The Tongue

Sydney is home to many acts and artists which profess to a ‘premier’ or ‘rising star’ status, but amongst the piles of those who do so, MC Tongue figures very prominently in considerations for the deserving bearer of the title. He has dominated the national battle scene, dropped a critically-acclaimed EP, Bad Education, toured extensively and has now attached another achievement to his distinguished resumé; a high quality, debut LP, Shock And Awe. It has more aspects of variety than a dodecahedron, from acute political commentary to matters of the heart, Shock And Awe is sure to leave a lasting impression.

Your new LP, Shock And Awe has been released through Sydney label Elefant Traks. How did this relationship come to be?
I guess I approached them in terms of putting it out. I had seen the guys play around Sydney quite a lot, I really liked the way they did shows, I liked the way they had a cross section in the crowd, it wasn’t just all hip hop dudes in hoodies, it appealed to the wider audience. But yeah, I liked how professional they were and I was a fan of The Herd. The way I really met them was through Urthboy, by playing Parkjam in 2005 and I just approached him and said ‘I really like your album and we’ll be playing today so if I could show you some stuff that would be great.’ He took my details and a few weeks later he rang me and asked me to come and host a Muph and Plutonic show. I said ‘ah dude, let me play there’ and then I played and that was part of just trying to stay in their face and make sure they were aware of me. After that, I did up the EP, took it to them and they said ‘well, we’re not really in the business of putting out EP’s but if wanted this EP, we’ll agree to do an album.’ The EP became the lead-up to the album. That was cool with me, it was like saying do you want chocolate ice-cream and vanilla ice-cream.

Do you feel they were most suited to your general style as an artist?
Umm, I don’t know about that. I could have gone with Obese, I spoke to Katalyst one time about going with Invada Records. I feel that as much as all these labels are different, there is a common thread, everyone in Australian hip hop is on the same side in a way. But I really liked the way Elefant Traks were doing things, I respected them as artists, I respected them as people. The thing about Elefant Traks that people should understand is that Elefant Traks is The Herd. All the money that runs the label comes from The Herd. That’s where the money comes from that allows other artists to have funding. At the same time, no one in The Herd is wealthy, everyone works other jobs. So the money they put into me is their personal money but they’re putting that money into me and backing me and that’s awesome. That’s the beauty of independent labels, there’s so much passion in it. For someone to back you that hard, for me it’s a beautiful thing, I’m very lucky to be with Elefant Traks.

After your success on the battle arena, do you think that people get a little too caught up on your battling career in comparison to your recording foray?
Yeah, I read something weird in a review the other day that said ‘The Tongue’s music is much more accomplished than we’ve come to expect from artists in the battle arena’ or something like that. It’s weird to me that people would still consider me as a battle rapper when listening to the record. It’s like you don’t listen to Eminem and say ‘uh, he’s a battle rapper.’ I just find that a bit strange but at the same time, it was definitely a launching pad for me, it gave me a lot of great experience and I made some good contacts. It was definitely a very useful thing and I’m proud of it so I don’t have a problem with people mentioning it but I think some people do focus on it a bit much.

Those experiences and in particular the Revolver win which enabled you to record the Bad Education EP, did that propel your recording career?
Only in the sense that it kicked my arse into gear. Before the win, which I feel lifted the profile a little bit, I was just travelling around the country entering as many battles as I could, taking on dudes in the street and wherever and just going raw on muthafuckers for a year. That was the plan, to do as many battles as I could. So that shit was all cool but there wasn’t much focus on the music, I’d always wanted to do it but I never really knew how to get started. Once the opportunity to have vinyl pressed up came along I was like ‘well, fuck, it would be such a waste not to do something’ and it was such a good way to get started. So the win definitely got my arse into gear. I just feel very blessed that Elefant Traks picked it up, that’s what is so cool about it, that they let me do the two releases because you can’t make any money from EPs, it’s really hard. Even though I payed for all the recording and everything before I even took it to them, I still don’t know if I’ve broken even from it and that’s after selling out the whole first run.

So the motivation that you gained from winning the Revolver Battle, was that something you really needed at the time or did you just feed off it?
There was a 5-year plan. The first plan was to master freestyling, I spent a year doing that, meeting up with all my friends and every Saturday we would have barbeques, smoke joints and freestyle all day and then there was this thing called Battleacts. We would go to that, normally once a month and all battle each other so that was a really good training ground. The second part of the plan was to spend a year battling, taking out as many dudes as I could. The third plan was to put out a release, find a record label and now it’s just tour tour tour. To be honest, the end point of the plan is just to make a classic album, an album that stands for something and represents something and hopefully unifies people and is just a positive force out there. There’s too many trash albums out there. The other thing is you gotta decide when have you succeeded, if it’s a classic album, the people have to decide that it’s a classic. You can’t come out and say it’s a classic, you can’t say ‘this is my classic album’. It has got to change people, it has to have an effect. So I don’t know when that is going to be, I’m not sure what the public view of Shock And Awe is but I think I might have further to go. That’s the end plan. I don’t know what is going to happen after that.

I’ve got other plans that involve hip hop that isn’t all rapping. I want to do a documentary about freestyling in Australia. I have the opportunity where I’m friends with all the best freestylers in the country, they’re amazing people, they have amazing stories to tell and basically the plan is just to fly around the country and hang out with all these dudes and get their stories. I don’t think the general public of Australia is aware of the freestyle sub-culture in hip hop. There are some people who live it and breathe it and it just means everything to them and it’s their release, it’s their meditation, it’s their way of dealing with the world.

“…You’re an artist, if you’re about expression, why would you say ‘I’m only about the expression that is rapping over beats at 90bpms, I’m only about rapping in a hoody about these certain topics.’ That’s bullshit…”

What impact did Triple J picking up the lead single on the Bad Education EP have on your stature locally?
It was good for it. They gave Bad Education a fair bit of play which was cool but then they did this weird thing of picking The Punch. We didn’t say ‘make this the single,’ they just took it and started playing it and it was like the eighth most played song of the year, they just thrashed it. At live shows, people know those songs and that’s a really nice feeling, I feel sorry for people who never get the experience of never having an audience being familiar with their material because it’s a nice feeling.

When you were thinking about beats for the new album, was there a particular style of production that you were looking for?
Nah, my formula is not to have a formula. Some people are interested in this consistent sound, like you can recognise a Hilltop Hoods song, it has a certain sound to it, a recognisable quality and that’s cool but for for my, me recognisable quality is you don’t know what the fuck I’m gonna do next. Every track I do, I want it to be different from the last one, to be challenging. It’s a bit pussy to be like ‘I’m gonna do boom-bap my whole career.’ You’re an artist, if you’re about expression, why would you say ‘I’m only about the expression that is rapping over beats at 90bpms, I’m only about rapping in a hoody about these certain topics.’ That’s bullshit, that’s not creative, it’s restrictive. When you’re restricting yourself and putting limits on yourself, you’re never going to reach your full potential. So I feel like I want to end up somewhere crazy, I don’t even know if it will be hip hop for the whole time to be honest.

Animal Crackers features an eccentric subject choice, was the concept narcotically inspired?
Nah, not really. I was just down at the park and I was thinking about what do I want to write a song about with Dudley because I got his details and was going to hit him up. I just came up with this idea that humans are really just animals, like we punish ourselves for cheating on our girlfriends, for getting in fights, we say that’s wrong and punish people and send them to jail. I mean, they must be natural because we always do them, regardless of race or time or social class. People do the same fucked up shit all the time so it must be the animal inside us. I called Dudley and told him this idea and he must have been weeded because he didn’t really understand what I was talking about and his idea when they recorded it was what animals think of humans and I kinda wanted to do something on that tip. I’m concerned, I mean, this environmental situation really disturbs me deeply and we’re just losing so many species of animals, it’s just not cool. Once an animal is extinct, it isn’t coming back. When I heard what he recorded I was like ‘that’s the shit, we’re just gonna go with that.’ He just rips it so tight, like what other emcee would start a verse with ‘warrior of the light, fight the mighty fight/with the eyes of an owl.’ Who else would say that?

Real Thing was an absolute highlight of the LP. Can you give me an insight into the process of production on the track? What made you go with live instrumentation?
To be honest, I actually wrote that track to a different beat. I had a producer who I payed money to and he never gave me what I payed for and we had a disagreement and it’s currently before the courts actually. We’ve got to go to court because I payed him and he hasn’t given me any beats or my money back so I consider that to be theft which is why I am pursuing this gentleman. But originally it was to one of his beats but then the relationship deteriorated and we had this disagreement and I didn’t get the beat right in the middle of making the album and it was a real stress, I went way over the due date with this record, I was supposed to be ready a bit earlier. So luckily when I was making this record, the guy who mixed it; Mike Burnham is the master of recording, he owns one of the last analogue studios in New South Wales. He is the master of recording instruments really. He has this group called The Heliocentrics, they have just released some stuff on Stones Throw Records, an album called Out There about two months ago. But after the beat went through he just decided to help me out, he played the drums and then we just got a mate to come in and lay down those keys and then horns players came in. They’re session players, pros, they just came in and knocked it out and they were just blowing away. These are guys that do saxophone 5 nights a week for 20 years and they were blown away by the sound that Mike gets because he just knows how to record sounds. He can just capture funk the way it’s meant to be played, soul motown type sounds. He mixes and records all different types of music from hip hop to rock to punk to hardcore. He’s a pro.

I Know A DJ strikes a similarly-jaded chord to that of Urthboy’s local anthem, No Rider off the Distant Sense Of Random Menace album. Did this track inspire the lyrics at all?
Yeah, well I guess there is that line ‘no shame in trying to make a dollar out the game/no game when radio’s payed to push play.’ It’s true, there is no shame, all these dudes are like ‘aww, you’re making money out of hip hop, you’re a sellout.’ I don’t believe in that stuff. I think if the music is good then the people want to buy and they want to come to your shows then why not make it something that a lot of people can access? Popular music is not bad, there’s bad pop music but The Beatles are popular. But radio is payed to push play a lot of the time. That is one of the good things about Triple J, you turn up with music and someone sits there, listens to it and decides whether they want to play it or not based on the merit of the music. Even something like Channel V, to be honest with you that’s why there’s another line on the album about Channel V. I got Channel V recently and it’s seriously just Rihanna and Kanye West and two other clips over and over again. That’s all I ever saw. I was left with no doubt in my mind that they’re just payed to play that. It’s hard to compete with that. But the whole point of the track is celebratory because I Know A DJ who will play music because they think it’s dope music. They’ll play a track because they have listened to it and they have decided that it has merit, not because it is a hot new single. So there is a bit of being jaded in that track but I think it’s more about celebrating awesome DJ’s.

Shock And Awe has tinges of political mindfulness, most notably in the tracks Somebody’s Trying To Kill Me and Inheritance. Can you explain the sentiment behind these tracks?
Well I’m into conspiracy theories. There are a lot of things that happen from 9/11 to The War In Iraq which I have my own beliefs about. But there are people out there who are making money from our pain and suffering and I just think that Coca Cola don’t need to put that much sugar in their products and McDonalds doesn’t need to prepare their food the way they do and the Australian government should not be sending people to a war that is so clearly not about what they telling us it is about. The track seems to have struck a chord with a few people so I feel like there are other people out there who agree with me. Whether it’s consumer getting hurt by a product – fatty food, cigarettes, children in sweatshops, whatever it is, there is pain and suffering involved and people are just happily making money from it and watching the money stack up. It bothers and scares me that it is so commonly accepted. Like with the James Hardie thing for example, it’s just beyond my why the government can’t step in and force them to pay compensation. Corporate Australia is in bed with politics. It’s like this pulp mill thing as well. I suppose that’s where Inheritance is coming from as well. You and I are going to grow up in a world that our elders create for us and if we keep building pulp mills and nuclear power plants, it’s going to shit. The nuclear debate for example, that really fascinates me. Why would you put yourself in a position where you are using something like nuclear power which can, again, run out and also have huge side-affects with all the waste when you could have solar power and vegetable oil.

The album title, Shock And Awe also exhibits your political thoughts. Can you explain the line of thought behind it?
I called it Shock And Awe because we are at war and I find that side of war interesting; the use of language. You can’t fight a war without deception, you need to keep the truth from the public. As soon as they start seeing dead bodies, especially those of their own soldiers, the war becomes very unpopular. That’s what happened with Vietnam, it blew everyone’s minds to see the horror of war first-hand and thats when the protests really started getting big. Its the same now, people are seeing horrific footage on the news night after night and its a constant reminder of what we are actually doing over there. Iraqi deaths have just surpassed the 1 million mark. So for the Americans to say they are using tactics of “Shock and Awe”, well, that is a very nice title for it. It sounds calculated and almost supernatural. Its a wank. “Shock and Awe”…ha…I would have given it another name.

I read on the internet that your regular DJ, Diaz, is heading overseas for a while. What is the story behind that?
He wants to take a break from DJ’ing and take a look around the world. He’s got some relatives in Peru he wants to touch base with so he’s saving up for a plane ticket. Good on him I say, the world is a beautiful place, if I wasn’t rapping I’d be on the next plane out of here.

Lastly, how did you come to choose ‘The Tongue’ as a moniker? Was it a product of battling?
To be honest I can’t remember the exact moment I decided on The Tongue or how it came about but its always been a name that brings a smile to peoples faces so I kept it.

www.myspace.com/thetongue06