Ask Tony Rotton, aka Taipanic, aka Blak Twang, what he thinks people need to know about him, and he breaks into a broad grin. "My music talks for itself, really," he chuckles. "We can talk about a lot of things I've done, but most of the time I let my music speak for me. And I say a lot of stuff in my music."
He's not wrong. Since long before he emerged on record in the late 1990s, Blak Twang had things on his mind, and a burning desire to say them over creative hip hop beats that he loves to create. The difference now is that it isn't just a few rap fans in south London who get to hear him: today, Tony's music speaks to the whole world.
As well as winning a MOBO award and becoming so synonymous with the British hip hop scene that he is frequently called upon to comment on TV shows when the topic is rap, Tony has earned international recognition, including picking up a Kora award (the African equivalent of a Grammy), a World Underground Music Award, and a nomination in the USA's prestigious and influential Source magazine awards for Best International Hip Hop Act.
In the past couple of years, Tony's music has taken him to west, north and south Africa, eastern Europe, the USA and the Caribbean, as well as most of the other countries that more traditionally appear on the itineraries of the world's hardest-working musicians. Like the biggest international rock bands he has recorded in Berlin, New York and Jamaica, and unlike all but a handful of his most enlightened rap peers he has stepped out on stage everywhere from Camden to Cape Town, Luton to Lagos.
Part of this widespread appeal is easily explained the second you see a Blak Twang show: where other rap stars may offer a desultory plod through some loping beats, live performance has always been at the heart of what Tony is about, and his records have been made with playing them live in mind. But the other reason he and his music have been so readily embraced by people from so many different countries and cultures is to do with his attitude. Whether touring as an invited guest of the British Council or gigging in far flung countries because people there have heard his music and asked him to visit, Tony's worldview is all too rare in hip hop, a genre seemingly dominated by, and fixated with, success in the USA.
"The reality of it is, young people in Africa are into the music just as much as a kid in Brooklyn or a kid in Brixton," he reasons. "And as an artist, you've got to think big. People who don't go because they think they won't make any money...? It's a shame. They might be able to draw on some of those experiences. It's not always about money, it's about experiencing the world, and knowing full well that your music is universal. Artists who don't think along those lines, they don't know what they're missing. I think it's stupid not to take every opportunity you get to broaden your horizons and have new experiences."
These views may sound odd coming from a product of the often fiercely self-contained world of UK hip hop, but Tony, a down-to-earth guy, was a kid with a cosmopolitan soul. Long considered part of London's rap scene, he was actually born in Birmingham, and spent a few years in Manchester before he arrived, aged nine, in south east London. His extended family tree had branches across the globe, and by the time he was in his teens he had already visited Egypt and Nigeria.
His formative years were spent playing football and listening to the "golden age" rap sounds of Big Daddy Kane, KRS-ONE, Rakim and Public Enemy. He'd written raps for a while, but didn't seriously consider his chances of making much of his rhyming abilities until he heard the London Posse's epochal single Money Mad, and discovered that rap could give you the freedom to speak in your own voice, not one borrowed from New York.
His first forays into the music business were not entirely successful. His debut album, Dettwork South East (a pun based on the name of the company that ran the trains in his Lewisham manor, and the London hip hop slang term coined in the late '80s meaning "very, very good") was promo-ed but never properly released; his second, 19 Long Time, suffered revisions and reworkings before limping to the shops in 1998. After more false starts than Linford Christie, his career got underway in earnest in 2002 when his third album, Kik Off, on which he blended metaphors from the football field with rap and production skills honed over a decade of active participation in hip hop culture, was released by the Wall of Sound offshoot label, Bad Magic. As well as providing the most coherent showcase yet for Tonys expanding skills as writer, producer and performer, the record established him as a mainstream star with tracks such as the anthemic So Rotton becoming Blak Twang's theme song, as a performance captured on video at Glastonbury proves, in which Tony's raps are drowned out by the thousands singing along.
There are two things (other than Tony's excellent and largely self-produced beats) that Blak Twang fans most expect from his records clear-headed conceptual songwriting, and plain-speaking on issues Tony thinks are important. From the beginning, songs like Red Letters which examined the tyranny of final demands and Queen's Head (a British take on the "dead presidents" US rappers often refer to money as) have shown that here is a rapper able to tackle complex issues as strongly as he used to tackle opposition players on the football field, and to do so with some skill and dexterity, too. The only question ahead of the long-awaited release of his fourth LP, Rotton Club, was whether he'd run out of things to say.
"At one point when I was writing this album I thought, 'Boy, I don't even know now! What haven't I talked about?'" Tony admits with a laugh. "But just when I was thinking I'd written everything, I realised, 'Oh! I wanna write about this too'. Every day you're learning and experiencing new things, so there's always something to talk about."
On Rotton Club, unsurprisingly, there are themes and concepts in abundance. GCSE, the first single, is Tony's attempt at filling in the gaps in sex education classes, to show his teenage listeners what they're risking by unsafe sexual practices, using illustrations and examples definitely not to be found on the secondary curriculum. Roadworks and Travellin' talk about his experiences round the globe and are delivered with his trademark conceptual complexity. My World uses samples from Tony's appearance in early 2003 on UK national breakfast TV, where he found himself defending rap music from government ministers looking to scapegoat the music for violence endemic in parts of society starved of investment and deprived of hope. There are love songs (My Lady), battle-hardened dis tracks (Beef Stop) and some superb examples of plain, old-fashioned rap show-off sessions (Lions Roam). In short, it's Blak Twang, but more so: the sounds, stories, styles and skills turned up to the max.
"A few people who've heard the record are saying it's my 'political' album," Tony says. "But to me, it's no different to what I've been doing before, really. I've always talked about things that I see around me, things that affect me or interest me. The only difference now is that there are more people listening."
And listening they are. OK, so he may not have them running to the record racks in New York or LA just yet, but Tony is shrewd enough to not get caught up in the trap of viewing platinum sales in the USA as being the only measure of a rapper's worth.
"To be honest with you, I've actually never pursued the States," he says. "I was featured in Vibe magazine in 1997, they said I had a Nas-like status in Britain. I remember it clearly. But... so what? Music's one of them things where people like it or they don't: there's nothing I can do, I can only do my music. Me trying to crack America, that's killing myself. Really. America's the biggest market, but the vast majority of records in the world are sold in places outside America. I look at it like, if I can sell records in Morocco and Madagascar, that's success to me. Already I feel very successful. I'm very ambitious, but I'm realistic as well. I might not sell a million records in the first week, but I know that what I've done is good."
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Big up Blak Twang! It's good to hear and see that there are still some people who have something to say. Big respect for this! Why Snoop cyaan come backa Inglan? :)
Hey Blak Twang i hope all is well, keep up the good work i have respected ur music from day one good to see that ur still doing ur thing. Nickita Martin x
Yesterday my two-year-old boy kept asking me: "Play tune, Beebee Aye-aye." It take me ages to work out what he meant, and it turned out he was saying he wanted to listen to BLAK TWANG!! I put on Kik Off and he was so happy and shouted: "Beebee Aye-aye! Dance! Dance!" and jumped around. I don't know if Beebee Aye-aye is your name or a line from one of the songs. Still, I'm impressed!
woo woo the shoot was wicked loved the fact I had to act , lol ;-) we was all blinged out!!keep it all up ur a talented and humble person loved working with ya( nice arms, garmz and reading your palm)lolololol xxxkadishaX
The icing on the cake of a sick sick event. Ran late but vibe stayed bless.
Killed it with the Quartet, band were made for you. Let me know if you wanna do any more work with them in the future, they can learn a track an hour and kill it live instrumentally.
"BLAK TWANG IS ENJOYING THE AFRICAN NATIONS CUP...PROPER FOOTY"
Indeed, Most def!!! What will i do when it's over. Fabulicious footy. If Nigeria don't win tomorrow, I'm deflecting to Ghana - not happy at all, with their first game.
Ghana however are on fire and hungrrrrrry. Funniest thing so far...the POWERCUT!!! at the start of the Mali game... Hilarious, only in AFRICA....
BLESS FAM PASSING THRU SHOWING SOME GANGSTER LOVE TO MOST CONSISTENT MC IN THE GAME HOPE EVERYTING BLESS AND THIS YEAR IS THE ONE WHERE U GET EVEN GET MORE BIGGER AND BETTER IN THE GAME 1
happy new year..n I pray God Support, Sustains and supplies u according to the riches in His Glory....
Help Dem Lord..is an inspiring song.. i am a fun, ur music has a positive message, n we need more of that especially amogst all the negative commercial music..it's inspiring...
keep doin ur thang...
drop by and listen to prince logic and let me know what u think
