A HIP-HOP JOURNEY THROUGH THE HALLS OF THE LOUVRE
▶ James De Valera, the first DJ to spin the wheels of steel at Louvre Abu Dhabi, tells Rob Garratt about beats and B-boys in the UAE
There are a lot of reasons James De Valera may look familiar. You might have seen him tearing up the dancefloor in a sweaty Dubai nightclub, or furiously scratching records at an international street dance competition. Or perhaps you have spotted him behind the decks at a five-star hotel’s rooftop lounge, or providing eclectic soundtracks to artsy cultural events across the Emirates. You might have even caught De Valera on tour in Europe backing vintage United States hip-hop group The Beatnuts.
One place you won’t have seen him, or any other DJ before, is Louvre Abu Dhabi – but on Wednesday, the artist better known as Lobito Brigante will become the first turntablist to appear as part of the museum’s live cultural programme. De Valera will perform over two nights alongside audio-visual cine-pop hybridists Rayess Bek and La Mirza, who will pay tribute to the golden age of Arab cinema with a mix of projections and music in Love and Revenge.
For his own closing set, De Valera is digging deep into his crates – which pack more than 20,000 vinyl records in total – taking cues from the global sweep of the museum’s stockpiles and exhibition plans, promising to drop Arabic funk, Japanese jazz, Afrobeat and other cross-cultural curios.
“For me, the true art of DJing is to have enough musical versatility to walk into a space, be inspired and channel something,” says the artist, formally known as Break DJ Lobito. “On the technical side, you can get as granular as you want – it’s really all about selection.”
A lynchpin of the UAE music scene for the past decade, De Valera has previously played to five-figure crowds, warming up for Snoop Dogg and Sean Paul in Abu Dhabi. But such commercial engagements are not the goal for a nimble-fingered traditionalist who sees DJing as a sacred, if malleable, art form.
Closer to his heart, the Spaniard was the creative force behind the outdoor cultural happening Street Nights Art – which showered Dubai’s JBR and Al Quoz with beats, B-boys, graffiti artists and food trucks – and is the founder of the Deep Crates Cartel, hosts of an influential weekly night at Casa Latina which propelled the underground clubbing movement in Dubai between 2011 to 2014. “I stole it,” he admits of the Deep Crates moniker, name-checking a pair of obscure hip-hop documentaries.
If you do recognise his face from somewhere, but didn’t recall the Lobito brand, it’s probably not your fault. De Valera prefers to let the music do the talking, and describes social media as a “repository of the subconscious mind” he’d rather live without – like his heroes, crate diggers and scratch DJs from hip-hop’s golden years.
His pedigree in the genre runs deep. While still an Arabic student at SOAS, University of London, De Valera warmed up for visiting A-listers including De La Soul, Slick Rick, Pharoahe Monch and spoken word pioneers The Last Poets. He also found time to play turntables in a band with Cypress Hill’s Eric Bobo, named Cultura Londres.
Arriving into the embryonic UAE scene of 2007, De Valera took a distinctly DIY approach, organising a string of pioneering B-boy battles – including 2011’s Battle of the Year Middle East at The Dubai Mall – believed to be the first of their kind in the region, and was later recognised as a “regional cultural leader” by the British Council. As a promoter, De Valera has brought hip-hop heroes such as A Tribe Called Quest’s Ali Shaheed Muhammad and Public Enemy’s DJ Lord to spin in the UAE, as well as global groove icon Quantic and reggae legend Horace Andy. He also co-organised 2012’s The DoOver, headlined by Aloe Blacc.
“I was forced into it,” says De Valera, of his promotional role. “When I first came over here and presented myself to people as a DJ, I got zero-response. Over the last 10 years, I’ve spent time building the kind of events I wanted to play.”
No stranger to gallery crowds, De Valera co-organised Art After Dark at The Ritz-Carlton, Dubai – where he served for a spell as the hotel’s music director – a spin-off of the official DIFC Art Nights after-party, which catered to a certain species of culture vulture. It seems not the least bit jarring that the evening after the second Louvre Abu Dhabi show, on Thursday, he will play an annual tribute to the late hip-hop producer J Dilla, a PopUp Classics gig at Tom&Serg restaurant in Dubai.
“I’ve DJ’d to big crowds in luxury hotels, dive bars and art galleries,” says De Valera. “It’s all just music, and music is universal. We create these structures and genres, and I guess the ultimate goal is to try and expand people’s perception and taste.
“If I really boil it down to what moves me at the deepest level, it’s that I have experienced this journey in music, and I want other people to experience and discover things as a result of it, too.”