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A Lord Finesse Preview

by David Knight / Published November 11‚ 2006 at 4:59am

Some background information on Lord Finesse who will be visiting Australia soon.
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Lord Finesse stepped into the hip hop spotlight some 17 years ago with his debut solo release Funky Technician. Now in 2006 he is representing original hip hop and the Zulu Nation through their worldwide commemoration tour to celebrate the emergence of hip hop as a cultural movement. Its been over 30 years since Afrika Bambaataa first worked to form the Zulu Nation which was created to bring communities together through music, using music as international vehicle to promote peace, unity, love and having fun. Hip hop is now a worldwide cultural phenomenon and it’s time for its grass roots foundations to be recognized and honoured because as Lord Finesse himself says “hip hop is here to stay whether you like what it changes into or not. It’s going be here forever – hip hop is forever”.

Lord Finesse is known as legend of hip hop music. Just to provide an example of the proliferation of his work, a tiny fraction of some of the artists he has worked with are: Afrika Bambaataa, Big L, Notorious B.I.G, Arrested Development, Brand Nubian, Capone and Noreaga, Dr Dre, Fat Joe and the list goes on forever. He has also released and produced countless albums, the most special to him being; “Id say the Awakening was a special time for me. It would have to be between the first and the third project. Like the Funky Technician, the Funky Technician was happening so quick I didn’t get a chance to enjoy it you know, we just made it happen. The Awakening I did get a chance to enjoy it and worked with a lot of artists and different people I wanted to work with”.

Working with an artist to produce and album is a crucial part to creating music for Lord Finesse who explains “that’s the art of producing, to sit down and work with the artist. You never seen Michael Jackson asking Quincy Jones for a beat CD, they sat down and they created magic together. So that’s the beauty of working with an artist, to sit there and pick peoples brains and to talk about their life experiences. And you can come up with something just off of that, just off a good conversation. I know what I’m going to do for this artist and you come up with it. I mean people get spoilt now ‘you come up with a beat CD and when you do the beat CD can you put a hook to it already’. I mean if you do everything for the artist then what are they doing you know”.

Lord Finesse focuses on and prefers producing and DJing these days “way more than the rapping now due to the fact that I’m bored with the rapping side of it now, due to the fact that I don’t think it’s lyrically challenging right now. It’s not fun like it used to be. But I still love music, overall I’m a music junkie and I’m a fiend for music and play a bunch of oldies and goodies all day up in the house you know”. Being a self confessed music addict and having done music most of his life I asked what he’d be doing if there was no music in his world and at first he was taken aback; “Oh wow, man, that’s good. Umm, if I wasn’t a music producer or if I didn’t do nothing with music it would probably be an electrical engineer or something or it would be something like that cause I’m into electronics hard you know”.

Regardless of what he might have been doing, what he has been doing over the last 20 years is hip hop so he disclosed to me the biggest change in the culture he had observed from when he started out to now. “It’s so commercialized and un-educational. Before you became educated by hip hop and privileged to an upbringing by hip hop but now it’s not about someone trying to make a difference, it’s about trying to make a record you can dance to and not about the actual culture of hip hop”. And that is why the Zulu Supa Jam tour is important and relevant today, even here in Australia where the scene is really still in its early stages of development. If you value quality and not quantity for Australian hip hop and hip hop culture worldwide support the movement and the members of the Zulu Nation when they’re here.

Lord Finesse will be touring Australia from November 16th to 19th 2006. Find out more here...

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