P-Money offers second helping of hip-hop magic

By ADAM BENNETT

With several recent overseas trips, a Tui award last month for producing Scribe's hit album The Crusader , and now the release of his new album Magic City, P-Money is spreading himself pretty thin.

"I'm all over the show at present, it's pretty busy," says P-Money, aka Pete Wadams, speaking from Auckland.

Having put the finishing touches on Magic City a couple of months ago, the prolific hip-hop DJ, beat maestro and producer was back in New Zealand for the release of Magic City after spells in Australia and the UK working on new material for Scribe.

Not surprisingly Scribe, who himself cleaned up at the Tuis last month features on Magic City and to some extent, the pair have been poster boys for New Zealand hip-hop's rise in recent times.

Wadams has seen the music grow first-hand. When he started his musical career in DJ competitions in the mid-90s, it was usual to get about 200 or 300 hundred people to a hip-hop night with maybe 500 on a big night.

"Now we're getting 2000 on a big night so it's huge, the growth has been crazy."

Even in the smaller centres around the country, Wadams says the size and make-up of audiences have changed.

"Now you don't just get the core hip-hop audience, you get a mainstream crowd who just like that kind of sound. They like to hear hip-hop beats, they like to hear rap songs and they like to see us perform."

Part of hip-hop's appeal may be that it offers a little bit more than dance music and Wadams himself says he has met many clubbers who now prefer the funkier, less repetitive beats and more sophisticated lyrical content of hip-hop.

"I'm not quite sure why that is. I remember it (dance music) being quite dominant maybe two or three years ago, but there's definitely been some kind of switch."

But he is in no doubt that local hip-hop has become stronger in part because it's finding its own style here.

While Magic City features US rappers Sauce Money, Assim, Capone, Skillz, Akon and Jatis as well as London's Mystro, Wadams says locals Scribe, Tyna, Con Psy and PNC hold their own by comparison.

"Local artists are more comfortable using language and slang that they would use in everyday life and putting more of their regular experiences from every day into their songs."

Wadams uses Scribe and 50 Cent to highlight the difference between the best New Zealand rappers and their US counterparts.

"Scribe is just really honest and very truthful about all of his experiences. He raps about his family, his day-to-day life and talks about hard times and good times and it's all genuine.

"Someone like 50 Cent who's experienced a lot of hard times... or rappers of that mould, seem to fantasise about the violence and stuff and make it more attractive and more like a movie.

"In reality they don't want to kill anyone - they're entertainers. They want to rap and make music, but that's what's selling, so they're more inclined to go the fantasy action movie route."

Wadams says he's sad to see the growing lack of reality or social comment in American hip-hop, a far cry from the late 80s and early 90s when Chuck D of the hugely influential Public Enemy once famously described the music as CNN for black people.

Wadams believes escapist movie channel HBO would be a more fitting analogy these days.

"It's not CNN any more. It's strictly entertainment if you're talking about the American angle of things.

"It's far less political and far less socially aware than in the days of Chuck D and Public Enemy."

Nevertheless, he believes hip-hop generally can be very powerful and positive art form for youth.

"You can use it to articulate how you're feeling and maybe some pressures and struggles that you and your friends and family are experiencing and communicate your story whatever it may be positive negative or otherwise."

But while American hip-hop becomes more lyrically focused on tales of lurid gangsterism, Wadams continues to draw musical inspiration from the US.

He says he wanted Magic City to be a continuation from his work on Big Things and Scribe's The Crusader - but he also wanted it to be different.

"I was just looking to include better instruments and more interesting arrangements."

After Big Things and The Crusader, Wadams says he travelled, worked with a lot of other overseas producers and had a lot of other experiences.

"I'm a bit more clued up as to how to produce a record and make it sound better.

He says a key addition to his sound in the last year is the classic Korg Triton synthesizer.

"A lot of hip-hop producers overseas that I met were using that equipment. "

While drawing on his DJ skills to select, cut and paste sections of sound from other sources, Wadams says the addition of synths adds depth to his productions. "It's just really a quest to find different sounds."

"Back then when Neptunes and Timbaland came through I think they were really trying to forge a new direction and just lead off with keyboards rather than just going back to the same kind of funk sounds that everyone had been using."

He sees the increasing use of synths and other instruments in hip-hop as part of a move to more musical innovation.

Bu t while hip-hop might nowadays feature mo re played instruments rather than samples, Wadams says producers are giving them a new spin, "so that it doesn't sound like your typical guitar-bass-keyboard combo, it's a hip-hop thing".

Wadams himself is now learning to play keyboards and extending his musical knowledge. He says the ultimate goal is maximise his own contribution to his beats, "to have nothing sampled and nothing referential of anything else - it's all just straight from me".

* Magic City is out now

- NZPA