The New Zealander deals with racism from the classroom in his rap.
School time wasn’t easy for the New Zealand rapper Who Shot Scott aka Zee: going to school for an “everyday struggle”, feeling like a freak, a stranger and being looked down upon as a “hairy Arab” because of his Iraqi roots. In the empowerment style that has been practiced in the identity politics discourse of the last few decades, Who Shot Scott is now turning the latter around, appropriating the term that was intended as an insult and calling his debut album HAIRY.
On nine songs he reports on the “Problems In My Head” that his teenage years left him with and smells nothing but a collection of vicious and incorrigible racists in every classroom and teacher’s room. This lack of lyrical originality would be more tolerable if it didn’t appear in the guise of supposed non-conformity and unruliness, even though it is of the most boring conformity.
It’s refreshing that the album, in contrast, is more musically daring and invites you to groove with its cheeky, poppy rap sound – and above all with cleverly used vocal games that overlay the staid, staid political predictability with humor.