While Tupac and Notorious BIG continue to be the focus of biopics, posthumous releases and conspiracy theories, the death in a car accident on 5 April of 42-year-old Anthony Depula went largely unnoticed. But while he was never a star, Tony D was, in many ways, a bold white-rap pioneer and an unsung hero of hip-hop.
In the mid- to late 80s, when the Beastie Boys were fusing punk and hardcore with rap to commercial acclaim, Tony D was making music much more beloved by the hip-hop cognoscenti. The city of Trenton, New Jersey might not resonate with music fans in the way the Bronx or Harlem does, but the area was a hotbed for hip-hop, and Depula, a beefy Italian-American, was at its centre. (He remembers the Trenton scene in an interview with Fat Lace magazine here.)
Startlingly, he found himself the producer of choice for Afrocentric rap acts such as Poor Righteous Teachers and YZ – groups that cleaved to the radical teachings of the 5% Nation. Even more startlingly, when Poor Righteous Teachers and YZ started squabbling and recording diss records aimed at each other, Tony D still had a foot in both camps, producing both artists' shots at each other.
It was the kind of divisive act that came naturally to the gregarious Depula, who turned into a rapper himself, releasing albums for Profile Records (home to Run-DMC) under his own name and as part of the group Crusaders for Real Hip-Hop. His outspoken lyrics caused rifts with Def Jam's white rap crew 3rd Bass, ironically at a time when both acts were paving the way for the likes of Eminem and Asher Roth.
Depula later launched legal action against Naughty By Nature after he claimed they had stolen a track from an instrumental album of his for the basis of their smash hit OPP. By this time, he had signed a deal with Manchester's Grand Central Records, and in 1997 he released the Pound for Pound album in the UK. More recently, as work dried up, he found his early records were in demand and he became a major second-hand record seller, exploiting the surging market for rare US rap on independent labels.
Depula saw his own musical legacy in production terms. In an interview a few months before his death, he told me: "I think I pioneered the use of vocal samples in hip-hop. No one was really using samples or loops that had a Tony voice in it until I did that." It's an area that Kanye West and the Wu-Tang Clan's RZA subsequently explored.
But I see Tony D as an early, credible white rapper – an unlikely MC who used humour and explored his own Sicilian and New Jersey culture rather than kowtowing to accepted hip-hop norms. It's an approach that won him fans and made him enemies. It would be a shame if his impact was forgotten.
