At the beginning of December, London based artist Alex Dutty put out a track titled ‘Proud To Be White’. Feeling that it was important to put out his side of the story – in a behind the track interview, if you will – Alex spoke to Matt Tarr seeking to dismiss a lot of the misinformation that had been put out surrounding the track…
On the feedback regarding the track…
Alex: The majority has been good. I’m not gonna lie, you’re always gonna get a few people that have got something to say. A lot of people are a bit scared to come forward and say that they appreciate the song. So what I’m getting is a lot of private messages from some of your favourite rappers telling me how much they rate me for doing this tune. But they’re not coming out openly on public forums which says to me that I’ve touched on something that a lot of people wanted to say but just didn’t have the balls to do it. By no means was the song about white oppression or black oppression, it was nothing to do with that, which seems to be a recurring comment that I see coming up.
On the recent media attention around race and the timing of the release…
Alex: Of course. You only have to look at the recent quarrels between Tyga, Jay Sean, Lil Wayne and Cash Money because they’re all getting the hump as their release dates are not when they want them to be. So I have no idea how people are that stupid to think that little old me in England has that much control over my release date that it was pinpointed with such precision to align with all the recent media attention. We set the wheels in motion for the song to come out six months ago, long before we could predict what would be in the media at the time. I fully understand how this might be bad timing for some. But I’m not here to be a yes man. I never wanted to start making music to put out the same old message that we’ve heard a million times and get the same sort of response. How many times can we hear about how many drugs a guy has sold or how many guns he’s got. It gets to the point where it gets a bit tedious. I refuse to be that artist and I came here to speak the truth; I wanted to delve into social issues that affect us all and get people to address them.
On how the track first came about…
Alex: My missus is a black woman and is the daughter of Barrington Levy, plus we have a beautiful daughter together and she’s gonna grow up in a world where we have white and black people fighting about the same issues that we were fighting about forty or fifty years ago. This is why I did this song because I think progressively, I think outside the box and I see where we need to go as a human race. I’m trying to get us to that goal a little bit quicker by addressing things that people don’t wanna address, but that need to be addressed. Without us talking about them and without people hearing the other side’s opinion, they’re not gonna understand where they fit into the whole grand scheme of things. Obviously as a white guy that has grown up surrounded by 90% black people, I understood it was important to be proud of who you are and so because I’m inspired by black music and black culture why would I have to denounce my culture and be ashamed of to be that colour just so that it fits in with the status quo of what the media is trying to push at this current time? That’s just not gonna happen.
On the inspiration of hip hop culture on the track…
Alex: When hip hop first started, if a guy was to come out and make a song about being proud to be gay, like Macklemore did, it would’ve been absolutely shut down and no one would’ve wanted to hear that. As culture and hip hop has progressed, we’ve been able to move past that way of thinking and allowed any kind of people to experience the music of hip hop, whether you’re gay, straight, black or white, so I felt it was very important that I put this record out here in a similar way to Macklemore, in order to get people to realise that stereotyping is just furthering oppression. The whole moral of the song is unity. It was nothing to do with trying to say that I’m more hard done by than anyone else, this was my story and my issues that I see. It doesn’t mean that because I’m inspired by black culture I’m not proud to be white anymore and that was pretty much the whole point of the song.
On negative reactions to the track…
Alex: Obviously people are gonna take it the wrong way and say what they want because they have a narrative that they want to fit my song into and the only way they can fit it in is to say it’s racist without really listening to the message or what I’m saying. Another thing that I don’t think people are aware of is that my management are a team of black men. When I sat down with the guys and spoke about the concept of the song, they were as excited about it as I was. They saw the vision as much as anyone else did and in fact they were 100% responsible for my video and that was because they understood what I was trying to do. For anyone to think that I could’ve done this song without running it past twenty or thirty black people, did no one think that one of those people would’ve said they thought it was racist and that they didn’t agree with it?
On a recent article written about the track by Complex Magazine…
Alex: I can take a lot of the comments on YouTube because you expect people to have an opinion. But it gets a bit ridiculous when members of the press start writing articles and not even founding it on any sort of substance of truth and literally just going on a tangent and not even listening to the song properly, jumping the gun and making assumptions, it was quite ridiculous. You would expect someone who is a part of the industry and should understand release dates etc to get that. It’s just very disappointing. She [Hyperfrank] didn’t speak to me before the article to hear my side of the story either. But that was to be expected. As much as there is narrow minded people there are also narrow minded journalists. Her article was very lazy and she pretty much lied throughout the first half of the article and it wasn’t accurate at all. One thing she did mention that was laughable was that the video was uploaded three years ago. I think she made that assumption because it says 2012 in the video, but we only included that because that was the year that there was a lot of attention on London due to the Olympics and we wanted people, in years to come, to look back and think of the track during that time. We hadn’t even written the song in 2012. Plus the trainers I’m wearing in the video only came out a few months ago!
On the main reason for putting the song out…
Alex: The main reason we put this out there is to give people an identity. There are a lot of people out there who are in exactly the same position that I’m talking about, that don’t have an identity and I found it very important to do this song because it gives them an identity where they don’t have to fall under other peoples umbrella. They have their own umbrella to stand under now. The message from my song was coming from a very good, positive, humble place and I only meant good things from that message. It’s sad that other people are using their own personal hang ups to demonise what was a massive and truthful statement that both white and black people agree with. The negative feedback has been from a 50/50 mix of black and white people and sometimes more white people.
On his upcoming new material set to be released in the new year…
Alex: I’m looking forward to people hearing it because we’ve perhaps given them a bit too much to talk about but I suppose we needed to at this stage. I’m very eager to hear what people think of the other songs that we’ve got to come out. I am one of these artists that’s gonna search for subjects to bring to the table to benefit society rather than promote an already distorted narrative that people are getting tired of.
If you haven’t already, check out the video for ‘Proud To Be White’ above and let us know your thoughts via Twitter and Facebook.
Matt Tarr
@MattTarrJourno
Matt Tarr
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