Relationship Rundown
Issue #25
Married hip-hop duo Apsci discusses pros and cons of mixing business and pleasure
By Amber Drea
Published: September 1st, 2005 | 3:53pm
When Dana Diaz-Tutaan and Raphael LaMotta met in New York City seven years ago, they didn’t get along so well. She thought he was an arrogant asshole, and he thought she was way out of his league, especially since she lived on the other side of the world in Sydney, Australia. After a year and a half of long-distance courting, the Australian-Filipina singer and the Italian-Irish producer-MC from Jersey made it official. With their genre-bending, full-length Thanks For Asking (Quannum), which features appearances by Mr. Lif and Tunde Adebimpe from TV On the Radio, the couple shows that opposites do attract.
Was it difficult to get on the same page, coming from completely different backgrounds?
Dana Diaz-Tutaan: I come from a very structured, almost rigid training and background and experience. Ra’s a lot more loose and conceptual.
Rafael LaMotta: I think in some ways what drew us together is that we each had skills we could bring to the table that the other person absolutely did not have.
How does working together affect your marriage or vice versa?
DDT: Sometimes we’re both in the same room, we’re on our laptops, we’re doing business, we’re chatting, and then we’ll start chatting to each other through the computer. We’ll be like, “This is frickin’ ridiculous. Let’s just talk.” (Laughs) And there are times where it’s like, this is couple time. This is outside time.
The song “Never Give Up” is about people not having faith in your relationship when you first started dating. Why was that?
DDT: It was really strange, the amount of skepticism we got. A lot of people say long-distance relationships don’t work. They do, you just really have to work hard at it.
RM: They [work] if they stop being long distance at some point, which ours did. I first came out to Sydney to stay with her and it was weird. There was a lot of resistance to us being together and working together. What I wanted to do was channel that into something that was creative and positive and let that propel us. If you get up there and you’re actually saying that, it gives you more of a reason to keep going.
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