 21/08/2007
The sheets are unashamedly used and shoved to one side on the bed behind him. It’s quite touching and honest. The room smells of incense (though I’ll not speculate why, of course). Simple clothes, but new – no sign of his considerable wealth on the wrists or around the neck, and there’s definitely no evidence of the delirious, dubious fashion choices suddenly made popular again by giddy new rave fashionistas. Juice-box bling, anyone?
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No, DJ Jazzy Jeff is simply an inauspicious, content-looking man on a sofa preaching about the death of the music industry. ‘The world will never be without music. It can survive without the record industry, but it can never survive without music. I think what’s going to happen, what needs to happen, is it’ll destroy itself so it can rebuild itself.’ And with that, he sits back decisively and gives me my first great quote of the day.
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‘Wha?!!’ we cry, a little shaken up, ‘Who is this agent provocateur issuing a clarion call to burn down EMI’s headquarters? This rabble-rousing Robin Hood seeking to return music to the people? We just wanted to know about Will Smith!’ Well, as a man once said, you can’t always get what you want. You can often, however, get something you didn’t ask for.
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Just look at Jeff. I suggest the following image to him: A young Jeffrey Townes, aged a mere ten, starts playing around at DJing in his parents’ basement. A pair of enormous headphones dwarfs either side of his tiny little head. It’s his kunstleroman moment of realisation, the inescapable march of history before him, swelling his little chest with pride. Visions of Grammies streaming before his eyes! Of his label, A Touch of Jazz, of revolutionary turntablism! Visions of enough platinum discs to melt down and then be re-moulded as a giant statue of himself in the very centre of Philadelphia!
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Jeff laughs at me. ‘Man, calm down. It was not like that. I just expected to be married with kids and working for the electric company. I did not expect this shit.’ Well, I prefer my version. Though now I think of it, one could never truly expect grandiose delusions from a man as humble and grateful as Jeff Townes. He’s just happy to be allowed to tour. ‘Y’know, the real bug out for me is to play in places I never thought in my life I’d even travel to – play in Indonesia, and then that same Notorious B.I.G track, that same Tupac track and that same Dr Dre track resonates in South Asia, in South London and in South Philadelphia. And I’m like, wow, that’s really deep.’ It’s like a language, I suggest. ‘Exactly! It’s like, though we don’t speak the same verbal language, we speak the same physical language. That’s crazy, man.’
Score great quote number two. Jeff, as you might have noticed, is enthusiastic about, like, everything. He even loves Scotland, where he’d played to thousands of people the night before we met. But to return to the portrait of the humble firebrand we painted earlier, Jeff is never more enthusiastic than when declaiming the death of the industry. ‘Y’know, there’s this big backlash against the internet because it’s taking money away from the industry, but the thing is – it might just be saving music.’ Quote number three! Keep listening, there might be more.
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‘Now that there’s the internet, there’s this wide open forum that kids can go to and investigate. They’re saying, ‘Man, what’s up with Nirvana? What’s up with Sting?’ They’re discovering all this shit and that’s where the hope is.’ I’m not sure they’re downloading Sting, but I get the point. It’s something apparent in Jeff’s new record, ‘The Return of the Magnificent.’ Lounging in an opentop Cadillac and brimming with all-star MCs, Jeff flips old school breaks and samples on us and drops a vibe that’s as timeless as early summer evenings – like opener ‘Hip Hop,’ where classic Jazzy J scratching punctuates Jeff’s agreement with Twone Gabz, that ‘Foreverever, foreverever and everever / Me and hip hop together.’ It was, he says, ‘a conscious nostalgia for hiphop,’ which taps back into his belief that new kids like Lupe Fiasco ‘and his skateboard record’ are going back to go forward.
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‘You don’t turn on the radio and get the history of hip hop. Or the history of anything. It’s just tensongstensongstensongs. The kids hear the ten songs all day, then they go to the club and they go to the DJ and say, play the ten songs. It’s the Matrix! It’s bullshit.’ What are we going to do, Jeff? Is it all just hopeless? ‘Nah, I see the hope. I remember coming to the UK waaaay back in the day, and when they’d play a hip hop record, they’d tell you about the original of the record. How cool is that? You’re educating your listeners about the record and the origin of the record. That’s where the new music is gonna come from, that’s what I wanna help do.’
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Where a better placed man to do so than he? He’s seen it all, from Melly Mel through Tribe Called Quest to now. That’s why Jeff Townes preaches doom for the industry, because ‘The industry doesn’t give a fuck about the artist.’ Unsurprisingly, he laughs off my suggestion that he’s a revolutionary (he’s far too laid back). ‘Nah man,’ he says, ‘I’m just one of those people that thinks music belongs to the people.’ Great quote number... Oh, I’ve lost count. The thing is, Jeff talks it up and lays it down in interviews; that way, when he plays, it’s just about the music.
‘THE RETRUN OF THE MAGNIFICENT’ IS OUT NOW (BBE / RAPSTER) |
