Ready D

Shaheen Ariefdien

He is a producer, MC, b-boy, graf-artist. He is kind of the all-rounder in South Africa. He is old, old-school defined. [laughter] I think both of us are regarded by a lot of heads as part of the pioneering generation of hip-hop in South Africa. For the first generation of hip-hop heads, it provided us with an opportunity to express ourselves in our terms with something that we could identify with. It is something where you didn’t need to be rich, didn’t need to own stuff in order to be accepted. And the very first two clubs at the time were a place called Teasers and then later the Bass.

Ready D

We encountered hip-hop in the form as we know it in the early ’80s, early as 1982-’83 I would say, and hip-hop predominantly. And also because how we have been divided and pushed into certain areas, obviously, we were only operating or traveling in the Cape Flats because you couldn’t travel over into other areas or just cross the road. We were heavy into the b-boy scene at that time and hip-hop was pretty much on the streets, apart from being out on the streets out in Mitchell’s Plain and other areas. We brought it into Cape Town because it was a central place for crews to meet from all over the Cape Flats in fact. And also for some weird reason there was lot of white kids into b-boying as well. It was a good opportunity for us to take out the white kid, you know? Just to let get them know, “Look at you, you know. You are fucking us over and one way we are gonna take you out with the windmill or the headspin or some shit like that.” [laughs] So at a certain degree it became very, very personal. And also the white kids were the guys that had sponsorships, the money. They were always looking good, always dressed well. The sneakers would match the tracksuit pants and the pants would match, and the hair was nicely combed and blow-dried and all that. And we were the scruffy kids coming out of the Cape Flats and, “Well, fuck this, we got nothing but we got moves.” And after coming into the city center, where all the events take place, you always used to battle. All over the city center, all over the streets. And some friends of us, who used to be in the punk rock scene at that time told us about this club called Club Teasers, which was a punk rock club, they had the Saturday punk rock sessions. And they told us, “Look, you guys got to come to this club, come and see because this is like some next shit.” And we didn’t know what punk rock was all about. We just knew these guys with the heavy spikes and the hair standing like this. [points to his head] And for us it was a trip. “Fuck, let’s go and see what this punk rocker stuff is!” For us it was weird. For people coming out of our community, dressed up all in black, painted faces and being into this punk rock thing and we were very, very curious. We went into the club, started b-boying and everybody was cool. The punk rockers, they were cool, everybody was very, very cool. At first they allowed us about ten minutes to b-boy. And more and more b-boys and b-girls heard about this. And then it became 20 minutes. And then it became a half an hour and later on in that year we found a way to actually creep behind the decks and play our own music. And because of that, the scene became big. And from there, we had “thrash bash” sessions and most of the punk rockers that came were predominantly white kids that were into the scene. And with hip-hop and the whole punk rock scene merging, there was obviously a get-together in those hardcore days. I think that was the only club and the only movement and the only scenes for some weird reason that was actually bringing young black and white kids together. In that sort of environment and from there it just grew and grew. And it blew up and it blew up. Teasers closed down and moved to another venue, became known as the Bass and that was a really popular venue.

And at that point in time I would say, 1986-’87 as we are moving on to the ‘90s, hip-hop started coming through with its black consciousness phase, where Public Enemy came out. You had X-Clan coming out, you had N.W.A. coming out, just to name a few. And one of the songs that really stood out, which became an anthem song, was a song called “Fuck tha Police” at that time. So we had like white kids out there like, “Fuck the Police! I am proud to be African! Fuck white people.” And we were like, “What the fuck? You are white,” you know? [laughs] “Why are you saying this?” But at the end of the day it was the music. It was the music, there was no color issue at that time and we were all in there thrash-bashing, jumping, going crazy with the punk rockers and everybody was just having a good time so that was really a very powerful force coming through by the merge of this two different styles.

Shaheen Ariefdien

At the time the anti-apartheid movement abroad was very active and at the time they called for a boycott for South African goods but also for people coming into South Africa. Whether it is artists, musicians, they were not touring South Africa. So it was very, very, very difficult to get hold of any kind of music that wasn’t really crappy British pop. Like, on radio you would hear Rick Astley and Kylie Minogue and just Stock, Aitken and Waterman shit. So if you wanted anything else you really, really had to dig.

Ready D

In our b-boy crew we had one kid, one white kid. And we got lucky because he had to sign up for the conscription campaign, which means that young white boys have to go and fight on the borders. They had to go out do their patrol in the townships. They just had to do these things under the previous government’s law and so forth. And with him being involved with hip-hop, I think he was probably one of a very, very few white kids who actually had the guts to go out into the townships at that point in time. And there were certain times that the cops would actually stop us and they’d interrogate us about this white kid walking with us in the townships, especially at night because we did a lot of shows at nightclubs up in Mitchell’s Plain. And what they did make us do was actually b-boy there on the ground. And his specialty was doing the kneespin. And they actually made him do a kneespin on the tar road until his knees bled. [laughs] And those are the things that the cops made us do if they would catch us out on the streets at night. And all we were doing was just coming home from the club, walking home. Obviously, at that time we didn’t have transportation or anything. And this kid decided he didn’t want to be in South Africa no more because things were building up and so forth. We were amongst a few fortunate kids who had somebody like this in our crew who travelled abroad because his parents were originally from the UK and he used to send us a lot of the music and the tapes at that point in time. And if one tape landed in our hands, the whole other Cape Flats will have that one tape, it would get duplicated and that’s sort of how the music spread. Later there was another DJ called Resano who was amongst the first two hip-hop DJs who would dash the crowd in the clubs and spin the discs. And this kid A-Ski as well. He used to send us a lot of the vinyls. And also at the venues some other kids, whose families went into exile abroad as well. And that’s how a lot of music crept in. Otherwise in the previous system, you would never ever in your whole life be able to get hold of a Public Enemy record. When “Rapper’s Delight” came through, that was cool. It was sort of the anthem of so-called young colored men because they could not get a lot of work in the cities before to work for the big international companies. And they used to travel abroad on these ships and this is how these kids brought in the music as well. So the music sort of found little gaps and little places to come in. And obviously, a lot of stuff was sent through as gifts. And it was sent to other addresses, it was not sent directly to a Mitchell’s Plain address or nothing. It was sent to some white person’s address. This guy Alan, his family and we just go and pick up the gifts or pick up the music on that side. And that’s how the tapes started circulating around the townships.

Shaheen Ariefdien

Yeah and also people had pen pals. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with Word Up! magazine, a little old crappy so-called hip-hop magazine. They had a pen pal section and kids just wrote to them from Germany or New York or whatever. And kids would write to them, “Send us shit, send us shit! Any shit!” So that was the great thing back then because we listened to hip-hop from the UK in the early ’80s, from Miami. So everything from the early, early MC Shy D, 2 Live Crew to Sir Mix-A-Lot to everything we could get hold of from the East Coast, West Coast. We didn’t really give a fuck where it was from. One of the favorite groups at that time was a British crew called Hijack. They just had two wicked, wicked DJs. You know, like crazy. And for us – because we were so isolated – “East Coast / West Coast shit, what is that?” – it doesn’t make sense. If it’s good, it’s good. Looking back, that was really what created a vibe. That you had people from different backgrounds, different musical tastes coming together. And the hip-hop heads, because you didn’t hear it on radio, everyone dissed it. It wasn’t on television, it was given absolutely no respect because it was kind of the poor man’s music. My father and his partner at that time, they had a little eight track recording studio. An R8 Fostex machine, a little grey thing. It’s a small machine but it’s a really nice machine. At that time it was a S-10 sampler. You could only find Roland equipment in the country at that time because of the cultural boycott and so on. So they made a lot of fucking money off musicians. And the S-10 sampler was a four-second sampler with four banks. And you really can’t sample any loops into that with like one second. So what we used to do – because he had a turntable at the time that had 78 [RPM]. So if you wanted a piece of a loop you would just sample it, like for this one second, 78 wrrrt, you know? Catch the thing and then play it like right at the end [of the keyboard]. So if you play it at C4 it will be like trrrr because of 78. If you slow it down it actually would [human beatboxing a hip-hop beat], you know? And then cut it up from the kick and the snare, really crappy sound. But that’s what we really wanted. So the very first thing I could remember recording one song live with just samples and cutting. What was that thing called on Wu Style? We took the James Brown sound that was like [imitates the Moog intro of Fred Wesley & the JB’s “Blow Your Head”] the Public Enemy sample and just looped a little piece of that. So you had four seconds, right? You had a drum loop, that bass sound, a guitar riff from some old South African record, a conga-type jive thing and a horn sound. And all we did was press record and played the thing live. Because we weren’t shown how to sequence this thing, you know? There was no one really around at that time to guide us with hip-hop.

Audience Member

What was the name of your crew?

Ready D

The first crew that we set up was known as the City Kids. It was the b-boy crew that later on became known as the Ballistic Rockers because of the song by this group called Newcleus called “The Wikky Wikky Song (Jam On It).” And somewhere in the break, this little funny voices said, “The beat goes on with the ballistic funk,” and that’s why we came up with the name. “Oh Ballistic, that sounds unusual, it sounds cool, it sounds different.” So we used that name as Ballistic Rockers. And the weird thing is, we were b-boying and doing our thing and about a year later we only heard that this whole thing we are doing out here’s going to become known as hip-hop or b-boying and the music as well. Just for some instinctive reason, we felt the style of dance fitted with the style of music because both were completely unusual. And the first time that we have actually seen all the elements of hip-hop together was in Malcolm McLaren’s video called “Buffalo Gals.” You had the Rocksteady Crew and the World’s Famous Supreme Team DJs scratching on the decks and all that. And we could relate to turntables because of our whole environment. We grew up with music and all those sort of things but for us, we thought this is a new form of gymnastics done to music. And also because we’ve been influenced by kung-fu movies and all those things and we were always that type of kids, doing flic-flacs and doing all the crazy stuff. For us it was cool, it was natural and also the characters in those videos, you could immediately identify with them. And after the Ballistic Rockers we eventually became known as the Prophets of da City.

Shaheen Ariefdien

Part of the reason was to not only utilize the typical hip-hop sounds, which were funk records and jazz records and dance records, whatever. But also to track down South African music and African music in general to see how we could play around with that.

Audience Member

What were your, I guess I could say, pipe dream of getting signed or putting something out at that time? What were your expectations when you were cutting your first record?

Ready D

Man, for me this mutual friend that Shaheen touched on earlier, I heard through him that he knows this guy. His dad got a recording studio and I thought, “Damn, this is my meal ticket.” I got to get hold of this guy because, you know, there was “Rappers Delight,” it was Kurtis Blow, it was all sort of these things. It was Run DMC and all those sort of things and my thing was: I wanted to get into the studio, make this record, I wanted to be rich and famous immediately. I wanted to be on the stage and go, “Everybody say hooo! All the ladies shake your ass!” – that sort of stuff. And then I hooked up with Shaheen. We are going to sort of back draft now, this is before Public Enemy, about a year or two before Public Enemy, am I correct? This is before Public Enemy, X-Clan, when hip-hop met with the black consciousness movement. So that was my pipe dream. We eventually hooked up, I spoke to Shaheen, he was like, “Cool, let me take this shit to my father, play it to him.” I don’t know what happened there but they came back and agreed, “Now it’s cool, we gonna put you in the studio, you do the record and this and that.” And hooking up with Shaheen, he was the one that was very, very hardcore LL Cool J-inspired battle MC in the Bass club. And we decided, “Your lyrics is dope, you are part of the crew.” And then getting into the studio, my bubble bursts right there because Shaheen was talking some other shit that I wasn’t down with at all. He was like up on some political shit because he was an activist in school. For me, I wasn’t interested in politics, I wanted people to go, “Hooo,” and he was, “No, no. Fuck the government,” and all this shit. I was “hooo” and I go, “Why fuck the government, what’s going on?” Things are cool up in Mitchell’s Plain. We had house parties every weekend. I am there DJing at all these house parties and the girls and all that stuff. All that made sense for me. And he is like, “No, no. There is a rally coming on and this and that’s happening.” And I am like, “No, no, no. Wait, wait, you know? I don’t understand this whole politics thing and this [Nelson] Mandela cat that you are talking about. I don’t give a fuck about this Mandela guy. I don’t know this guy. He doesn’t love you.” I didn’t see him before because being on school and all that, we weren’t taught these things. And for some very weird reason, we ended up with our very first gig. Then it was myself and Shaheen out there. I think it was an anti-drugs rally, set up at the Muslim community in Cape Town.

Shaheen Ariefdien

Was it the first one? In conscription campaign!

Ready D

In conscription campaign, yeah. This organization set up this gig in Protis, to sort of voice opinion about how unhappy they were about sending kids to the army and so on. So I mean, ironically, this became our first gig and we wrote the song called “Fuck the Government” and I am up on the stage with Shaheen, still not understanding what I am saying because I still needed to make the girls go “hooo” and all that sort of stuff. And then the second gig came and that was the anti-drugs gig. So with all these events with a conscious nature attached to them – and at the same time we were sitting in the recording studio, and I think it dragged about a year and a half before we actually released the record – and then Public Enemy came along. And that’s what really kicked me, basically kicked me in my glory left, right and center because now I love Public Enemy. I needed to understand what these guys were saying. And at the same time listening to while being educated as well. And you know, just time went on and Prophets of da City would touch on some of that. We were forced to educate ourselves outside the school boundaries about truly what was happening on the political arena. Because at that time I didn’t understand why the cops are smacking me up and down just walking up the street. “Eight o’clock. Why are you not in the house? Why are you walking here?” Buff baff. They kick you in your chops. Back home and you ask yourself why. I am just going to listen to a new hip-hop record. And we were sitting there all night and analyzing the music, that’s all we were into at that time.

With Prophets of da City we recorded three albums up until the point where we actually went into the first democratic election and this album [shows the CD] called The Age Of Truth is our third album, which started causing a lot of trouble for us in the country and also in the Western Cape. The other thing that you guys will pick up as well is also the heavy Public Enemy influence as well because we were really inspired by the Bomb...

Shaheen Ariefdien

The Bomb Squad.

Ready D

The Bomb Squad with these layered productions, just with a whole lot of different sounds. They just used to kill with a lot of other sounds. So obviously, we were heavily influenced by that and taking it and putting it into sort of our own context.

(music: Prophets of da City – “United We Stand”)

Shaheen Ariefdien

The intro of two tracks have got these vocal samples of Nelson Mandela. At that time that was an absolute “No, fucking no!” His slogans at that time were very, very popular with the student movement and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, like, “An injury to one is an injury to all, united we stand, divided we fall,” it was a chant underneath. So from the get go, when you play the album, there was an indication of what you can expect. The second thing, so you have the slow vibe is, we sampled marimba sounds and programmed it in a hip-hoppy type of way.

(music: Prophets of da City – “Divided We Fall”)

That worked well for the live show, because the b-boys at the time were incorporating things like gumboot dancing, pantsula, other South African forms of dance. Which for colored kids at that time – because we were taught to not embrace our African roots – also caused a whole lot of shit inside of South Africa.

Ready D

This is a song called “African, Very African” and what happened at this time, this song wasn’t intended to be on the album. But at that time we were sitting in the recording studio and that was the day that Chris Hani was assassinated and...

Shaheen Ariefdien

He was a member of the ANC but also the Communist party and they needed to get his ass out of the way somehow because he made a statement that the success of South Africa, this new South Africa, will be determined on how the people on the margins, the extremely poor, how they will be incorporated into South Africa and not have to suffer again. That just meant a lot of shit to a lot of people. Like, “What did he mean by that?” And so he was assassinated for that and it was on this day where we were just programmed something and just put something together in the studio at the time.

(music: Prophets of da City – “African, Very African”)

Ready D

At that time in the Cape Flats, in the world of segregation, being black and colored and all this and that, hip-hop was really a very, very strong force. So it broke down and stripped down the whole color issue. People didn’t see color at that time. It was all about skills at that point in time because we were all into b-boying and b-girling. So it was cool when people would see you come through your area with your tracksuit and your cap and your sneakers, they knew you were cool. They wanted these guys that were doing this dance on your heads, you know? So you didn’t encounter a lot of trouble and people just wanted to see you dance. Because at that time it came through it was very, very exciting for people because of the visual appeal as well. And also just, I think, the music blew people away as well. Because at that time, we were only influenced by like Euro pop music predominantly and by what came in from the States. Because growing up in this colored areas and also if you look at the history, and what Shaheen mentioned about advantages and disadvantages and so forth, obviously our parents and some people in our families had jobs so they could afford to buy a hi-fi system or whatever. And also the music that used to heat that community or stuff like reggae, funk, soul, jazz, blues and also traditional type of music known as cape minstrel music, or people wanted to call it “coon carnival music.” And what was going on in the sort of like black areas or like black parts of the township, they were into totally different style of music. You know, the more traditional gospel, mbaqanga music and just different sounds. That would lead us on the way to kwaito music. And the one song that really made a huge impression and impact on the scene was a song called “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa. And we know, just in terms of modern electronic music, that song lead on quite a huge history, just for music in general. And the next song we want to play is a tribute that we did to Afrika Bambaataa and also to “Planet Rock.” At that time he was saying stuff that we could feel and identify with. We just found that it was very important to do this track. And with this track we sampled “Planet Rock.” We called it “Planet Cape Town” and we also put a lot of African elements in it. Just a way to demonstrate to the people, we are trying to express ourselves in the way that we know best and also we are proud of our music, our heritage and everything else. Because at that time we were taught to hate everything that was African. So this was just another form of rebellion as well. And also just to sort of push the DJ to the forefront as well. So this is a combination of all these elements, “Planet Cape Town.”

(music: Prophets of da City – “Planet Cape Town”)

Shaheen Ariefdien

This here is “Wild Stylz,” inspired by the movie Wild Style, the hip-hop movie that also played a really important role in our life as well. It’s kind of a getting to understand the vibe of the culture. It’s coming.

(music: Prophets of da City – “Wild Stylz”)

Audience Member

You were like the first battle DJ out of South Africa. Could you please tell us what year you were in the DMC?

Ready D

Yeah, I competed in the DMC twice in... Gosh, I think it was ’98-’99 if my memory serves me correct. One in France and one out in New York, that was only two times that I went abroad for that. But previously the battles that used to take place, I would say to a certain extent, I was more this kid that was out there in his room, scratching and playing for his friends. And what happened is, when we used to buy records in the stores, all the big name club DJs were always out there. They were the guys that had the money, they bought the records and everything. And these were the guys that were laughing at us kids buying this hip-hop music because they used to diss us for buying this music. All the DJs used to rush to buy the latest house records and we were out there, looking for “Planet Rock,” looking for this and that or whatever, you know? Because we had a couple of independent stores that came up, that started servicing all these guys and a lot of stuff that hit the Billboard charts obviously came through. And we were the guys that used to order that underground hip-hop music at that time. And for me, one of the reasons for going out into the clubs and battling against these DJs were all personal reasons as well. “Fuck you! You got the club. You are in the club, you got money, you got gigs, you got girls.” [laughter] And me with my Lenco turntable, you know, practicing on an amplifier. My mixer used to be a big round knob on the amplifier and that’s how I used to practice in the beginning. It was a turntable in a wooden case.

Shaheen Ariefdien

Balance was with coins all over, so the shit don’t jump. Because when we press here, the thing jumps up on the other side.

Ready D

The needles were jumping as well. It was in this wooden box and springs and we had to stick like wooden wedges right around the turntable to prevent it from moving around. So it was that sort of scene, you know? And also I think I only owned about four or five records at that time, that I could say was mine that I bought out of my own pocket besides being borrowed, you know, from this other kid, DJ A-Ski. The white kid we were talking about that was in the crew back then. And obviously, he wouldn’t let me enter competition using his records because he was crazy at the time. I might just mess up his records, so that was the only records I used in quite a few competitions. And for some reason I own two copies of “Al-Naafiysh the Soul” and up until today I still use that same song, mixing and scratching as well.