“Americans created house music, but it’s only over the past five years that they’ve embraced it full-on. They’ve even renamed it!” he says with a cackle. “They’ve called it EDM, like it’s something new!” The house music sound has bled across into hip hop, though Teeba despairs for the state of the genre. “We grew up on the hip hop of the ‘80s and ‘90s, which was rich and diverse in terms of the palette of sounds,” he continues. “Today’s hip hop, at least the mainstream, is dull as dishwater. It’s all got the same drum sound – there’s a Roland 808 sound on every single track, and it’s boring as hell.”
Now he’s on a roll, it’s hard to slow him down. “It seems to be the industry idea that if you just put a rap on anything, no matter what, that makes it a hip hop record,” he says. “You can’t put a rapper on a Justin Bieber track and make it hip hop – it’s not the case. That’s just a crossover that someone in a suit dreamed up. If you pick up a rap album, you’ll always see tracks featuring other rappers, collaborations and cross-pollinations, but now pop albums are like that too – every song has a feature credit. I think there was a rap song featuring John Mayer. I mean, he’s fine and everything, but what does he have to do with hip hop music, and why would you want him anywhere near a hip hop record? It’s just the industry going, ‘If we put him on this, we can sell this song to his fans, and maybe get some hip hop fans into John Mayer’. It’s a really transparently calculated effort to cross acts over and sell more records. It doesn’t make for good music at all.”
While he despairs for the mainstream – Nicki Minaj is another target of some choice words – Teeba it not yet ready to concede his beloved hip hop to the pop charts. “The underground, certainly in this country, is starting to regenerate itself,” he continues. “It went through a period of non-development, but I think that it’s back now.” It’s difficult, in the present climate, for independent artists to make money from their work, but rather than holding people back, Teeba insists that this has led to a newfound sense of creativity. “There’s less expectation,” he says. “When you’re working on that independent level, you don’t have MCs walking in with this idea that they have a dollar value. Because no one’s making money, people will work on a project if they’re into it. That’s when you’re going to get the best results – you’ll get a great collaboration with someone who’s inspired by your music, rather than someone who was paid to be there.”
The chaps from The Herbaliser are all set to return to Australia for a DJ tour, and I ask Teeba what we can expect – where exactly their heads are, and what new tunes have been getting their attention. After his rant against the mainstream, he seems quite keen to reassure me that he and Wherry aren’t old fogeys.
“We hear new sounds all the time!” he says with a laugh. “We hear the dubsteps and the drums and basses and all the new-fangled dance music styles!” It’s safe to say that you won’t be hearing any Nicki or Justin, although not all contemporary music is out. “I loved Otis by Kanye West and Jay-Z,” Teeba says. “It was so great to hear proper hip hop in the charts. I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he continues, “we take influences from new music, but our primary interests are the same as always. We love soul, funk, jazz and hip hop. That’s very much what you’ll hear in a Herbaliser set.”
Teeba insists that being a DJ is his true passion. “I was a DJ before I ever made music,” he says. “I learned about arrangements, and about the kind of records I wanted to make, via DJing. The DJ’s job is to expose you to music that you may not have heard before, be it old or new. A good DJ can get you to come down and have a bit of a dance while you hear stuff you haven’t heard elsewhere. That’s what I love to do.”
Some DJs who also produce use their sets as a testing ground for their own material – or simply as a way to show off – but Teeba insists that The Herbaliser won’t be going down that path. “We’re not the kinds of guys who will come along and play our own music,” he says. “Personally, I love the music we’re making now. I think it has more dimension and depth than ever before. We’ll play some of our own, but we’re DJs, we like to play as diverse an array of stuff as possible.”
BY ALASDAIR DUNCAN
