By now I'm sure most of you who listen to our music have realised that TZU are not really the most Alpha male-ish kind of guys in Australian hiphop.
we don't really swagger like we have something to prove.
We don't aspire to the life style that you see advertised in film clips on video hits , we don't dumb ourselves down and Pip and I have never really written a proper battle rap. Oh well.
In fact when it comes to subject matter we pride ourselves on exploring new frontiers and we try and handle well worn topics with something that I hope our audience recognises as originality.
We've never really been too concerned wheather our lyrics have 'street' cred or if they make us sound tough and intimidating , which is not to say we don't wield anger , we just don't fashion armour out of it , in fact quite the opposite , our litmus test is - Is it authentic , does this make me more human and does it bounce ?
The older I get the more I keep searching for that. Art that rings true.
The same way that when you first hear Bill Hicks you think ' Fuck me , he's being a bit honest ' Or you see a Daniel Kitson show and think " Not a punch line in sight but I like the way his mind works". Or you see a Wes Anderson film and think " yep that makes me feel more accepting of my weird flaws and self doubts ".
A long time ago in a galaxy far far away we decided that what we said was just as important as how we said it.
And the music we said it on top of better be top shelf.
Our first record Position Correction was made when Aussie hiphop was still teething. It was made when we were all young and idealistic and we wrote songs about summer. The production was handled mainly by Paso and Yeroc and was composed almost entirely by samples from old records.Position Correction was our most hiphop record and was as true to the traditional form as four misfits could manage. It still remains probably our most popular record amongst the hard core.
Our second record Smiling at Strangers was made during a time when we were all feeling a bit sickened by the state of hiphop as a dominating consumer culture so we felt we needed to reach for something else , something outside our immediate sphere of influence. We plugged in guitars and mic'ed up drum kits and wrote songs about love and shit. We tried to subvert our own style , our own cliches and that of the genre we operated in. It alienated alot of people but was a liberating album to make.
The new album 'computer love' feels like a perfect melding of the two. It subverts the genre but stays true to the form. It sounds familiar and totally experimental. The topics we rap about are self referential but also universal. Sure there are love songs and politics on there but we approached them differently. We also touch on domestic violence , drug addiction , work place psychosis , and man boobs.
At some point we realised this album is the final in a trilogy. It's the apex. The album that fuses together what we did with Position Correction and what we tried to do with Smiling at Strangers. It's also the last official album on our label Liberation. I really hope you get to hear it....