Joint Force talk 95

Joint Force were DLT, Otis, Slave and Mo Delay (Angus McNaughton). This interview is from the NZ music show Frenzy, which screened 11 May 1995, on TV3. Directed by Ross Cunningham, animation by John Pain, voiceover by Kate Stalker.

Sadly, all of Joint Force's releases are currently out of circulation. These days you can catch Slave MCing with Fat Freddys Drop. Otis and his wife run the Lucky Taco food truck.

Joint Force (OJ, DLT, Slave). Photo: Greg Riwai

Spark it up: 94 NZ hiphop

Here comes 26 minutes of rare footage from Big Day Out 1994, courtesy of Deepgrooves. Live snippets of Urban Disturbance (feat Zane Lowe) dropping No Flint No Flame, my man Bobbylon joins 3 The Hard Way for Hiphop Holiday (at 11.21) and there's "Damn Native, Joint Force [doing Nightmare Man] and the Pacifikan Descendants amongst others. We also see an array of who's who in the local Hip Hop scene backstage along with other familiar faces, Mr. Chris Sinclair, Mr. Nathan Haines to name a couple."

Follow the link for an interesting commentary on local hiphop in the 90s and the label's take on the Hiphop Holiday controversy ...

Screengrab: Bobbylon with 3 The Hard Way, at Big Day Out 1994.

MC OJ and his boots

Photo: Audioculture/Murray Cammick

There's a great piece freshly posted up on Audioculture this week by Gareth Shute, documenting the rise of a couple of AK honky rap boys, MCOJ and Rhythm Slave, loads of awesome photos too. My old band Hallelujah Picassos played with them a bunch of times, they were/are great guys. We even played the Auckland Town Hall with them, on a weird ass bill headlined by Push Push. And I remember we did a support slot alongside Joint Force (OJ, Slave, DLT) for Supergroove, in a basketball stadium in Mt Maunganui. That was a funny gig.

OJ (from Audioculture): "Back then, people always said – you’re just two white middle-class honkies, you can’t rap, it won’t work. We were like – just watch. And that’s how we gained our place in the history of local rap music. There’s some fucking gems in our hip-hop careers, but we never expected that we’d blow up and be huge. We just wanted to have a lot of fun and we definitely succeeded in that respect.”

The post on Audioculture mentions a song we did, called MCOJ and his Boots. I dug it out and uploaded it to Youtube...





LISTEN: Hallelujah Picassos - MCOJ and his boots / Picasso core, both off the 1993 album Drinking With Judas. OJ and Slave did a song called Dr Martens, about OJ's boots, and we did one too. Listen and you will hear OJ's disgust with our song. Sorry, OJ. On the end, OJ and Slave do a lively acapella of Picasso core. Warning - some swears.

Joint Force (OJ, DLT, Slave). Photo: Greg Riwai