The Beatnuts aren’t keen on Jennifer Lopez.
Lopez pirated the beats from Watch Out Now for her 2002 hit song Jenny from the Block so the hip hop and production duo from Queens, New York, took her to court.
 She lost and now pays The Beatnuts royalties.
“She ripped us off. It’s exactly the same production,” says Psycho Les, over the phone from his “big ass” house in New Jersey.
It’s a summer evening in New York and Psycho Les has entered an elated state of mind.
“Me, what am I doing? I’m on the vapours man. I’ve heard you have some nice stuff there in New Zealand and everything is crazy down there.”
Les’s first Kiwi contact was producing and laying down lyrics for South Auckland rapper Mareko’s album White Sunday.
Although the recording was done in New York, in a couple of weeks Les will see Mareko’s home country for himself when he visits to play a show in the Capital.
Before making contact with Les, of Colombian ancestry, Capital Times got his answer machine which relays cackling laughter sampled from an underground Japanese vinyl.
“Yeah I like that, it makes you think,” says Les.
The other half of The Beatnuts, JuJu, a Dominican American, also grew up in the New York City incubator of ground breaking, politically savvy hip hop. It’s the city of Afrika Bambaataa, De La Soul, and a Tribe Called Quest.
“I grew up around the DJs, I was inspired by them and always into break beats, cutting and recording,” says Les.
With his New York drawl, he says he likes cruise down to fellow Latino Tony Touch’s establishment, Sutra, and listen to Spanish music, or to the BB Kings Blues Club near Times Square.
The Beatnuts grooves come from the musical cross-pollination of billboard gangster rap and underground political poetry.
“I remember back in the day the billboard charts were all gangster rap. In today’s [popular] music I don’t hear gangster rap, it’s more like gay rap. All the gangster rap I like is underground,” Les says.
He’s a sampling madman and spends hours in music stores and tweaking tunes.
“The sound we want is when [the beat] drops you feel it right away – we are back to the [record] crates, grimy, and dirty shit.”
The Beatnuts, San Francisco Bathhouse, June 17.