Out of Afrika

It’s one o’ clock in the morning and deep in the darkest, haziest reaches of the Music Centre’s basement, Afrika Bambaataa is putting on his shades. A precautionary, soul-security measure against the website crew’s camera, the gigantic navy wraparounds obscure half his face and offer no clues as to where his gaze rests. Bam’s quite a large fellow by anyone’s standards, and I get the distinct impression – not for the last time – that I am indeed talking to a brick wall. He sits up straight and turns to face me: “OK. Now I’m ready.”

If one were to seek out the people responsible for kickstarting hip-hop, techno, house or any of their many mongrel offshoots, Afrika Bambaataa would have to be close to the top of the family tree. Thanks largely to his authorship of the mighty ‘Planet Rock’ way back in ‘82, an unlikely collision of hip-hop and Kraftwerk-inspired technopop, he’s frequently and breathlessly held up as The Originator by beatheads across the globe. Since his earliest days in the Bronx, Bam has commanded respect – and that respect wasn’t always contingent on DJ skills or production talent. Many of the members of his peacenik Zulu Nation organisation – and Bam himself – are former members of one of New York’s most feared street gangs, the Black Spades. We begin talking about his turning point, the channelling of energy dedicated to violence into less destructive ends:

“Well, basically it was seeing a lot of people getting killed, or beat up,” he remembers. “I was getting a lot of knowledge from the different organisations that came to speak to us, and once I got into the music thing, I always had this vision of building up a Zulu Nation of our own, with all different nationalities, races, ideologies and religions. So I said, this is the time to make it, now, while I’m doing this brand new thing called hip-hop, and bring it all together in the culture.”

Did it occur to him while recording ‘Planet Rock’ that he was creating a whole new musical form? He doesn’t hesitate.

“Well, I knew that, technically, I wasn’t going to be the first with uptempo-style hip-hop music, and be the first black electronic group out there, so I was trying to please the black/latino audience and the punk-rock white audience. I didn’t know it was going to blow up with the brown, the yellow, the red, and all the other people around the world were going to start loving the music.”

Had he any inkling of the consequences of this music at the time, of how fast and how far hip-hop would travel in the next twenty years?

“Well, it’s travelled world-wide. I had a vision that it was definitely gonna catch on. When we started out, we started grabbing the Tri-State area, then people started sending cassettes to cousins, and they’d make copies and send it to their cousins. The word started getting around, then the music industry jumped on it, and we started pushing it home on the records, putting messages on our records. That’s how we got to build up our hip-hop culture.”

Sounds easy, right? Not if you factor in the legwork and mileage that the Zulus, and Bambaataa in particular, have put into the progression of the form.

“Definitely. ‘Cos I really did a lot of a lot of work, in Ireland, y’know, when nobody was really into it, by playing in little pubs, cafes, clubs and then bigger clubs, and keep coming. Not playing all the key spots, like Dublin or Berlin or London, just going all around and playing for the people. And people would be like, at first, ‘Aw, what you doing, messin’ up the record?’ And then it caught on, and as we went through our life, it got funky in all the different cities in Europe.”

The majority of Bambaataa’s life has been in stark contrast to his early gang days, about moving himself and others (especially those in his own community) away from a life of violence, about finding a strong voice through hip-hop. If we are to take it that he’s been an important part of that shift in black perspective, how does he feel when he sees the music rip itself apart from the inside with the sort of East/West battles we’ve seen in recent years?

“Yeah, it saddened me – I’ve always been trying to bring about that unification into our world community of hip-hop, but I understand certain things that go on, certain controls or mind-games that the industry and other people play on each other. A lot of rappers have a lot of accountability to theyself, of what they do and say in public. So it’s a whole picture of all different things that cause a lot of friction with that. A lot of media play, when they played up the whole west coast/east coast situation. The Zulu Nation had no problem with that. We was on the east coast, the west coast, the south coast, the north coast and a whole lot of other places besides.” Continuing on the topic of split nationhood, Bam has this to say about our own shores: “It’s like over here, when you have a country split up, we want one nation of Ireland, let’s stop the arguing, get down to the nitty-gritty of the problem, and everyone should sit down and talk and think, and be thinkers, and try to straighten out the problems, and then we can have one nation of Ireland.”

If I was a betting man, I’d most likely wager against David Trimble being the proud owner of a mint copy of Shango Funk Theology, but you never know.

Does Bam think that hip hop still scares some people?

“Oh, most definitely,” he fires back, “there’s a lot of rappers, and some of them are bold speakers, say what they say, and mean what they mean.”

Does it scare people solely because MC’s don’t hold back, or is it because hip-hop is still a predominantly black form, and black empowerment still scares some people?

“Well, it’s not a black form no more. It came from black, latino people. It’s just like when the creator sends the prophet, he sends it to one particular people. But then the word gets out, then you have people following the word of this prophet all over the planet earth.”

The world is not enough for this particular ambassador, mind you: “Sometimes you’ll hear people talking about “universal’, but universal really means all the other planets, all the solar systems. When this word stretches out, it’s not in the black community, it’s a world community. And anybody that’s getting scared of it might as well be scared of their own country, ‘cos now you got your Irish hip-hop, your British hip-hop, your South-African hip-hop. You gotta watch that. Hip-hop has brought more people together than all the politicians put together on the planet earth.”

Has he ever considered running for political office? A brief flash of distaste and then: “I never thought of doing it... but you can get a good feel for what’s going on in the world right here, it’s a really dangerous and dirty game. I’d rather be on the humble side, and speak from my learning and with the Supreme Force, whatever you call it.”

Bambaataa is something of a scholar of the supernatural – we chat for some time about various deities (“some people will say ‘I’m Muslim’ or whatever, but I say I’m Muslim, Christian, Hebrew, Buddha, everything and then some”), Atlantis, the Gaia hypothesis and then finally a subject befitting a self-styled intergalactic electro-ambassador: little green men. I ask him if he’s ever seen a UFO, and he smiles like he’s remembering his first taste of chocolate.

“Well, back in ‘79 in the Bronx, me and a couple of friends were out sitting on a bench, and we saw these little lights – it was clear sky, we couldn’t see a cloud – but we could see these little lights going zipping around.

“They kept going quicker and quicker, and disappearing and coming back again – we were like ‘what the hell is that?!’ All of us knew about UFOs, but we never called it an Unidentified Flying Object, just an Unexplainable Flying Object, ‘cos we know what we saw.

“Every time you see it on TV, you see some white guy claiming to have been abducted – they’re going to start asking some questions, like we don’t have no black, coloured people being chased crazy abducted – why ain’t we getting abducted?!” he laughs. “People aren’t nervous about it anymore – we’ve been seeing all these science fiction movies over the past 15 years – we’re ready for the truth!”

At this point his appointment with the crowd is drawing dangerously, so it’s time to wind up. I have a chance for one last question before Afrika Bambaataa removes his interview-shades for the night, so I ask if he thinks ‘they’ listen to his music on other planets?

He flashes a wicked grin: “I think they do. Yeah, definitely.“