Czech rapper Bonus: Alone in the dead of night, heading upstream
Bonus, aka Bourek, aka Martin Tvrdý – real name Martin Hůla – is a DJ, musician, rapper and songwriter. He was behind the creation of the band Sporto and has recently been performing with the Martin Tvrdý Trio project.
For his second LP, "Náměstí míru" ("Square of Peace") he was awarded the Apollo Prize in 2012. His unique style is a mixture of influences, from the quiet singing of a singer-songwriter to angry rap, playing with multilayered sounds and always featuring lyrical content as a very important component.
The following interview with Bonus was first printed in the magazine Romano voďi (Romani Soul):
Q: In your lyrics you often criticize anti-Romani or generally racist sentiments and displays of intolerance in the Czech Republic. What do you base that on, what leads you to do it? Have you had any particular experience with some of the minorities here, people who are members of them, through friends perhaps? Where do you find "your place" in this topic?
A: One thing is that I view my position on this issue as the position that should be normal. I understand why it is an advantageous strategy for a capitalist society to point the finger at the poor and blame the minorities, but I don’t understand how it”s possible that people here are going for this as much as they are. Personally I have never had any of the bad experiences people always talk about here when they say "I’m no racist, but gypsies bother me because of X, Y and Z". I grew up in Kostelec nad Černými lesy and there isn’t a big Romani community there, just a couple of families, but they’re the same as the gadje [non-Roma]. As a child none of that mattered to me and it didn’t matter to anyone else there. Things are the same there today, even better. I just learned from my Dad that some black guys have opened up an auto repair shop there now.
I have traveled to India, and when you are there you realize how much we create our own prejudices, how much we meddle with things we know nothing about. I am doing my best, more and more, not to judge people at all – I can understand what motivates the people I know, but it strikes me as totally crazy to judge someone from a different culture. In India the different ethnicities, religious groups and sects coexist together, moreover there are castes that differentiate society there in a completely other way, and one sees the breadth of those various starting points and how everyone has to work together.
Just today I was wondering why, for example, we expect those living in a foreign country to have to speak that country’s language, or rather, why can’t they speak their own language among themselves – the classic position on that here is "Learn Czech". I don’t feel any big relationship to the fact that I am Czech and I don’t identify with the state at all. I do stuff in Czech because I am doing my best to work locally, which is important to me, but it’s OK if a community here has preserved its own language, because that language is basically the greatest thing they have.
Q: Could you tell us a story about discrimination, whether from your own life or that of someone close to you?
A: I have always been a bit of an outsider, but that just had to do with the usual stuff. I grew up in an atypical environment. During the 1980s my Dad created a gallery in our home, so what we had or didn’t have at home was really different from everyone else – what’s more, I wore glasses and had difficulty making particular sounds in Czech as a child. As for discrimination… our sound engineer Manča is bullied [in studios] by other sound guys because she’s usually the only girl among them. It’s the same when we play live. There basically are not many girl bands here, and whenever there is one, we always hear a lot of horrible chauvinistic bullshit about them.
I find it rather interesting that in the Prague hardcore punk scene specifically there is not a single gay performer, and I don’t understand why, whether it has do with the fact (and probably it does) that the hardcore punk community is latently homophobic and so gays would be afraid to come out there. It strikes me as odd that there are none, because I know a lot of gay people here but none from that scene, while in Germany, for example, there’s a hardcore queer festival. Maybe it’s not direct discrimination, but it’s definitely a subliminal form of it.
My Dad told me a story once. When [Allen] Ginsberg was in Prague, they photographed him disembarking from the airplane in just a poncho and tennis shoes and put it on the cover of some magazine. He spent several evenings meeting people at the Viola [Theater] and my Dad, who had read Ginsberg’s poetry, wanted to meet him too, but they wouldn’t let him in because he wasn’t wearing a tie.
Q: In your song "Dětem" ("To the children") you sing the words "Good Night White Pride". Is that just your wn initiative, or do you know the people around that movement in the Czech Republic?
A: I know them. Ondřej [Vlk], who is filming videos with the Olympians, plays with me in a band and also sings in that song "In the dead of night" ("Sám černou nocí"). I have always thought it important to support that, to somehow be active. This is a cultural, nonviolent way to express how sad it is that we even have to talk about such things anymore. It’s "sad when you have remind children what they must never forget". This should be automatic, all bands should support it.
Q: You have two sons of your own. Do you sometimes think about how you will explain that topic to them someday, familiarize them with it? Have they already gotten into it?
A: Well, Kašpar is still a little guy, he’s two, but Prokop had great luck because he started going to a nursery school that is really multicultural. They had two Vietnamese kids, and Indian guy, a little girl Lucie from Brazil, I believe, and now there is a Russian boy there. Most of them spoke Czech. They obviously look different, but children just don’t worry about that. I take him to the movies to see various Pixar productions and other films, and the topic of difference is frequently raised in those. The crop-dusting plane who wants to be an acrobat, "Kung-fu Panda", who despite everyone’s expectations becomes a warrior, stuff like that. It’s all basically the old motif of Lazy Jack, who is nice and sincere and succeeds because of that. I’m pretty glad he likes the Smurfs, their society is perfectly heterogeneous but at the same time they all stick together, they have to cooperate and they know how to.
Q: Your songs mostly speak to young people, but in one of them you say you don’t want to be a teacher. Do you have a message for young people?
A: I believe they should not let themselves be manipulated, they should not be apathetic, and mainly they should not be like their parents. They should do their best to create something, to say something.
Q: Probably the strongest of your songs on the topic of discrimination and intolerance is the piece "Sám černou nocí" ("Alone in the Dead of Night"). They say you wrote it overnight. Was there some specific inspiration for it?
A: It was more like an idea. One Monday in the summer, when almost every weekend the media was full of reports about these Fascist marches, I heard that song by [Czech country musician] Tučný on the radio and suddenly it had new meaning for me. I remembered the American poet from the 1940s and 1950s, Langston Hughes, who was involved in Black issues and who often used the motif of a Black man’s last words before being lynched. Suddenly I was hearing that scenario in Tučný’s lyrics: "String him up/he’s not one of us/but he is breathing our same air".
Q: "Sám černou nocí" ("Alone in the Dead of Night") really gives me chills, mainly because if you listen to it just superficially, you concentrate on the chorus and the end, where you sampled Tučný’s song, and you could interpret it the opposite way too. "Černá noc" [literally black night, dark night] is a multi-layered metaphor. Have you had any feedback on that piece specifically, whether negative or positive, from random listeners, from anyone Romani or members of any other minority?
A: I don’t have any feedback from Romani listeners, but when I released it they posted it online at iDNES.cz and there was a debate about it with about 120 postings, and the feedback there was that I’m an artist like those who upheld the communist regime, etc. When I created the invitation for "Brno Blocks" [a gathering to block a neo-Nazi march in Brno], there were threats posted there by the Nazis. It’s fun to watch the security guys at music festivals, because they are often Nazi sympathizers, and when they hear me say "I’ll be doing Good Night White Pride" they prick up their ears and you can see how unpleasant it is for them. We played this year at a festival in Polička where the security guys were Romani, that was fantastic.
Q: I think your music has a very unique style, it’s hard to classify it under a definite genre, but your life philosophy comes from the Straight Edge culture. Could you tell our readers what that is and why you like it?
A: Its a very personal thing for me to be Straight Edge. I just feel that it suits me to be sober. That goes for all drugs, but alcohol, in my opinion, is a big topic, because it is tolerated and, for precisely that reason, it is dangerous – what’s more, it’s a crazy business, so when we start consuming it, we become part of the system a little bit more. I don’t want to get completely carried away, because I also use electricity and stuff, but I think alcohol is interesting because it has become a social norm. It’s hard, for example, when your uncle has a birthday and everyone comes over and has a drink and he says to you "Don’t insult me" if you won’t have one. Or then there are absurd situations when you’re somewhere and you order a water and everyone asks "Are you driving?" or "Are you on antibiotics?" and then you have to defend your choice. That’s basically a form of discrimination too.
My whole approach has two levels to it. One is sobriety itself, which is pleasant for me because it’s productive and also a challenge, a psychological one, because I have to find another way to relax, another way to overcome difficulties or embarrassment, and it’s basically more adventurous, for example, to try to speak to someone when I’m feeling shy.
The second level is what was behind the idea of Straight Edge when it began. It’s about doing something unexpected, something that isn’t normal. When the guys in America started it, not only did they not drink alcohol or do drugs like all the other kids, they also didn’t cause disorder, fight at concerts, or go wreak havoc in the streets. They didn’t do any of that precisely because society expected them, as punks, to do it, and that made it terribly easy to "label" them, but they just didn’t do any of it – they were swimming upstream.
Q: By not doing those things, that’s nice.
A: Yeah, it’s basically civil disobedience. Gandhi always said: Don’t attack the English, you must do something they can’t anticipate. The principle of nonviolence there was important, because the moment the Indians would have taken a stand through force, the English would have had a reason to use even greater repression in response – but if you don’t do that, then you basically disarm them. One of Gandhi’s themes in the struggle for independence was the colonial monopoly on salt production. In 1930 the Indians held a nonviolent march to the salt mines in Dharasana. Instead of attacking the English there, they spent hours moving forward, row by row, allowing themselves to be beaten without defending themselves. The women tended their wounds in a field hospital and the men returned to take up their positions again and again. Ultimately the British Empire could not sustain the pressure of conscience put on them by the press over that incident. That, too, in my opinion, is the Straight Edge principle.
