Posting this up as the launch date for the brand new
documentary on Dawn Raid has just been anounced - out in cinemas Jan 21 2021. Directed by Oscar Kightley.
[I remember when I did this interview, Danny and Andy didn't want to come into the city to do it, they insisted I come out and see them on their own turf. I caught the bus out to Papatoetoe one friday night and they showed me round their shops and their studio, all self funded. I was mad impressed.]
It's A Raid!By Peter McLennan, NZ Musician, vol 9 no 6 Jun/July 2001
"For me, South Auckland is the centre of Polynesia,” says Brotha D as we walk back towards the offices of Dawn Raid Entertainment. He and his business partner YDNA have just taken me on a tour of their operation, out in the South Auckland suburb of Papatoetoe.
Up the road they have two shops; one selling their own clothing range under the Cocoland label, and a hair braiding shop called Klass Kutz. They've just bought a factory to house their screen printing operation, but they still haul their bags of T-shirts and hoodies off to the Otara markets every Saturday morning, just as they've done for the last few years.
We settle down in the comfortable surroundings of Dawn Raid HQ. They've recently opened up their own studio, right in the heart of South Auckland and close to their shops.
These boys are serious about their music, but they're also serious about business. Brotha D (Danny Leaosavaii) and YDNA (Andy Murnane) met while on a business course back in 1996.
"The original idea came when Danny was in Lost Tribe with UPR (Urban Pasifika Records), and they were doing really well,” says YDNA. "I came along in '96 and went on tour with Lost Tribe. We started thinking about it in back then, and started it in '98.”
Brotha D continues: "We actually thought the ride we wanted was the one with UPR. While this ride was going on, me and Andy were in business school together (they both left just short of finishing, when Dawn Raid started to take off). But then we saw the corporates get involved in it, and it's like a massive hand that slows the process of our wheel, that was spinning fine, you know? We saw that and went 'No way. If we do this, it's gonna be totally ours.' We're the ones that make the decisions, not some board meeting that decides how your album cover's going to look, and who they're marketing it to. Wouldn't we know best, cos we're doing the music?”
Brotha D says the idea for the first Dawn Raid compilation, 'Southside Story', came from his time with UPR and Lost Tribe.
"We were climbing, you know? Going to the music awards, doing the sets with Dave Dobbyn, and then I looked behind, and realised there was no one coming behind us. There was a major gap, from where Lost Tribe and UPR were and street level kids.
"With Lost Tribe, when Summer In The Winter broke out, it came in at number 16, so we knew the kids were listening to it. So we said let's grab these kids, and we'll develop them. All the acts on the first album, they're all unknowns. Now you tell me, which record label would ever go as far as doing something like that? No one, and we knew that.
"We knew we had to get the money ourselves. So Andy got the whole T-shirt thing together as our source of income. I went to find a studio that would believe in the same vision we had, because studios cost what, $80, $90, $100 an hour? Brothers ain't got that! I went to OMAC (Otara Music and Arts Centre) which is just down the road, and they put a big bill in my face. No way can we develop our kids in this way.
"Then we ran into Kev (Kevin Rangihuna) of One Luv Studios, in Surrey Cres. It's amazing, we had to take kids from South Auckland into the city, to Grey Lynn, to get recorded. To me, that is so barmy. That's why we always give our props to Kev, for believing in the same visions.”
While Brotha D was getting the music happening, YDNA was out there working for the cause.
"When the first album came out, we had a release party and we made a lot of money, not truck loads, but enough. Then we thought 'What do we do now, do we make more albums, or do we invest it in something else?' And we invested it into T-shirts, into clothes.”
Every morning Andy went to the flea market, with his wife and child, selling the T-shirts.
"That's still going on!” he says. "That's something people need to recognise too, it's bang on a year since the first album came out and here's another full length album, and look how professional it is, you know? And not only that, we started five businesses in that time too. When the first album came out, those two shops down the road didn't exist.
"It only took us 'til December to make the shops, and then we said, 'Damn, we need the new album'. At Christmas time we absolutely cracked it, made heaps of money and started to talk about a studio. We had Carlos 'C-Trax' Marsh (engineer) come on board, and we sat down and said 'What if we just do it?'.”
Brotha D sees the studio, not only as a way of recording young rappers from around his neighbourhood, but also as a training ground in production.
"We can start training our young fellas, put them into courses, and get them thinking about production. Then they can start developing others as well. We realised that a lot of money can be spent on studio time, so we just thought we'd take our cash and make our own. We need to get that message out to the kids too. If kids come up here struggling and they say 'We've saved $200', there's no doubt that Carlos would say 'I got a whole day for you, knock your song out'.”
YDNA knows the lie of the land: "As far as business goes, you have to set the standard. For some reason we have never got the funding, the video grants, people just don't seem to want to give it to us. So we just say 'Oh well, fine. We'll just step up to a level where you will have to help us.' We learnt from the first one and this time we did radio ads on Mai and in Sounds' magazine and we made a lot of business arrangements - but we're making $18 of the back end, so if we go gold like King Kapisi, well, you do the figures. ($135,000 for the calculator-challenged.) We'll be looking good.
"It's like, we're not getting the video grants, but that's cool, cos we've obviously made enough to do all this,” he says, gesturing at the studio. "'We don't buy flash cars and stuff, we buy flash businesses', is what we like to say.”
"That's why we are trying to get the funding people to come down here,” says Brotha D. "That's almost like our challenge to people, you know - 'Come and see for yourself'. A lot of people are skeptical.”
Unlike the first compilation, which featured fresh undiscovered talent from South Auckland, the second album adds several American hip hop acts to the mix. Brotha D explains: "It's not for comparison, the word here is 'contrast', and that's exactly what it is. What we're trying to say here is that we're coming up, this is the level we want to raise the game to. We've got to try and get our stuff up there, or that kid who's playing Snoop Dogg ain't never gonna touch our stuff. So, if that kid goes and sees our stuff, and the level is there, just as much as Snoop, maybe he'll check it out. These are stories about us, not about what's happening over there and these aren't established artists like Kapisi, or Ermehn. These are all fresh, new talent.”
The American artists on the album came through when YDNA visited the US last year, hooking up with acts like Boo Yah Tribe and Daz Dillinger. Dawn Raid has further Stateside connections, from supporting visiting acts like Naughty By Nature, Snoop Dogg, and Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
YDNA observes: "The thing is, hip hop came from America. I know everyone always tries to put their twist on it, like is there a Polynesian hip hop? Yeah, sure there is, we're Polynesians. But if you want to crack it in the hip hop world, it ain't in the three million people here, I can tell you that right now. For us to do well, if it's bringing in their music and selling it here for our people, or us selling ours over there, or in Tokyo or Africa or Australia, that's what we want to go and find out. What's going to make the kids go 'Snoop Dogg or Dawn Raid'?
"We gotta put up a fight, and the thing is, when you listen to our album, our kids sound just as good. With this album, we're giving something to our community, cos we think what we're giving is best suited to here, and America. We concentrate all our time on this, right here. You can just do it - Brotha D wants to do an Island album - bam, he just goes in there and does it. That's the beauty of independence. Like Kog Transmissions - we've had a good talk to Kog, and they've told us not to sign to the majors, you know?”
When I ask them where Dawn Raid sits in New Zealand music, YDNA doesn't hesitate: "At the top of New Zealand hip hop!” (Cue more laughter from Brotha D.) "The thing with us is, see that? (he points.) There's album number one, that's number two. You name another New Zealand hip hop artist that's done that. I can only name one, which is DLT. So when we drop our next album or single, whatever we drop next, we go down in history as the first people to ever do it. And we ain't got signed, we ain't even got a video out. So we're gonna go down in history anyway, and we could call it quits then, and just say we're gonna do business ... we're not gonna do that, of course.”
Brotha D says it has taken a while for people to catch on to what they do, even within hip hop circles: "Like, the first Hip Hop Summit goes down in Christchurch, and they phone us up; 'We'd love to have you guys, we've got five tickets for you to fly down'. And I said 'Do you know anything about us?' and they said, 'Yeah yeah, we've got the album, it's beautiful'. I said, 'Man, we run 25 deep, you cannot get the full impact of Dawn Raid if you just take five of us, so either you've got 25 seats on that plane for us, or we ain't coming at all'.
"And hallelujah, we all flew to Christchurch!” adds YDNA.
Brotha D falls about laughing, then continues: "Now, imagine what it did to my young fellas, first time ever out of South Auckland. We stayed a whole week down in Christchurch, and it was mindblowing for them. They came back, and all these ideas just came flooding out of their heads. You know, if we can't do something, we'll tell you we can't do it. That's one of the big things about us and the young acts we do have - we're just straight honest with them. The big corporates aren't that honest, cos I've experienced that myself.”
They're currently working with Deceptionz, Kaos, 275, Ill Semantics, and have signed one year contracts with them.
"We say to the kids, 'We'll talk again in 12 months time, cos we don't want to hold you to nothing',” says YDNA. "With this second album, we came out with it cos we told people this is what we're gonna do. We'd just bought a factory, and obviously, factories aren't cheap, and we probably could've just sat back and relaxed for a bit.
"People talk shit all the time in New Zealand, even the majors, saying 'Yo, we're gonna get behind this product', then they find out people ain't buying it, so they hide that one out the back. It's like the industry telling us 'This is the way it is, this album sucks'. We knew the UPR album didn't suck. We knew it was awesome, but about a month or two after it comes out, we go up to Sounds, and on the bargain basement table are stacks of UPR albums for $10. The difference is, back then people out here knew we were UPR, with our stand at the markets. So I said sweet, $200, I bought 'em all. I went to the Otara markets, and sold them all for 30 bucks each!”
The ethnic mix on Dawn Raid may be diverse but Brotha D and YDNA know exactly where they're coming from: "On this record label there's every culture,” says YDNA. "Carlos is Maori, Fred is Nuiean, I'm Irish, he (Brotha D) is Samoan. New Zealand is a Polynesian island, we're all Pacific people, we all came from somewhere else, and that's what we try to bring, because hip hop is worldwide.
"I hate all the rules that go with hip hop - to me it is whatever you make of it. We do our own thing. I mean, do me and Brotha D breakdance? Hell no!”
Yes, Brotha D may not be busting head spins, but he does know that a man's gotta eat: "When people say 'We're all four realms' (graffiti, breaking, MC'ing, DJ'ing), I'm like, good on you, but we're providing for our community, know what I mean? That four realms ain't gonna feed some of these mouths that we're feeding at the moment. Like Fred and his family - they run the clothes shop.
His whole family is like 'Oh my god, here's my son, who I thought would never amount to anything', now look at him. He's been with us from the start, when we were first printing up T-shirts, and now he's in there, running the shop, and he hasn't changed, but the way people think about him has changed. We're just trying to give them hope that there is another way to look at it."
