For more than ten years, New York rappers The Jungle Brothers have been influential luminaries in the hip-hop world. Known here largely through the quality of their albums, and beloved by a small coterie of committed Irish fans, these titans of the US urban underground have never performed live in this country before. Hence the excitement around their appearance at the Cork Soul and Disco Festival over the June Bank Holiday Weekend.
The Brothers' last album, Raw Deluxe, is a multi-faceted cruise around their particular planet of sound. A good starting point for new recruits, the album is 65 minutes of inventive, melodic, sensitive-yet-hard-hitting hip-hop. Speaking to Mike G over the phone from the States, I ask him which track on Raw Deluxe means the most to him.
"When Jungle Brothers put together an album," he replies, "we try to make the whole album solid. I look at the whole project and appreciate the whole thing, so it's hard for me to pick just one track. That's our focus when we go in to record; to make a solid album, not just a couple of hit songs.
"With a whole tight album, when you're listening to it it's like ohhhhhh - you feel where we're coming from. And I hope that's how you felt when you heard the album: it's like oh, I can really feel these guys, the vibe is solid. If you hear one song but the next song makes you want to skip, you're not gonna get the complete picture, you're not gonna know where we're coming from."
So where are they coming from?
"With that album we came from more of a soulful vibe, like laying down some of our experiences and showing the strength of our will to keep maintaining and trying to create good music. Our motto is 'stay true to yourself'. I mean, we make fun songs that are bragging and boasting and stuff, but most of the songs are really pertaining to life and our life experiences.
"To a certain extent," he avers, "our music is political only because it speaks about life. It's political when you lay down different choices people can make."
Aside from music, Mike's main interest is his young family: two daughters and a fiancee. Does he find domesticity a good base for creativity?
"Yeah, definitely," he concurs. "Not even just creativity, but business-wise, so you can focus on what you really have to do.
"When I'm on the road, I gotta speak to my kids, especially my oldest, really, because she's seven. My youngest is only eight months, so she's not saying much. But I've gotta hear their voices in my head to stay focused on things. Because sometimes it's really hard to stay focused in the business - you've got so many different things pulling you from side-to-side. Of course you've got the glamour, you're always rocking clubs, you've got people pulling at you . . . and it's good to be able to take a step back and take a look, and that's what family does. Take a look at what's around you."
Prolific to the last, the Jungle Brothers are currently working on another album. "Right now," Mike explains, "we're trying to get more dance-orientated with our tracks, but I think the vibe is still the same. We all like a strictly uplifting vibe, know what I mean?"
To uplift is one of the Jungle Brothers' main goals. How do they know when they've achieved it?
"Usually when we come do shows, and we see the expressions on people's faces as we're performing certain songs, and a lot of times people come up to us and they say, Yo, this song meant so much to me, it got me through this particular time, and I can't find enough words to say thank you. And those are the ways that we feel it. But we feel like we're still in the middle of our career and it ain't over till it's over. And when the last jumping jam is done, then we'll know how well we did, you know?" n

Aoife NicCanna

One of Ireland's first women DJs, Aoife NicCanna made her name during the early '90s in Dublin as part of the influential Horny Organ Tribe, a large collective of DJs, musicians, performance artists, body painters, piercers, masseurs and other artistes who ran regular clubs and big one-off events, often to celebrate Samhain, Bealtaine and the other pagan festivals. Since then, Aoife has developed into one of Dublin's most popular DJs, with permanent weekend residencies at Ri Ra's of Dublin and Silk in Limerick, and an R...B slot on the highly-esteemed pirate radio station, Jazz FM. On top of all that, Aoife is currently studying sound recording in Ballyfermot Rock School, learning skills that will increase her own technical prowess.
DJing may still be a man's world, but the lack of female role models hasn't stopped Aoife.
"There is a bit of discrimination, but not really," she describes, when I ask her how a woman gets on in such a male-dominated field. "You do get more encouraging things than discriminatory things told to you. What's more frustrating is when you're a kid and you don't even consider yourself to be a DJ because there's so many men doing it.
"Once you're doing it, it's not as frustrating as not doing it. So rather than getting bitter or twisted and trying to fight it, just do it and be it! It's so much better just to be doing it, and not to feel that there's any boundaries.
"Also, you can learn a lot from men being men in business. And they can learn from me being a woman in the business, so we can balance off each other and learn from each other. I've learnt from men - there's just so many things! - all about their confidence and their way of going 'yeah, but I'm good,' and their ego and things like that. They know what they're worth. Without putting us down, they don't doubt themselves from a business point of view, whereas when I was starting off it was like, 'Oh no, that's too much money,' or 'You can't pay me that, give me what you want.' And now it's like, '#150 and that's it.'
"And I learnt that from the men!" laughs Aoife, a vivacious, accomplished, down-to-earth DJ, whose love for what she does shimmers through the music that she plays. n