Not just black noise, hip-hop mondial

Multikulti, rhizomatic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you, growing like wildfire through the cracks and fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

From its origins in Jamaican sound systems and DJs toasting, exported to New York by Kool Herc Its multikulti manifestations with Latino graffiti writers and Puerto Rican and Filippino-American breakers taking it way outside the USA Into the Middle East, for example

Shehadin the Martyrs in Palestine saying it in anasheed, chanting to an Islamic beat

Ahlam from Morocco mixing beats in ’95 with Bill Laswell on ‘Acting Salaam’

Tribal bass dub with a parental advisory sticker: ‘Warning -contains messages from Arabs’, on the Barbarity label with Aisha Kandisha’s Jarring Effects

In Lod, Israel, TN Tamer Nafar the Arab Palestian rapper in the State of Israel, rhyming in Hebrew and Arab, Salaam Aleikum!

And Shabak keeping hip-hop alive in Israel, along with Booyaka, Subliminal and Israel’s Most Wanted

Aki Nawaz and Fundamental stirring it up against racist violence in the UK with ‘Dog Tribe’

And Hustlers HC and Asian Dub Foundation doin it for Inglan’ and Inglanistan

And the Sons of Hagar right here in Seattle, named after Abraham’s wife and Ishmael’s mother, rapping about polygamy in ‘Sistersss’ and about the Palestinian revolution

60 groups in Oran, 100 in Algiers, making Algeria the hip-hop leader of Arab nations and the Islamic world

MCs mixin and code switching in Arabic, French and English

MBS in Ouled El Bahja talkin about the daily war in Algeria Intik, De Men, Hamma, K2C, Darkman, Cause Toujours and K Libre on Algerap

Arab-French MCs fighting Islamophobia –

Saliha, ‘une fille rappeuse’, ‘une exclue, une petite Beurette’, with ‘Enfants du Ghetto’ and Siria Khan’s ‘La Main de Fatma’ on Rapattitude in 90 and 92

IAM’s pharaoism on the Planet Mars in Marseille, le cote obscur, and Yazid’s ‘Islam’ and ‘je suis l’Arabe’, Mafia Maghrebine, 113, K-Rime, Cause Toujours, Kery James, Clotaire K representing Beyrouth Ecouere – Gutted Beirut

French hip-hop, the second kingdom, second biggest hip-hop industry in the world

Where Islam is the second biggest religion, and banlieue hip-hoppers from Arab, African, Caribbean and Southern European origins turn the red white and blue into the black white and beur, enriching the language with verlan reverse slang, and veul, reverse reverse slang, where Arab bnecoems beur and beur becomes rebeu

Suprême NTM and Ministère Amer charged fined and suspended prison sentences for dissing the police

19 hip-hop artists joined forces for ’11 minutes 30 contre les lois raciste’ 11 minutes 30 seconds again the racist laws

Where hip-hop is an educational institution, in the land of La Haine and Le Pen, where Saian Supa Crew

Join hands through the darkness with DLT down in Aotearoa /New Zealand

MC Solaar, born in Dakar, setting the standard with his ‘radicool’ prose combat, a million seller, sowing the wind and reaping the tempo, a cliché in France now, but the only French rappeur to get through the US customs with Guru and Missy Elliot, even if Dee Nasty got there first

And hundreds of others following le flow – Assassin, Arsenik, ABS, Afrodiziac, Aktivist, Alliance Ethnik, Addis Posse, Alarme, Argotrip, Akhenaton – and that’s just the ‘a’s!

Inspiring Francophone hip-hoppers in Montréal – Dubmatique, crossing the axis from Dakar to Paris to Montréal, keepin it réal,

Along with female MCs in La Gamic, La Costellation

Shout outs for les femmes du hip-hop francais – Ste Srausz, Les Nubiennes, Siria Khan, Saliha, Unique and Résolument féminin, B Love, Princess Anies, Lady Laiste, the black mama of Zulu rap, and B Side, who started it back in ’82 with ‘Change de Beat’

Global shout outs to the small but growing feline nation of women in hip-hop: Michie Mee in Canada, Feven in Sweden, La Pina in Italy, Da Drill in Bulgaria, Sabrine Setlur aka Schwester S, Cora E, Meli’s Skills en Masse and Tic Tac Toe in Germany, MC Trey, Maya Jupiter and her sisters on Native Tongues in Sydney, Moana, Teremoana Rapley, Nemesis and Sheelaroc in Aotearoa, and many many more

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you, growing like wildfire through the cracks and fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Startin’ right in the USA, with the Hispanic causing panic -

Chicano Frost’s Calo and Spanglish, doin’ it for La Raza (rasa)

Ya Estuvo, blitzin’ the culos, inspiring Latino MCs all over South America

Like Claudio Yarto, MC of Calo in Mexico

Taught himself to rap from Frost’s tapes

Colombia’s rap cartel pushing up from under, la Pozze Latina in Chile, El Sindicao Argentino del hip-hop, Racionais MCs and Cambio Negra in Brazil, Terra Firma representing Brazil in Adelaide

Fidel Castro proclaiming rap music is the existing revolutionary voice of Cuba’s future, Orishas representing Cuba in Paris, SBS, Reyes de la Calle and many more at the Cuban National Hip-hop festival in Havana, Italian rappers switching to Latin lingos and regional dialects

After freestylin’ with Frost in Rome in 92

South African coloured rappers like Brasse Vannie Kaap, Brothers of the Cape

Sayin’ it in Afrikaans, English, xhosa, Arabic, ebonics and prison slang

Finding more to identify with in Latino hip-hop than the African American kind

So Cypress Hill claim they’re funky bilinguals?

Hey should take a few language lessons from Silent Majority, the funky multilinguals,

Macaronic rap, Lausanne on the map, rhymin’ is the art, part of a global thing

La majorité silencieuse, not just a pale copy of the USA

MCs code switching through French, Spanish, Swahili, English and Jamaican patois –

Dans une autre langue, in another language and another one

Hookin’ up with MC Carlos from Sens Unik:

‘OK!OK! El rap es Americano

But if American was yellow our music would be Chinese

Senor C does it in Spanish

And is proud of his Latin blood

Music is contagious and rhythm is a plant

That grows from New York to Martignan’

American Indian voices don’t seem to enter the US hip-hop equation

The pow wow hip-hop of Robbie Bee and the Boyz from the Rez,

Ebony warriors straight outta Albuquerque, hoka hoka hey!

Native American rap from Litefoot, signifying Sitting Bull on ‘A Good Day to Die’,

On a Mission with Frost, indigenising Woody Gythrie on ‘My Land’

Btaka Brown’s Cherokee Indian funk , WithOut Reservation, Caspar the Hopi reggae rapper

John Trudell - Graffiti Man’s sure got something’ to say,

Nation conscious rap, rockin’ the res, ranting and rolling

Zimbawe Legit, Dumi Right and Akim

The real brothers from the mother landed in the US in 1992

Rappin in Shona and Ndbele

Coined the phrase doin’ damage in our native language

Got a little help from DJ Shadow’s Legitimate Mix

Censoring their lyrics, and where are they now?

Back in Zimbabwe cos they dared to criticise

Lost tribal followers and bogus Afrocentricity

Positive Black Soul, straight outta Dakar in Senegal

Swutchin from English to French and Wolof,

Salaam to the real Nubians,

The brother men from another land known as the motherland

The new underprivileged party representing Djoko, Unity

Inspiring a whole new generation of Senegalese hip-hop

Da hop from Dakar with Bideew Bou Bess,

Wa BMG 44, Boul ‘n’ Bai and Kantiolis

Keepin it multilingual down there in Dakar

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Travelling the world over, from up in Greenland, Kalaalit hip-hoppers the Nuuk Posse sayin’ it in Greenlandish, Inuit, Danish and English, sampling whalesong and throatsong, mixing Public Enemy and trip hop Contesting the dominance of the Danish language, and Quarashi in Iceland

All the way down to Planet Cape Town, South Africa, the ghetto code of the Universal Souljaz, Prophets of Da City, Cape Crusaders re-releasing Nelson Mandela, Black Noize and Grave Diggers’ Productions

To Ranking T, raggamuffinement votre on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean,

And Da West Indies Krew doin it in kreyol, Brother Resistance coining rapso in Trinidad,

To Bad Balance, Raketa and Malshishniki in Russia, LiRoy, Molesta and more than 250 hip-hop releases in Poland,

Parazitii, B.U.G. Mafia, Akcent, La Famiglia, Maijuana, Racla, Da Hood Justice, more than 60 hip-hop artists in Romania, G Play and many more in Hungary, Goumeni Glavi, the Rubberheads, Misha Shamara, DJ Dido, Upsurt, Momshevski Sviat, Romanetza I Enchev, Igrachite, Dreben G, Pikaso, Spenz and Sniper Records in Bulgaria, where hip-hop is stealing the thunder from chalga and ethnopop

Rapmasters and JAR in the Czech Republic, Trosky in Slovakia, Lukas, Sindikatas and Skamp in Lithuania, with asides in French and English,

Skandalnavia Hip-hop, Tommy Tee, Warlocks and Diaz in Norway, Clemens and the Funk Flush in Denmark, Petter, the Latin Kings, Global Warming, Feven and many more in Sweden,

Papa Dee, the original black Viking, beating back Scandinavian skinheads

Finland - not all Bomfunk MCs and Darude – the second coming of Suomi hip-hop

Kwon’s multicultural dynasty, Fintelligens hooking Helsinki up with Petter and Peewee in Stockholm, Ritarikunta outta Turku, Avain, Seremoniamestari, Tulenkantajat, Skillsters, Ezkimo,

Doin’ it in Finnish but the hip-hop language is universal

Big up to Paleface The Pale Ontologist, the iconoclast, Finnish but sayin’ it in English, a Nordic parody of Eminem, blowing your house down, denouncing hip-hop as a punitive community, where not even old school heads are granted diplomatic immunity, tellin’ MCs to stop sayin’ the darndest things, and spittin’ self-possessed shit and start teaching, and Father Metro, and Giant Robot doin it in English too

7 (siete) Notas 7 Colores, Violadores del Verso, Solo los Solo, Hippaly in Spain,

El Payo Malo tellin’ us da donde venga with flamenco samples in Andaluz,

Negu Gorriak rapping Basque nationalism for the 90s

Black Company and Da Weasel’s Microcosmica, Casos de policia and Para noia in Portugal,

Osdorp Posse and Spookrijders doin’ it for Nederhop in Holland, Starflam Combattants surviving in French, Spanish and English in Belgium

The Cosirappteam in Slovenia, world championship skiers MCing ‘I Ski fast I ski slow’ in Slovenian and English in 94,

Dissed by Ali En, and followed by Klemen Klemen and Pijama

Street Explosion in Ljubliana 2000, with Blackout 00 and Megablast from Zagreb

The Ugly Leaders from Rijeka, Croatia, with DJ Pimp and Lyrical Maniac MC Condom X representing the war in Bosnia

Freundeskreis outta Stuttgart called hip-hop Esperanto

The philosophy of streetpoetry, a lingua franca

MC Miliano, soulguerillero, international linguist and lyricist

Hookin’ up with immigrants, a transnational underground culture

La langue d’amour die sprache der liebe the language of love

A transnational lingo defeating bankrupt cultures

Fast to learn and easy to understand

Advanced Chemistry started the immigrant hardcore in Germany

Italian, Ghanaian and Haitian Germans straight outa Heidelberg

Attacking racism with ‘Fremd im eigenen land’ foreign in my own country

And Turkish-German rappers Karakan, Erci E and Da Crime Posse showing the way with Cartel, Oriental hip-hop splashing down in Turkey, blitzing Krauts with Attitude like Die Fantastichen Vier

Texta in Austria, breaking down language barriers with Sprachbarrieren

Hip-hop in Italy started in English in 1990 with Italian Rap Attack – DJ Skizo in there with Radical Stuff, most of the others now long forgotten,

Except Frankie Hi NRG fighting da faida in Italian with a lone jew’s harp and a Frost sample of El Chicano’s ‘Viva La Tirado’

The social centres and the Rome militants - Onda Rossa Posse, Assalti Frontali, AK47

Papa Ricky and the Isola Posse All Stars at the Kantiere in Bologna

Almamegretta mixing Neapolitan song, dub and hip-hop in Sons of Hannibal, Attacking racism by tracing Italians’ descent from Africa

99 Posse and Possessione talking about the place where they live in Napoli dialect

Comitato and LHP at the Leoncavallo in Milano, Africa Unite and Mau Mau in Torino, South Posse in Calabria, Suoni Mudu and the Salento Posses doin’ it in Salento dialect, Sud Sound System inventing rappamuffin and tarantamuffin,

Nuovi Briganti in Messina, Sa Razza in Sardinian

Papa Ricky son of an opera singer, other posses sampling Rossini’s ‘Barber of Seville’

MCing started with recitativo in 17th century Italian opera

And the first ghetto was the Jewish quarter in Venice

So maybe hip-hop was originally Italian?

Hellenic hip-hop with TXC, Nebma, Active Member, Himiskoubria and the Terror X Crew sayin it in Greek London Posse defining UK hip-hop, Tricky, Massive Attack and Aspects on the Bristol tip, The Streets’ ‘Original Pirate Material’ straight outta Birmingham into London, sounding more like John Cooper Clarke than LL Cool J

Big Dada on the avant tip with cLOUDDEAD, Ty, Roots Manuva and TTC’s ‘Ceci n’est pas une disque’, remixing Foucault’s remix of Magritte’s ‘ceci n’est pas une pipe’

Y Tystion, straight outta Aberystwth, testifying in Welsh, doin’ it for cool Cymru (Kimru), denouncing New Britain and old lies, and Manau’s Panique Celtique bringing Celtic hip-hop to Breton and the top ten in the French charts

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement-headed global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Across to Asia with LMF, the Lazy Clan from Kowloon East Side, Hong Kong

9 tone Cantorap, a linguistic rubik’s cube,

Scratch rider world champion DJ Tommy on the decks, sampling Bruce Lee and dissing grass without roots, mixing thrash metal with Cantopop and Cantonese opera, representing street kid triads in housing estates – Respect 4 da Chopstick hip-hop!

Rock star Cui Jian’s raps on ‘Power to the Powerless’ attacking materialist idiots and the Hong Kong handover,

Paving the way for the Chinese MC Brothers in Beijing, sampling Nintendo and Nirvana, rappin in Mandarin, a language spoken by more people in the world than English

Khmer Rap by Khmer Rouge, pirated in Phnom Pheng, unbeknown to its author, Prach Ly the Cambodian American rapper from Long Beach, telling his tribe about the legacy of Pol Pot’s year zero, Laostha in Laos, Too Phat, Reefa, Naughtius Maximus and Poetic Ammo in Malaysia saying the world is yours with intellectual poetry, pop rap in English, and with Sheila Majid, sayin’ it in Malay,

Dick Lee the mad Chinaman, rapping in Singlish in Singapore with the Kopi Kat Klan,

Tao Saji started it in Korea, now MP’s 2000 master plan has taken it away, with Da Crew, Joosuc, Tequila Addicted, South Side Allstraz, Soul Chamber, and Tasha brilliant bilingual Korean-American Wonderwoman with Tiger JK from Drunken Tiger, combatting Ice Cube’s racism on ‘Black Korea’

And the Mountain Brothers, Styles, Peril-L and Chops from Penn State representing Asian-American hip-hop inscrutably

Along with the Seoul Brothers dissing ‘Yellow brothers and sisters fakin’ perpetratin’ like Barbie and Ken’ and refusing to perform novelty racist caricature shit jumping out of Chinese takeout boxes on Weird Al Yankovic’s ‘Rice Rice Baby’

And Yellow Peril, formed in response to racist violence in New Jersey, decrying ‘Asian sisters made into Hollywood hos’ by gweilos in Miss Saigon and the like

And Filipino hip-hop, Flip hop, not just Filippino-Americans like the Invisibl Scratch Piklz, but MCs sayin it in Tagalog, like the Ghetto Doggs collective,

And Sudden Rush’s Na Mele Paleoleo , True Hawaiin hip-hop

And Japan’s hardcore crews battling JRap with the Little Bird Nation and Schadarapa bridging the gap

Microphone Pager coming out of the Hokoten and Yoyogi Park, DJ Krush and B Fresh and K Dub Shine, Zeebra, Rhymester, Buddha Brand and BOSS the MC

ECD called it ‘a flame flying across the ocean’ from the USA, which ignited the fuel already there in Shibuya And Sheelaroc in Christchurch sharing the mic from New Zealand to Japan

Japanese hip-hop re-surfacing in Australasia with Dieske and Ryo in Two Dogs in Brisbane, making Australian hip-hop multicultural and multilingual

Wizdm,a South American Aussie with Brethren in Sydney, passing the spoon in ‘Pasa La Cuchara’, ‘Que passa Gough Whitlam, Ciao Pinochet’

And Ila Familia pa’ mi gente for their people in Sydney MCing in Spanish and Spanglish and English

Sleek the Elite bangin’ the mike for the children of the cedar, Lebanese –Australian hip-hop along with South West Syndicate,

Mass MC hooking up with global Italian hip-hop, and Et-Nik Tribe settling the score, romanicin’ the racist

And all the way back to Down Under by Law in 1988, Westside Posse becoming Sound Unlimited from the underside making it to a major label, and Def Wish Cast’s AUST down under coming upper defining Australian hip-hop

The Arrernte Desert Posse and Blakjustis rapping for Aboriginal women, passing it on to Native Rhyme Syndicate putting indigenous Australian hip-hop on the map,

Songlines passing through Brutha Black in SWS, Hip-hop a Place of Peace and Desert Rap, and Wire in Western Sydney with Trey and Maya Jupiter

Curse ov Dialect in Melbourne reincarnating rap from the dead, with ‘all cultures clashing’

Hou from Koolism in Canberra passing the kava bowl and the alali drum and the tapa cloth to MC Trey and King Kapisi, Pacific island Polynesian hip-hop following the rhymes ‘from the kingdom of Tonga to Western Samoa,

To Fiji, to the Cook Islands, to Tahiti to Aotearoa’

And Te Kupu in Upper Hutt Posse starting it in te reo Maori in 88, praising the warrior chiefs in Aotearoa with E Tu, finding the hip-hop whakapapa in Maoitangi, mixing patere with haka and waiata and karanga for the tangata whenua

Dam Native greeting the funk with their Mauri, and Iwi, DLT, Che Fu, MC Wiya, doin’ it in Maori language

The Dawn Raid Colective, P Money, Deceptikonz, Ill Semantics, Aotearoa hip-hop getting out to the masses,

And King Kapisi’s Samoan hip worldwide, inspiring Nesian Mystik’s N.Z.H.I.P.H.O.P

Aotearoan and Australasian hip-hop worldwide

Global hip-hop worldwide

Global noise, hip-hop mondial

Not just black noise

Multikulti, rhizomic, syncretic, not just monochrome

A plant comin at you growing like wildfire through the cracks and tiny fissures

Of the homogenised cement of the so-called global music industry

Global noise all over the planet, indigenous vernaculars

MCs doin’ damage in their native language

Indigenising hip-hop all over the world

Smiling At Strangers is bound to stir up local hip hop purists - as Joelistics states in the press release, ’somewhere along the way hip hop became a tired corporate beast that ran to a formula and trotted out the same lame cliches. Kind of like the cheerleader for capitalism. … TZU have always flown by the seat of our pants. With this album we wanted to push ourselves to do something different … from the local scene and the international scene. We challenged ourselves to write an album where we played all the instruments and wrote songs that were equally influenced by Muddy Waters and A Tribe Called Quest. A lot of inspiration for the songs comes from the concept of “What would it sound like if the Beatles made hip-hop? What if Ray Charles was taken to a jam with DJ Krush and the Kinks. What would that sound like?’

The result is sometimes rough but always adventurous, if lyrically not as cutting edge as TZU’s best work, and whether its more rock orientation will lead to the kind of crossover success enjoyed by 1200 Techniques will probably depend on how Mushroom markets it. What remains consistent is TZU’s characteristically wild, crazed and often exhilaratingly imaginative approach to hip hop that is more aligned with Paso Bionic’s other crew, the avant-garde lunatics Curse ov Dialect.

TZU formed in Melbourne in 1999, incorporating members of Curse Ov Dialect (notably DJ Paso Bionic, who shares production duties with Kiwi DJ Yeroc) and Pan, most notably lyricist, DJ, fruit vendor and Yoga teacher Seed, and represent the new generation, good time, party end of hip-hop, but with old school conscious lyrics and intellectual overtones. These are signalled by their name, a reference to Lao Tzu, ‘the original ancient Chinese B-Boy sage who freestyled the Tao Te Ching 3000 years ago (and we’re still feeling it)’ - lead rapper Joelistics, a part time teacher and high school hip-hop and theatre workshop facilitator, is Eurasian and takes his Daoist heritage seriously. He also name checks the I Ching-influenced writing of ‘the Magellan of psychedelic headspace’, Terence McKenna, on ‘language as the furniture for thinking and feeling and the building blocks of culture’. Joelistics is an engaging rhymer, and a champion freestyler, guesting with Sydney agit-rap group the Herd and showcasing his rapid-fire improvisatory MC skills regularly in ciphers at events such as the Newcastle Sound Summit. Position Correction, released by Mushroom subsidiary Liberation, follows on from the group’s more tentative, self-produced debut, the 6 track EP, Um …Just a Liddlebidova Mic Check.

It leads off with the relaxed, loping beats of ‘Who?’, an introduction to the group, which is also the subject of a high-energy ghetto-style video clip, ‘We Are TZU’, which looks like it was filmed in an underground car park. (It is featured on the giveaway CD Rom with issue number 11 of Stealth magazine, the local hip-hop mouthpiece, along with an interview with Joelistics.) ‘Summer Days’ is an exercise in hot weather hedonistic party rap, while the up-tempo guitar-driven title track introduces the group as ‘backpacking rat pattern back fashioned Fat Latin bushwalking nutcracking wordsmith tactitians’ while attacking current government spending cuts on education and the environment, mistreatment of asylum seekers and support for those who demonstrate. ‘The Horse You Rode in On’ is a full-on political diatribe against Aussie patriotism, the government, talkback radio, ‘redneck clucks’ and a range of other establishment forces, expressing ‘the kickback from toes you tread on’, and quoting the Herd’s ‘burn down the parliament’ along the way. The album ends with the ten-minute ‘Travel Song’, a freewheeling, Kerouac-like stream of consciousness recollection of travel experiences in the Himalayas, tropics, and elsewhere, backed by an insistent Hammond organ figure and bassline and small string orchestra. A slow church organ-like figure, swelling into an orchestral interlude, completes the quasi-classical final segment of the album, which covers a wide range of moods, styles and tempos, and represents another new direction in Australian hip-hop coming from an idiosyncratic Melbourne push which is making an important impact on local indigenisations of the genre.

Her debut 10 track album opens in an appealingly laid back and melodic mode, with keyboards and lush instrumental backing (including a cello on ‘Blind is the Dollar’) occasionally reminiscent of the Bristol trip hop sounds of Massive Attack and Tricky, becoming feistier and the more up-tempo in the second half, with the guitar-driven move-your-butt funk of ‘It’s the Way, the more aggressive ‘As I Escape’, about the on-the-street experience of graffiti writing, which samples Sydney MC Hyjack, and the pounding, Ser Reck-produced final track ‘Gravity Warriors’ about her eponymous break dance crew. Also backed by the scratches of her regular DJ Bacon and production team Mobius Cube, she alternates singing and a soft, melodic rap style on tracks such as the opening ‘Time to Myself’, a claim to privacy with references to ‘juniper berries and frangipani’, and ‘Ghosts of Poets’, which refers to her influences and inspirations as a rhymster. While sometimes straying into new age territory, with references to aromatherapy, she also delivers a laid-back form of conscious rap which attacks commercialisation. While too many tracks are self-reflexive, dealing with the experiences of writing and delivering rhymes and performing on stage, as well as participating in the other elements of hip-hop, this is a musically diverse release and a welcome addition to the steadily growing number of Australian hip-hop releases by women MCs.

DeFocus is the most recent showcase of Clan Analogue artists’ work, and its subtitle ‘Low Res’, apart from suggesting the rock musician at the centre of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Idoru, derives from the low resolution electronic production that predominates on this compilation. As Clan Analogue’s website states, it ‘steers a path through ambient dub, minimalist techno, electro noise and lo fi’. Throughout the sixteen tracks, ‘anti-production, accidental noise, low bit-rate recordings and analogue tape dropouts make sporadic appearances’ challenging listeners to ‘question their received notions of electronic production’. The ‘error messages’ of the cut-click-glitch mode of electronica pioneered by the more ear-bleeding approach of the Viennese label Mego predominates here, although often in the more melodic, listener-friendly versions of the sub-genre popularised by British artists such as Pole and Four Tet. But it is often hard to distinguish these tracks from standard techno fare. Monotonously repetitive beats tend to predominate, ranging from the standard thud-thud-thud-thud techno brutalism of Fluffy T Bunny to the slowed-down brutalist drum and bass of Alex Davies, the rubber band pulse of Terry Nation and the more melodic ambient dub of Deep Child’s ‘Refugee Dub’, which does little to justify its title. Clan founder Kazumichi Grime offers a more melodic, but darkly ambient pulse on the Terry Riley-like ‘Monomental’, Pretty Boy Crossover mix static, electronic buzz, echo and vocal samples on  ‘Switch’, CSB VS. Windup Toys combine music box-like chimes and electronic bleeps and swooshes with a insidously insistent, reverberating bassline, while it is a relief when beats drop out altogether on the final two tracks, Able Child’s electronically modulated lion roars and the funereal keyboard loops of Zog’s “April DX’.  An acquitred taste no doubt, and not especially challenging in relation to other recent electronic music production of the Ninja Tunes variety, but at least this is refreshingly non-commercial, local, do-it-yourself fare.

Beyond Underground is accompanied by a limited-edition comic book, written and illustrated in black and white by Mistery, which recounts the ‘expanded story’ of the album. This is an impressive production, although it is badly in need of a spell check, and like the album, has a certain uniformity of style which limits its appeal. Strongly influenced by Mad Max, especially on the video release for the album’s single ‘Intercepta’, which features Mad Max replica cars, stunt men and Emil Minty, the ‘feral kid’ from Mad Max 2, the album also boasts influences from Journey to the Centre of the Earth, War of the Worlds, The Crow, Sleepy Hollow and The Matrix, as well as the film music of Henry Mancini, Danny Elfman, Hans Zimmer and others. These are difficult to detect, given the rather regular beats and dual vocal delivery throughout, give or take a few orchestral flourishes. Mistery’s narration which links the 20 tracks is ponderously flat and featureless, and even Morganics’ news reader, who leads off the album with a report from Broken Hill on the post-apocalytic state of the nation, sounds unconvincing and underwehelming. It’s largely a problem of tone – there is a lack of humour and variety of moods and emotions here, with most tracks delivered with a relenlessly declamatory solemnity where touches of irony and levity would have been welcome. ‘Profit or Prophet’ takes a swipe at the Australian music industry and its relegation of hip-hop to an underground cottage industry, but without achieving much impact, and ‘Power of Words’ features a few lines in Spanish to little effect, while guests like Sleeping Monk, Mass MC, Ser Reck and DJs Nick Toth, Nino Brown and Flagrant don’t make much of a lasting impression on proceedings (and as with so much hip-hop, there is a dearth of female voices). One can’t help the impression that in their long absence from recording, Brethren have been overtaken by more recent developments in Australian hip-hop, with groups like Curse Ov Dialcet and TZU and artists like Maya Jupiter, Macromantics and Liones offering far more experimental, adventurous and variegated excursions into the genre. Brethren’s faintly ludicrous sci-fi gangsta pose in front of the Intercepta car on the back cover of the CD, in black replicant-like garb and dark glasses, weilding lethal looking artillery, seems only to confirm that this may be a key moment of local hip-hop history, but it is not a very enduring or exciting one.

I start with an example from Zimbabwe that challenges the standard rhetoric about the Afrodiasporic and Afrocentric aspects of African-American rap and hip-hop (e.g., Rose). In the title track of Doin’ Damage in My Native Language, an EP produced in the United States in 1992, Zimbabwe Legit (brothers Dumisani and Akim Ndlouvu) provide English translations of key expressions employed in their Zimbabwe regional tribal dialect, Ndbele (Jones 111). These English expressions (“Power to the people”; “The ghettos of Soweto”; “You know where to find me–in Zimbabwe”) serve for the Anglophone listener both to locate Zimbabwe Legit firmly in its county of origin, Zimbabwe, and to indicate the proximity of that country to South Africa. In addition, the brothers Ndlouvu prioritize their native dialect as the main source of their art of rhyming, which finds local equivalents for certain rhetorical attributes of African-American “nation conscious” rap. The back sleeve cover and the CD itself highlight and celebrate words in Ndbele as a form of “concrete poetry,” but Zimbabwe Legit’s raps also incorporate Shona, the more “standard” language of Zimbabwe. So the linguistic “damage” done by Zimbabwe Legit is directed not only against the English language of their colonizers–which Zimbabwe Legit needs to use in order to be accessible in the United States–but also against standard linguistic practices in Zimbabwe. This concern for linguistic authenticity is furthermore linked to broader notions of authenticity and Afrocentricity. In a track entitled “To Bead or Not to Bead,” the brothers Ndlouvu criticize African-American rappers who assimilate African fashions such as hair beading. This track is entirely in English, and includes an apparent reference to the rhetorical embrace of the Italian-American Mafia by African-American gangsta rappers:

Some MCs would rather be Italian/Now sportin’ beads and a black medallion/Medallion on your chest, but do you feel it in your heart?/Jump off the bandwagon and pull the cart. (Qtd. in Jones 106)

Despite its inventiveness and its “authentic” African origins, Zimbabwe Legit was a distinctly minor voice in the chorus of African-American hip-hop in 1992, and the group subsequently disappeared without a trace from the United States music industry. An entry about Zimbabwe Legit on the Rumba-kali African hip-hop website describes it as the first African hip-hop crew to break into the United States and European markets. When Zimbabwe Legit’s Ndlouvu brothers were college students in the United States, they secured a record deal and an unreleased album produced by African-American hip-hop producer, Mr. Lawng (for the Black Sheep label). Dumi Ndlouvu later went on to become part of the rap group called the Last 8th, and he now goes by the name Doom E. Right.

Another marginalized African rap group which shares Zimbabwe Legit’s multilingual dexterity is Positive Black Soul, a duo from Senegal who rap in a combination of English, French, and their native Senegalese language, Wolof, thus managing to address two major global linguistic groups in the African diaspora as well as those in their own locality. In the track “Respect the Nubians,” Positive Black Soul identifies itself in English in relation to African-American rap as “a brother man from another land known as the motherland.” In “Djoko” (Unity), rapped in a mixture of Wolof and French, they address more local concerns, describing themselves as “a brand new (political) party … we are underprivileged, but we want the good life.” Their multi-lingual rhymes enable them to address their immediate constituency as well as audiences in the United States and the world at large (the album sleeve contains the lyrics to all theft tracks in English translation). Unfortunately the United States and the world at large didn’t seem to be listening, and the first album by this innovative group did very poor business in the English-speaking world.

Deleuze’s notion of the “rhizome” is aptly applicable to hip-hop culture and rap music, which has rapidly become globalized and transplanted into different cultures throughout the world. This rhizomic process is expressed directly in the work of another rap group, Silent Majority, which is based in Switzerland and raps in a mixture of English, Jamaican patois, French, Spanish, and Swahili. Referring to themselves as “funky multilinguals,” Silent Majority’s members foreground their collective linguistic dexterity in a track entitled “Dans une autre langue” (In Another Language). In it, guest Spanish rapper MC Carlos from the bilingual Lausanne-based group Sens Unik states:

Ok! ok! el rap es americano/Pero, si el americano fuero amarillo/Mi musica saria una musica de chino/…. /La musica es contagiosa y al ritmo es una planta/Que cresce de Nueva York a Martignan

[Ok! ok! rap is American/But if American was yellow my music would be Chinese music/…. /Music is contagious and rhythm is a plant/That grows from New York to Martignan]

This use of the trope of rap music as a “plant” neatly corresponds to Deleuze’s “rhizome” and serves to emphasize the “glocalization” of rap, which, although a worldwide phenomenon, is, like African-American rap, still very much concerned with roots, family, locality and neighborhood. As Sens Unik’s MC Rade puts it in the same track, in a mixture of French and English: “Our music is not a pale copy of the United States, Lausanne on the map, rhymin’ is the art, part of a global thing.” Perhaps one of the most peripheral examples of the global linguistic indigenisation of rap as a “resistance vernacular” is the Nuuk Posse from Greenland, which uses its distinctly minority language (Inuit) to rap about the domination of their country by the Danish language (Barnes 1997).

The variety of ethnic origins among French rappers, from the French Caribbean to the Arab populations of North Africa to other parts of Europe, is notable. The origins of French hip-hop in the immigrant and working class housing projects of the banlieues (outer suburbs) of French cities, as displayed in Matthieu Kassovitz’ 1995 film La Haine (Hate), are also notable. A broad variety of musical inflections ranging from hard-core rap to reggae and raggamuffin distinguish French rap from U.S. rap and give it features more in common with British and Italian hip-hop. The “adaptation” period of French hip-hop in the 1990s involved the growth of hard-core rap and Zuluism (based on Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation), where African-American models were adapted directly to French realities, but other concepts, such as Afrocentrism, could not be translated wholesale into the French context. Andre Prevos shows how French rap crews like IAM attempted to circumvent the “return to Africa” ideology prevalent among some U.S. rappers in order to avoid playing into the hands of French right-wing anti-Arab movements like Le Pen’s National Front (“Post-Colonial”). Consequently IAM constructed an elaborate “Pharaonic” ideology and mythology which boasts about Africa, but not black or Arabic Africa, rather adapting the Africa of Ancient Egypt into a religious symbology. They also mythologize their native Marseilles, a marginalized city with a high non-European immigrant population, as “le cote oscur” (the obscure side) of France, and rap in Marseilles dialect. As Steve Cannon has noted, there is in Afro-French rap “a closer physical and therefore less mythical relationship of (black) rappers in France to the `pays d’origine’ [African homeland] than in the USA” (164). Cannon also notes that, despite the fact that only six percent of the population of France consists of non-European immigrants, rap and hip-hop have become a vital form of anti-racist expression for ethnic minorities:

studies of hip-hop in France in the 1980s and 1990s suggest that not only is the most numerical participation in both production and consumption of hip-hop “products” among people of minority ethnic origin, but also that hip-hop in France is characterized to a great extent by its role as a cultural expression of resistance by young people of minority ethnic origin to the racism, oppression, and social marginalization they experience within France’s banlieues and in its major towns and cities. (155)

Like a number of other non-Anglophonic countries, the first compilation of rap music in Italy was almost entirely in English. Called Italian Rap Attack and released in 1992 by the Bologna-based dance label Irma, it included a brief sleeve note by radio DJ Luca De Gennaro declaring that “rap is a universal language, in whatever language and whatever part of the world it is performed.” But in fact the only Italian-language track on the compilation was Frankie Hi NRG’s “Fight da faida,” with its half-English, half-Italian refrain urging resistance against Mafia blood feuds. This track deservedly became the most re-released and most famous Italian rap track of the 1990s. It was a courageous declaration of resistance against the Mafia, and, in marked contrast to the celebration of Martin Scorsese’s Italian-American mafioso stereotypes in American gangsta rap, it became one of the dominant polemics of “nation conscious” Italian rap. Frankie Hi NRG’s barrage of internal rhymes also illustrated the greater facility for rhyming that the Italian language had over English, while his use of a brief burst of a woman rapping in Sicilian dialect was also a first:

Padre contro figlio, frateno su fratello/Partoriti in un avello come came da macello;/Uomini con anime/Sottili come lamine,/taglienti come il crimine/Rabbiosi oltre ogni limite,/Eroi senza terra/Che combattono una guerrafDa la mafia e la comorra, Sodoma e Gomorra,/Napoli e Palermo,/Succursali dell’Inferno.

[Father against son, brother against brother,/Born in a grave like butcher’s meat;/Men with minds/As sharp as blades,/Cutting like crime/Angry beyond limits,/Heroes without land/Fighting a war/Between the mafia and the camorra, Sodom and Gomorrah/Naples and Palermo/Regions of hell.]

Although there are Italian posses based in the major cities like Rome and Milan, a notable feature of Italian rap is a tendency to manifest itself in smaller and more marginal regional centers. If Turin and Naples became major localities for rap music, Sicily, Sardinia, Calabria, and Puglia were just as important. A nationwide network of centri sociali (social centers), which were often set up in occupied disused buildings, became the focal point for Italian hip-hop culture. As Italian rappers began experimenting in their native language, they also Italianized U.S. hip-hop expressions like “rappare,” “scratchare,” and “slenghare” (to use slang) and began to rap in their regional dialects. Some rappers also revived the oppositional political rhetoric of the militant student groups of the 1970s, and in some cases began to excavate Mediterranean regional folk music roots which had been neglected since the Italian folk music revival of the late 1960s. A distinctive musical syncretism also emerged among the Italian rap groups that pushed out the parameters of hip-hop and more often than not became fused with raggamuffin reggae (“ragga”), dance hall, and ska influences. This led to the coinage of the term “rappamuffin” in a 1992 Flying Records compilation of Italian rap and ragga entitled Italian Posse: Rappamuffin d’Azione. The Sud Sound System, based in Salento on the Southern Adriatic Coast, took this even further, referring to their hybridized music as “tarantamuffin,” referring back to the dance tradition known as tarantella. The hybridizations of both Sud Sound System and the Marseilles-based Marsilia Sound System were studied by the French ethnomusicologist George Lapassade and his Italian collaborator Piero Fumarola, and as Felice Liperi has indicated, the use of dialect in Italian rap was partly a consequence of both technical considerations and the choice of polemical subject matter: Clearly the motivation was not only cultural, it was also technical. Italian DJs and musicians who chose the musical idiom of rap, which is based on the relation between words and rhymes, found dialect a more malleable language in which to combine rhythm and rhyme. But it is also true that once they found themselves talking about the domination of the mafia in the south and urban disintegration, a more coherent use of the language of these localities came spontaneously. Dialect is also the language of oral tradition, and this brings it closer to the oral culture of rap. (201)

This is particularly evident in the work of the Bad-based group Suoni Mudu, which superimposes a street map of Bad on its name and enacts a mock Mafia murder on the cover of its polemical 1996 mini-album, Mica casuale sara (Hardly by Chance). The CD cover includes the lyrics to their track “Citt e camina (L’ambiente)” (City and Hearth [Where I Live]) in both Barese dialect and “standard” Italian. This begins with an address to local Christian Democrat and neo-fascist politicians and then proceeds to mark out a criminal cartography of Bad:

Ind’a Libberta acchemma] [nne l’omerta/Ind’a Sambasquhle acchemma] [nne u criminale/A Japigie stene na Coop addo vennevene la robba / A Carrassi uno scippo] [ogni due passi.

[A conspiracy of silence rules in Liberta/Organized crime rules in San Pasquale/There was a co-op in Japigia which sold drugs/In Carrassi a bag gets snatched every two meters.]

The track exposes a conspiracy between the government, the police, the Mafia and their Calabrian and Neapolitan equivalents (the Ndrangheta and the Camorra), and expresses similar sentiments to those of “Fight da faida,” but they are articulated very differently. The loping ragga beat gives the track a sense of grim resignation as well as denunciation, and the sung refrains--”Poverannu” (poor us) and “Ste fatt’u sccehe” (the die is cast), which use a female voice--draw on local musical idioms to express a sense of grief. Barese dialect is also used for its musical attributes, as in the line “Ask me for two hits (of heroin), there, give him two hits,” which in Barese is sing-song: “Di du, da d&amp; de du.” As Goffredo Plastino has noted, “dialect is also used for its different musicality with regard to Italian, for the greater possibilities of rhythmic and musical organisation of phrases which it allows” (100). The use of local expressions, the perorations through the main precincts of Bari, and the roll call of politicians also give the track a specificity and sense of locality which “Fight da faida” lacks. Suoni Mudu provides a detailed and intimate cartography of the Bari criminal underworld which is fleshed out by its idiomatic use of the “minor language” of Barese dialect. “Fight da faida,” on the other hand, like the Rome-based rappers Menti Criminali (Criminal Minds), addresses the whole of Italy by using standard Italian. As a member of Menti Criminali put it, “my rhymes are written in [Standard] Italian so that what I experience and feel is clear from Sicily to Milan.” But this kind of clarity often involves sacrificing a sense of local identity which is vital to the regional diversity of Italian rap. In the case of the Sardinian group Sa Razza, rapping in Sardinian dialect serves as a means of defending local (and national) pride. As the group puts it in its track entitled “The Road”: “We prefer Sardinian slang rap. You have to defend your pride in being Sardinian, brother. That’s why we’re rapping, here the only hope is for my people to survive. Survive on the road” (Qtd. in Pacoda 42). For the Sicilian group Nuovi Briganti, rapping in the dialect of Messina is a way of maintaining contact with the poor and dispossessed people of its locality, who have difficulty expressing themselves in “standard” Italian: <blockquote>We are based in one of the most devastated areas of the city, and the people in the neighbourhood have difficulty expressing themselves in [Standard] Italian. They’ve been used to speaking dialect since they were children. And they were our first reference point, the people who have followed us since we began. And rap is about communication. (Qtd. in Pacoda 42)</blockquote> A more paradoxically polemical use of Italian dialect as “resistance vernacular” occurs in a track by the Calabrian group South Posse, which was based in Cosenza until it disbanded in 1995. In “Semplicemente immigrato” (Simply Immigrated), Luigi Pecora, an Italian of Ethiopian origin, also known as Louis, uses the dialect of Cosenza as a way of expressing his adopted Calabrian “roots.” As Plastino has stated, here “dialect serves the function of identifying the privileged interlocutors of a discussion, the people of Cosenza, and challenging them to a dialogue. At the same time ... it is a way of elaborating a personal style” (98). Influenced by the dialect ragga-rap of Sud Sound System, Pecora wrote “Simply Immigrated” in dialect as a way of expressing his ability to belong to Cosenza, and to get closer to the inhabitants, who he addresses as “brothers”: <blockquote>Eppure molti dicono tutto il mondo e paese/Eppure troppi dicono vattene al tuo paese/Ma dicu ma moni tu chi cazzu vu I mia/Ca signu vinutu druacu a lavura pe fatti mia ...</blockquote> <blockquote>[Many people say all the world’s your home town/Too many people say go back to where you came from/I’m telling you what the fuck do you want me to do/I came here to work and mind my own business.]</blockquote> The simplicity of the language used here is abetted by musical repetitions of particular words, and there is a shift in the track from the direct address ofT’ and “you” to “he” and then “we,” indicating that the narrator identifies with both the immigrant and the native Italian. The use of dialect here is strategic, an act of defiance, and to emphasize this Pecora raps the first two lines in standard Italian before shifting into dialect in the second two. As Plastino notes, this mixture of dialect and Italian corresponds to

the way a young person from Cozsenza talks today, which is what Luigi Pecora wanted to identify himself with to communicate more clearly…. The reference to “roots” is made to indicate the need to establish an exclusively linguistic relationship to one’s region. (100)

But South Posse also uses dialect to rap about racism, in the context of both the discrimination against southern Italians by northern Italians and the exclusion of immigrants from Africa, who are often refered to as “extra-comunitario,” a euphemism used to describe non-Europeans.

In spite of the fact that Aotearoa/New Zealand is on the opposite side of the globe in relation to Italy, we find that there too indigenous language is used in rap as a form of “resistance vernacular.” The native inhabitants of Aotearoa, the Maori, constitute about thirteen percent of the 3.36 million population of Aotearoa, but forty percent of Maori are in the lowest income group, and twenty-one percent are unemployed, compared with 5.4 percent for pakeha (persons of European origin). Seventy-five percent of the Maori population is under thirty years of age, but forty percent of Maori youth are out of work and four out of ten leave school without having graduated. Since the 1980s, steps have been taken by Maori towards a renewal of their cultural and social traditions, and to regenerate te reo Maori (the Maori language), which is only spoken by about eight percent of the inhabitants of Aotearoa. This establishes it as a “minor language,” although it is the language of the indigenous inhabitants of Aotearoa, the tangata whenua (people of the land). The syncretization of aspects of traditional Maori waiata (song) and imported African-American musical forms is one which many Maori popular groups and performers have pursued in different ways and to varying degrees throughout the history of Maori popular music. Given the implausibility of entertaining strict notions of authenticity and purity in relation to Maori cultural traditions (or to any contemporary indigenous musical forms), the combination of traditional waiata (song) and popular musical forms from the United States is part of a cultural project of self-assertion and self-preservation which is linked with a global diaspora of musical expressions of indigenous ethnic minorities’ social struggles.

Maori rappers were quick to adopt the trappings of hip-hop culture and to explore its affinities with indigenous Maori musical and rhetorical forms. This is illustrated by the way concepts such as patere (rap), whakarongo mai (listen up) and wainua (attitude) are easily assimilated into hip-hop discourse. The first Maori rapper to release a recording was Dean Hapeta (D Word), with his group Upper Hutt Posse. Hapeta was part of a “lost generation” of Maori youth who didn’t have the benefits of learning the Maori language at school, as is now customary, and thus had to learn it himself. This informed the militancy with which he uses the Maori language in his raps. As Hapeta says, “Although I love and respect Hip-Hop, being Maori I only take from it what doesn’t compromise my own culture. But in spite of this I have found them both very compatible” (Qtd. in Frizzell 48; cf. 50).

Hapeta and other Maori and Pacific Islander rappers and musicians have substituted Maori and Polynesian cultural expressions for the African-American rhetoric of hip-hop, while borrowing freely from the musical styles of the genre (and it is an indication of the strong position traditionally held by women in Maori and Pacific Islander societies that the misogynist aspects of U.S. hardcore rap are totally absent from its Maori and Pacific Islander appropriations). The result is a further syncretization of an already syncretic form, but one which is capable of having strong musical, political, and cultural resonances in Aotearoa. In their 1996 album Movement in Demand (a title derived from Louis Farrakhan), Upper Hutt Posse combine the use of traditional Maori traditional instruments, militant patere and karanga (raps and calls to ancestors) and invocations of the spirits of the forest (Tane Mohuta) and the guardian of the sea (Tangaroa), and rhetoric borrowed from the Nation of Islam. The album also draws on the group’s reggae and ragga inclinations, funk bass rhythms, blues guitar riffs, and hardcore gangsta-style rapping which switches from English to te reo Maori. One of the album’s tracks, “Tangata Whenua” (“The People of the Land”) is entirely in Maori, a choice which runs the risk of receiving virtually no radio or TV airplay, as the national media in New Zealand still regard the Maori language as a threat to its Anglophone hegemony. Nonetheless, Hapeta completed a powerful video for “Tangata Whenu,” was previewed on a Maori language television program. It tells the story of a polluted river, a consultation with a kaumatua (elder), traditional Maori gods destroying a factory, and an expression of Maori sovereignty:

Ko Papatuanuku toku Whaea, ko te whenua ia/Ko Ranginui toku Matua, kei runga ake ia/Whakarongo mai kite mea nui rawa/He take o te Ao/He kaupapa o toku whakapapa/Ko IO MATUA KORE, te mama tuatahi/E ora! koutou! toku Iwi,/Whaia te wairua o te ahi/Whakatikangia te kupu, te mahi,/Whakatahea nga hee o Tauiwi,/Kia rere ai nga hiahia, nga moemoeaa,/O te hinengaro/Kia toko ai hoki te whakaaro moohio/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Pake–Whakapapa/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Take Me Te Mana/Taangata Whenua–Ko Te Hana O Te Haa/Taangata Whenua–Te Ahi Kaa

[Papatuuaanuku is my mother, the earth/Ranginui is my father, he is above/ Listen to the thing it’s very important/A root of the world/A foundation level of my genealogy/It is Io-matua-kore, the first parent Live! you all! my people,/ Pursue the spirit of the fire/Make correct the words, the work/Cause the wrongs of Tauiwi (the foreigner) to pass away/So the desires, dreams, can flow/Of the conscience/So wise thoughts can rise up also/People of the land–The durable lineage/People of the land–The root and the authority/People of the land–The glow of the breath/People of the land–The ever burning fire]

The track starts with a woman chanting a karanga (call to ancestors), and includes the sound of the purerhua (bull roarer), a traditional Maori instrument consisting of a piece of greenstone or wood rotated on a piece of string which makes a whirring noise associated with sounding the alarm. The track draws on key concepts in Maori philosophy, which are familiar to some pakeha, such as whakapapa (lineage), mana (authority), tangata (man), and kaupapa (strategy or theme of a speech). It also draws extensively on Maori oral traditions and rhetorical figures. The track is not translated into English on the lyric sheet of the album, which suggests that it is addressed to Maori only, although most New Zealanders know the meaning of the term tangata whenua. To adapt Zimbabwe Legit’s phrase, in “doin’ damage in [his] native language,” Dean Hapeta and the Upper Hutt Posse use the rhetoric, idioms, and declamatory styles of hip-hop to express Maori resistance and sovereignty, and in so doing, they indigenize it. Rap becomes subservient to an expression of Maori philosophy and militant dreams, and is thus absorbed into the wider project of Maori sovereignty. On 1 January 2000, Hapeta released Ko Te Matakahi Kupu (The Word that Penetrates), a twenty track rap album entirely in Maori, under his Maori sobriquet, Te Kupu (D Word).

From our consideration of hip-hop scenes in places like Zimbabwe, Italy, Greenland, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, we see that the the rhizomic globalization of rap is not a simple instance of the appropriation of a U.S./African-American cultural form; rather; it is a lingustically, socially, and politically dynamic process which results in complex modes of indigenization and syncretisim. The global indigenization of rap and hip-hop has involved appropriations of a musical idiom which has become a highly adaptable vehicle for the expression of indigenous resistance vernaculars, their local politics, and what Kong calls the “moral geographies” of different parts of the world. The “minor languages” of Maori and Italian dialects, together with the use of verlan and veul in French and the languages of other ethnic minorities within dominant languages such as French and English, however, pay a price for their status as “resistance vernaculars.” While the use of these vernaculars can be regarded as constituitive of deliberate strategies to combat the hegemony of the English language in both the global popular music industry in general and in hip-hop in particular (which, its African-American linguistic variants notwithstanding, still represents a dominant language), their limited accessibility in both linguistic and marketing terms largely condemns them to a heavily circumscribed local context of reception. In contrast, a hip-hop group such as the Swedish crew Loop-troop reflect the continuing dominance of the English language and American culture in the formation of global pop:

We’ve all had English in school since we were 10 years old and there’s a lot of sitcoms and films on TV that are English/American. The whole of Europe is becoming more and more like America basically. I guess we’re fascinated with the language. But the way rap in Swedish sounds is a little bit corny and I think it’s great that people as far away as Australia can understand us. I think that’s the main mason why we rhyme in English. (Qtd in McDuie 31)

What Looptroop risks in their embrace of the Anglophonic and American homogenization of Europe risks, of course, is the erasure of any distinctively local or even national features in their rapping and breakbeats. In contrast, Maori rapper Danny Haimona of Dam Native sees the popularity of U.S. gangsta rap and R&B among young Maori and Pacific Islanders as the biggest threat to their appreciation of their own culture expressed in local indigenous hip-hop:

There’s such an influx of American stuff, and we need to quell it, and we need to give these kids some knowledge on what’s really up…. Kids don’t want to be preached to, so what I’m trying to do is put it on their level, and take all the good influences from hip-hop, and bring it close to home. There is a good vibe out there for New Zealand hip-hop, but it’s being poisoned by the Americanisms–the Tupacs and the Snoop Doggy Doggs. You have to have a balance, and Dam Native are trying to help kids work out that they have their own culture, they don’t have to adopt Americanisms. (Qtd. in Russell 18)

In this context, the choice of local indigenous “resistance vernaculars” is an act of cultural resistance and preservation of ethnic autonomy, and as such, it is a choice that overrides any global or commercial concerns.

Note Throughout this essay, translations from French, Italian, and Spanish are by Tony Mitchell; translations from Maori are by Dean Hapeta and Tony Mitchell.

Works Cited Barnes, Jake. Review Kaataq (CD), by Nuuk Posse. The Wire 158 (April 1997): 65.

Bell, Susan. “Talk of Town Irks Academie.” The Australian 20 Jan. 1999. (Rpt. from the London Times.)

Cannon, Steve. “Paname City Rapping: B-boys in the Banlieues and Beyond.” Post-Colonial Cultures in France. Ed.

Alec Hargreaves and Mark McKinney. London: Routledge, 1997.150-66.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Tr. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

Frizzell, Otis. “Hip-hop Hype.” Pavement (NZ) 8 (Dec. 1994): 44-50.

Gilroy, Paul. “`After the Love Has Gone’: Bio-Politics and Etho-Poetics in the Black Public Sphere.” Public Culture 7.1 (1994): 49-76.

Goudailler, Jean-Pierre. Comment tu tchatches: dictionaire du francais contemporain des cites. Paris: Maisonnuveau et Larose, 1997.

Jones, K. Maurice. The Story of Rap Music. Brookfield: Millbrook P, 1994.

Kong, Lily. “The Politics of Music: From Moral Panics to Moral Guardians.” International Association of Geographers’ Conference, U of Sydney, 1999.

La Haine. Dir. Matthieu Kassovitz. Egg Pictures, 1995.

Liperi, Felice. “L’Italia s’e desta. Tecno-splatter e posse in rivolta.” Ragazzi senza tempo: immagini, musica, conflitti delle culture giovanili. Ed. Massimo Canevacci et al. Genoa: Costa & Nolan, 1993. 163-208.

McDuie, Duncan. “A Looped Nordic Sample.” Revolver (Sydney) 1 Nov. 1999: 31.

Pacoda, Pierfrancesco, ed. Potere alla parola: Antologia del rap italiano. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1996.

Plastino, Goffredo. Mappa delle voci: rap, raggamuffin e tradizione in Italia. Rome: Meltemi, 1996.

Potter, Russell A. Spectacular Vernaculars. New York: SUNY P, 1995.

Prevos, Andre. “Post-colonial Popular Music in France: Rap Music and hip-hop culture in the 1980s and 1990s.”

Global Noise: Rap and Hip-hop Outside the USA. Ed.Tony Mitchell. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2001 (forthcoming).

–. “The Rapper’s Tongue: Linguistic Inventions and Innovations in French Rap Lyrics.” American Anthropological Association Meeting, Philadelphia, 1998.

Robertson, Roland. “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity.” Global Modernities. Ed. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson. London: Sage, 1995.25-44.

Rose, Tricia. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1994.

Russell, John. 1997. “Rhymes and Real Grooves:Dam Native.” Rip It Up (NZ) 240 (Aug. 1997): 18.

“Zimbabwe Legit.” Rumba-kali African Hip-hop Website. rumba-kali.www. cistron.nl/zimbabwe.ht. 1999.

Discography

Dam Native. Kaupapa Driven Rhymes Uplifted. BMG/Tangata Records, 1997.

Menti Criminali. Provincia di piombo. X Records, n.d.

Positive Black Soul. Salaam. Island Records, 1996.

Silent Majority. La majorite silencieuse. Unik Records, 1994.

South Posse. 1990-1994. CSOA Forte Prenestino, n.d.

Suoni Mudu. Mica casuale sara. Drum & Bass, 1996.

Te Kupu. Ko Te Matakahi Kupu. Universal/Kia Kaha, 2000.

Upper Hutt Posse. Movement in Demand. Tangata Records, 1996.

Various. Italian Rap Attack. Irma Records, 1992.

Zimbabwe Legit. Zimbabwe Legit. Hollywood Basic, 1992.

Music emanating from Tasmania has generally been pretty much off the radar in terms of mainstream or even underground success or acknowledgment in Australia. A scroll through the bands and artists listed on the TasMusic website yields few if any familiar names with the surprise exception of the world music award-winning Kazan Tatar singer Zulya Kamalova and her band the Children of the Underground, whom few would associate with Tasmania given the distinctively Russian and Tatar orientation of her music. As Aline Scott-Maxwell has commented, ‘her blond, eastern European appearance and striking looks, the expressivity, flexibility and distinctive timbral quality of her voice, described in reviews variously as pure and rich, the often melancholy themes of her lyrics and the languid style of her songs, and their remarkably diverse backings are her trademarks. But her world music success is as much to do with her ethnic Tatar identity as it is with these other things’. But Zulya’s Hobartian bassist, mandalaika player and arranger Andrew Tanner is a key component of the Children of the Underground, as well as being involved in the ‘gypsy Latin swing’ of Rektango, a Hobart-based world music outfit featuring Jugoslav vocalist and percussionist Tania Bosak, who play Bulgarian, Russian and Latin dance music featuring sax, flute and accordion, and whose members frequently play at a regular Friday night outdoor gig in Salamanca Square. There are also regular pub-based jazz groups and while I was in Hobart last December I witnessed a pretty good blues -rock pub band of guys mostly in their 50s, belting out early Rolling Stones covers and other blues standards - there was even a harmonica player in the audience who kept joining in with them, even though he wasn’t part of the band. There’s clearly no shortage of music in Tasmania, it’s just that most of it doesn’t get heard on the mainland.

Of course there are numerous Tasmanian-born musicians now based on the mainland or outside Australia. Country singer and prolific recording artist Audrey Auld Mezera is originally from Hobart and has had a long association with Bill Chambers in NSW, but now lives in California, where she runs her own label Reckless Records, specialising in ‘music with the dirt left on’. On her live album with US guitarist Nina Gerber In the House, her song ‘Mountain Home’ makes reference to growing up in Fern Tree, on the slopes of Mt.Wellington in the south west of Hobart, commonly referred to rather ominously as ‘the mountain’, although there are other mountains on the island. The slopes of Mt.Wellington can be cold and treacherous as well as spectacular, and the moonrock terrain of its farther side was named Transylvania in the 19th century, and has been described by Edward Colless as ‘the legendary domain of genetic throwbacks and demonic, cannibalistic clans in settlements falling into dereliction, run on welfare and living on the gun’. These badlanders were portrayed as an inbred, innocent but lethal tribe in Louis Nowra’s 1985 play The Golden Age.

Another folk-oriented music group from Hobart who had made some impact in the late 1980s was Aria-award-winning Wild Pumpkins at Midnight, featuring Nick Larkins, Michael Turner and Debra Lamskey, who produced a number of politically provocative songs such as ‘Nuclear Picnic’ and ‘Apathetic’ before going through a number of changes in lineup, relocating to Amsterdam and touring Europe extensively throughout the 1990s. But dredging up other familiar musical names associated with the Apple Isle is a difficult task. The TasMusic site includes an all-female rock group called the Jane Does, who seem to sum up the anonymity most Tasmanian recording and performing artists register on the mainland. The ‘A to Z of Original Tasmanian Music’ featured in the local bimonthly music magazine Sauce drew a similar blank beyond vague recognition of names half-remembered on posters and flyers pasted around Hobart – an indie rock group called the Muddy Turds are a particularly lurid example - as a Sydneysider I’d heard of none of the artists listed there. Similarly, flicking through a rack of local indie bands’ and recording artists’ CDs in Tommy Gun records in central Hobart drew another blank.

Like other peripheral music localities such as Dunedin, Perth or Geelong, one perhaps expects Tasmania to have a thriving local (as opposed to national) music scene which represents and expresses a strong sense of the resonances of suburban isolation and remote landscape, conveying what Sara Cohen has called ‘the sensuous production of place and maps of meaning’. One example of this is Melbourne-based jazz singer Judy Jacques’ 2003 Australian Jazz Award-winning album Making Wings, which was written on Flinders Island and is partly based on early 20th century recordings by Tasmanian Aboriginal singer Fannie Cochrane Smith, who made the first sound recordings in Australia in Sandy Bay in Hobart in 1899. The album uses location sounds such as bird songs and nature effects in exploring Jacques’ ancestral past in the Bass Strait Islands, and the cover is richly illustrated with grotesque black and white etchings of birds by artist Doug Hails. The opening song ‘Heart of the Island’ traces Flinders Island’s songlines: ‘I’m hearing a song through the heart of the island/not like a word/a sound/like the call of a traveller /feeling the dark night … through moon on the sea/or something too old now/too rarely opened/a song to be found on the galloping wind/through the old birds returning/ with memory of a people’/. There are various songs based on birds and bird calls, and one is drawn from a letter by Matthew Flinders to Ann Chapelle. The album has been described by John Whiteoak as displaying an ‘adventurousness … which includes improvisations based, impressionistically, around ghostly Tasmanian indigenous songs recorded 100 years ago on wax cylinders’.

Jacques’ album evokes a rich sense of Tasmanian gothic, in terms of an often eerie, weird or grotesque sense of animism in the landscape. As Jim Davidson has described, much of Tasmania conveys ‘the low-keyed gothic of the grotesque… Excess apples are carved, drowned in vinegar, plasticated and sold as Applefolk; tree ferns are mutilated to make anthropomorphic figures’. Tasmanian soundscapes match the bleakness of the landscape in places like Port Arthur, with its melding of the stone relics of the memorial to the victims of Martin Bryant’s shooting spree with memories of brutal convict deaths from the 19th century, or the Copping Colonial Convict exhibition and the stuffed mole figures of Mole Hill, now in a Launceston theme park. Roger Scholes’ film The Tale of Ruby Rose also resonates with Tasmanian gothic, expressing in Colless’words ‘a fascination with abnormality expressed through “oddity” and intensity: awesome landscape and the harsh or even occult extremities of human nature’.

But according to Kieran O’Brien of the acoustic five-piece group Waiter, Tasmania is not all desolation, dereliction and dark spaces, but has its bright side for musicians: ‘The fresh air, wild wilderness and chilled back vibe make Tasmania a great place to live. There’s plenty of quality musicians floating around and you can be at band rehearsal in under twenty minutes; meaning that no one is usually more than two hours late. There’s a lot of diversity in the Tasmanian music scene, and you can often be surprised by quality bands that seem to randomly emerge from the depths of obscurity’. These random emergences often take place at a number of regular local music festivals, such as the Amplified Music Festival, now in its third year, run by Arts Tasmania, held in both Launceston and Hobart, which showcases a plethora of local musicians in all genres from classical to hip-hop and includes a ‘global battle of the bands’ as well as music industry workshops. The Falls Festival, held at Marion Bay over three days at the end of December, features popular Australian recording artists alongside local groups and musicians, as does the annual Gone South festival in Launceston. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and Chamber Players have a long history, there is a Conservatorium of Music in Hobart, and venues such as the Republic Bar, the Loft, the Brisbane Hotel and the Uni Bar attract national and occasionally international rock and pop acts. Nonetheless Tasmania’s remoteness still renders it very peripheral in terms of its national impact, with many local musicians moving to Melbourne or beyond in order to make a mark.

Tracking Hobart Hip-Hop

In keeping with the Do-It-Yourself ethos of Australian hip-hop, which until recently was also largely off the radar in terms of Australian Music Industry coverage, small but lively urban hip-hop scenes have sprung up around both Hobart - the ‘South Side’ - and Launceston – the ‘North Side’. The Tasflow website, run by Launceston-based MC Mynse , aka , producer, promoter and music writer for Sauce, Ryan Farrington of the Altrueistic crew, celebrated its first anniversary on August 31 with a Birthday Bash at the Brisbane Hotel in Hobart. This featured a number of Tasmania’s principal hip-hop luminaries: Mynse himself, EPC, mdusu&damesa, Oratoric and Paddles and the Tasmaniaks supporting Darwin-based Mc Dan the Underdog. By September Tasflow had had over 13,000 postings, and it incorporates a radio station which plays mainly Tasmanian hip-hop, a photo gallery, discussion forum, a buy sell and trade section and links to the myspace sites of most Tasmanian hip-hop artists. The central hub of the Hobart scene is Ruffcut Records, an upstairs shop for clothes as well as CDs and vinyl in Elizabeth Street Mall in the city centre, where producer/event promoter Jason aka DJ Grotesque of hip-hop ‘supergroup’ Heads of State and S.L.U.T. productions has held sway since August 2001. Ruffcut has one of the best collections of Australian hip-hop CDs I’ve seen anywhere, and a reasonable selection of vinyl. Grotesque runs a weekly hip-hop event and radio program on the student-run Edge Radio 99.3 FM, while Mynse organises the Homebrew event, which has moved around venues such as the Mint, the Trout and the Loft. Both Mynse and Oxcyde have studios in Launceston where other hip-hop practitioners such as Axecent and Projekt sometimes congregate.

Heads of State include MC mdusu and DJ damesa, whose 2006 album Sounds from Our Town features a spectacular photo of Hobart harbour and CBD, reproduced on front, back and inside covers as well as on the CD itself, and contains a key track ‘True South Side’, with its downbeat jazz guitar riff, drums and sax breaks, and a chorus which goes ‘we’re hijacking this ride/ bringing you the flavours which you haven’t yet tried/ and now we can’t be denied/ if you’re talking hip-hop Hobart is the true South Side’. Mdusu goes on to proclaim the duo’s grounding in record collecting: ‘we’re South Side warriors/ isolation breeds leaders not followers/we demolish the shit and make our names eponymous/our knowledge isn’t stuff you can learn in colleges/but rather in foraging in record bins to borrow shit’. The album’s instrumental title track begins with atmospheric city sounds and segues into a gently melodic jazz guitar and drums, which somehow manage to evoke the Hobart cityscape and port of the CD cover. A hidden track follows, relating a caricatured ocker anecdote about a bashing in the city mall. Elsewhere mdusu boasts he is the ‘Mouth for the South’: ‘who’s always there to represent, who‘s down with MC elements, who makes the beats for all the rappers, and who’s in here to make it happen’. Generally his style is relatively mellow and anecdotal, while dameza maintains a pleasant, loping, low-key jazz-scratch beat. It’s an album which deserves to be heard outside the confines of Tasmania, and an important representation of place in the spirit of hip-hop everywhere.

Oratoric and Paddles have so far released an EP Most Days (2006) with three vocal tracks and five very impressively dark-sounding instrumentals. The title track is about the downbeat flow of everyday life in Hobart - ’Most days you’ll see me catching the bus’ - and the role of hip-hop in ensuring ‘tension’s relieved’. The title of the melancholic ‘A Dark Wind’ comes from a spooky sample describing a driverless car on fire and mass suicides in the sewers first used by Montreal-based Israeli minimalist avant-rock collective Godspeed You Black Emperor! and ruminates on the gloomier, suicidal side of Australian school and political life and the dilemma of being ‘out of sight like the Loch Ness monster’. ‘The Selfish Lowlife’ is a more upbeat evocation of life below the poverty line and the depressing aspects of life in ‘Tasmania, [where] it’s cold in the winter’. The CD cover shows Oratoric and Paddles sitting on a bench on a beach dressed in hoodies - Oratoric holds a microphone, Paddles holds a cheap portable battery record player and a pile of records sits between them. It is a ‘Paraletic Poets Production’ and the liner notes conclude ‘Please support us. Burn this shit’ – the epitome of DIY.

Low-key production and sometimes monotonous instrumental beats such as a cheap casio feature on Mynse’s debut EP, the unfortunately named The Mynstral Cycle, with its down-beat word play drawing in a few unnecessary expletives along the way. On ‘Spend a Little Time’ Mynstral admits ‘I’m just getting started like first season Sopranos/got the crowd goin’ nuts, like I’m handing out pistachios/and from those facts, I’m simply just a stubborn man/shotgunnin’ cans comparing notes with mates like Rumn and/I find my peace in choppin’ beats until I’ve got bloody hands/and by the end of this release you’ll see my cunning plan’. Well, not exactly, but Mynse has an unforced style of delivery which incorporates some sometimes cheesy-sounding background vocal and brass effects in what he describes as ‘light headed’ hip-hop. The EP was mastered by beats producer Ren Rizzolo, also known as Crytearia, who has produced a couple of his own albums and brings a cosmopolitan approach to Hobart hip-hop. Of Italian extraction, Rizzolo is majoring in French at the University of Tasmania, and fifty percent of what he listens to is Italian hip-hop, especially the output of Vibra Records in Verona. Ren has family in Bassano di Grappa in the Veneto region, and was an exchange student for ten months in Mantova, so in a sense he is rediscovering his Italian background through hip-hop. ‘There’s a producer/ DJ called DJ Shocca from Verona, and he put out an album that was sort of basically all his beats and different groups and MCs around Italy. And that inspired me heaps … I hadn’t heard anything quite that good come out of Italy’. The album is called 60 HZ, and after Ren ordered the vinyl version off the Vibra website, it was delivered in a pizza box.

Ren’s first encounters with hip-hop mirrors that of many other hip-hop artists in other parts of Australia; after getting into the Beastie Boys through his older brothers in grade six, he hooked up with an MC called Caddy in grade seven who was into A Tribe called Quest, started rapping and then moved to producing beats. He acquired a record player and started collecting second hand records which he bought for 50 cents from the Tip Shop in South Hobart and the Resource Centre in Hobart’s city centre, which has scavenging rights from the city dump and sells all manner of wondrous recycled detritus such as old sepia postcards, abandoned diaries, moulding matchboxes and dysfuctional radios. Starting off with Disney records and anything that was ‘quirky and different’, Ren gradually became more discriminating: ‘over time you grow that taste for stuff to sample, you can sort of look at a record and say “that’s going to be crap”’. He acquired the computer program Acid and ‘started from scratch’ looping samples: ‘I didn’t have anyone telling me how to do anything, I just eventually worked it out after listening to some recorded hip-hop and just with continuous messing around with sounds and stuff, I got the hang of it’. He moved on from Acid in 2004, after self-producing his first album Create in 2003, but never managed to record anything with Caddy, who is now part of a crew called Secluded Minds, whom Ren sent some beats earlier this year. In August Crytearia and his current MC Tempest did a gig with Secluded Minds at the Art factory in Hobart.

One of the problems with the emerging hip-hop scene in Tasmania is clearly its isolation and lack of mentors; as Ren recalls a ‘temporary little breakdancing scene’ emerged at the university gym in 2001 when some Japanese exchange students started training up some of the locals, but it died out when they went back to Japan. Morganics’ public lecture-performance ‘Hip-hop is my passport’ in the University of Tasmania Senses of Place series in April 2006, which stated ‘Hip-hop is a global phenomenon that gives voice and a sense of place to people around the globe from Rio De Janeiro to Manchester, Tokyo, New York, outback Australia and Hobart’ is still talked about. There are a couple of graffiti enclaves in Hobart, one in the car park next to the cathedral, the other in an alleyway behind Sportsgirl in the City centre, with both walls displaying a lot of wit and writing wisdom reminiscent of the huge stencil graffiti scene in Melbourne. There are also a few stencil graffitis around Salamanca square, which used to be the scene of underage hip-hop gigs in 2002, because as Rizzolo says, ‘most of the people that were making hip-hop then were under age… And then this one time this bogan guy decided to chuck a brick through the toilet, and after that, no venue anywhere would book hip-hop.’ The current scene has managed to overcome this circumspection from publicans and venue managers and now hip-hop gigs are held fairly regularly, often with local groups and artist supporting touring Australian groups such as the Obese label Block Party in August 2007, Music versus Physics, whom Ren and Tempest supported in 2006, Macromantics and Astronomy Class. Crytearia and Tempest supported Curse ov Dialect at the Republic bar earlier this year, courtesy of now Melbourne-based Uber Lingua DJ and SBS radio DJ Moses Iten, who lived in Hobart for a number of years in the early 2000s and helped to foster a hip-hop scene. But like Iten and Hobart hip-hoppers 3to2, who formed at Burnie College in 2000 and later got into the top 20 of Triple J’s Tasmanian Unearthed project, moving to Melbourne often becomes a necessity in terms of finding more infrastructure, more work, and a bigger scene, although 3 to 2 still regularly return to perform in Tasmania, playing the Falls festival in 2006.

Crytearia accepts the fact that he will probably inevitably move to Melbourne, but for the moment he’s quite happy to be based in Hobart and do his beat production work on the internet: ‘There’s a lot of individuality, and people wanting to be slightly different from the next person … and a lot of that expression of people wanting to get away … Everyone’s always been pretty independent, as far as anything in Hobart goes. I like it here. I like the fact that I’m from Hobart and Tasmania, but I’m not going to put on a track and say “Hobart, Hobart, Hobart’, that kind of thing. I feel that it’s a universal music, so I don’t want it to be pigeonholed. I want someone to listen to it and say “Hey, this is great instrumental hip-hop”, I don’t want them to say “Oh, this is Hobart hip-hop”. The cover of Ren’s most recent CD, Landscrapes, which has already been released a a single with the same title, is a photomontage with Mt.Wellington in the centre of a number of other mountainous landscapes from Peru and elsewhere. ‘I guess I’m interested in exploring my heritage and that sort of thing. There is a bunch of Italian things happening on this CD, some samples of when I was in Italy that I recorded of my friends – a lot of the inspiration is from being there. There’s a track “Brick Walls” that has drums I recorded – my host brother is a drummer – practising under a church.’

Ren also got a lot of inspiration from Melbourne hip-hop scene. Reason played a track on Triple J from Create – which he now virtually disowns as apprentice stuff – and feels an affinity with ‘the Melbourne underground scene – Jase and Prowla and Brad Strut and those guys I was really inspired by, as well as stuff like Bias B. and Brothers Stoney. And definitely production-wise, people like Plutonic Lab. There are so many great artists here. Pasobionic – I really like his beats’. But he has little time for overt expressions of Australian identity in local hip-hop: ‘I probably used to be one of the people saying “No, you can’t rap in an American accent”. I still don’t like hearing an Australian putting on and American accent, like Weapon X. But on the other hand, when I hear people like the Lyrical Commission dudes just put on the Australian accent that pisses me off more, almost, than an American accent. That just sounds terrible. I’d prefer just a natural accent, that’s all you need. A lot of whatever I hear coming out lately, it’s all just a bit repetitious, it’s all like beer and barbecue rap. And I think that’s kind of passed on ten odd years ago, but people are still doing it because they think that’s what’s going to get them played on radio or whatever’.

The instrumental hip-hop of Crytearia, Paddles and others aside, there seems to be a good deal of white Anglo male celebration of Cascade drinking in the Hobart hip-hop scene, and few if any female MCs in sight. Nonetheless most Tasmanian MCs I’ve heard manage to avoid stereotypical ockerisms and overtly masculine behaviour and are producing beats and rhymes which deserve more attention. One distinctively different MC is Creator, aka Alfred Cauker, a Somalian-born body builder whose track ‘Music in French’ appeared on the 2003 SBS Radio compilation Sonic Allsorts, a collection of tracks by Australian artists in languages other than English, which I reviewed in the January 2005 issue of Music Forum. I didn’t manage to track down Creator, but I did meet up with film clip producer James Newitt, who directed the video clip of the same song, renamed ‘Je t’aime’, which features Cauker dancing, doing breakdance moves and walking jauntily around the streets of central Hobart, rapping in French with rhymes addressed to a ‘mademoiselle’. It’s an oddly ‘exotic’ take on Hobart hip-hop which suggests that as with artists like Zulya and Rektango, there may be significant elements of world music in the Tasmanian music scene.

The first sentence in Ian Maxwell’s book states a familiar dilemma for practitioners of both Australian cultural studies and ‘peripheral’  popular music studies : ‘Writing about hip-hop in Australia with a predominantly North American readership in mind is hard work’ (ix). So hard, in fact, that five years passed between completion of the PhD thesis in Performance Studies at Sydney University Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes is based on and its publication by Wesleyan University Press’ supposedly globally-oriented Music/Cultures series, whose readers, among other stipulations, insisted that Maxwell add a Preface entitled ‘A Brief History of Race in Australia’. This was seen as a necessary  contextualisation of his focus on what one reader called ‘a relatively obscure local scene’ of predominantly white, middle class hip-hop practitioners far removed from the by-laws and orthodoxies of African-American identity politics which have dominated US hip-hop studies. As Ser Reck of Def Wish Cast put it, summing up the ‘indigenising’ local dynamism of Sydney hip-hop in defiance of this African-American prerogative: ‘They’ll tell you it’s a black thing, man, but it’s not. It’s our thing’ (67). Emphasising this marginality, one of the book’s dust jacket blurb imprimaturs, by cosmopolitan Columbia University ‘world music’ commentator Timothy Taylor, rather patronisingly suggests Maxwell’s ‘exciting’ approach to his subject will even ‘interest people who might not otherwise have much interest in hip-hop in Sydney’.

Recent praise in the New York Times for 2004 Aria Award winning hip-hop duo Koolism, who are based in Canberra (and, some might think, ironically won their award for “Best Urban’ release), suggests hope that US hip-hop parochialism might be eroding slightly, as native language hip-hop continues to take root in unthinkably far-flung, marginal localities such as Palestine, Iran, Algeria, Greenland, Romania, the PRC and Wales. Meanwhile the huge growth in diversity, range and prominence in Australian hip-hop over the past two or three years has extended to Sonic Allsorts, an all-Australian compilation of hip-hop by 17 artists from 7 states  performing in over 20 languages, including French, Spanish, Punjabi, Swahili, Macedonian, Henghwa, Mandarin, Samoan and Tongan. But Maxwell’s study covers the relatively barren years of Sydney hip-hop between 1992 and 1994, when the scene was still almost entirely underground, struggling to define itself and negotiating a geo-political shift from the western suburbs into the inner city, where its main focal points were situated  - radio station 2SER, which ran ‘The Mothership Connection’, a weekly hip-hop show where local MCs could battle it out freestyle in the absence of any real back catalogue of local recordings, and the Lounge Room record shop, started in 1994, which in those days  also served as an informal locus for live DJing, rhyming and break dance performances. Combining ethnographic analysis with theoretical readings of the various embodied practices of hip-hop in its geographical locations around Sydney along with close textual exegesis of key recorded texts (such as the identity-defining Def Wish Cast track ‘A.U.S.T.’ which gives the book its subtitle), freestyle battles, written texts from ‘zines and the street press and pronouncements about the ‘four elements’ (Mcing, DJing, breaking and graffiti) by key figures such as Miguel D’Souza, Blaze and Ser Reck,  Maxwell manages to tease a vast amount of data and significance from a barely visible scene. He does not set out to provide an historical survey of the Sydney scene from its beginnings, and overlooks pioneering figures such as Maltese-Australian Case, who with cohort Mentor released ‘Combined Talent’, generally acknowledged as the first Australian hip-hop recording in 1988, calling themselves Just Us for obvious reasons. Also absent is reference to the 1988 Virgin compilation Down Under by Law, which despite causing general embarrassment, contained tracks by the West Side Posse, who were later to become Sound Unlimited, along with Sharline (aka Spice), the leading female figure on the Sydney scene in both MCing and graffiti, who does get a brief passing mention, but only in reference to the self-consciously feminine ‘Sugar and Spice’ connotations of her tag. As Maxwell is at pains to point out, in keeping with the focus of the Birmingham CCCS subcultural studies, he was observing what was largely an all-male scene of protagonists who had yet to experience the destabilising impact of female MCs or DJs:

The hip-hop world I encountered was for the boyz, a masculinised, even phallocentric world in which young men performed, rapped, breaked, boasted, bombed, leaving their phat tags to mark their presence, hung out, strutted, posed with their legs thrust out and their hands hooked in low-slung pockets, fingers brushing their groins. Where young men talked about their Community, Culture, Nation ( 33).

A key textual focus is on the two main Australian hip-hop releases of the time, Sound Unlimited’s Postcard from the Edge of the Underside, and Def Wish Cast’s Knights of the Underground Table, both of which, as Maxwell notes, define themselves as ‘underground’, despite the fact that the Sound Unlimited release was backed by Sony and led to an unfortunate commercial skirmish with members of the Back Street Boys which sent the group into pop-soul obscurity and a sizeable debt to the record label. Meanwhile Def Wish cast, who reformed in 2003, continue the battle to ‘keep it real’.

In the process of applying various theoretical tropes to Sydney hip-hop, including Appadurai’s scapes, Maxwell skirts around the issue of ethnicity and its role as a defining factor in much Australian hip-hop - figures such as Lebanese-Australian rapper and comedian Sleek the Elite don’t get much airplay, and Maxwell relies a great deal on Pakistani-Australian informant Miguel D’Souza to provide an ethnic angle. He does briefly mention two now-defunct, short-lived all-female Aboriginal posses, mis-spelling their names in the process - the Arrernte Desert Posse, who combined traditional bodypaint and dance moves with rapping,  and Blackjustis, who represented Redfern, but were deemed to be ‘not really hip-hop’ (68) by local luminary Blaze (whose Finnish background, later manifested in a return to his homeland to examine the Suomi hip-hop scene, is not explored). While emphasis on the importance of ethnicity and class as a factor of the identity politics of hip-hop is sometimes over-stated, Maxwell’s choice to focus on mainly middle-class Anglo-Australian protagonists who were involved in ‘predicating a community based on an affective identity, rather than on blood descent’ (97), although it provides a local counter to the widespread insistence on African-American ownership of US hip-hop, sells short the significant number of Lebanese, Pacific Islander and other hip-hop practitioners who have been negotiating links between their own indigenous cultures and hip-hop (from Rosanno and T-Na, the Filippino-Chilean brother and sister duo who fronted Sound Unlimited, to Fijian-Australian MC Trey and Tongan MC Hau of Koolism who are  prominent current examples).

Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes, is not quite the first book-length account in English of a non-US hip-hop scene (Ayhan Kaya took that distinction in 2001 with the fascinating Constructing Diasporas: Turkish hip-hop in Berlin, closely followed by the disappointing Black, Blanc, Beur, Alain-Philippe Durand’s  compilation of essays on French hip-hop which appeared in the US in 2002), 3 but it’s  an important local extension of the existing, mostly US literature on the subject. In representing the idiosyncracies and distinctively local, suburban configurations of hip-hop in Sydney, Maxwell chronicles, transcribes and narrates a cross section of Sydney’s MCs, DJs, breakers and writers, its voices, scratches, moves, and pieces, its freestyles, texts, publications and pronouncements, as well as its emergent pedagogies and epistemologies which figures such as Morganics have since taken to remote Aboriginal and disadvantaged communities all over Australia. Maxwell does so with an immediacy which brings the scene and some of its main personalities and protagonists vividly to life – including a number of now forgotten crews like Urban Poets, Voodoo Flavour, Fonke Nomads, 046, Illegal Substance and the White Boys, who gave varying degrees of substance to the scene at the time. While Def Wish Cast might have been a more appropriate presence on the cover of the book than J.U. of the now defunct but then seminal Easybass, Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes offers a cartography of Sydney hip-hop’s contested spaces, places, events, ideologies, urban mythologies, battles, traditions and self-definitions as a ‘polychrome Pacific’ outgrowth of the hip-hop nation. At the same time, Maxwell theorises his responses to the various ‘flows’ of this local hip-hop scene through sharply critical readings of a wide range of existing writing on hip-hop, popular music, subcultural studies and cultural philosophy. The result is, to use the top level of Blaze’s hip-hop CD ratings system, ‘Doper than dope. Buy it.’ Similar, but significantly and parochially different  narratives remain to be teased out of the Melbourne scene.

1. Meaghan Morris, ‘On The Future of Parochialism: Globalisation, Young and Dangerous IV, and Cinema Studies in Tuen Mun’, Seminar given at UTS, October 2004, p.3.
2. Slavoj Zizek, ‘Knee-Deep’, London Review of Books, 2 September, 2004 , p.12.
3. Ayhan Kaya, Sicher in Kreuzberg: Conducting Diasporas:Turkish Hip-Hop Youth in Berlin, Transcript verlag Bielefeld, 2001. Alain-Philippe Durand Black, Blanc, Beur: Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture in the Francophone World, Lanham, Maryland and Oxford:The Scarecrow Press, Inc.  2002.
4. Morris, op. cit., p. 27.

The result of a nationwide competition as part of the 2003 Noise Festival, Sonic Allsorts leads off with a track in Swahili by Sydney-based hip hop producer and MC Mr.Zux, following on with ‘Eh Mate’, in French and Punjabi, by Brisbane artist Prussia, and a Spanish rap by Adelaide based Joel Castell. The most popular track amongst the six judges by a wide margin was Curse Ov Dialect’s ‘Curse Ov The Vulk Macedonski’, which features traditional Macedonian music and MCing by Borsch from the multicultural Melbourne crew who are redefining Australian hip hop. Also scoring highly were ‘Nursery Chant’ by Sydney artist Tufa, who sings, chants and raps in Henghwa, and Latin American collective Ila Familia with their anthemic salsa dance track ‘Ven a Bailar’. Morganics’ ‘Multi Lingual MC’, which features snippets of 15 different languages, is also included, and Palmer attributes the predominance of hip hop on the album to the fact that it is ‘the most active lyrical modern music’ and ‘ a style that allows the un-represented to be represented’. Further examples include Creator, a Tasmanian-based MC from Sierra Leone who raps here in French, but also performs in Mende, Creole and English, Mandarin MC Horny Keung, whose name comes from an evil sauna bath owner featured in the cult movie Hong Kong X File, ‘Oiaue’, a part Tongan-language, part English track from Canberra-based hip hop duo Koolism, an R&B track in Samoan, English and Cook Island Maori by Soul-Jah On, a French track with some deft scratching by Darwin-based Vassy, gamelan jazz from Indonesian artists Anything But Roy, and drum ‘n’ bass with Punjabi and Urdu inflections from Vir Asan. Sonic Allsorts is much more than a curio - it represents a hidden face of Australian music, and some of these artists already have albums out (Mr. Zux has one in English, and is about to release another in Swahili), and I for one eagerly await further recordings by most of the artists on this compilation.