Local artist Don Dada takes the hip-hop music scene by storm
JOBURG – There is new kid on the block of the hip-hop music scene and he goes by the name Don Dada.
There is a young man in our midst that is taking the hip-hop music scene by storm and he goes by the name Don Dada.
Don Dada is Jamaican pidgin English for ‘boss of the bosses’.
“This is what I want to be in the hip-hop scene. I want to be the hip-hop boss of the bosses, a don dada of hip-hop, which happens to be my stage name,” he said.
“I want to fuse my reggae influences from the late Bob Marley, whom I so dearly respect for taking reggae music from nothing to the dizzy heights of international music. Robert Nesta Marley, as he was known at birth, rose from nothing to become the don dada that he was at his death soon after his world-acclaimed performance at the independence celebrations of Zimbabwe in 1980.”
Don Dada, who sports meter-long dreadlocks was born in Zimbabwe, Harare, to a family of avid Bob Marley fans and even today, 37 years after Marley’s death, Don Dada’s father is still a reggae and Rastafarian fanatic.
“I grew up with these enormous reggae music influences in life, which I still adore today, but I have adjusted that beat to the modern beat of hip-hop,” said Don Dada, born Menelik Nesta Gibbons 30 years ago this April.
He believes that hip-hop music is no different to reggae, as both of them are a form of protest music as epitomised by Marley in his philosophical songs such as Buffalo soldier and No woman no cry, among many others.
“I have added a different voice to rap music… and that voice is a booming baritone. They often call me the Barry White of rappers,” said the musician, whose first name was taken from Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia.
“A single [A Team] from my latest album, Avant Garde, is currently making waves on Metro FM and this can only be the start of much bigger things to come from me,” said Don Dada, who was brought up by a Rastafarian father and a Christian mother, both of whom emigrated to South Africa with him at the age of five.
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