Daara J's Spirit-Cosmic Gestalt of the Rhythm Divine

Story: Tom Terrell

In 2003, a singing/ rapping trio called Daara J released one of the most exciting hip-hop albums on the planet.  Four square in the tradition of conscious rap a la Native Tongues Posse, Common and Talib Kweli, Boomerang’s 13 tracks deal with racial pride, community solidarity, fighting oppression, morality, love and respect (for fam, women, and self).  Three things distinguish Daara J and Boomerang (Wrasse Records) from their freestyling peers and their audacious music stilo (hip-hop beats crisscrossing with reggae, soul funk, African and Cuban grooves), verbal cipher (French-English-Spanish-Wolof) and, most tellingly, their nationality: N’Dango D, Aladji Man and Faada Freddy are from Senegal.

While the fact that three African brothas could come up with an alhim that is every bit as bona fide as Kweli’s Quality will no doubt surprise the U.S. hip-hop massive, heads from Dakar who have been weaned on imported 12-inchers, LPs/CDs, videos and FUBU-Phat-Farm-Sean-John just smile and say, “Uh yeah.” When they hear those beats and rhymes from America, they’re feeling the Ancestors.  Boomerang is calling people to move,” clarifies Freddy.  “It says that rap music was born in Africa, grown in America and it went around the world to come back to Africa like a boomerang.  That’s why we have to be under the same groove and the same mood.” (FYI: Today there are over 8,00 rap crews in Senegal)

In 1979, New Jersey indie label Sugar Hill Records released “Rapper’s Delight” by Big Bank Hank, Master Gee and Wonder Mike, ala the Sugarhill Gang.  A series of round robin party chants, outrageous sexual boasts, food jokes and doggerel scat (“…hip-hop-ya-don’t-stop-to-tha-rockin-to-da-bang-bang-boogie-say-up-jump-da-boogie-to-da-rhythm-of0-a-boogi-ty-beat…”), set to the rhythm track of Chic’s disco smash “Good Times,” “Rapper’s Delight: was the proverbial shot heard ‘round the world.

Although it eventually sold over two million copies worldwide (outselling Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick In The Wall”), won NAIRD’s Record of the Year award and blew up America’s radio, R&B and pop sales charts, “Rapper’s Delight” was tagged a one-hit wonder novelty by industry weasels and media pundits alike.  As always, the “experts” were wrong…dead wrong.

For the disenfranchised black and Latin youth of South Bronx, NY, “Rapper’s Delight” was not bullshit “novelty.”  They knew it was the latest offspring of a new style that had been birthed in borough parks, house/block parties and clubs seven years before by Don Dada DJs like Kool Herc, Pete DJ Jones, Afrika Bambaataa and Grand Wizard Theodore.  To them, Sugarhill Gang was no more than carpetbaggers: three cornballs from Jersey who rode to mainstream glory on rhymes stolen from Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush Brothers.  Playa hating aside, the kids soon realized that “Rapper’s Delight” was nothing less than a middle-fingered ”I am somebody!” validation of their underground B-Boy (as in “Bronx Boy,” “Break Boy,” “Beat Boy”) culture to the outside world.  In the 1980, the B-Boy nation cold bumrushed the show: Sugarhill Gang rocked the U.K. TV show Top Of The Pops, Blondie gave authentic B-Boy MC Kurtis Blow the opening slot on their January U.K. Tour and both Blow’s “The Breaks” and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “Freedom” were certified gold singles.  B-Boy icons the Treacherouse Three, Sequence, Spoonie Gee, Funky Four Plus One and the Fearless Four enjoyed local hits as well.

The next year, Blondie’s “Rapture” and the Clash’s “Magnificent Seven “ and “This Is Radio Clash” brought rap to the vanilla suburbs and got paid in full.  The Clash hired graffiti legend Futura 2000 to spray-paint onstage backdrops during their London and Paris gigs.  Within weeks, both capitals were “bombed” by native taggers.  The genie had left the bottle.  A year later, GMF&FF’s “The Message” and Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” had B-Boys, rocker and new wavers at home and abroad breaking ‘n’ popping and a film called Wild Style conflated 10 years of B-Boy evolution into a zeitgeist mythology epic for the masses.

Between ’83 and ’90, hip-hop’s impact on black and white America’s respective cultures was profound.  “Walk this Way,” Run-D.M.C.’s collaborations with Aerosmith, not only topped R&B and pop charts; it revitalized the rock band’s fading career as well.  White rappers the Beastie Boys dropped the first platinum hip-hop album.  Yo! MTV Raps became the video network’s number one daily program. Public Enemy headlined rock venues around the world.  N.W.A. invented gangsta rap and were hounded by the FBI and Police Benevolent Associations coast to coast because of it.

In the ‘90’s, hip-hop and its practitioners were bigger; more six-degrees-of-ubiquitous in America’s pop culture matrix than Elvis and the Beatles combined.  Seventy-one percent of hip-hop’s consumer base was white and most of them wore hoodies, low slung baggy jeans and Tims like their ghetto-real idols.  TV action shows and adverts jacked hip-hop beats and video techniques, hip-hop video directors became Hollywood auters, rappers became TV/movie stars, rockers became rappers, DJs played in rock bands and Jimmy Page jammed with Puffy on Saturday Night Live.  At this year’s Grammy Awards, Outkast’s Record and Album of the Year awards at long last acknowledged officially what youth at home and ‘cross the globe have known for the last two decades: hip-hop is America’s number one pop music.

Forgive the above digression, but to fully understand the how and the why of Daara J, you had to know the complete why.  Now let’s go back to 1991.

In ‘91, MC Solaar, a Senegalese expatriate living in Paris, released his 16 track debut album Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempo.  Though Solaar wasn’t the first MC to rap in French, he was the first to create music whose lyrical content, arrangements, samples, beats and production drew from American hip-hop’s spirit-cosmic but rather than be blatantly imitative, was a sound that reflected the culture and life he was living.  Qui Seme le Vent Recolte le Tempe was the first true Afro-French hip-hop record…with out apology.  Once Solaar proved French hip-hop could hang, others jumped to it.  In the years since, Paris-based Bon Dadas like Saian Supa Crew, IAM, Paasi, Akhenaton and MC Disiz La Peste have consolidated, refined and expanded the genre to a uniqueness all its own.

It was no mere accident that the cat who flipped French hip-hop’s script was a Senegalese; it was Destiny.  See, Senegal’s youth had been feeling the B-Boy thang since the early ‘80s.  It was strictly a karaoke scenario until some unknown geniuses discovered that the traditional Wolof-inflected tassu (ego-tripping boasts), baku (“battle” raps) and kevaku (fast, tongue-twisting) forms were better suited for homegrown ciphers.  BAM!  Overnight, Dakar rap crews jus’ grew like Topsy.  By mid-decade the scene was divided into two rival camps spearheaded by Syndicate and King MC’s, respectively.  In ’89, the two crews became Positive Black Soul.  Three years later, they supported MC Solaar on his Dakar debut concert and French tour.  PBS’s impressive guest shot on Baaba Maal’s Firin’ In Foula led to their ’96 Mango debut Salaam (the first African hip-hop recording to be released in the U.S.).

Daara J’s story began as all hip-hop fairy tales do: in da club.  One night in ’94, Faada Freddy and N’Dango D. were chilling in Dakar’s Metropolis club, freestyling to the beats.  Aladji Man steps to them and joins the cipher.  Gasses by his ragamuffin steez, Freddy proposes they form a group  “When we met, we realized that we were involved by the same vibe, the same mood,” says Freddy.  “The name Daara J came from the basic traditional school where parents used to send their children to learn Koran, to be well-formed to face the difficulties in life.”  So in a philosophical way, Daara J means “school of life.”

A few months later, Daara J’s mix tape is burning up the underground.  After four more years of winning freestyle battles, dropping mix tapes and opening up for PBS and Pee Frois, Daara J gets signed to French indie label Declic.  Their self –titled debut makes enough noise in the Parisian underground to earn them their first overseas tour.  Even better, the ’99 release Xalima rams Paris’ famed Radio Nova and London’s Kiss FM for the next two years.

Back to the present: 2004 should be the year Daara J goes international with a quickness.  This year’s BBC World Music Awards honored them as Best African Act and as of this writing, Boomerang is number one on the European world music charts.  Rocking Spanish guitars, dubsonic bass, funky brass, jazzy flutes, accordion and guest shout-outs from Rokia Traore, Sergent Garcia, Disiz la Peste an Dee Dee Bridgewater’s daughter China, Boomerang is, in hip-hop parlance, “on some whole ‘nother shit.”

“African music is very, very rich; when you listen to Baaba Maal or Rokia Traore then you feel that we have a lot to show,” muses Freddy.  “We consider ourselves modern griots as well.  Senegal is a spiritual country and we believe that it is important to feed the body and the soul.  So we try to bring that to the hip-hop music to show that apart from the basic roots of the hip-hop there’s another kind of behavior, another way to act.  That is the African attitude.”

The most beautifullest thang about Boomerang it the way Daara J’s unique, jazz-influences harmonic-melodic- rhythmic phrasing transforms four disparate language streams into one tonally homogeneous flow of emotion, triggering colors and nuances.  Couple that with the beats, grooves, vocal arrangements and production that smell like an Orishas rap rumba (“Esperanza’), a Fugees R&B-ragga pimp roll (“Paris Dakar,” feat. Disiz la Peste), straight-up Philly new-soul (“Hip-Hop Civilization”) of Dr. Dre G-Funk (“Babylone”), and you get African Diaspora transcendent/resonant hip-hop.  Boomerang is all about exalting in the spirit-cosmic gestalt of the Rhythm Divine.

Hip-hop has given Daara J’s lives a sense of purpose.  These Senegal homiez are on a mission.  “What’s most important is to try to set up a bridge between the American and Africans because we are all Africans; we’re all from the same source,” says Freddy.  “Y’ know, we’ve only been separated by the 400 years of slavery.  We all have the same ancestors and we’re all the same.  It’s just the ocean that separates them from us.  And we’re going to try to link up and to make a compact world.  We want to make Africa revive again.”