Position Correction (Review)

TZU formed in Melbourne in 1999, incorporating members of Curse Ov Dialect (notably DJ Paso Bionic, who shares production duties with Kiwi DJ Yeroc) and Pan, most notably lyricist, DJ, fruit vendor and Yoga teacher Seed, and represent the new generation, good time, party end of hip-hop, but with old school conscious lyrics and intellectual overtones. These are signalled by their name, a reference to Lao Tzu, ‘the original ancient Chinese B-Boy sage who freestyled the Tao Te Ching 3000 years ago (and we’re still feeling it)’ - lead rapper Joelistics, a part time teacher and high school hip-hop and theatre workshop facilitator, is Eurasian and takes his Daoist heritage seriously. He also name checks the I Ching-influenced writing of ‘the Magellan of psychedelic headspace’, Terence McKenna, on ‘language as the furniture for thinking and feeling and the building blocks of culture’. Joelistics is an engaging rhymer, and a champion freestyler, guesting with Sydney agit-rap group the Herd and showcasing his rapid-fire improvisatory MC skills regularly in ciphers at events such as the Newcastle Sound Summit. Position Correction, released by Mushroom subsidiary Liberation, follows on from the group’s more tentative, self-produced debut, the 6 track EP, Um …Just a Liddlebidova Mic Check.

It leads off with the relaxed, loping beats of ‘Who?’, an introduction to the group, which is also the subject of a high-energy ghetto-style video clip, ‘We Are TZU’, which looks like it was filmed in an underground car park. (It is featured on the giveaway CD Rom with issue number 11 of Stealth magazine, the local hip-hop mouthpiece, along with an interview with Joelistics.) ‘Summer Days’ is an exercise in hot weather hedonistic party rap, while the up-tempo guitar-driven title track introduces the group as ‘backpacking rat pattern back fashioned Fat Latin bushwalking nutcracking wordsmith tactitians’ while attacking current government spending cuts on education and the environment, mistreatment of asylum seekers and support for those who demonstrate. ‘The Horse You Rode in On’ is a full-on political diatribe against Aussie patriotism, the government, talkback radio, ‘redneck clucks’ and a range of other establishment forces, expressing ‘the kickback from toes you tread on’, and quoting the Herd’s ‘burn down the parliament’ along the way. The album ends with the ten-minute ‘Travel Song’, a freewheeling, Kerouac-like stream of consciousness recollection of travel experiences in the Himalayas, tropics, and elsewhere, backed by an insistent Hammond organ figure and bassline and small string orchestra. A slow church organ-like figure, swelling into an orchestral interlude, completes the quasi-classical final segment of the album, which covers a wide range of moods, styles and tempos, and represents another new direction in Australian hip-hop coming from an idiosyncratic Melbourne push which is making an important impact on local indigenisations of the genre.