The bling that shakes the barley

Listen carefully to This I Have To Hear, the new album from Messiah J and The Expert, and you might get more than you’d bargained for. As a shout-out to astute fans, the Dublin hip-hop duo have illicitly sampled several well known pop stars. Obviously, no names are mentioned – so early into their career the last thing Messiah J and The Expert ( aka John Fitzgerald and Cian Galvin ) need is a zillion dollar lawsuit care of the mainstream record industry. Perhaps they’re simply getting off on the sense of danger?

“It’s just a bit of fun,” explains, Galvin, beat master to Fitzgerald’s street-preacher rapper. “We did it for the one guy out there who picks up on the sample and goes ‘yeah – fair dues – they’re willing to take chances’.”
Sampling, in fact, has caused the pair no end of heartache. Their first album, 2002’s What’s Confusing You?, contained a Dean Martin sample – the track in question was a concert favourite but, fearing they would be sued out of existence, Galvin and FitzGerald exorcised it from their songbook.
“Clearance is such a big issue nowadays,” explains FitzGerald, who raps at 100-mph on stage and speaks twice as fast in person. “An album like the Beastie Boy’s Paul’s Boutique [pieced almost entirely together from from samples] could never be made today.”
Artists will routinely demand 60 per cent of royalties in exchange for permission to sample their work, continues Galvin. Considering the average hip-hop track may contain three or four samples, this would require Messiah J and the Expert to hand over 180 per cent of their profits. You do the math.
Besides, sampling, Galvin believes, has become a lazy way of cribbing off more talented musicians. As an example, he cites Kanye West’s ‘Touch The Sky’, which lifts Curtis Mayfield’s ‘Move On Up’ in its entirely.
“That’s just so lame – taking someone else’s song,” says Galvin sniffily. “Puff Daddy did it as well obviously, when he rapped over The Police’s ‘Every Breath You Take’. You could just sense him waiting for the cash to roll in.”
Speaking of hip-hop’s A-league, it turns out that Galvin and Fitzgerald have barely a kind word for Eminem, Diddy or yes, even Kanye. (“His first album was good. But then it went very mainstream,” sneers Galvin).
Sacred cows aren’t spared a bashing either – recently Messiah J and The Expert opened for Wu Tang Clan’s Ghostface Killah in Dublin and were horrified by what they saw.
“Ghostface was the worst hip-hop show we’ve been to – by miles,” says Fitzgerald. “He celebrated all the lame old stereotypes. Sampled gunshots would go off between every song. Just terrible.”
Depressingly, more than half the audience revelled in every cliché- soaked moment, chips in Galvin: “Okay, so a few people thought it was pretty dreadful. But you had all these guys getting into the karaoke spirit of it.”
Shortly after the Ghostface gig, HP caught up with Messiah J and The Expert backstage at Vicar St., where they supported Public Enemy. The plan was for Galvin and Fitzgerald to hang with Chuck D’s posse before the show. As it transpired, they got to meet the NYC polemicists only briefly.
“They literally pulled up in a van as the curtain went up,” recalls Fitzgerald. “The music had already began when they entered the building.”
Starting out, the lads worshipped at the altar of crews such as Public Enemy and Wu-Tang (“They were like superheroes,” says Galvin. “Raekwon, Method Man, The GZA – they all had their own costumes and symbols and everything.”). Nowadays, they hardly ever listen to hip-hop
“I buy like, one hip-hop album every six months,” Galvin expands. “We’re into stuff like the Arctic Monkeys today, because what they’re singing about is real. Eminem was like that early on. But now he’s as bad as the stuff he used to take the piss out of.”
Considering that hip-hop is their chosen trade, one might expect this disillusionment to pose problems. In fact, their love of rap is undiminished. What they can’t stand is all the gangsta boilerplate – 50 Cent, in their opinion, is the worst thing to ever happen to the genre.
“To me, hip-hop is the purest folk music,” maintains Galvin. “You can start up a beat and rap over it: you don’t need any instruments. You just need something to say.”
Still, Dublin does love to pigeon hole and Messiah J and the Expert don’t often get to play to the eclectic audiences they believe to be their natural constituency.
“We’re coming from the leftfield end of the spectrum,” Galvin resumes. “We've a lot in common with the likes of Sage Francis and Buck 65, who incorporate elements of the blues and post rock into their sound.”
Also holding the duo back, believes Fitzgerald, is a widespread prejudice against Irish hop-hop.
“We’re always told, ‘Well, you’re pretty good...for an Irish band’. Fuck that: we want to be good full-stop."
Fitzgerald bristles at the suggestion that Messiah J’s rapping isn’t sufficiently ‘street’.
“I’m a middle class kid. I’m not going to pretend to be working class, just as I don’t pretend to be American. This stuff is the real me. I rap in my real accent.”
Abroad, Messiah J and the Expert have found it easier to slip free of genre hand-cuffs. In the UK, influential DJs Steve Lamacq and Annie Mac are fans, while MTV2‘s Zane Lowe is reported to have salivated over What’s Confusing You? (for their part, Galvin and Fitzgerald are proud of their debut but feel it suffers an excess of enthusiasm).
During the recording of Now This I Have To Hear, there were even rumblings of major label interest from London. In the end, however, nothing came of this, prompting the pair to set up their own imprint, Inaudible Records.
“We thought, we’ve got a great album here. Why are we waiting for someone else to do it for us?” says Fitzgerald. “Majors in the UK were telling us they were interested in putting out the record but the phone calls never came. So we decided ‘Feck it, let’s just do it ourselves’.”
By day, Galvin works with classical distributor Naxos. Classical music, he feels, is exponentially more experimental than what passes for left-field contemporary music: “Thing’s are so formulaic today. You’ve got your verse, your chorus, your verse, your chorus. With classical music, these guys were really pushing the boundaries, bending the rules. You never knew what would happen next. It’s probably not a good comparison, but, on this record, we’ve tried to do that. We’ve messed around with the time signatures, we’ve put in bits of guitar. Anything to make it different.”
Messiah J, for his part, works in a newsagent.
“It’s okay,” he ruminates. “You encounter all human life there. I get whole songs out of the stuff I see every day.”