The proposition that hip hop is universal makes more sense every day. From its roots in New York, the music has spread across the whole of the planet. It's everywhere. But hip hop is specific, too. Take Hazo. The producer who puts together the instrumental hip hop of the Ill Dependents project is based in Galway, Ireland. "When I go to make a track I want some part of myself to come out in it. I don't wanna be a carbon copy, as much as I like American hip hop. I want my own sound to come out. I want the sound of living in Galway on the western tip of Ireland to come out. I can listen to a record from New York, LA or London and I can say, that's what it's like to live there for them. Hopefully this is my bit of information to them. To get a sense of where I'm coming from or just the feelingings that I have. I just try to let them go through the equipment." The Ill Dependents EP (on Ultimate Dilemma) achieves this with some ease. From the mournful, sparse funk of "Tog Sos" to the rhetoric of a Bobby Sands poem on "The Retort", Hazo shows his understanding of the music as well as his own appropriation of it. Both are contained in his explanation of "The Retort". "I wanted to make a point. No one's ever listened to me. We get no say. You feel powerless. When you listen to "The Message" you can directly relate to that. There's something universal in it. And I think that's true of the poem, too." The universal and the specific run through everything this Irish beat-boy does. That's hip hop. "It's the hundred-monkey effect. You know that? They're doing a scientific experiment and they have one bunch of monkeys on one Island and another bunch on another island. And they have their nuts on the shore. The monkeys on one Island start cracking the nuts on rocks on the beach. The monkeys on the other Island do the very same thing at the very same time. The ideas went across time and space." That's hip hop.

by Clare Maloney - originally printed in 'Straight No Chaser' - July 1998