Chuckie, the hip hop traitor and house defector

Chuckie, the hip hop traitor and house defector

28 August, 2009 | 6.29AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News: chuckie, cr2 records, hip hop

We haven’t met Clyde Sergio Narain yet, the DJ otherwise known as Chuckie from The Hague, but he sure sounds like a cliché. A diamond-encrusted watch, a contacts book full of American rappers, a flat bill baseball cap, and a pair of bejeweled DJ headphones. Now that’s so hip hop.

But the same homey who won two MOBO awards for Best Urban DJ, and who counts Lil John, Will.i.am, and Jermain Dupri as friends, also rocked Miami’s Winter Music Conference in March with an electro house anthem, opened up ID&T’s 40,000-capacity Sensation White dance event in 2008, and played at David Guetta’s ‘F*** Me I’m Famous’ night, at Pacha in Ibiza. He grew a club night from the ground up, and releases DJ-friendly dance tracks on his own label. Now that’s so house.

Chuckie is a conundrum, a traitor to hip hop, and a defector to dance music, but his background is even more confusing. “My dad is half black, half Indian, and my mum is from Indonesia,” says Narain, in an accent that is impossile to pin down. “I grew up in Suriname, South America, before moving to Europe.”

That helps explain Chuckie’s multi-faceted approach to music, that knows no boundaries or allegiances. He is a citizen of the world, not from here, not from there, but from everywhere: a product of globalisation.

It’s all in his name, of course: Clyde the Scot, Sergio the Italian, and Narain the Indian - it sounds like the start of a good joke, one that Chuckie is in on too. His club night is called Dirty Dutch, the perfect title for a party which hosts pop, rock, techno, house and hip hop all on the same night. It’s a proud mongrel.

“Dirty Dutch stands for nothing, and everything, it’s the way I like music to be,” says Narain. “They are eclectic events, and we’ll play anything.

“As a DJ, that’s the way I’ve always been, and when we launched the Dirty Dutch events, I discovered there were so many other people who had the same mindset. Everyone’s iPod has a bit of Sting on it, a bit of hip hop, some indie, and maybe Daft Punk or Justice’s album.”

“Holland is a melting pot of cultures too, and at our events techno, house, minimal, and hip hop people come together.”

In 2005 Chuckie held his first solo concert at Amsterdam’s Heineken Music Hall after a number of successful Dirty Dutch events. It sold out, with 5500 attendees. “Then I started doing bigger and bigger parties, and hosted a stage at Mysterland festival,” he says. “This December, we’re hoping to do a solo concert for 20,000 people.”

Whilst Chuckie slowly conquered The Netherlands, it took the wider dance music world a while to notice him. In October 2008, he released the single ‘Let The Bass Kick’ on Netswork Records, and by the time Miami rolled around it had grown into an major electro house anthem.

In particular, a bootleg of Chuckie and LMFAO’s ‘I’m In Miami Bitch’, called, ‘Let The Bass Kick In Miami Bitch’, became one of the most talked about records of the conference.

The music is a hodge podge of electro synths, pumped up urban breaks, and four-to-the-floor vibes, similar in style to Diplo and Laidback Luke’s genre-defying WMC bomb ‘Hey!’. It has just been released on Britain’s Cr2 Records.

“I grew up in South America, and was surrounded by reggae, and other music from the continent,” says Chuckie. “Then when we moved to the EU I discovered U2, and 80s pop, and then eventually found hip hop. I was a little b-boy, and became a hip hop DJ, and then I got into UK breaks. The Prodigy ‘The Fat of the Land’, is probably my favourite dance album of all time. All of that helped me evolve musically.”

Then came his defection to dance music. After becoming bored of the hip hop scene - “there was nothing new happening” - Chuckie, the successful urban DJ, began to flirt with house. He was inspired by the story of Kenny Dope, who was a hip hop DJ before becoming a Masters At Work house star. 

“I’ve been following Kenny Dope since his hip hop days, and I have all of his old Nervous Records,” says Chuckie. “Dance music was never cool on my block, but he inspired me to go beyond hip hop and he showed me that it was ok to mess around with dance music. I played with him at a party recently and I thanked him for that.”

Narain became disaffected by hip hop and its cult of personalities. A b-boy from the 80s, he witnessed the music change. “Hip hop grew out of disco breaks and then MCs came along who bigged up the music,” he says. “But then the MCs became bigger than the actual music. The music no longer mattered, and it became all about the MC. Beats now have to serve the MC in hip hop, but I wanted to bring the music back to the centre stage.”

Chuckie found dance music’s open-mindedness and instrumental base attractive. “The thing I love about dance music is that it embraces all these different sounds and is completely open to new ideas,” he says.

“Whatever crosses my path, I’ll try it. Last Saturday I did a set at a festival and played mainly techno, with a lot of Thomas Schumacher records. And I’m known for playing whatever I like. My fans don’t mind if I sneak in a pop record.

“The other day I played in Saint-Tropez and this club owner told me that no DJs ever want to play there because they don’t like playing for the crowd or compromising their music.

“But I can play anything - pop, 80s, hip hop, and house, and I can mix it all, as I learnt to loop and scratch from my hip hop days. Because of my background, I understand a lot of different styles of music.”

When asked about dance music’s oft-perceived purist culture, Chuckie is respectful, even if it’s not for him. “Sometimes even I only want to listen to hip hop or house music all day, so I understand where purism comes from,” says Narain. “But look at Switch - he did Christina Aguilera’s album. Diplo worked M.I.A.’s record. I would love to do a dance track with Kanye West, or sit in the studio with Trentemøller. That’s why I got bored of the urban scene. Maybe I’ll even be a rock star someday,” he says, with a laugh.

Since ‘Let The Bass Kick’, Chuckie’s profile has grown significantly in the mainstream - he was voted No.1 DJ in The Netherlands at the recent TMF Awards, beating both Armin Van Buuren and Tiësto - but he’s yet to gain the respect of dance music’s more committed aficianados. He is from hip hop, after all.

But where there’s a will, there’s a way. Along with his electro house and David Guetta collaborations, he has also released a number of mainroom-pleasing progressive house and tech-influenced house records.

You can’t take away my musical freedom. If I want to make a techno record, then I will.

“I really want to produce more progressive tracks, and I’ve just finished a techno EP but I don’t really know what to do with it,” says Narain, who after sensing that there may be some cynicism from Beatportal’s readers at this point, continues, “Some people will say that I shouldn’t be trying to make techno after coming from hip hop, but why not? You can’t take away my musical freedom. If I want to make a techno record, then I will.” Spoken like a true dance music fan.

Some Chuckie house and techno tracks

Chuckie ‘Any Noise’

Chuckie ‘Pong To This’

Chuckie ‘Aftershock (Can’t Fight The Feeling)’

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