Attitude Solution
After nearly two decades of frustration, local MCs Pikahsso and Tahiti finally exhale on PPT's Tres Monos In Love.
4.October.2006

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Tahiti (also sticking to the alias) sits quietly through the interview. Again, it’s a shadow of his outrageous stage presence; this MC climbed to the top of Dallas’ ranks by putting on crazy gigs, declaring himself “whack like Dave from the second Real World” and throwing hamburgers at concertgoers after asking if “they got beef.”

            Of course, knowing that he’s the subject of a positive article, he can relax a bit. The self-proclaimed “military brat” owns up to having to work harder to make friends through his childhood years moving from state to state (South Dakota, Colorado, Michigan) before landing in Arlington for college in his early 20s.

“I dunno what it is about Texas, but it takes people a long time to warm up to you,” he says. “Seriously, you come from somewhere else, people will be like, ‘You sound white.’ People won’t wanna talk to you.”

It didn’t take long before Tahiti was hooked up with a rap group, joining Native Poet (along with longtime collaborator Chucky Sly) in the late 80s. Though he grew up in a musical family--both of his parents were music majors, his dad a trombonist and his mother a piano and organ player--Tahiti wanted to blaze his own trail. In junior high, he was forced by his dad to take up the trombone, rather than his choice, the drums, and subsequently never touched the instrument again (until forced to hum through the trombone during an embarrassing, impromptu performance at a retirement home months later). And though his mother tried to push the piano, Tahiti busts out his usual sly smile: “We had the Atari, you know, so I wasn’t really trying to fuck with the piano.” Once a white friend in South Dakota introduced him to “Rapper’s Delight” in junior high, hip-hop became the only stable thing in his pack-up-and-go childhood.

“I lived in a fantasy world, dude,” he says. “I’ll say this, though, as a result, I can make friends pretty quick. I’m a quick judge of character. But yeah, dude, I used to get really bad grades, spend a lot of time in my room just listening to music, doing weird shit.”

18 years ago, Native Poet shared a University of Texas at Arlington stage with Group With No Name, one of Pikahsso’s first groups. Tahiti laughs: “They had this thing called The Black Extravaganza [pauses to laugh again] to celebrate Black History Month. They’d have black kids...basically, a talent show.”

Pikahsso, a proud South Dallas native (“Lincoln High School, know what I’m talking about!”), entered the hip-hop realm thanks to being dragged to a national Islamic convention. On the car ride, the 14-year-old heard the Fat Boys beatboxing, something that sounded much more interesting than any rapper he’d ever heard on the radio. Once he reached Washington, DC, he met some fellow heads (“you know how when kids walk around anywhere, they find their kindred spirits”) who taught him how to beatbox, pushing him to do so on a microphone in a private room.

“He says, ‘Beat-box on it, man,’ and I was like, [heavy bass, scratch sounds, whirring robotic noises]. I’m doing crazy moves. When I walk out, it’s pandemonium. ‘Who the hell? What was that?’ I had no idea it was going into the main room. ‘You hear what happened?’ I was like, ‘Uh, I dunno!’ But I liked that.”

Pikahsso returned home with a newfound hip-hop vision, though stage fright (he recounts a beatbox disaster at a school concert) and fears of being replaced by a drum machine soon led him toward the MC side of the spectrum. And after mouthing off to a study hall teacher in high school, he was forced to transfer to choir, after which he gradually began experimenting with harmonies in his rhymes.

“I didn’t even realize it was funk,” Pikahsso says. “Over the years, it just got inside of me. If I’d never gotten in trouble in study hall, I never would’ve been funky. I didn’t even like singing!”

Tahiti and Pikahsso have long, drawn-out, detailed stories about their early days, but after the late ’80s, the stories dry up. Tahiti started the Free Agents with Chucky Sly in 1994...“together until now” is as much as he elaborates on that group’s years. The normally chatty Pikahsso just about skips the next decade altogether, choosing not to elaborate on a long, unproductive period: “I’m real sensitive like that. If I don’t like something, I’ll quit. So I’ve been my own personal enemy.”

Dallas, of course, has been an outsider to the national hip-hop scene ever since the D.O.C. left town, meaning even the biggest Dallas MCs are still bits of dust. But Tahiti and Pikahsso were outsiders even within Dallas; the former was a small, quirky dude full of wit in an otherwise tough and thuggy rap scene, and Pikahsso’s Parliament-leaning funk-rap fit the mold even less.

“People looked at me like I was a Martian at shows,” he says. “Who is this weird-ass dude, man? Sometimes they say it verbally, sometimes the expressions. But it was like, you know what? Lemme perfect my craft.”

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