Rap attack
Joe Lampard takes no bullshit from Credit To The Nation’s Matty Hanson.
Eighteen-year-old Guardian-reading son of a Pentecostal minister, brought under the wing of
Chumbawamba at the age of sixteen, and well-sussed .
musician, Matty Hanson (aka MC Fusion of Credit To The Nation) is learning and growing from his mistakes as he goes along.
Throughout his two-year career, in which he has attracted press attention by sampling both Nirvana and Public Enemy, he has made strong vocal attacks on American peers such as Ice Cube and Ice T, and has slagged off the whitewashed rap of Kriss Kross, Marky Mark and Vanilla lce. This is one artist who certainly isn‘t going to sit on the fence and take any bullshit, whatever form it takes; sexism, fascism, homophobia, racism, all are equally high on Matty’s biting lyrical agenda.
‘What l‘m saying in my lyrics is important and needs to be heard, ‘cause so many people just make music for the sake of making music, or if they do
have a message it’s a negative one. Like all the sexist 3
bullshit that you hear when listening to hip-hop, lce Cube and ice T, shit like that, black people have a hard enough time as it is without having this sexist stereotype to cope with. I mean so many people are put off hip-hop because of the macho image it has.’ Not that Matty is holier-than-thou and scared to admit his own mistakes. ‘When I started out, l was
just like any other typical hip-hop fan. Looking back
on some of the stuff I did is embarrassing. My first track, ‘Pay The Price‘, was slagging off Vanilla Ice
for copying black artists and hip-hop. At the time l’d .
wanted the front cover to be a picture of me standing in front of a Mercedes holding a dog, you know, it’s like, what the fuck has that to do with Vanilla ice, it’s
a cliched stereotype itself. Also, when i listen to it now I've got a fuckin‘ American accent, you know like a lot of British hip-hop acts have — trying to be something they're not. On the flip side of my new single, One Little lndian needed something quick, so they stuck on ‘Time To Get Hype‘ which I hate listening to now, so i had to get something on it, to take the piss out of myself.‘ Hence the ‘American Wannabe Remix’.
While chatting to him, you can't but notice a hint of apprehension and anger. ‘At the start the music press couldn‘t print enough good things about us, but now it‘s like some of them have just got bored of that and have ran out of good things to say, so they‘re turning on us and being stupid and picky. But not all the music press are like that, it’s not that I want to take Chumbawamba‘s stance and not talk to press, ’cause
. j 7‘ :5,
in the end it’s the press that can help me get my message over to more people,’ says Matty diplomatically. But then again you can’t exactly blame him for his apprehensive approach to journos. As he says, ‘In certain music papers we went from having single of the week and being somewhat flavour of the month to having cheap jibes thrown at us and being accused of working off Chumbawamba’s back and copying them.’
in keeping with Credit To The Nation’s recent single release, ‘Hear No Bullshit, See No Bullshit, Say No Bullshit’, leave the music press to play their games and read no bullshit.
Credit To The Nation play The Calton. Edinburgh on
Sun 22 as part of The Convulsion Fortnight.
mm . . .and you’ve gottogettirereand hack . . .’
' Clearly Paul devotes so each of his
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CO The List 20—26 August 1993