His name is William Calhoun, but you can call him Dub. That’s shortened down from initials “WC,” amended to “Dub C,” then clipped to just “Dub.” The South Central-L.A. resident is one of the original West Coast street rappers (along with Ice-T, NWA, CIA, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, MC Eiht, DJ Quik, Cypress Hill, Spice 1, Warren G, Mack 10) who blew up Cali-centric “reality rap,” aka gangsta rap, into a global phenomenon. It began humbly, by rhyming on playgrounds and in backyards with kids like O’Shea Jackson, aka Ice Cube.
“I knew that if I chose to do anything, I could achieve it,” Dub says. “We believed it ’cuz we was strong individuals. But I never knew I would be gettin’ down in front of 50,000 people in Moscow, Russia, like me and Cube did a couple months ago.”
His recording career started in a group called Low Profile with DJ Aladdin. Aladdin went on to work with Ice-T while Dub hooked up with rapper Coolio, DJ Crazy Toones and Sir Jinx in WC and the Maad Circle. After that came his affiliation in 1994 with Ice Cube and Mack 10 in Westside Connection, which brought the biggest spotlight of Dub’s career, capped by the groundbreaking Up in Smoke Tour of 2000 with Dr. Dre, Eminem, Cube, Snoop, Xzibit and others. Some of the most iconic footage from it was Dub’s infamous and stylized “C walk.”
Over his two-decade career he’s repped South Central-L.A., rapping on police brutality, gangbanging, poverty.
“Substance,” he says. “A long time ago there was substance in music. You had to rap about something [and] make sense.”
That substance, based on the reality around him, could be rough stuff, as in his joint with Cube on “Keep it 100.”
“In the studio trying to balance the two/ One pocket full of rap money, the other crack residue/ I ain’t on the Internet/ Muthafucka, I’m in a set.” That’s “set” as in gang set. Dub reps the hood in general, and street soldiers in particular. A performing artist, street reporter, and entrepreneur, he also harbors an angry political hunger:
“[Racism] hasn’t changed,” he says. “There’s still police abuse. Everybody’s guilty until proven innocent in my neighborhood. Everybody gets a fair trial? That don’t apply to us minorities. They just change uniforms. One minute you might see a muthafucka in white sheets, the next minute police uniforms, the next a three-piece suit.”
But he’s about a good time, too, in the midst of the struggle.
“Everything is from the heart,” he says. “We laugh in the hood, we tell jokes, we smile. Like Ice Cube’s movie Friday. Every hood is the same. What goes on around me goes on in the suburbs. We just don’t have opportunities.”
He’s lived and seen the kind of hard-knock life that makes a good party as necessary as a lunchbreak in the workday. Of the Planet Gemini show he says, “If you ain’t coming to party, to have a good time, don’t come out.”
WC and others perform Friday, Jan. 13 (10pm doors), at Planet Gemini, 2110 N. Fremont Blvd., Monterey. $20/advance; VIP tickets available. 213-290-9198, www.planetgemini.com