FAT FREDDY’S DROP / “Roady”
Music is the primo language to convey emotion. Emotion is not just feeling, but also attitude: how one approaches and manifests a feeling or behavior. The social context of music is the source of one's attitudinal predisposition, the where we be coming from when we feel and express what we feel. Hence, BoL always be dropping genealogy and archeology in order to fully grasp the meaning of the feeling that the music we share imports. In other words, to understand the one drop you got to know what’s being dropped and why.
Fat Freddy’s Drop is some dope sounds out of Aotearoa (AKA New Zealand) reflecting the Maori presence. In 1980, Bob Marley slid through there and their island culture was forever altered to exciting heights of new confidence in their own roots. One friend says you can hear ocean all up in this music, in its openness both to influences and its tendency toward rolling, repetitious rhythms. But more than geology I think we are dealing with sociology, and particularly with the politics of the society in that geography, both the politics of colonialism working on them ("them" being the Maori people) as well as the politics of self-determination working for them. Hence, Fat Freddy's Drop records on their own label and produces themselves independently.
What we hear up in here is not only an insistence that their day is going to come, but indeed, that the new day be just around the corner, all they got to do is turn. Transform themselves from what others made them be into what all they want to be.
Which is how these folk make reggae something akin to funk.
I have this theory: there is a hole in the earth, and all the peoples who trace their origin to Africa, well, they meet up underground (I believe it might be somewhere just below Kilamanjaro) and exchange sounds. Must be. Otherwise, how could peoples on the other side of the earth sound like they come from Detroit or Memphis? Brazil/Angola or Cuba/West Africa could be connected by a bathtub floating on the trade winds, but Aotearoa?
When you listen to a track like “Hope” there is no doubt some gospel stuff working here, and while I know missionaries been all over the world, I don’t believe Tom Dorsey and Mahalia Jackson were down there. But beyond the sound (and that is undoubtedly a great beyond), listen to the lyrics. How is it that there is such serious communal love radiating out of this music? Where they coming from that they got such a much "hope"? (By the way, the female lead on "Hope" is Hollie Smith, a dangerous voice who sings with that catch in her throat that could entice Lucifer to install air conditioners in hell, just so he could chill while enjoying the way she blow.)
Fat Freddy’s Drop is a serious band. The core of the congregation is: Joe Dukie (Dallas Tamaira) lead vocals, DJ Fitchie (Chris Faiumu) MPC2000 and engineer, Dobie Blaze (Iain Gordon) keyboards, Jetlag Johnson (Tehimana D. Kerr) guitar, Tony Chang (Toby Laing) trumpet, Ho Pepa (Joe Lindsay) trombone, Fulla Flash (Warryn Maxwell) saxophone & flute. Although they been around for a handful of years, Based On A True Story is their first studio album.
Mainly they are a live band.Their music is a trance experience with one song liable to go on for a half hour or more. They are mostly acoustic but they do have DJ Fitchie using various digital machines to enhance their production. Sort of a digital-laced, roots-based, funk-influenced, reggae sound flowing from a Maori sensibility. (Which includes an island mentality, a mentality that is both an isolation as well as an awareness that most of the world is beyond the horizon, which in turn implies in order to fully be who you are, you got to deal with the over the seas elements that are forever washing up on the shores).
I know this doesn’t sound much like a description of the music as music, but if you want to understand why the music sounds both familiar and different, all at the same time, you have to understand Maori reality, Maori dreams.
The last cut is a sliver of a live performance of one of their popular compositions, “Wandering Eye,” except that what we hear is the dubbed up instrumental outro recorded somewhere in Italy while on tour. Maori music in Italy—get to that! I play this stuff all the time. As they note on “Roady,” one of my favorites, “I do it for the love of music.”
In the weeks ahead I will be sharing more Maori and Aotearoa music on BoL. Meanwhile, revel in this beautiful wash of upful sounds from down under. Give thanks for the hole in the ground and for the folks who give voice to cultural exchange, proving once again: one people, one aim, one destiny. One sound. One love.
—Kalamu ya Salaam
Truly uncategorizable
It's going to take me a while to figure this band out. Kalamu is right about their sound. Too smooth to be reggae. Too laid-back to be funk. Too soulful to be pop. I know it's fashionable to claim disregard for categories, but sometimes categories are a stop-off on the way to understanding. The phrase may be over-used, but Fat Freddy's Drop is truly uncategorizable. I've been listening to these tunes all week, but I still don't know what exactly to make of them. Both "Hope" and "Roady" stick with me sometimes. Other times, the songs sound like soundtracks to a dream: floating, drifting, transient. Of course, it helped to find out that they're primarily a live band. That explains the looseness of the compositions; the repetition and simplicity of the lyrics; the extended, jam feel of their intros and outros. The thing is, Fat Freddy's mellow skank grows on you: I already like these songs a lot more than I did the first time I heard them. Give me another couple of weeks and...who knows?
—Mtume ya Salaam
This entry was posted on Sunday, June 11th, 2006 at 12:05 am and is filed under Contemporary. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
3 Responses to “FAT FREDDY’S DROP / “Roady””
June 11th, 2006 at 8:46 am
As usual, you have introduced me to music that I absolutely love! First there was Beady Belle…then Corinne Bailey Rae…and now THIS! I have a good buddy from Australia who adores funky music, and I’m sure that there’s “something in the water” (since the Earth is 70% covered with it) that causes various groups from all around the globe to absorb these ethereal grooves and rhythms.
THANK YOU for once again expanding my horizons.
June 12th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Nice list of tracks. As Mtume said, “Truly uncategorizable – It’s going to take me a while to figure this band out.”
I was sitting here listening to the mellow reggae beat of Roady, thinking of how Bob Marley cross-pollinated a New Zealand sound. Then about 3/4ths through the song out breaks a rap and the tone changes. More Raw, more Funky, more protest-song like, and sax that would make Maceo Parker smile a bit. I almost felt duped in a good way musically. Then I listened to Hope and started scratching my head. Could this be on the SAME album, let alone could this be done by the SAME group?!? Then I heard Wandering Eye and really got confused. Is this a mash up of 70’s Funk/Reggae using early 80’s instruments?
All in all, of the set I like Roady the best. For some strange reason it reminds me of the UK Soul Artist Omar (Lye-Fook).
June 18th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Excellent to find you exposing FFD for people, they are truly brilliant, and need to be known by everybody! I do what I can, and was introduced to them myself by a friend who lived in Aotearoa.
I saw them play three weeks ago, in Ireland, at a one-day festival, they played for an hour, and what sounded like 3 tunes, based on the pauses between them, but they melted everything together, I am sure they played blips of every track on the record. It was very good!
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