An Overdue Tribute: Loki's History of Scottish Hip Hop
Speak to many artists in our wee scene and you hear a recurring complaint: the Scottish music industry, encompassing labels, promoters, booking agents, journalists and “tastemakers”, absolutely hate hip hop. After all, how can it make sense that a multi-faceted art form with decades of history in this country is seen as an idiosyncratic aberration at best and a depraved hobby for coked up bams at worst? Matters are hardly helped when you have the likes of Brian Beacom, one of our country’s award winning entertainment writers, describing rap as a “sorry stream of semi-literate consciousness… with all the cultural merit of Wee Willie Winkie”.
Maybe it would be better for our image if all hip hop’s critics expressed their objections in such terms, at least providing us with establishment figures to rally against. The truth is more painful: self-proclaimed gatekeepers of Scottish culture don’t hate hip hop - they’re just utterly indifferent. As I’ve written before, some of that has to do with classism and a longstanding cultural cringe. Working on arts and entertainment desks at newspapers (i.e. the few that still have them), I saw first-hand how palatable indie bands were afforded endless puff pieces for breathing while hard-grafting emcees were mocked with “gangster” puns and Eminem comparisons.
However, there’s another aspect to this: certain music genres and modes of culture are hegemonic in this country in a way that hip hop never has been. It’s partially why Scotland’s resurgent folk scene is able to chalk up multiple nominations for this year’s Scottish Album of the Year awards but no rap record gets a look in. It isn’t the public who decide the longlist and subsequent shortlists but pop critics and promoters. Scottish trad artists didn’t start being taken serious by the mainstream overnight – over the past several years, they’ve penetrated the bubble by purposefully seeking to raise their scene’s visibility, celebrating their history and building a narrative.
As you can imagine, then, I was absolutely over the moon to see a full 30-minute documentary air on the new BBC Scotland channel over the summer (which you can watch here) as part of a special “hip hop season”. Astonishingly, it’s taken over 30 years for our public service broadcaster to adequately document Scottish hip hop and its contributions to our culture. Sure, there’s written history: Bram ‘T3xture’ Gieben, Dave ‘Solareye’ Hook and Drew ‘Werd’ Devine’ have done great work, and we intend to contribute via long-form interviews on this new blog. But in terms of visual storytelling, Loki’s History of Scottish Hip Hop must surely be considered the first major attempt to achieve what classic docs like Beat Street and Wildstyle did all those years ago.
Its release seemed a good opportunity to sit down and chat with Darren ‘Loki’ McGarvey about our scene and the direction it’s going in. Whatever you think of his albums, polemical books, political commentary, provocative columns and podcast appearances, it’s impossible to deny he flies the flag for our scene on mainstream platforms more frequently and vociferously than anyone you can name. His passion comes across powerfully in our chat (which partially explains why our conversation darts about so much). You get the sense that for him, the documentary isn’t just a quirky commercial project to fill a schedule. As he puts it: “The hip hop season has at long last opened a commentary on Scottish hip hop, its contributions to our culture, how Scottish identity has shaped our own hip hop culture, and how hip hop can have a role in bringing together divided communities.”
How long has this project been in the making?
This documentary has been in the can for a while. The idea began three or four years ago. Sace [Lockhart, producer and director] brought it to me as a kind of definitive take on the history of the Scottish iteration of hip hop culture and its roots in the US and the UK. We had a great deal of trouble, not necessarily getting the pitch right but the environment wasn’t ready for it.
And, of course, half an hour is only really a snapshot into such a multifaceted culture. How long did you initially sketch it out to be?
We pitched it as an hour and it was cut to half an hour. There are issues you can imagine will arise from the hip hop community when they see it – some will be frustrated their crew isn’t mentioned it; some will be frustrated there isn’t a ten minute section on someone like Mog, for example. Personally. I think he should have his own half-hour documentary, but ultimately we’re the ones who had to decide what the most important story being told was. For us, the most important story is capturing that pioneering phase of Scottish hip hop, when people like Sace were kids. Back then it was breaking that was the big draw, and it was important to show how this reduced territorial tensions. Young people were travelling from scheme to scheme, breaking on cardboard outside shops. This was something that had never been seen before. Meanwhile, people like Gaz Mac, one of the godfathers of graffiti, was going to the Art School with portfolios and they weren’t interested. This is how cutting edge it was. The same people who knocked him back would later be salivating over Banksy.
When writing about the graffiti scene, I always found it ironic there were no spaces for artists to do their thing, and people like Gaz had to obviously set up a private space at SWG3, but authorities are happy to commission murals by people that only got good by tagging illegally in the first place.
Exactly. We touch on that in the film. And it plays a big part in the sense that its split up into looking at the different elements: graffiti, breaking, deejaying and emceeing. The film in a certain time frame goes into the history of American hip hop, its development, then the Scottish iteration. We had a sit down committee with II Tone Committee, which has never been done. It’s rare to even see a picture with the four of them in it. That for me was a great honour. We did it in the recording studio where they did their first projects. We also looked at how the value system of hip hop has changed over the years. In the early days, there was a focus on being proficient in every element, at least. You might specialise in rap, but you could DJ and you could break and you could tag. Think of guys like Konchis and Physiks now – when I was workshopping them when they were 18 they could do a bit of everything, whereas now a lot of folk specialise in one area.
You mentioned this being the Scottish iteration of hip hop, and so in some ways the doc feels like an overdue Scottish equivalent to the sorts of documentaries you get on American hip hop. Did you take any inspiration from some of the famous documentaries from the 1980s, for example, like Wild Style? Is it stylised in that sense or a bit more geared towards a BBC audience?
The way the documentary has been edited, the aesthetic, we think that is representative of a kind of hip hop style, some of the production that is used for the soundtrack. It’s got its own look and own feel. While films like that are natural references to make and we reference them in the film, those films represent an older style of documentary making that people wouldn’t sit through now. Think of something like The Defiant Ones and how it’s edited. It’s more representative of the kind of pace and style that people are used to in the era of YouTube, where if something’s not grabbing you in two minutes you’re clicking on the next video. So it’s quite current aesthetically.
Chronologically, where does your story and your era come into the story then?
Well, me personally, I’m there in the beginning, talking about how I got into it, the artists I’d first heard of like Big Div and the guys at Powercut Productions. I talk about the issue I had around the accent, the first time I heard hip hop in that accent and how it made me cringe.
That’s interesting. For me and people I know who are into it, you got into American hip hop first, then English hip hop before enjoying the Scottish stuff, all in that order. Maybe it is that cultural cringe. Was that the same for you?
Absolutely. In fact, I maybe got more schooled on the UK scene after hearing some Scottish guys. But all in all, the documentary does try to reference current artists, so some of the younger guys and women doing it like Shogun, Empress, Gasp and others. Yes, these guys are overlooked and as a scene we’re used to having conversations about underexposure, but I hope when people from the scene read this they look at the context and how a lot of it works.
When Young Fathers won the Mercury Music Prize, there was a lot of outcry in the Scottish hip hop community and resentment expressed because they’re not overtly “Scottish” in how they brand themselves, but that’s nothing new. The LuckyMe team excelled in much the same way. When these artists have succeeded, though, it’s turned a lot more attention onto our scene. I had media requests for days after – I’m sure Hector Bizerk and Stanley Odd did too – when Young Fathers won. When you might watch something like this and you don’t see yourself in it, you have to think about the bigger picture and think about the community as a whole. We’re on a long journey of trying to get Scottish hip hop seen as legitimate, not necessarily mainstream, but not unacceptably radical and different.
Pic: Wikimedia Commons
One thing some would struggle with presenting something like this is having to resist the temptation to be annoyingly moralistic. I mean, I always get a bee in my bonnet about seeing the same rehashed articles about rappers being the “Scottish Eminem” and so on. I did wonder if there was a point in the documentary – cut out or kept it – where you wanted to get things off your chest. How polemical did you intend to be?
With this, it all had to flow. It’s quite tightly written. Unlike some other work I’ve done where half of it is off the cuff, this had to conform to a rhythm. We had to fact check everything we were saying. It all had to be grounded in reality. I’m hoping that it will inspire enough good will in the hip hop community and also that people, rather than just being against it because it doesn’t reflect their exact expectations, see it as another step towards something they might be able to be involved in down the line. These things open the doors. Artists who think about things professionally and strategically will see the benefits of this regardless of whether their scheme or crew are referenced in it. The story of the culture is much bigger than any one of us.
On the culture point, you mentioned how different elements of the scene are covered. One observation some people making when going to a breaking event or a beatbox event or whatever, is they tend to draw in their own sub-scenes. It’s easy to romanticise hip hop as a unified arts movement composed of different forms. Things are perhaps a little more segregated than we might want to admit. To what extent does the documentary convey that?
There are two key reasons hip hop has fragmented and elements are isolated from one another. One is the decline of public space, whether it’s venues like this [a café] or community centres or venues with the capacity to hold dynamic events like a hip hop convention with workshops and breakers and graffiti artists and DJs, then that has an impact. The other aspect is since hip hop has become commercially successful and rap tends to be the thing that’s presented only, that’s all people engage with when they first see hip hop. Whereas Wildstyle and Beat Street had an emphasis on specific areas, they presented hip hop as elemental. People saw every aspect represented. Now they don’t, so it doesn’t occur to people, even many emcees. Can it be changed? Who knows? We can’t answer every question in the doc but we try to represent every element in the documentary.
The battle scene has at different points been pretty big in recent years as well, as you know. Was there much space to delve into that?
Sadly, we needed more time to lend context to it. In the hour long pitch, we had a section dedicated to battling and a more lengthy and scholarly take on the Scottish language and the issues around it. We looked at flyting, for example. These are things that had to be dropped or cut for time. We got Dave Hook [Solareye from Stanley Odd] involved. He helped give us the more in depth academic take on Scottish identity in the context of hip hop.
Obviously, there’s a political dimension to all this as well, and artists like yourself have often received notable coverage for exploring big political issues. No art is made in a vacuum of course and Scottish hip hop has mostly emerged in working class communities where certain attitudes are very prevalent. How did you engage with that?
We touch on it. A lot of the early music that was released was referencing Thatcherism. While we don’t have the time or researchers to go on a deep dive, and there’s an element of political correctness at play, attributing social decline to one political party in a BBC documentary is obviously problematic.
Something you expressed in the Daily Record column you wrote ahead of the doc’s release was that hip hop spoke to a certain community in a way that no other genre in Scotland really can. What is it about hip hop that makes it such a vehicle for provocative or hard hitting themes, do you think?
Hip hop is primarily designed for activism. The whole process by which hip hop emerged in the first place was radical, using public space, engaging in civil disobedience and vandalism, and finding a voice to channel things that weren’t being talked about because they affected minority groups who weren’t enfranchised. So even just the process of hip hop in itself is activism. That doesn’t mean every artist has to be political, but it’s useful for most artists to recognise engaging with hip hop is a political act on some level and it wouldn’t exist if not for the people who took those steps initially. I’d love to do something more in that vein – who knows whether that door will open.
One thing I did identify in the documentary is you pay tribute to women’s contributions to the scene. Hip hop can of course be quite a macho arena and some groups have often been marginalised. How did you approach addressing that when making the documentary?
Much of the documentary undoubtedly charts a period in history where it was predominantly white, working class men involved. I don’t want to undermine the story of the pioneering generation by superimposing values we’ve developed since, but it’s also important we put the spotlight on many of the women artists, promoters and so on doing important things in the scene. I’m now also seeing younger artists actually confront these things and debate, which is great. A lot of the younger artists getting involved now are increasingly more progressive than they’re given credit for.
Speaking of young people, many may watch a documentary like this and feel inspired to get involved. What advice would you have for them, not only as performers but also as they seek to engage with the wider hip hop community?
There’s an intensity and aggression and bravado to the younger folk’s stuff, which you’d expect. The ones who’ve been successful have professionalised what they do, the ones who get paid for gigs, the ones who do workshops, the ones who have diversified in areas like media or whatever, because ultimately you reach an age where responsibilities come into play and pull you away from your music. When I go play or Stanley Odd play, we have our own scenes around us. There’s a difference between a collection of artists talking about each other and sometimes resenting each other, and just forgetting about it and ploughing on with what you need to do without being mean spirited to people.
People get gassed up because they get views on social media and they have mates that cosign them – that’s cool, you need that – but the real test for upcoming artists who want to succeed beyond the scene is to take stuff to a non-hip hop audience. Do your lyrics stand up when you pull the beat out? What’s your showmanship like? How many gigs have you got under your belt? Do you get paid for them? These are metrics for progress. If you don’t want to go down that route, that’s cool too, but if you upload some freestyles and generate a buzz because of a beef doesn’t necessarily mean you’re up front leading the community. What some of us lack in youthful exuberance, we make up for in seasoned maturity in the message we carry to those outside of hip hop. Think of Big Div or Steg G.
How do you hope this documentary is received?
While certain compromises have been made to get it done, I think it retains enough integrity and I think it’s just hardcore enough that the pioneering generation will be happy to see the effort we’ve put in to reflect what it was like in that time and the real sea change that occurred in sections of working class communities, where hip hop invigorated people in a way I think that nothing else besides things like football had done previously. We wanted to pay tribute to that.
Loki’s History of Scottish Hip Hop is available on BBC iPlayer