14

ISSUE 0

D R . I . P.
TONY
L K I M

’
KO O

N
S
I
T O N

K
U T
TONY B

BRE A O NET!
S
LIVE
back to burn
speakerbussin’ up
in the bronx...
BY T LA ROCK
The first time I heard any music similar to hip-hop music was
what’s now called break-beats. It was actually my father who
I first heard playing records with breaks on them – though he
wasn’t paying attention to the breaks! But the first time I heard
them in a hip-hop context was through Kool Herc (pictured),
who was from my area of the Bronx. This was in the early ‘70s,
in the community centre of an apartment building. I’d heard
breaks before that, but it was just called funk. But Kool Herc
had that system where you could really hear the pounding of
the drums along with the bass part of the record.
Kool Herc’s system didn’t consist of 10 or 20 speakers – he
just had huge speakers that packed a powerful punch. He also
used to drive around with a speaker sticking out the trunk of
his car. Back then you didn’t have built-in car sound-systems, so
all around the Bronx you had people driving around, blasting
the music from speakers placed in the trunk of their cars. The
other thing we did – and this was before we’d go out to the
parks to play – was I’d put out two big speakers in front of my
building, a two-family house, and play music that way.
A friend of mine at that time was a b-boy named Vincent
Thompson – he didn’t have a colourful name! – who was a
break-dancer; and also a deejay named Harold Jackson aka
DJ Skeeter: these were people who were playing music in the
neighbourhood. There was also one very well known b-boy
called Sah-Sah who definitely had the biggest local reputation
out of everyone. Other deejays from that era who never get mentioned are
Prince and Blackjack – who, by the way, was the first ever person
I also studied kung-fu at an early age, just like DJ Breakout, that Kool Herc let on his system outside of his immediate crew.
the deejay from the Funky Four [Plus One]. He was a friend of Blackjack played a lot of break records. There was also a hip-
mine – I believe he lived in Edenmoore projects. We’d hang out, hop duo named DJ Pee-Wee and DJ Punch who were relevant
practice, spar together, and he, like Kool Herc, had speakers at that time. These were all deejays from the Bronx, all from
that were so powerful he named them Sasquatch! the section where hip-hop started.
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Tony D R.I.P .
Recalling the Career
of the trenton icon…
By John W McKelvey

On April 4th 2009, word that Anthony Depula had passed

away started to spread across the internet and make roads
throughout the hip-hop community. It looked like a hoax at
first – for reasons we’ll come to later – but finally an article on
NJ.com confirmed the tragic news.

Depula started out as one half of the Partners In Rhyme, as

Grand Poobah Tony D, releasing a two-song 12-inch record with
Cool Gino G in 1987: ‘It’s My Day’ b/w ‘I’m Terrifyin’’ on Body
Rock Records, a division of Tommy Boy. It’s a fun ‘random rap’-
sounding little record, produced by Vandy C, and with a distinct
LL Cool J influence. Later, Tony dropped the Grand Poobah
part from his name, in deference to the Masters Of Ceremony’s
Grand Puba Maxwell.

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But while the Partners never made another record, Tony
found his true calling behind the boards. His first production
came out later that same year, YZ & G-Rock’s ‘I Am Who I
Am’, a move which led to the formation of his company, Two
Tone Productions, which produced albums and singles for YZ,
Poor Righteous Teachers, King Sun, Too Kool Posse, Kaaos,
MC Sergio and others. He also co-hosted a Princeton-based
radio show called Raw Deal where he’d debut the artists he
was working with. Tony had crafted a sound that was at once
varied and yet instantly recognizable. When asked by Fat Lace
to describe what he contributed to the game in an interview
shortly before his death, he said, “I think I pioneered the use
of the vocal samples in hip-hop. Think of the Average White
Band for ‘Thinking Of A Masterplan’ and the James Brown one
for ‘In Control Of Things’. No one was really using samples or
loops that had a voice in it until I did that.”
His success as a producer created a demand for his first
mostly instrumental album, released in 1989, entitled ‘Music
Makes You Move’ – that’s ‘mostly’ because it features a cut
by the Too Kool Posse and a sick duet with YZ called ‘Get Off
The Rhythm’, where the two of them rhyme over their hit ‘In
Control Of Things’, going hard at other artists who’d since
jacked the sample: “Who in the hell do you think you are?
A star like me? No, you’re not; so stop. Big Daddy Kane stole it,
TONY D’S SOUND
WAS VARIED
YET INSTANTLY
RECOGNISABLE
Lakim Shabazz stole it, GangStarr stole the whole ‘In Control’
rhythm. Who’s next to do it? I’ma dis who in the hell ever steps;
I’ll break ya neck!”
Ironically, this same album led to one of the most famous beat-
jackings in hip-hop history. In 1991, fellow New Jersey natives
The New Style took the set’s first song, ‘Adam’s Nightmare’,
and used it for their hit debut as Naughty By Nature, ‘OPP’. And
they didn’t just use the same Jackson 5 sample (‘ABC’) that
Tony D had discovered; they also laid it over the exact same
‘Substitution’ break; and they took two separate segments
of the J5 song and pieced them together in the same way. It
makes you wonder about Kay Gee’s claim to the Source in ‘92
that they’d never heard ‘Music...’ before crafting ‘OPP’...
But it didn’t slow Tony down – he stayed busy getting genuine
rap classics under his belt. And besides producing, he kept
rhyming, first contributing a killer song to Jazzy Jay’s ‘Cold
Chillin’ In The Studio’ set, ‘Back To The Lab’ (plus producing a
slick number by Ice Cream Tee on there), and then grabbing a
record deal with 4th & Broadway as an emcee and releasing
the album ‘Droppin’ Funky Verses’ with DJ Troy Wonder.
Tony’s beats, of course, were impeccable, but as an emcee the
results were more varied. He had a hard delivery and a cool
voice, his flows were varied and creative, and when he was
on point Tony D was an emcee to be reckoned with; but he
had a serious penchant for some very corny lyrics: “Suckers
be sayin’, ‘Tone, you ain’t nothin’’/But I got more flavor than
Stove Top stuffin’/Nuts! My favorite past time/Forget the last
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 line ‘cos you can’t gas mine/
Like Sunoco, you go bum
loco/Visit Acapulco with your
girlfriend Yoko… Ono!” The
rhyme scheme’s nice, and
there’s a genuine freestyle
feel – but you weren’t going
to intimidate anyone in your
neighborhood by blasting
those words out of your jeep.
And it was probably that
corniness that kept him from really blowing up as a rapper.
Still, he had two reasonably successful singles off that album:
‘EFFECT’ followed by ‘Check The Elevation’ – and you would
have been hard pressed to miss the videos on Yo! MTV Raps
in those days. (Tony D even has two cards in the Yo! MTV Raps
trading cards deck.)
And it’s here we should pause to touch on his beef with 3rd
Bass, and MC Serch in particular. Here, because he takes
shots at them throughout the album, calling Serch “devil”
repeatedly and making puns off their song titles. There’s
debate over what exactly drew or maintained Tony’s ire, but it
likely stemmed from the fact that in Serch’s pre-3rd Bass days
he had a deejay who also went by the name of Tony D. On his
blog, Serch said, “I met Tony [Depula] back in the day with
that brother Wise Intelligence and Poor Righteous Teachers,
and he tried to play me. He even put out a record called ‘Don’t
Fall For The Gas Line’...” And he came even harder at Serch on
the antagonistically titled ‘Shoe Polish’, saying, “I stepped to
CBS, they was wit’ it/They said you got another white rapper? I
said ‘Quit it!/I’m not gonna give you suckers what you want/A
replacement for the group that you love to flaunt/Outspoken
drug users drinkin’ beer on stage?’/Now they got you, another
beast in the cage.”
But despite his beefs and his hardcore delivery, Tony was a
conscious lyricist. His content was never gangsta, most of
his verses were freestyle wordplay, and he devoted songs
to issues like police brutality and stopping racism; plus he’s
probably the only rapper to take a stance against product
testing on animals.
4th & Broadway never asked Tony for a follow-up album, but
he stayed busy producing. In 1992 he formed the Crusaders For
Real Hip-Hop and signed with Profile. Two Tone Productions
took full production credit for the album, but he used an alias
to mask his role as lead emcee, switching up to Don Nots. (The
other members were Mr Law and a reggae chanter named
Rahzil Hi-Power, formerly of Blvd Mosse, another group Tony
produced.) Their lead single, ‘That’s How It Is’, got a lot of
play, and it was followed up by a more underground 12-inch
featuring remixes and the exclusive B-side ‘La Cosa Nostra’.
Still, the Crusaders never really caught on with the mainstream,
and the style of the Five Percenter acts he was producing
were going out of vogue – so Tony D went underground. After
producing Wise Intelligent’s first solo effort and a track for
Kwest Tha Madd Lad, it was the independent release of his
next instrumental album on Contract Records that took him to
the next level. Mark Rae credits that record with inspiring his
label, Grand Central Records – and after forming it he signed
Tony, who released a series of instrumental albums and singles
throughout the rest of the ‘90s and into 2001.
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After remix work for The Outsidaz’s ‘Who You Be’ though,
production work quietened down, and Tony D became an
online presence, selling beats on forums like The Vinyl Exchange
and UGHH, plus touting records from his collection on eBay.
(The rap nerd in me is damn proud to have feedback from him
declaring Werner “knows a great record!”) But after forming
the Cha-Ching label to drop PRT’s ‘Rare And Unreleased’ set,
Tony D started selling mix-CDs, and then MP3s of rare ‘random
rap’ – allegedly without compensating the artists – a move
which led to his bootleg ‘The Philly Throwback’ vinyl series.
Unfortunately, the shady rumours don’t stop there: nefarious
chatter abounds about emailing collectors and taking offers
on rare records he didn’t have, and his eBay account was
eventually shut down. (‘Buyer beware’ stories are but a
Google search away from those who claim to have got stuck
for hundreds of dollars – and received conflicting excuses,
including claims that his wife had left him.)
But according to a touching piece in The Trentonian, they were
still together, his wife cooking dinner for them when he got a
phone call and left his home on the evening of April 4th. On
his way back, he “lost control of his 2002 Suzuki XL wagon
about 6.20 pm and struck the fence of the St John’s Cemetery
on Bunting Avenue near Lalor Street.” He was pronounced
dead on arrival at the Capital Health’s Fuld Campus hospital in
Trenton – a sudden and shocking end to a great artist. He left
behind a wife and two young daughters, Sophia and Olivia,
and the people who knew him personally all describe him as a
sweet, friendly man with a genuine passion for the music.
Tony D leaves us with a large body of great work – much of it
rare and yet to be properly discovered or appreciated. Beyond
that, he apparently had a ton of unreleased music – both his
own and by the artists he produced. On his MySpace page,
he was offering CDs of unreleased Crusaders For Real Hip-Hop
songs “circa 1993”. He had leaked a few tracks already, like
‘Dummy Move’, a track with him, YZ (pictured) and B-Fyne
dissing PRT, and was talking to labels about putting out more.
I hope his wife or the artists he’s worked with can still get this
out, because I for one would love to hear it. Tony D – a man
who recorded more gems than we’ll probably ever know.
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MCNALLY’S THE CHEF’S BACK
IN THE HOUSE!
ANCIENT BRITAIN
THE CONTINUED SEARCH
FOR THE FUNKIEST GORGON...
By James McNally

[Last month Ancient Britain went on the trail of Tony Buttons’s HHC DIGITAL #002
elusive 1994 classic ‘Funky Bumpkin’. After a little bit of OUT MAY 12TH
www.hhcdigital.net
investigation we tracked him down...]

“My name’s Dappa-Dred now or Dap-D. But back when I did

the ‘Funky Bumpkin’ record I did it under the name of Margah
Man Tony Buttons.

“The older generation called me Buttons after my father, who

was off the scene for a while, so the right thing to do was to
fly the flag in his name. And I’ve always been a skinny dude
[Margah is Jamaican for ‘Skinny’] and due to my mother, who

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is called Margaretta, a clothes designer, I formed the first part
of the name that I made that record under. The label itself was
called Marga records.
“I started rapping when I was ‘bout ten, eleven-years-old
maybe. I chat, I rap, I do alladat – it’s the year 2009 an’ I refuse
to come wack! My father’s side of the family resides up these
sides [London], but my mother’s side reside in the south-west,
and when I was 13 I used to roll wit’ these deejays who’d tour
around the Midlands. They weren’t my age group, but when
my mans and them mans linked up, suttin’ dope was always
set to happen. I remember one time when four of us – me and
my friend Marv, GI Joe and Gary – hijacked one dance in Oxford
and I rapped to 50,000 people over some Ragga Twins joint!
“But, you know how it is, I didn’t want to be here five years
later and say ‘I’m an emcee’ without suttin’ real to back that
statement up wit’. The older generation, especially black
people, make dudes feel like they got no ambition. Maybe I’m
just a dreamer, so I put together a little business plan, ‘cos ‘tings
have to be legit, that’s key. Put together some bank money,
PYBT [Prince’s Youth Business Trust] money, and some o’ my
money and cut a vinyl: my first one.
“I’m still to this day not content with the recording [of ‘Funky
Bumpkin’]; it makes me sound child-like. I bus’ a lot better
in reality than on that record, but it was good to have had
I REMEMBER HIJACKING
A DANCE AND RAPPING
OVER A RAGGA TWINS
JOINT!
the experience of writin’, producin’, recordin’, releasin’ and
performin’ that project. I would have liked to have made a
video for that shit: imagine a group of nikkas with Wellington
boots in the rain in a forest or meadow, you know, just going
crazy, some dirty south lick. But it just didn’t get to that point.
You think that’s it? Nah, Westwood got untold amount
o’dubs that I did after being managed for a brief spell by this
American dude called Rocky Hill. I even rinsed at BBC wit’
Westwood at the controls.
“Since then, I was on loud.com [in Steve Rifkind’s online emcee
competition]. I brought my mic to the table and I represented!
I did that due to being in a court dispute pertaining to a record
I cut in 2005 called ‘Nuff-a-Dese’/’Real-Toppa’. To cut a long
story short my professional integrity was in question and had
yet to be resolved at that point, which meant that recording
was put on pause.
“The Loud competition? Obviously people wanna get brave
when they see you down; maybe I had retired or some shit.
I just had to do it. This nigga stood up and guess what? This
nigga still standin’. I shot everyt’ing that moved. You’ll be
hearing more from me soon, a lot more; and trus’ me they
ain’t heard shit yet.”
(Check out www.myspace.com/dappa-dred and
www.hitmanrekordz.webs.com for more on Dappa-Dred.)
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THE ‘90S
FILES
By Robbie Ettelson Photography by Kristina Hill

5. KOOL KIM
AFFILIATIONS: Kim and Hass G began as the UMCs
(The Universal MCs), a duo from Staten Island. Their Wild
Pitch debut was co-produced by RNS, who would later work
on projects for Shyheim and GP-Wu. Hass went on to produce
‘Apollo Kids’ for Ghostface and ‘Magic Stick’ for 50 Cent.

CLAIM TO FAME: Gave us the hit single ‘Blue Cheese’ and

the under-appreciated ‘Fruits Ov Nature’ album, plus a UMCs
poster was a regular fixture on the lounge room wall on Martin
Lawrence’s character on his popular ‘90s sitcom, Martin.

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CURRENT STATUS: Evolved into the rap superhero known as ENTER THE WU:
NYOIL to eliminate sell-outs and weak rappers. His excellent “We used to all work at the Statue Of Liberty – it was me,
‘Hood Treason’ was recently re-issued as a double CD by the U-God, Method Man, Deck and Hass – and that’s where I met
folks at Babygrande. Hass. Me and Meth used to go to public school together, back
when he was just Clifford Smith and I was just Kim Sharpton.
FIVE ESSENTIAL KOOL KIM TRACKS: Me and him used to play trumpet together – he modeled his
UMCS ‘ONE TO GROW ON’ trumpeting style on Clifford Smith, the trumpeter, ‘cos our
Silenced the critics who mistook them band teacher used to say he reminded him of him – which was
for a happy rap novelty act. The 12-inch pure bullshit. When I heard the real Clifford Smith I was like,
version is essential. ‘Get the fuck outta here!’
UMCS ‘SWING IT TO THE AREA’
The way the track shifts gears mid-way through from breezy “Son used to enjoy Clifford The Big Red Dog books… I’ma
to hardcore is priceless. show you how well I know this cat. But son was in Stapleton
UMCS ‘SOME SPEAK ILL THOUGHTS’ – I wasn’t no hood dude like that, so I wasn’t gonna rock with
The highlight of their troubled second album – with a beat him in Stapleton. And I knew Rakeem [RZA] from back when
that’s crack-rock catchy. he used to rock with this dude Forest, who calls himself Ishem
NYOIL ‘WHAT UP MY WIGGER, WIGGER’ now. Rakeem and Forest, they used to have they thing, ‘cos
A sobering lesson in race relations set to an immense break. Rakeem ain’t no emcee. He wack! He a wack rapper, kid. But
NYOIL ‘SHOUT IT IN THE STREETS’ Cappadonna, who used to be called Original God at the time,
A superb showcase of how sharp his vocal technique has he was ridiculous. Back then, Cappadonna was the Slick Rick
remained after all this time. of Staten Island.
“Now I’ma telI you a funny story about Shyheim and them GP-
Wu cats. I used to live on Cedar Street, which is adjacent to
Broad Street, which is where most of them cats is from. They
walked by, and they knew I was living there so they’d try to
tease at us, on some ol’, ‘Wooooo-Tang!’ You know, try to start
some shit. They think I would not come out! It’s so funny, man,
I was watchin’ this interview that G-Dep or one of those dudes
was givin’, and he used to box, so he was like, ‘Yo, I like when
cats try and came at me thinkin’ that I’m just some rappin’
dude, and y’all be all loose – ya arms be all loose, ya neck be all
loose – riffin’ with me like I’m a herb. But of course you don’t
know I box – I’ll knock your ass out!’
“And that shit is so true, ‘cos as a rapper it’s the same thing.
Dude’s be swearin’ I’ma say some ‘Blue Cheese’ shit, man! They
be swearin’ that’s what’s gonna come out my mouth! And I’m
like, ‘Aight!’
“I remember one time I came outside, yo – me, my cousin who
was called C-Strangles, and his dude Prezzie – who was his
rhyming partner at the time – we came outside... Man, I like
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to eat a whole chuck outta all three of they asses! They got
rocked so bad, that after that motherfuckers was comin’ by
just givin’ me love, yo. They got demo’d – all of ‘em! Shyheim
is my son, B. He can’t front on me! I remember when he was
literally knee-high to me! It’s like, ‘Come on, stop playin’, pa.
You wanna come and battle me? And you ain’t even got no
lyrics other than what…’ Come on, man.

“In New York there’s great love and appreciation for the Asian
culture because we grew up watching kung-fu movies all day!
The Master Killer, The Five Deadly Venoms – this is all shit we
grew up watching. So everybody was on it like that, but they
[Wu-Tang] was calling theyself, ‘Yo, it’s that Wu-Tang slang.’
So we was like, cool, them brothers is comin’, so we’d say stuff
like, ‘I flip my style and start to flow Tang Wu,’ out of respect,
and in our minds they was comin’ soon so we was gonna pave
the way for them, and when they got on, they would holler
back. Except… Well, that wasn’t the case. Power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely, and that’s pretty much
the long and the short of it. It was real unfortunate, ‘cos we
thought it was gonna go that way.”

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BIG CHEESE AND FRUIT BASKETS:
“[The first UMCs single] ‘Invaders Of My Fruit Basket’ came out
the same time as De La Soul came out, and Red [Alert] would
not play the song, ‘cos he didn’t want us to be competition
with them. He held us back. A lotta people don’t know that. We
weren’t on some Daisy Age shit – we weren’t abstract. We just
made some weird titles so people got confused. Like ‘Fruits
Ov Nature’ – everybody thought that was some fruity shit,
right? But the ‘Ov’ was meant to be spelt ‘Uv’ so that it spelled
out F-U-N! We was on some 5 Percenter shit right before then,
which is what it correlates to as well. Fruit Of Islam will fuck
you up!
“I’ll tell you why the ‘Blue Cheese’ video was one of the worst
videos in hip-hop ever – because it was so campy and cheesy,
and they did it so cheap. The budget that they had for it was
not the budget that we thought. I made the concept of the
video – however, it was supposed to be this phantasmagorical,
visual cornucopia of eye-candy that was supposed to blow the
minds of the hip-hop world away! It was supposed to be the
equivalent of how a Michael Jackson video is like, ‘Pow!’
“There was cereal back in the day called Oh’s and a puppet
would come out of the cereal and be like [singing], ‘Oh’s cereal!’
That was the same puppet! They just put a gold tooth on the
mouth! I was sitting there thinking, ‘These wack bastards…’
UNLEASHED:
“Admittedly, the [follow up] ‘Unleashed’ album was not as
honest as the first album. I say that because I honestly would’ve
liked to have done a different album. But at the time it was
sincerely the album we could deliver – that was the UMCs in
that situation. Two years after the first album, I’d done lost
my house, my grandmother done passed, my mother been at
war, my brother moved away, I had a child and another on the
way. I never drank or smoked, but now that I’ve been under so
much duress because my record label won’t pay me – now I’m
drinking and smoking and buggin’ out. Now you’re this totally
different dude, and you’re going into the studio after two years
of experience: you’ve been around the world, you’ve done
slept with groupies, you’ve done been disappointed seeing
how much sharks this industry is, motherfuckers disrespected
you, got jumped, beat, fought, win, loss...
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“So now you’re in the studio making this album, that had
nothing to do with the kid you was when you was 19 and at
home with no responsibilities.
“The last things your fans heard was, ‘We are the kids from
Never, Never Land!’ The next they know, they hear you talkin’
about, ‘Ay yo, I be the rough, rugged!’ ‘Oh, these niggas are full’a
shit! They tryin’ to act hard!’ Do you know how many people,
right now, walk around with the stigmata of, ‘I got fucked-up
by them UMCs dudes!’ Because of that very statement. It’s
awful, B! You know who told me about this years ago? It was
De La Soul! They going outta town and cats be like, ‘Oh, De La
is soft!’ Then they see the dudes is towering infernos and they
gotta think twice!”
DON’T WANNA MAKE A PITCH THAT’S WILD:
“We got deaded from Wild Pitch because Stu Fine got beat-up.
At the time, Stu was making us do ten songs a week, and we
weren’t getting paid anything. Our apartment only had two
windows, and both of them were facing each other – that was
the most depressing place you could imagine being in. We’re
living in squalor, we’re very frustrated and angry – things aren’t
going well. So we got into the studio, it’s Hass’s birthday, and
we’re begging Stu to give our publishing back so we could get
a publishing deal and get a couple of hundred thousand dollars
and get it together.
“Now the shit that was so hurtful was that me and Hass
would’ve did anything for Stu. I mean, honestly, we were like
two pit-fighters – no one did a better show than UMCs! You got
on the bill with us, you were getting rocked! KRS-One? Rocked
by us! Naughty? Rocked by us! Black Sheep, Main Source, Greg
Nice? Rocked by us! And you know what this cock-sucker did?
He brought a cake to the studio session! Knowing that we were
literally hungry at that very moment – hungry like we hadn’t
eaten in a couple of days because we didn’t have no money!
Hass kicked the cake over, and our team took a ride with that
cat on the elevator when they seen that. There wasn’t any
words traded between us and them – I seen the look on them
cats’ face, and I knew what was gonna happen. When he got
on that elevator, you could just hear the sounds of the tussle
and him just screaming. It was some rough brothers that was
in there with that dude – he had to be hospitalised. It was an
awful thing, man. I really regret that. And then after that we
got black-listed and nobody would fuck with us, so we had to
lay low for a while.
“To be honest, I’ve never made a dime from selling records. If I
had started working in McDonalds – part time – from the time
I signed with Wild Pitch until the time that it was truly over, I
would have made way more money than I did. When I got my
first number one plaque I had to hop the train. A number one
plaque from Billboard, and I had to hop the train to get home!
Unbelievable. We sold over 250,000 records, easy. We’ll never
know how many we really sold... One time I got a letter from
the IRS, said we owed them a million dollars. I was like, ‘Word?
For what?’”
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25 YEARS AGO, THE BREAKIN’ MOVIES
MADE THEIR MARK ON POP CULTURE.
SHABBA-DOO TAKES US BACK TO THE
DAYS WHEN TURBO AND OZONE HAD THE
GAME ON LOCK... By Richard Watson
MOVER AND BREAKER
Boy did George Orwell get it wrong with Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Sure, his 1949 tome kicked some prescient predictions about
surveillance society and the erosion of the individual, but across
the globe b-boys hardly suffered the novel’s eponymous year
as mental slaves in a dire dystopia. Nope, they were too busy
freaking the wildly expressionistic dance moves birthed by a
futuristic culture called hip-hop – and if ol’ Big Brother was
watching over them, he did so slack-jawed at their funky fresh
manoeuvres.
Actually, Big Bro was probably busy peeping the flick that
helped cover the world in lino. Made on a shoestring, Breakin’
transplanted the culture clash musical melodrama of West
Side Story to the Cali streets, where promising jazz hoofer
Kelly (Lucinda Dickey) befriends street dancers Turbo (Michael
‘Boogaloo Shrimp’ Chambers) and Ozone (Alfonso ‘Shabba-
Doo’ Quinones). So popular was Joel Silberg’s movie that
no sooner had TKO triumphed over both rival dance crew
Electrorock and the stuffy dance establishment than Breakin 2:
Electric Boogaloo hit cinemas. Here Shabba-Doo reflects back
on his part in the movement...
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Where were you career-wise when Breakin’ came along?
“I’d already had a pretty significant career. I started out circa
1971, ‘72 as one of the original Soul Train gang before becoming
one of the founding members of The Original Lockers, who
were headed and managed by Toni Basil. We did countless
television shows and tours with the likes of Frank Sinatra,
Dean Martin and Bill Cosby. If you went to Las Vegas you
wouldn’t see us dancing on a street corner – we were in the
main showroom, on the marquee level. The group disbanded
around 1977, right after we did The Dick Van Dyke Show, and I
went on to headline with Bette Midler on her Divine Madness
tour on Broadway. I brought this brand of street dancing to
that show, garnered a lot of publicity, and was eventually
given my own series, called The Big Show, on NBC.”
What was the format of the show?
“I was responsible for putting together huge production
numbers and creating what is now known as ‘musical street
theatre’. I discovered and hired a number of different dancers
including Boogaloo Shrimp, Pop N’ Taco and Poppin’ Pete. So
I had all that under my belt when New World pictures gave me
a contract to star in a film called Body Rock. This was during
the whole breakdance gold-rush when everybody wanted to
make a breakdance movie.
“But then they told me that they were taking me off the
picture because they wanted a guy that girls would like. So
they hired Lorenzo Lamas and I went off and choreographed
a music video that garnered a lot of press – ‘All Night Long’ by
Lionel Richie. I toured with Lionel and put together the other
street dancers that toured with him, namely Boogaloo Shrimp
and Pop N’ Taco.”
So Breakin’ came along next, right?
“Right. I’m unemployed when I get a phone call from Cannon
Films saying they want me to choreograph a movie called
Breakin’. I showed up there in full Shabba-Doo regalia, you
know: the ear-ring, the red hat, the long coat – I came as is.
“I’m sitting there meeting with [exec producer] Menahem
Golan regarding the choreography, and he said, ‘Are you an
actor? Can you act?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m from Chicago.’ I don’t
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know what that really meant, but he was like, ‘Okay, Shabba
Doo from Chicago, why don’t you go and audition for [Pamela]
Basker and [Fern] Champion, the casting agents for the film,
and tell me what they think.’ So I did and during that audition I
said that one famous line: ‘I’m Ozone, street dancer,’ and was
given the part. I had to play an 18-year-old and at the time I
was about 30.”
Did you bring Boogaloo Shrimp on board?
“Shrimp, Pop N’ Taco, Ana ‘Lollipop’ Sanchez, Poppin’ Pete
and all of the main street dancers in the film aside from Lucinda
Dickey were recommended by me. They were all part of my
dance crew in some way.”
Director Joel Silberg and the producers weren’t from hip-hop
backgrounds. Were you constantly being consulted on how
scenes should be played?
“Absolutely, from day one. From my meetings with Joel Silberg
I knew that he wanted to create a film that really felt real from
a dancer’s perspective and I think the first conversation we
had, he wanted to know why we do what we do. I thought that
was a really important question – most people just wanted us
to do it and they pretty much didn’t care how it came about or
what the feeling was or any of that stuff. To be honest, I was
a kind of walking, on-set street dance aficionado and historian
in residence, so I did lend them that expertise, yes.”
THE ORIGINAL LOCKERS
WERE HEADED AND MANAGED BY
TONI BASIL!
Presumably you and Boogaloo Shrimp already had your
chemistry down pat...
“Oh yeah, absolutely. That relationship was not created on set;
we brought that to the table. At the time, I was Shrimp’s legal
guardian. His parents signed a document allowing him to tour
with me. Right from day one, Shrimp and I had a chemistry
reminiscent of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. If you look at the
film you’ll see that Shrimp takes on the Jerry Lewis persona
and I became more of the Dean Martin character, the straight
guy. That was in terms of on camera.
“Now, we know in retrospect that Jerry Lewis was really the
genius behind the two of those guys, but unlike them, I was
really the guy who kind of masterminded things behind the
scenes. Shrimp didn’t have that knowledge; he was only about
15-years-old at the time.”
What do you remember about filming the dance showdowns
in the Radiotron?
“I fractured my rib filming the first dance scene and it was
towards the beginning of the shooting schedule so I didn’t
ever mention it. I wrapped up my wrist for the whole movie
and people just thought it was part of the costume, but I was
dancing really with one arm. I couldn’t really roll my wrist, and
to this day, because it didn’t heal properly, it will hurt at certain
times. But, yeah, they were difficult to do, with the on-set fog
that they made with oil or whatever.”
In his big screen debut, Ice-T gives a glimpse of the charisma
he’d build a career on. What are your memories of him?
“I was very good friends with Ice-T, and he always exuded that
sort of star power and personality. I was having a conversation
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not so long ago with the writer of the original Breakin’, and he
brought up something that I wasn’t really aware of. He said,
‘Before you were really finalised as Ozone, we had approached
Ice-T ’cos he had the same kind of leadership qualities that
we thought the character needed to possess.’ He said that
Ice-T told him, ‘Hey, you know the better one to have for
that role would be Shabba-Doo because he is that guy. To all
of us Shabba-Doo is the leader, so he is Ozone.’ I was kind of
surprised but not that much, because Ice-T’s the kind of guy
who’s gonna do what he thinks is right for the movement.”

One of the movie’s highlights is the scene where, ordered by

Ozone to sweep the street, Turbo dances with the broom...
“There’s been a lot of talk about how that scene came about,
but I’ll tell you in all honesty: that scene right there was due
to the genius of Hymie Rogers, one of the original members
of the West Side Story Broadway cast and a choreographer on
our film.

“This idea didn’t meet well with Shrimp. I remember very clearly
that he did not want to do it. If you watch closely while he’s

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dancing with the broom, at some point he unceremoniously
throws it to the ground. Now I tell you, editing saved him, but
the reason he threw it down was because he was frustrated
with it. He was uncomfortable; he just wanted to dance with
the thing.
“He didn’t want to do any of the moves that became the
trademark stuff. It wasn’t his idea to put the metal plate in the
broom bristles. The way the camera was positioned mid-thigh,
you couldn’t see his foot, so he gestured as if he was magically
making the broom rise up, but it was fitted with this metal
piece for him to step on. Then it looked like he was magically
controlling the broom when it was being moved with a fishing
line – of course everybody could see it, but that kind of added
to the charm!
“You have to credit to Michael Chambers for brilliantly doing
it, but it was Hymie Rogers who instigated those ideas.”
While Breakin’ was filming, Beat Street was being made in
New York. Was there any rivalry between the productions?
“There was a sense of rivalry that existed between the
production companies, but that didn’t really exist between
us, the dancers in the films. Even though our film was called
Breakin’, we weren’t really breakers in that real sense.
Breaking is a really specific form of dance. For instance, let’s
look at martial arts being the kind of umbrella term for all
forms of Asian-influenced combat. Hip-hop dance or street
dance would be that umbrella term, and then under that let’s
say locking would be karate, popping would be kung-fu, and
breaking would be ju-jitsu, more ground oriented. So any
rivalry was between the production companies vying for the
same consumer dollar.”
Were you surprised at all by the movie’s success?
“I personally took on the attitude like, ‘See, I told you so.’ You
gotta understand, I had been with The Lockers on Soul Train
and we were a famous group so I had already been around
town beating that drum before Hollywood decided to make
the movie. So when Breakin’ became a success, I just kind of
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yawned my way through it because, you know, I already knew
what was up.”
After the summer success of Breakin’, the sequel was in
cinemas by Christmas that year. How did production compare
to the first movie?
“It was the same sort of market-sensitive attitude towards
the release of the second film; more so, in fact. It was kind of
like, ‘Let’s get all we can and not really care anything about
quality or any of that stuff. It had a larger cast and many more
dance numbers but we produced the second film for the same
amount of money.”
From the start, the sequel felt much more flamboyant, more
like a straight musical...
“It did, it did. I think creatively it took the wrong sort of turn.
Rather than get more expansive in terms of the larger musical
numbers and all that stuff, I think it probably would have been
best served if they had gone more inside and said, ‘Let’s go into
the characters, dig deeper into the motivations and have some
of that stuff become a little bit more real and more raw.’
“In a lot of ways, Breakin’ kind of scratched the surface of
being almost a reality movie. Reality TV is so popular these
days and Breakin’ kind of scratched the surface of that. Aside
from the cast having different names we were pretty much
playing ourselves. There was no character development there.
ICE-T WAS
ORIGINALLY APPROACHED
TO PLAY THE CHARACTER
OF OZONE
I mean, Ozone is Shabba-Doo and Turbo is Boogaloo Shrimp
and Special K is Lucinda.”
The scene in which you teach Turbo how to woo a girl with
the help of a doll is funny but also genuinely bizarre...
“That was kind of new but we also knew there was this comedic
chemistry between us. Now get this: that wasn’t written. In the
script, I think it was a line: ‘Ozone shows Turbo how to get it
on with a girl,’ then the next line was, ‘Ozone and Turbo dance
with a doll.’ That was it. There was no lines, no direction, and so
literally, on the set, Shrimp and I improvised that whole thing,
like, ‘Hey, just look in her eyes and do what I do and just smile.’
We knew what we were doing. We played up the whole Dean
Martin, Jerry Lewis aspect of our characters’ relationship.”
You co-choreographed Three 6 Mafia’s performance at the
2006 Oscars. Having starred in one of hip-hop’s earliest flicks,
was it a thrill to help put the culture centre stage at the
Academy Awards?
“I remember Three 6 Mafia showing up to rehearsals with
their entourage. They come in ten deep, okay, with the Gucci
sunglasses and watches with faces the size of trashcan lids.
They walk into the room and of course everybody was like,
‘Ooh, Three 6 Mafia!’
“The one guy turns around and he looks at me and his jaw
drops. All of this big, gangsta, dangerous-looking crew started
acting like they were all ten-years-old, saying how if it wasn’t
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for me they wouldn’t have what they’re enjoying today. The
whole of the room was just stood there with their mouths
gaping open.”

Was that a typical reaction? Presumably the success of the

movies changed your day-to-day life...
“I had fame going in, but what the Breakin’ films did was elevate
me to a mythological state of being. I could go anywhere. To
this very day, people see me and they cry. When I conduct my
House Of Shway workshops around the world, kids actually
line up and they fall into my arms and they cry. I’ve kind of
taken on almost this sort of Ghandi, Dalai Lama persona within
this movement. People wanna go back to when hip-hop felt
good. Hip-hop entered a very dark episode in its life with the
Biggie Smalls and 2Pac killings and the shootings and the
negativity associated with that world. But even now, in the
Obama era, people want to go back to feeling good and they
want hip-hop to be what it always was meant to be – bringing
people together in harmony.”
(For more on Shabba-Doo hit up www.shabba-doo.com and
www.myspace.com/onqmedia)

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