‘The 90s rocked, it ruled’
Salt-N-Pepa’s here - or at least they will be soon, writes
Shaun Bamber.
When the future mother of my children was pregnant with our first child – we now have three – she asked me to make her a CD of ‘birth music’ to listen to when she was in labour.
For my own amusement, I added a couple of extra songs to her preapproved list, one of which was Push It by Salt-N-Pepa. (The other being Snoop Dogg’s Drop It Like It’s Hot.)
And so it came to pass that Push It became one of the first songs my son heard as he entered this world. (He seemed to suffer no ill effects from this I might add, either mentally or musically – in fact by age three he had the track listing of Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The USA album memorised. But I digress.)
Anyway, this little anecdote seemed like a great opener for my interview with the aforementioned Salt-N-Pepa, arriving on our shores this June as part of the I Love The 90s tour alongside fellow 90s luminaries Vanilla Ice, Coolio, Tone Loc, Color Me Badd and Young MC. Or at least so I thought, until I dialled into the conference call and caught the journalist ahead of me finishing her interview with a remark about Push It‘s popularity on birth music playlists. Guess my joke wasn’t so clever or original after all.
But Salt-N-Pepa’s influence goes far beyond birth music playlists. As one of the first all-female rap groups, they broke new ground in the maledominated and often misogynistic world of late 1980s/early ‘90s hip-hop, and helped pave the way for later female artists like Foxy Brown, Lil’ Kim and Missy Elliott. And with two US gold albums and three US platinum albums to their credit, including 1993’s five-times platinum album Very Necessary, the accomplishments of this Grammy award-winning trio - Salt, Pepa and DJ Spinderella - just can’t be argued with.
Like the now 50-year-old Pepa (real name Sandra Denton) says, ‘‘We are respected – we out there. No one can take that from us’’.
Talking to them on the phone from Bismarck, North Dakota, where they are literally minutes away from taking the stage, the chief difficulty in interviewing Salt (also now 50) and Pepa is that at first it is hard to tell them apart by voice alone.
Both women are somewhat hoarsesounding – as well they might be after having performed as many as a dozen shows a month since February 2016.
This was back before I Love The 90s became a full-blown nationwide American and then international tour which will see Salt-N-Pepa take to the stage almost 100 times before it finally wraps up in Birmingham, England this October.
Eventually I get the hang of who’s who however – although this is less to do with what they sound like and more to do with how they talk.
Salt (real name Cheryl James) seems the more thoughtful of the two, expounding on how their audience has evolved, why I Love The 90s has been so popular and reflecting on SaltN-Pepa’s beginnings more than 30 years ago. Pepa on the other hand peppers our chat with hype man-like pronouncements along the lines of ‘‘Salt-N-Pepa’s here!’’ and ‘‘The 90s rocked, it ruled – it said this music is here to stay!’’
Like Public Enemy’s Chuck D and Flavor Flav – who they have performed with in the past – it’s easy to see how these two rappers complement each other, both on and off the stage.
And despite being in the middle of a tour that by the time it’s over will have lasted almost two years, when it comes to taking the stage, Salt-N-Pepa are ready to do the business, however they might be feeling.
‘‘What makes this so worth it is really right before you walk on stage and they say, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, SaltN-Pepa and DJ Spinderella’, and that crowd roars,’’ says Salt.
‘‘It’s like whatever energy you didn’t have before, it comes right back to you just from that appreciation from that audience and when it’s sold out to the rafters and you walk out there it’s just like, ‘Wow, this is amazing’.’’
"What makes this so worth it is really right before you walk on stage and they say, 'Ladies and gentlemen, Salt-N-Pepa and DJ Spinderella', and that crowd roars. Whatever energy you didn't have before, it comes right back to you."
I Love The 90s Tour: Trusts Arena in Auckland June 3, Horncastle Arena in Christchurch June 4.