You were actively involved in the early hip hop scenes in London and Paris. How do you think hip hop’s changed over the years?

As far as my involvement with Hip Hop goes, I started to fall out of love with it at some point during the mid- to late nineties, when rap overtook and eclipsed everything else that this culture had been about for me. By rap, I mean the type of lyrics, which tend to gloss over and glorify the more negative aspects of the socio-cultural or socio-political environment from which this culture first emerged. I was turned off of it regardless of the fact that these irresponsible words were musically supported by some of the most talented producers out there.

My ethos as far as Hip Hop goes is one that Bunny Wailer (or was that Peter Tosh?) once summed up in the following manner, “In the ghetto, we put zero and zero together and made one;” making positive out of negative, where the state and the social services have abandoned the underprivileged and the disenfranchised to their own fate. We didn’t come from a well-off background in Mauritius, but it was no ghetto either. Still, our parents made a few wise choices in their lives, for the sake of their children, and also tried to bring us up correctly. The social environment that you’re born into doesn’t always allow you the luxury of options, and things can go the wrong way, even for those who did start out trying to do the right thing. This shouldn’t provide an excuse though, for all those who just give up on trying to turn things around, and choose instead to exploit and profit from their own neighbours’ misery and loss…

Of course we shouldn’t be disproportionately idealistic about the origins and workings of this culture, as it wasn’t all rosy fun and games in the seventies and on, but I would still add that, if we look back to the early eighties, the crack culture and economy which swept across the United States deeply affected and influenced the development of the culture (or should we say that it caused its regression?), and transformed the value system from what skills you had to how much drugs you sold, people you shot, or bitches you had.

Music, being the one main aspect of the culture which could be transformed into a marketable product, took on a much more important role, as it brought money, whereas it was before then just one of the disciplines of the culture, along with the dancing or the “graffiti”-writing. It swallowed up all that DJ’s and MC’s could contribute to the whole, and eventually transformed them into some ghetto or gangster fantasy that was played out in the form of music videos, encouraging many a talented but short-sighted lyricist to do likewise.

Up until October ’86 and “Walk This Way,” by Run DMC and Aerosmith, Def Jam was the only big label with consistent big hits, but, a couple of years later, when the majors realized that even the small labels were getting into the charts, they decided that it was time to invest a little and cash in big on our culture.

Groups had their demos accepted because they sounded like the real innovators who had made their mark off of the quality and originality of their music alone, these same innovators which were each and every time different from their predecessors. This is what attracted us and excited us back then about the culture, just knowing that the few tunes coming out in the coming months would sound so new and fresh; making us always look forwards in what we did, wide-eyed, with an even wider viewpoint.

In the early eighties there was more electro being produced than rap, per say, lyrics-free music that you or I could interpret in any way we felt, enriching the diversity within our culture. The “problem” with lyrics is that they can become a two-edged sword, which could just as easily point in new positive directions, inspiring, uplifting, and empowering us; or else they could become some kind of formatting, programming, and brainwashing process of a more narrow-minded kind.