INTERVIEW - STEALTH MAG

With Dizzy Dustin busy downing happy meals at MacDonalds, Andy Cat was left to steer Ugly Duckling's "journier" solo. Mark Pollard went along for the ride.

They call themselves "retro" hip hoppers but, really, they are more focused on creating and performing entertaining music than any of the labels that people can throw at them. Ugly Duckling’s Andy Cat, Dizzy Dustin and Young Einstein are now a formidable threesome however it has taken almost a decade for them to build up enough momentum to release an album. With Young Einstein concocting the majority of the musical backing on an MPC (the same MPC they have been using for the past nine years), the group’s latest offering, "A Journey to Anywhere", is heavy on staple jazz and funk riffs and light on attitude, a combination that has earned them a following all over the world.

When you think ‘Ugly Duckling", chances are you are picturing the gold chain they have linked with themselves like Flava Flav and his clock; or perhaps you recall one of their choruses. The gold-chain wearing and catch-phrase repetition ("It’s freshmode, whut") has worked favourably to some extent for the group by giving easy visual and audio items for people to recall and associate with the group. According to Andy Cat, "We think that stuff is kind of funny and kind of cool but we certainly want to get past being an old school hommage group. But at the same time that’s part of our sound, that’s part of our style. It’s the hip hop we grew up with so we’re trying to merge the old school with some real imagination and cartoony, funky flavour. That’s where Ugly Duckling is at now." However, Andy continues, the way they go about things is a double-edged sword. "It’s certainly been cool in a lot of ways but our sound and our approach … a lot of people have a hard time getting into it because it is so old," he says. "A lot of people think that it is over and it is time to move on. A lot of people are resentful of our classic approach to hip hop."

By "classic approach", Andy is referring to the group’s production style which is based on sampling and sequencing loops instead of layering chopped-up sounds. And, it appears, he is talking more in the context of commercial radio and club DJs than the global underground that has taken to UD like a duck to water. He continues: "So a lot of times it is hard to get into the mix with DJs because they are trying to get a certain ‘modern’ sound and being that our stuff is more classic – loop-oriented and music-oriented – they just sort of shy away from our record."

The mindset that Andy and Ugly Duckling are battling against is the same mindset that any artist trying to create their own sound comes up against: commercialism. "America is just an incredibly big commercial market and kids grow up with commercial products and big record labels shoving stuff down their throats to such a degree that all the radio stations play the same twelve tracks over and over again. It is almost inescapable for a kid and being that we’re all moulded with that mentality that’s sort of the musical appreciation that you get."

That said, Ugly Duckling are still about creating catchy music by their own definition. "When we do music we do approach it with, ‘Yeah we’re going to have a chorus on here that’s going to have a hook’, and we’re trying to make the tunes catchy but that’s not only for commercial purposes. It’s stuff that pulls people in and grabs them into the music and every great song ever to me had a great hook whether it was A Tribe Called Quest or Big Daddy Kane." So from "Freshmode, it’s freshmode, it’s whut" to "Every body c’mon – na na na na na" through to "Rock on Top", the chorus and the hook are important to UD for a very simple reason: "it’s because that’s what we think is good music."

As for politically and socially driven content, Andy says: "I don’t approach lyrics to be the greatest rapper in the world. I approach lyrics to be part of the instrumentation, almost like a percussive instrument over our tracks. We just try to get something funky going rhythmically." There is no doubt that music can be a catalyst for social change however Andy makes an interesting point about artists in the context of post-MTV superstardom and their ability to really make insightful comments. "To me, people who are artists and rock stars, all they really should be doing is entertain people and play music because they probably have the least grip on how reality is." He points to a quote from Elvis Presley to support his argument: "When Elvis was making his comeback - it was in the early 70s - someone asked Elvis, ‘What do you think about the Vietnam war?’ And Elvis just went: ‘I’m an entertainer. I’m a song-and-dance man. I don’t share my political views. I just like to entertain folks.’ And I thought that was kind of a funny contrast to the hippie generation where everybody who could play a guitar sat there and told everybody else how they should live their lives and Elvis, who in fact served in the military, knew better to just keep his mouth shut and shake his butt."

How far they can keep pushing their "retro" label remains to be seen. "We went through that on our first EP because we had all these songs about the old school and stuff and you can’t just keep talking about that stuff over and over again. So with this record we tried to develop it a little more, still do some old school hommages and also go into some new subject matter. So I suppose with the next record we’ll try and develop it further and maybe take a lot of the subject matter more along the lines of the song, ‘A Journey to Anywhere’, where we get into some real dreamy-cartoony and funky stuff." It is this sort of escapist track that really excites Andy. "From underground up to the jiggy stuff, the subject matter has got really repetitive in hip hop music so we want to do something adventurous… I’d like to lean more towards the side of KMD or ‘Three Feet High and Rising’ [by De La Soul] - experimental with the sound and subject matter."

Initially it took Ugly Duckling a while before their hard work started paying off but Andy sees the lag as fortunate because it has enabled the group to "grow and get tight as a unit." And now that the unit has arrived in Australia it’s time for us to get first hand experience of just how it is for Ugly Duckling to rock on top during their journey to anywhere, a voyage that still has many years to run.