usually reply:

“Well, if you do go to Australia, make the time to fly the extra 3-4 hours to my country – it’s worth it!”

Australians and Kiwis are all well aware of our differences – we are so much the same in so many ways that we have made a point of highlighting these things. I was thinking about a really simple and relevant way to illustrate these differences in character and this is what I came up with: When comparing Australia and New Zealand’s forays into Hip Hop music I think you get a really good sense of the traits of each country. Making some blanket generalisations here – a typical Australian track tends to be very ‘Australian-centric’, definitely quite irreverent and maybe even to the detriment of its appeal to overseas listeners. A New Zealand track tends to assimilate itself to an international or American standard – maybe it’s even hard for outside listeners to determine exactly where it’s from. Of course the danger of generalisations is there is always an exception to the rule but for the sake of illustrating this point – this works quite well in this case.

Like everything though, there are reasons and there are cycles within popular train of thought at any time. Right at the beginning of my ventures into Hip Hop and doing graffiti – I was lucky enough to witness the emergence of a very talented and influential group of local artists that really epitomised a staunchly ‘kiwi style’. Of course, they weren’t the very first to do that – there was the important and hugely iconic group ‘Upper Hutt Posse’ and their track ‘E Tu’ from 1988. In all honesty though, the groups that had the most impact on me were those that were most prolific around the time I started High School. Musically I’m referring to Dam Native (Which Bennet Pomana from Upper Hutt Posse was a member) and Urban Disturbance and graffiti wise I speak of DLT, Opto, Daniel Tippet, DAF crew and Tank WL.

Dam Native – Behold My Kool Style

Performing on a Red Bull Live Sessions – May 2008. Check the Oli Green lyric in there “Kicking up a storm like an 8-legged Van Damm”

My memory may not be 100 percent accurate with some dates but I’m pretty certain around early 1993 the posted up top first went up in Bungalow Bill’s shop window – in the form of a giant black and white poster that took up nearly the entire frame. It may be hard to fathom anything more local – more Maori than Upper Hutt Posse but this single image of Danny Haimona aka Hyper D from Dam Native just screamed at me at such an immense volume.  I would go as far as saying that Danny was easily one of the most iconic and influential local artists of that era – in all regards, ranging from his swagger and sense of style, the manner in which he made music with the perfect balance of Maori attitude yet not in a way that put it in the realm of being easily pigeon-holed as just ‘cultural music’. He made straight up and down Hip Hop music with raw attitude and he influenced a whole generation of Maori youth that didn’t necessarily feel that their voice had validity within the genre.  To me, Danny represented empowerment that stood the test of time. He could flip effortlessly between Te Reo and English, spoke in local terms and in real Maori slang with a natural accent. If I had to write a list of the most important names in NZ Hip Hop music history – he would undoubtedly stand near the top and I’m pretty confident few would contest that fact. For a good decade you could travel to the most rural places and hear people rapping in a style derivative of his – drawing on his ‘Ism’s’, like the title he coined to describe his style: Horified.

The first actual recording I heard of Danny wasn’t until a bit later – I think around 1994 when I managed to get my hands on the rough demo version of ‘Urban Disturbances’ 37 Degrees Latitude album from Oli Green’s younger brother Guy (He wasn’t supposed to have it and definitely wasn’t supposed to give copies to us but yeah, that’s what kids do!). I used to mop the floors at the Ponsonby Community Centre after school and I had the demo on repeat on my Walkman. The track was called ‘Relay’ and from the intro:

“Kia Ora Kotau – This D-A-M-N-A-T-I-V-E – The original Horified Hip Hop – About to ahh – Get wicked with UD…”

To the line:

“How do I know? Because I’m Maori to the bone bro.”

I may not be doing a good job conveying how awesome it was to me but as a die hard fan of Rap music – even a try-hard rapper myself it just felt powerful to hear such local voices. (Also check Hamish from Christchurch’s Beats And Pieces on the 3rd verse – killer)

From Ice TV 1995.

Urban Disturbance had started out as ‘Leaders Of Style’ and the group consisted of Oli Green, Zane Lowe and Rob Salmon. I remember seeing them for the first time on the TV3 show Yahoo around late 1992 and being really captivated. I think the reason they resonated with me was they were both really good and also because they were white boys. I hate to say it that way but it just made me feel like ‘Hey! I could do this!’. Not long after that they made the name change to Urban Disturbance and with that came their conscious decision to rep a very natural kiwi accent. Much like Dam Native, the way they did that was with a real sense of balance between what sounded good and international yet infused with plenty of local slang and references. Between UD and Dam Native, being Kiwi seemed so cool to me right then.

As I mentioned in one of the earlier posts, one of my closest friends at High School was Guy Davey-Heap who is Oli from Urban Disturbances younger brother. Guy was a popular kid at school, good at basketball, fashionable and had a way with the girls.  A lot of our knowledge of music was drip fed from Oli – through Guy and to us. My entire music collection for the first two years of high school were literally cassette dubs of Oli’s CD’s – which Guy was well aware of as an important commodity. Guy was a hustler at heart and knew how to stall out on the key tapes in exchange for lunches from the tuck shop or maybe an item of clothing, a cap or pair of shoes. Of course, I never had much to offer fashion wise so I usually won him over with my enthusiasm for the music and our kindred ambition to be rappers ourselves.

From the point that I became a semi-regular fixture at Guys house, I started to come in contact with Oli on occasion. It’s funny to reflect back on that because I was so completely in awe of him and his friends – almost to the point where they were just so amazingly cool in my eyes. I think it’s a thing you do when you’re young and in my case, I was the oldest of my siblings, mainly raised by my mother and desperately lacking older male role models. I was so conscious of trying to be cool whenever Oli and his friends were about, I was cautious about what I said – any slight nervous slip would result in getting paid out some how. Usually though, my deliberate and awkward manner around them would always result in me saying something dumb – and then getting given flack.

These situations were likely the most forgettable of things for Oli but to me, any hint of info was like gold. I really formed most of my opinions about fashion, style, swagger etc from a combination of what I was told directly or what I would eavesdrop and hear. There were a few occasions where Oli actually lined us up and would literally school us on what was what. Where to get the best T-Shirts or where the best barbers were and even how to rock our jeans. Really funny stuff in hindsight but at the time this advice was heavy.

Something that Oli did – a lifestyle decision he most likely never stuck with but at the time it was something I viewed as really courageous – was when he went completely drug and alcohol free. Amongst my group of friends, the culture we had around our use of substances was really strong, the idea of giving that up was far-fetched to us in the least. I just remember being really impressed by that, I honestly felt that was the most righteous thing anyone I knew did. Drugs and alcohol represented a sense of rebellion to us but then because of him it seemed like being drug free was even more rebellious in some crazy way.

By the end of High school I was definitely at a cross roads as far as my personal direction in life. To add to that, many of my friends were really drug and alcohol affected – to the point where some were fighting for their sanity. I don’t want to mention specific names, the people that know – know but some of my closest friends were really battling and hardly resembling their old selves. It’s the hardest thing when you feel so conflicted between being a good loyal friend to someone and also seeing how their own behaviours are isolating them more and more from everyone around them. Over time the old crowd really drifted apart.

In 1996 I had a string of incidents that really changed me completely – I was thrown down three short flights of stairs at a gathering one night, dragged up a driveway and beaten really severely. I had two much older guys kicking my head from either side. I woke up looking like the Elephant Man, my head was swollen out like Frankenstein’s Monster. I walked around with a big chip on my shoulder for months on end. It was really a combination of bruised pride and fear. I started to act out my aggressions whenever I was drunk – one night I came very close to hurting someone very badly and it served as the first of many wake up calls. Once again, it’s not something I can talk the specifics of but it was honestly such an ugly incident that I’m not proud of.

The conflict that existed within me was I was not particularly tough, not an aspiring gangsta like kids I knew, I feel I was well-raised and from a happy home environment. My interests were art, music, performance – not really pursuits synonymous with the type of negative behaviours I was starting to develop.

The last time I drank alcohol was in January 1997. It was the morning after a night actually worthy of it’s own novel. I woke up covered in piss, shit, blood and dirt with around $400 in loose money in my right pocket. My friends had found me lying in mud on Williamson Ave in Grey Lynn at 5am, crying with an empty 40. The day after was filled with reports of my out of control behaviour, random sightings around the city – some so embarrassing I honestly just wanted to die.

I swore from that day that I would never drink again. Of course it was a really powerful decision to make – one that also proved very isolating and lonely at times. It’s completely irrelevant to me wether Oli stuck with his non-drinking but the fact that someone that I admired and looked up to a lot did that proved enough inspiration for me to do the same – and over time, this choice has genuinely been one of the most defining decisions of my life. What being substance free represents to me is the clarity and focus I’ve needed to push forward with my creative pursuits. It showed me for the first time that I was a person that could make bold choices and stick with them. I don’t like to preach to people about what they should and shouldn’t do but for me this could have been the single most pivotal and empowering choice of my lifetime. One that really helped me find my identity.

MY STYLE JOURNEY: PART 3 – 93 ‘TIL INFINITY

Life is full of defining moments. I’m talking about those key turning points and situations that seem insignificant at the time yet in hindsight those events can often mark the most significant changes in your direction. Here’s a really corny analogy but sometimes I feel like a ball on a pool table. I feel like my collisions with the other people in life are similar to when a game of pool is played – those interactions can send you ricocheting off in a seemingly random direction. This post more or less sets the landscape for my graffiti and Hip-Hop world in Auckland city as I was coming up. A lot of characters are well known now but at this time we were all little punk-ass kids finding our way.

A selection of albums we were listening to in 1993. Not all of them were released that year but this is essentially my life’s soundtrack in my early teens.

1993 was one of the most pivotal years of my life when I look back on it. As I mentioned in the last post it was my first year of High School and I attended Western Springs College in central Auckland. It was there that I met a lot of people who really helped me refine my tastes in music and art. The school itself always held a reputation for celebrating creativity and so my mother felt it was the natural choice of the secondary schools in walking distance. During that time, there was no strict school zoning as such and so Western Springs had students from a wide range of neighbourhoods, which varied from lower, working and middle class areas through to reasonably affluent parts of town. The school population was made of people from Western Springs, Pt Chev, Mt Albert, Kingsland, Morningside, Sandringham, Grey Lynn, Ponsonby, St Marys Bay, Herne Bay, Freemans Bay, Westmere, Avondale, Waterview, New Lynn, Glen Eden, Devonport, Takapuna… The list goes on. Aucklander’s will appreciate how crazy a mix that is.

Aside from Bonus and Bart, there were many other taggers and people at Springs that would come to emerge as personalities within the Auckland graffiti and Hip-Hop scenes. Risk (DFH, MCF) was two years ahead of me and was already famous amongst our peers for his versatility in tagging styles and his fearless approach to skating. He seemed impervious to pain – one of his party tricks involved bottling himself repeatedly without even flinching. Ironically, he is now a glass artist. I recently saw an article on him where he was quoted as saying: “I used to be famous for breaking it not making it!” which I thought was brilliant. Early in my 3^rd Form year, Risk and Bart invited me to skip school with them and chill in the park for the afternoon, smoking weed and tagging in vivid all over an over grown flax bush. Perhaps it was the smoke – actually I know it wasn’t but I just sat there in awe of their ability to pull out tag after tag – each different to the last. They did them linked, backwards, upside down… They made it look so effortless – like it was breathing to them.  Actually, a fair number of the Auckland KOA kids went to my school. From memory there was Erupt (also a class mate from Kowhai Intermediate), Rapid, Junkie, Varns, Kurupt and Avias. A few of those guys made my first two years at school pretty hard but eventually became good friends during 4^th and 5^th form.

Gasp RFC was a year older than me and in my form class. He had been writing Rocket the year before that, mainly with a kid from my area called Dylan -he wrote Sneak. Dylan played a rather major role in motivating me to actually get out tagging – I mean properly, as in at night with real spray paint. I came up with a few names that year – my first name I tagged about was Scribbles, sometimes shortened to Scribs. I even played with the name Scribe (imagine that!). The reason I absolutely had to have a name with ‘S’s’ in it was because of the yin-yang S’s that were current at that time – popularised mainly by the crew ‘Ebony Society’. Our early tags were mostly around school, down at the spacies at the Morningside shops or along the tracks at the local train station.  Eventually I moved on from those names and tagged Twice and then Meth (totally bitten from Method Man… Shame!). That was until sometime towards the end of 1994 or early 1995 when I finally settled on the name Askew.  I got that name from a Freestyle Fellowship lyric in the song Park Bench People. I chose to stick with it immediately loving the symmetry that was possible with that letter combination.

Chilling with Dylan. I don’t know why we each have a pair of headphones on. I also can’t begin to tell you how much my mothers fluro green, purple and pink paint job on my bedroom walls tormented me!

Those that know me well will tell you that my first element was MC-ing. Ever since 1990 when I was in standard 4, I had been trying to make music. I started out making 4 bar tape loops from the beginning of my favourite rap songs and writing verses to those. I then acquired my Stepfathers rather basic drum machine and started sequencing beats on that. I also learnt piano since I was Eight years old and used to practise on a Synthesizer. It had a sequencer on it and so what I did was make my bass lines and general melodies on that. The main concern though was that the drum sounds were unauthentic and I knew it, so I would manually synch the drum machine and synthesizer (which took work!) and then rap over the top of those in my bedroom. To encourage me my Stepfather set up a simple PA in my room with a microphone to practise with, even though they had to deal with the annoying ruckus that ensued. I often tried to rope all my neighbourhood friends into rapping with me, going as far as to write all their verses for them. No one had the same enthusiasm for making music as me and so it became a solitary pursuit… That was until I started High School and I found a tight bunch of friends with a kindred love of Hip-Hop.

Within the first few months at WSC, I met Danny England and Guy Davey-Heap. For starters, they were infinitely more knowledgeable about Hip-Hop than I was and it showed. These kids were ahead of their time in regards to how they dressed, what they listened to and the way the conducted themselves. They were from Ponsonby and Grey Lynn and had attended Ponsonby Intermediate prior to Springs. There was certainly a lot of sizing each other up before we struck up a friendship and because of my naïve and generally scruffy way of dressing I know I was being judged. These guys wore flash sneakers and Workshop jeans, fitted hats and starter jackets. They always rocked backpacks and listened to walkmans with big Sony headphones. I wore a pair of imitation name brand sneakers or Chuck Taylors that were falling to pieces. My jeans were my Stepdad’s, I borrowed them because they were baggy and so I thought they looked cool, even though they were probably stonewashed and tapered.

We started talking because we all had a love of the Hip-Hop Music but it has to be said that they had far more discerning tastes than I did. For example, I would listen to everything from Public Enemy to Mc Hammer and everything in between regardless of whether it was commercial or otherwise. Rap was Rap to me and I was by no means a snob about it. They were elitist’s, they listened to groups like EPMD, Gangstarr, Pharcyde, Black Moon, A Tribe Called Quest, Leaders Of The New School… They knew their shit. I soon Learnt that Guy’s older brother was Oli Green from Urban Disturbance (early 90′s Hip-Hop group consisting of Oli Green, Zane Lowe and Rob Salmon) and a lot of the influences and tastes were trickling down from him to my crowd. (This is a whole other post so stay tuned).

Through Danny and Guy I met one of my very good friends Vents RTR, who was also much into all the same music and Fashion. He was two years ahead of us but had grown up with Guy, so he would often give us the time of day. Eventually we all became a very tight knit crew and our focus shifted quickly from just socialising to making music. This was the start of our infamous ciphers at the Ponsonby Community Centre. Danny’s mum ran the place and on the weekends she would allow us to use the facilities, sometimes we would literally camp out there from Friday night until Sunday afternoon. Between Danny and Dylan we had a complete DJ set up consisting of one Technics 1200 turntable and one miscellaneous belt driven turntable off a home stereo system plus a very basic mixer. I had the PA and a microphone and that was all we needed, the platform was set. We used to drink terrible cheap alcohol like Gimlets Vodka and Lime, Screwdriver and Bahamas ’62 and rap for hours. Occasionally we would be blessed with a visit from some of the older guys, for example I remember Che Fu during the Supergroove days rapping the verses that eventually became immortalised on DLT‘s track ‘Chains’. It’s almost surreal to fathom that when I look back now – considering how iconic an artist he is. Oli Green came to one cipher and drilled us about how to ‘really freestyle’ and told us we needed to bring something more honest with our subject matter and delivery. That is advice that could benefit many local artists still today.

http://www.vimeo.com/809827

Usually most nights ended when we were literally too messy to even talk, let alone deliver a coherent verse. Perhaps Danny and Dylan would have an argument about who was the DJ for the group and Dylan would storm out with his portion of the equipment. Either way, some times we would walk back to Kingsland and Morningside and drop some straights along the way, likely in Spraykote ‘Azure Blue’ or some ‘Dazzle’ – That’s what graffiti was to me then. It wasn’t structured or overly ambitious, it was just part of our chosen ‘lifestyle’.

I have to credit a small handful of people for really changing my outlook on graffiti around that time. Firstly, my friend Vinnie who wrote ‘Duck’ and another friend Liam who wrote D.Dare (after comic character Dan Dare) but eventually he changed it to Skare. They were the first people to show me ‘Subway Art’ and my first friends that started really drawing pieces with any real vigour. About this time Cripes (MCF) started attending our school – and he was another one with a very natural style and a lot more understanding of what graffiti was supposed to look like. About this time we actually consciously started thinking about doing pieces and wondering where and how to acquire enough paint to do so. About the same time, Webs was coming to a similar conclusion and he did a few basic bits and pieces around. This in turn motivated me to find some paint and do something slightly more elaborate than a tag – I did a filled in scroll with tags inside it and drop shadow. It could possibly have been the wackest thing ever painted in spray paint. Through Webs I met a kid named Shawn, who had spent some time at school in New York. He was interested in the same music as us and also dabbled a bit with graffiti. He introduced us to his friend who would eventually become known as Ikon RTR. From that point, literally everything changed.

To Be Continued…