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B-boys, beats and sean nós

Ireland

Chapeau : Hip-Nós, a collaboration between sean-nós singers and dancers and South African, Irish and American rappers and breakdancers, works much better than might be expected

Source : Culture Europe International (http://www.culture-europe-international.org)
01 49 40 72 46 - contact@culture-europe-international.org
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Rubrique : Revue de presse

du 08/11/2009 00:00 au 08/02/2010 00:00
Paris 75007 France (Ile-de-France)



Texte : Par PETER CRAWLEY
The Irish Times
Ireland
October 19th, 2009
(extracts)

Gearóidín Breathnach, a sean-nós singer of high repute, has just delivered four verses of a 19th-century love song in the auditorium of the Axis Arts Centre.

Ray Yeates, director of Axis and musical director of the fourth instalment of an annual event that solders together the rhythmically wayward tunes of sean nós with the breakbeats and explosive rhymes of hip hop, asks his guest MCs for their response.(...)

When Breathnach delivers a decelerated version of "Óró Sé Do Bheatha ‘Bhaile", performed over what may once have been the sound of uileann pipes, but now a fizzing ambience over an arrestingly queasy beat from DJ Moschops, two rappers compare their grievances. “I don’t mean to preach, but we need to teach the kids the real facts,” begins Finglas rapper Warren Gifford (Warren G), adding a potted history of famine and dispossession.

“That still didn’t stop the English from raiding our houses/ Get yourself a Paddy – only five pounds sterling/ the Negro costs 50 but the Paddy can live in the garden.”

Yansen’s response, which comes with a studied flow, is more quiet and insistent. “I am the memory, the griot, and remember we will/ I am every drop of blood that was spilt for my people/ I am Nelson Mandela, Steve Biko and Ashley Kriel.” His rap traces the contours of time immemorial. “I am the ancient African soil from which all life sprung/ It is me dangling in that tree you racists hung.” If this was a battle rhyme, you’d have to hand it to Yansen on points.

(...)Hip hop has always sampled diverse sounds and woven them into its fabric. One of its unspoken central tenets is that there can be no apartheid in music.(...)

“It’s all storytelling,” says rapper Ophelia McCabe. “That’s why every one of us is here. Sean nós would have been a way of recording real events in history and culture in the same way that I may express myself through lyricism, dance or drawing. It’s all our personal stories. That’s where it all comes together.

“It may clash, but it eventually gels because we’re all standing on our own two feet doing our thing.” Everyone is alive to the danger that sean nós might be swallowed by the rhythmic insistence of breakbeats – “squashed by electronics,” is how Yeates expresses the concern – and no one wants it to feel like a backing track.

Breathnach is understandably sensitive to preserving boundaries: “It’s important that you don’t try to change what you do yourself. You try to meet in the middle. If I try to sing in line with rap, then I would be losing sean nós. If they bend to accommodate me, it wouldn’t work either.”

Curiously, though, with a music that is several centuries old and that the participants roundly consider to be the preserve of a minority of traditionalists (...) it is hip hop that often seems to be facing a graver threat to its existence.(...)

“We’re not affixed to a scene or a culture of making money, which is hard in Ireland anyway,” says Ophelia. “The commercial world creates a very bastardised form of something that began from pure expressional roots. Anything doctored and manufactured for commercial gain loses the message.”

Many participants will speak of hip hop offering a chance to kick-start a renewed interest in sean nós, but when McCabe speaks of “removing the security of your beat” to create something much more risky, it’s not fanciful to think it may work the other way around. Whether Hip-Nós will ever cohere into its own genre or if it exists only through annual intervention is something few can say.

“To be honest I don’t know,” says the DJ Moschops (Harry Webley), (...) "There are rappers from Cork using beatbox, harmonica and tin whistles. There is a strong connection to the past in Ireland, more so than many countries. And there’s a real yearning to recapture that sort of purity and clarity.”

With a sharp poignancy, Yeates recalls that the form was starting to take root in the work of the rapper Daniel McDonnell, aka Lunitic, who had begun to incorporate bodhrán beats and folk music into his rapping, until his death earlier this year at the age of 24.(...)

“You may say sean nós is a thousand years old, or hip hop is 30 years old, or that Irish hip hop is only 15 years old,” says Ophelia. “But really they’re all as old as the universe. When humans started to record, or write down any feeling, you’d have found an incredible, fast lyricism and delivery. The gift of the gab. We’ve always been highly expressive verbally.” The oral tradition continues, whether in Irish, English or Afrikaans, matched with bodhráns, B-boys or breakbeats.

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Date de publication : 08/11/2009


Période traitée : 2009-10-19
Mots-clés : Ireland, Irish hip hop, hip hop, sean nós, Ray Yeates, Axis arts centre, Gearóidín Breathnach, Ophelia McCabe, DJ Moschops, Harry Webley, Daniel McDonnell, DJ Lunitic
Inséré le : 08/11/2009 13:51