ZULU aka MC ZULU is a Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

-based Panamanian dancehall

Dancehall

Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s. In the mid-1980s, digital instrumentation became more prevalent, changing the sound considerably,...

 reggae

Reggae

Reggae is a music genre first developed in Jamaica in the late 1960s. While sometimes used in a broader sense to refer to most types of Jamaican music, the term reggae more properly denotes a particular music style that originated following on the development of ska and rocksteady.Reggae is based...

 singer.

Biography

Rowland was born in Panama to parents who were in the U.S. military, and moved to Chicago in the 1980s, where his schoolmates gave him the nickname 'Zulu'. Zulu began his career as a producer

Record producer

A record producer is an individual working within the music industry, whose job is to oversee and manage the recording of an artist's music...

 of house music

House music

House music is a genre of electronic dance music that originated in Chicago, Illinois, United States in the early 1980s. It was initially popularized in mid-1980s discothèques catering to the African-American, Latino American, and gay communities; first in Chicago circa 1984, then in other...

, and underground hip hop

Underground hip hop

Underground hip hop is an umbrella term for hip hop music outside the general commercial canon. It is typically associated with independent artists, signed toindependent labels or no label at all....

 during the late 1990s in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. After a contractual dispute with former partners, Zulu embraced his Panama

Panama

Panama , officially the Republic of Panama , is the southernmost country of Central America. Situated on the isthmus connecting North and South America, it is bordered by Costa Rica to the northwest, Colombia to the southeast, the Caribbean Sea to the north and the Pacific Ocean to the south. The...

nian-Jamaica

Jamaica

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, in length, up to in width and 10,990 square kilometres in area. It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about south of Cuba, and west of Hispaniola, the island harbouring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic...

n roots and choose to pursue a career singing reggae.

Zulu's early songs were mixes of English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 and Spanish

Spanish language

Spanish , also known as Castilian , is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that evolved from several languages and dialects in central-northern Iberia around the 9th century and gradually spread with the expansion of the Kingdom of Castile into central and southern Iberia during the...

 lyrics

Lyrics

Lyrics are a set of words that make up a song. The writer of lyrics is a lyricist or lyrist. The meaning of lyrics can either be explicit or implicit. Some lyrics are abstract, almost unintelligible, and, in such cases, their explication emphasizes form, articulation, meter, and symmetry of...

, but subsequent releases were English Patois

Patois

Patois is any language that is considered nonstandard, although the term is not formally defined in linguistics. It can refer to pidgins, creoles, dialects, and other forms of native or local speech, but not commonly to jargon or slang, which are vocabulary-based forms of cant...

 style. As a baritone

Baritone

Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...

, the singer has a vocal range of four octaves. Like many dancehall vocalists, he has been known to employ the use of various catch phrases; such as "Spread The Word" and "You Know The Business". He has released several independent projects which are punctuated with distinct three to five part harmonies. He describes his style as "electro-reggae".

His more notable musical collaborations have employed Kool Keith

Kool Keith

Keith Matthew Thornton, better known by his stage name Kool Keith, is an American rapper from The Bronx, New York. A founding member of Ultramagnetic MCs, Kool Keith has recorded prolifically both as a solo artist and in group collaborations. Kool Keith is the self-proclaimed inventor of...

, Earatik Statik

Earatik Statik

Earatik Statik is a Chicago based underground Hip Hop group that has been around since 1999. The group consists of two MCs, Sef Rich and Carlos Polk.-Early years:...

, Aceyalone

Aceyalone

Eddie Hayes, better known by his stage name Aceyalone, is an American rapper.He is a founding member of the Freestyle Fellowship. Apart from his role in Freestyle Fellowship, Aceyalone is also a member of Haiku D'Etat and The A-Team , and he is a co-founder of Project Blowed.After releasing a...

, The Drastics

The Drastics

The Drastics are a roots-oriented dub reggae group hailing from Chicago. Though primarily classified as a reggae group, The Drastics embrace many styles of music both live and in the studio...

, Ghislain Poirier

Ghislain Poirier

Poirier is a DJ/producer from Montreal who is signed to the Ninja Tune record label. He has, however, also worked with other labels such as Chocolate Industries, Rebondir, Shockout, Musique Large, Intr_version and 12k. His work mainly consists of original instrumental mixes and mixes featuring...

, and Kush Arora

Kush Arora

Kush Arora is a dub and bhangra music producer from San Francisco His path to music meandered through metal, punk, goth, and industrial music. He also has a use for Punjabi instruments. He refined his booming, percussive aesthetic as a punk band drummer and cultivated his subversive sound-design...

.

In 2003, he was hired as a producer and engineer

Audio engineering

An audio engineer, also called audio technician, audio technologist or sound technician, is a specialist in a skilled trade that deals with the use of machinery and equipment for the recording, mixing and reproduction of sounds. The field draws on many artistic and vocational areas, including...

 by the Jamaican record label

Record label

In the music industry, a record label is a brand and a trademark associated with the marketing of music recordings and music videos. Most commonly, a record label is the company that manages such brands and trademarks, coordinates the production, manufacture, distribution, marketing and promotion,...

, [Manatee Records. His 2005 release, "Riddim Killah" was released throughout the Orient by the Hawai

Hawai

Hawai can mean:*Hawai, Tottori, town in Tottori Prefecture, Japan*Hawai, India, the administrative headquarters of Anjaw District, in Arunachal Pradesh, India*Hawai, New Zealand in New Zealand...

ian label Sharlene Oshiro & Assoc., and Zulu won a 2007 Hawaii Music Award.

Apart from those mentioned above, other pseudonym

Pseudonym

A pseudonym is a name that a person assumes for a particular purpose and that differs from his or her original orthonym...

s he has used include Zulu Riddim Killah, Bad Man Zulu, Zulu Man, Digital Screw, Whitelabel Menace, Zulu Star, Zulu Massive, and Zulu D. Rowland.