Hub alternative hip-hopper spits rhymes his own way

Dave Wedge

Steven Perez makes his living selling beats, doing voiceover work and spinning alternative rock records. But all that’s really just a front — means to an end that allow him to keep living out his hip-hop dreams.

The Lowell rapper/producer, better known by his moniker D-Tension, pays the bills by selling beats to HBO, Discovery Channel and ESPN in addition to DJ’ing at WFNX 101.7 FM. But his true passion lies in his crass, sarcastic — yet always clever — brand of hip-hop.

“I just kind of abandoned the rules,” he explained in a recent phone interview. “I’m sarcastic as a person. I’m humorous as a person so that should come through in my music.”

It’s a style that’s taken the 35-year-old nearly two decades to perfect.

Originally from New York, he moved to Lowell in the mid-1980s and in the ‘90s started rapping in clubs and promoting shows around the Boston area. Since then, he’s worked with most of the region’s top stars, including Edo G., 7L & Esoteric, Akrobatik, Mr. Lif and Termanology, as well as emo-rap king Slug from the Minneapolis outfit Atmosphere.

His latest disc, “Contacts and Contracts II” (Brick Records), features over a dozen of his most scorching beats and collaborations with many of the above-named rappers. But it’s the accompanying disc, “Rap Music Sucks,” where D-Tension puts his no-holds-barred, wisecracking style on full display.

“There’s a saying that writers use, and that’s that you have to write what you know. Well, a lot of people at 19 don’t know what they know,” he said. “When I first came out I sounded like everyone else. There was nothing terribly special about it. But I really hadn’t found myself as a person. Basically, I’ve always been a funny guy but I was making all these serious songs. You have to write what you know.”

In the hilarious “No Habla Español,” he does just that, joking about being a Puerto Rican who can’t speak Spanish. He pokes fun at the fact that he only knows basic Spanish words that most English-speaking people know — like “Goya” and “burrito” — but can’t conjugate verbs in his parents’ native tongue.

“My grandmother hates that I have to speak Spanglish, but it’s the only way that I can manage,” he deadpans in the song’s chorus. A self-produced video for the track is posted on the popular site YouTube.com, as is a video for “Soccer Mom,” a gut-busting song in which the bearded rapper pines for suburban housewives.

The latter video mocks the over-the-top commercialism of mainstream rap, trading writhing overpaid supermodels for regular-looking middle-aged women in jeans. And instead of guzzling expensive champagne in a marble-encased jacuzzi built for 10, D-Tension and three soccer moms cram themselves into a large tub with 40-ounce bottles of beer.

It’s good parody in the vein of the comedy rap of Chris Parnell from “Saturday Night Live,” but D-Tension is far from just a goofy gimmick. He loves hip-hop and stays true to the boom-bap vibe of the music’s golden era.

“The problem is with rap music, not hip-hop,” he says. “My favorite era of hip-hop was the beginning until the early ’90s, because it was not corporate. It was do-it-yourself like punk rock. But major labels got involved, movie companies and clothing designers, and it became such a big business that it lost its life. It became something that has become exploited to death.”

Despite his anger over Madison Avenue’s cultural hijacking of urban culture, D-Tension isn’t totally disenfranchised. He’ll be one of several acts to hit the stage Saturday at the Middle East in Cambridge as part of the 2006 Winter Hip-Hop Fest.

“The Boston hip-hop scene is going strong and there’s a lot of good stuff coming out,” he says. “There’s a lot of good kids out here right now.”

The 2006 Boston Winter Hip-Hop Fest, featuring D-Tension, Insight, Termanology, Elemental Zazen, Awol, Brix and Letia Larok, Saturday at the Middle East, 480 Massachusetts Ave., Cambridge, $12, www.mideastclub.com, 617-864-3278.