Sauce

When Ken Hell parties, he parties hard – but at the age of 27 the parties are getting harder. I talked to Ken about his coming to terms with ageing in a medium that favours the latest, youngest thing… and porn (but you’ll have to listen to the mp3 for that…)!

What’s ‘scarn on, exactly, for you today?
Not a great deal really, still recovering from the Urban Music Awards a few nights ago. I know it’s been a while, but I really pushed it beyond normal pushing it. We all got up to Sydney a night early and… yeah. I think I ended up [with] alcohol poisoning by the end. I was at the after-party tripping out. It was a bit much.

So what does after-party recovery involve for you – curling up with a nice book and just sleeping in?
Nah, I couldn’t do anything like that. The first night I actually left the after-party a little bit early because I was so hurt. I ended up just lying in the hotel room in Sydney shivering and then burning, shivering and burning, shivering and burning! And this, sort of… yeah… it wasn’t great! I just really wanted to sleep but I couldn’t sleep at all. So that was the first night. The next day, obviously, I had to fly back to Melbourne and then, what I did, I opened the door to my house. I walked in to the couch, and then sat down. And then I moved my arm a bit to the remote control. And then I watched Foxtel.

[Laughs] I thought you were gonna say you woke up forty-eight hours later wearing a tutu… but obviously not!…
I couldn’t function enough to make it to the shower! I was just lying on the couch flicking between History Channel and Discovery Channel. The good thing was that they’re right next to each other so it didn’t take much actual effort… So that was Tuesday night and by this morning… yeah. I was back to human.

Well that’s nice. I’m glad. It seems that “effortless” goes hand-in-hand with Ken Hell. I’m sure you’ve put a lot of hard work into where you are at the moment, but with the Urban Hip-Hop scene being so ripe here in Australia, how have you found it carving yourself a niche in our cultural identity, so to speak?
I guess it’s one of those things where, for a while, I had a niche where it was more mine than anyone else’s, I guess. But then… there are a lot of people listening out there… and some of them pick up on what works and what doesn’t work and eventually they have bits of it. It’s not like they’re taking my soul kind of thing, it’s just that everyone develops together. For years I was the funny guy, and now you’ve got younger dudes like 360 and Pez who are just… man. I listen to their stuff and I’m like, this is outta control – they’re so hilarious… they’re taking it to the next level, for sure. They can say everything I can’t!

So they would kind of be like the Family Guy to your Simpsons for example?
I’m certainly beyond Family Guy. I don’t think there’s a cartoon for them! I think they… where they even start is at the peak of Family Guy… Now I’m 27, it’s not that I’m old, but as you get older there’s less and less you can get away with. You start feeling more and more ridiculous as you get older. They’ve got that many years of use, and they still really don’t really care about the repercussions of what they say… less than I do! It’s the whole “not taking it too seriously” [thing].

Hip-hop has had a tendency to take itself way too seriously, which is strange when its visual image is sort of based around tracksuits that are five times too large. Where do you see yourself fitting in to it now?
I used to love the tracksuit pants …all of that, when I was an early teenager! To be honest when I first got into it… I liked the style, I liked everything. It wasn’t just about rap, or just about anything like that, it was the whole thing; it was just really cool. It still is that way for lots of younger kids. It’s just [there’s] less you can get away with before you start looking like an idiot beyond a certain age, I guess. There’s a whole thing about people “keeping it real”. To be honest, they take that to the next level talking about artists having credibility; it’s like, dude – you do extreme poetry! If you were a doctor or a surgeon, I’d want a surgeon with credibility. If you were a politician… yeah. But dude, you rap! There are really important things in the world. I like rap a lot, right, but [some people] just take it too far.

Ken Hell takes it further with thoughts on multiple identities, his new single, and porn in the full mp3 interview

Ken Hell’s new single, TRUCK is available from the iTunes music store.

http://www.myspace.com/kenhell