Saigon and Dolasoul - two DPT members
DPT is short for Tha De-Plow-Matz. The crew is made up of Saigon (real name Saleeh Mzee), Dolasoul (real name Ahmed Dola), Trip Dogg (real name Philip Mwinmanji) and Storm (real name Amour Shamte). In the DPT family we also find manager/organiser Nkwessa.
The origin of DPT can be traced back to 1992 when Saigon and Tripp Dog met in school and started to rap just for fun. Since then a number of guys have been involved with DPT shorter or longer periods. Saigon met Delasoul in Lagos, Nigeria, when their families lived there. As the name implies the hardcore members of DPT are sons of Tanzanian diplomats. Their parents give them a lot of support.
DPT mixes lyrics in English and Swahili, but more in Swahili, since you can't sell music with text in English in Tanzania. They had a cassette released in 1997 recorded at Master J's studio. Master J recorded them for free but gets royalities on the sales! This a kind of deal that you hardly can find in the conventional music business.
Master J has also done the instrumental parts for the recordings:
Master J mixes the beats and everything. We just drop the lyrics.
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We're trying to come in our own way, our own Tanzanian way. The
instrumentals they may sound more European I know that but
there are a couple of songs like "Tanzania" in our latest album where
we incorporate some local, traditional music. Like the guitar
line, we try to put some element of live music back into the
music.
They say that the hip hop culture in Dar is basically limited to rap
music and clothes. Dolasoul says:
Tanzanians don't go out there and do crazy stuff. They are
really respectful people. If you do that everybody would say
"Hey what's wrong with him. He's a Tanzanian, why is he doing
that?" It's a matter of different values.
You can add that spray can paint is quite expensive...
They add that there are status problems:
We don't really get much opportunity. The last time we
tried to go for an interwiev on a radio station we had to go through
a very long process to get there. They have to sign you up,
book you up. You have to wait for one week or even a month
before they decide if you can go there.
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There is this conception here in Tanzania that rap music
is just for dropouts, people who smoke mariujana. Tanzanians
think that we're just copying Americans, we steal their rap
stuff, the instrumentals. There is people out there who still
thinks some of the songs we've made that they are American and
we just changed the words a little bit. But that's not the
case actually.
They are performing live, but not on any occasion:
There are people who organize concerts in a rush just to
try to make money. They try to use you. You hear promoters
every day coming up 'Oh I have a concert can you come and
perform there?' You go and perform and at the end of the day
you get nothing at all. 'I ran into a loss. I don't have money
to pay you. Maybe next week I'll have the money.' So we try to
do very few concerts and make the groove different each time.
We've got a name also. It took a long time to build that
reputation. You can blow in up in a day. So we try to restrict
the amount of performances we do.
We don't perform in parties and things like that. Most concerts we do them in cinema halls, so there are
seats and nobody can stand up and dance. Some people in the
back will be standing, move and make noise.
Asked about their plans for the future they say:
Basically to go out of Tanzania to perform, may be in East
African countries, like Nairobi, Kenya, Uganda. Later on maybe
South Africa. If we get that we may go to Europe. But first
of all we'd like to get all of Africa in hand. Recently we
received and invitation from a promoter in Nairobi who took II
Proud there. So in December we going there to perform in Nairobi.
Samples from the cassette Tha De-Plow-Matz 4 Life (FM Music Bank)
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