Article - Hip-Hop 4 Dumeez (Metro, SMH, 10/3/06)

Everything you didn't want to know about hip-hop will not be explained to you.

by Benito Di Fonzo (Metro, SMH, 10/3/06)

Hip-hop-lomat Bushman has been to former porn cinema the Hub before.

"He was in the pictures they were showing there," says his sidekick Vowel Movement, who along with Bushman will be "aducating" Australians in hip-hop there.

"That was my previous employment," Bushman says. "I was known for having the least endurance. Of all the people who had been in pornography, no one had ever seen anyone go as short as me."

This journey, however, is to bring to Sydney the show Hip-Hop 4 Dummeez, a hit at two festivals in their Canadian homeland, Montreal's Just for Laughs and the Ottawa Fringe Festival. It runs as part of the Cracker comedy festival.

Set out like a special-edition DVD, complete with extras and deleted scenes, Hip-Hop attempts to explain the fine points of the form to a mainstream audience.

Bushman: "You may learn something, but that will only be in spite of the jokes."

Vowel: "You'll probably forget things."

Bushman: "You will watch our show and you will come out knowing less things, not only about hip-hop, but about your own self."

Vowel: "It's like a weekend smoking weed straight. That's how you'll walk out of there after 60 minutes."

The duo created the show with Jerome Sable, a fellow member of Canadian hip-hop collective the Grafenberg All-Stars, who took their name from the doctor who "discovered" the G spot.

"We has found the G spot of hip-hop and we tickle it, ever so gently," Bushman says.

What advice can they offer readers who want to fake being "fly"?

Bushman: "One thing that's very important is that he's gotta wear some bling. It's like five-necklace minimum, five-ring minimum. If you go under that, it's a faux pas."

Vowel: "It's also important that he apply the linguistic phenomenon of Pizig Lizatin, which is the hip-hop appropriation of language through adding an 'iz' to absolutely anything. Also, if he's referring to where he's from, he'll want to take the first letter from his hometown and dot it or spot it ..."

Bushman: "... or vill it or kill it or town it or down it."

Vowel: "Sydney would then be the S Spot, or S-Town."

If you were from Mosman, then, you'd call it Mo-Town?

"Or Mo-Money-Town," Vowel says.

How should one address a lady?

Bushman: "You can call her a bitch, a ho. If she's a hip-hop girl she'll understand it's a positive thing."

Vowel: "Yeah. If you say, 'I really respect the line of work you're in, bitch,' that works."

Bushman: "You got to visualise cool waves while saying that."

The characters of Bushman and Vowel Movement have known one another since primary school.

Vowel: "We used to rhyme words together, like jelly and -"

Bushman: "Belly."

Vowel: "And K .Y. jelly."

Bushman: "With gay man's belly."

Vowel: "We passed that in class."

Bushman: "Well, the rhyme, that is. We is a couple of geezers, but we is not a 'couple'. I mean, off the record, there is times when I like a snuggle on the road, but that is not to be put in the article."

Do they think other hip-hop artists are as close as these two - such as, say, 50 Cent and Eminem?

Vowel: "I don't think there's any real emotional bond [between them], just raw sex. But when it comes to Eminem and [producer] Dr Dre, I think there is definitely like a strange, father-son kind of Amsterdam experience."

Can hip-hop change people's lives?

Bushman: "Definitely - for the worse."

Vowel: "We are parasites on the face of this earth and we are here to spread our disease."

Should people take shots, then, before the show?

Bushman: "That would be wise. Unless you want me living in your stomach for the next six months."

(originally appeared in Metro in The Sydney Morning Herald, 10/03/06) http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/03/10/1141701667417.html