MC Zulu talks the way you want a dancehall rapper to talk. Whether he’s toasting over cut-up dubstep beats or answering your dumbest questions in a booth at the Rainbo, his deep growl has such a distinctively Caribbean lilt that you keep expecting him to slip into patois—he reminds me of modern reggae lions like Bounty Killer and Shabba Ranks. But Zulu, real name Dominique Rowland, just has the accent, not the vocabulary—he spent his early childhood in Panama and moved to Chicago when he was nine.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The scene Zulu calls home is the one that gave birth to what New Yorker pop critic Sasha Frere-Jones has christened “lazer bass”—a sort of club music for futurists that literalizes the one-world dreams of Internet utopians by combining geographically distinct subgenres from several continents. It blends dancehall with American hip-hop, UK grime, reggae-influenced electronic styles like dubstep and jungle, and maybe a dozen or so other idioms, from electro to fidget house to South African kwaito. With so many component parts, it might seem that lazer bass could sound like almost anything, but the genre has a few unifying elements: insanely, hilariously deep bass lines and goofy, colorful synth voices that are sometimes more like sound effects than actual musical tones.
Zulu says he actually prefers working here, as opposed to a city with a large Jamaican population like New York or Toronto. Because there’s little competition and no pressure to conform to an existing scene, he can do whatever he wants. The only real drawback is that old-model media and label types would never think to look here for somebody like him. “I would describe Chicago as a field of wildflowers,” he says. “As opposed to being a cultured garden where you have this kind of flower in this section and that kind of flower in that section. That’s what the music industry needs—they need a quote-unquote culture in an area for them to recognize something’s going on.”
This kind of adaptability has become a basic tenet of his personal philosophy. “You need to take the shape of whatever vessel you have in front of you,” he says. “You gotta be pliable. At birth we are pliable. At death we are rigid and dried up. If you’re a rigid and dried-up person you are flirting with death.”v
