Articles tagged with ‘The Herd’

• The Rappers are Revolting: Mixing Folk, Hip-hop and Politics

  This piece was written in response to an article in The Age which argued that there were no protest songs in contemporary Australian culture. The rebuttal was subsequently published in The Age on August 1, 2006, and discusses the political content in a number of Australian hip-hop groups, including The Herd, TZU and Morganics.

  Tags: hip-hop and folk music, The Herd, protest songs, Pegz, Tony Mitchell, Reason, Morganics, Upshot, Elefant Traks, TZU, eco hip-hop, Press & Media

• Unkle Ho

  This 2005 interview with Elefant Traks co-administrator and The Herd producer Unkle Ho took place just after the release of his debut solo album Roads to Roma. Unkle Ho talks about his family history, his travels and its influence on his sampling, his method of music production and running of Elefant Traks in general.

  Tags: production, Unkle Ho, The Herd, instrumental hip-hop, Elefant Traks, sampling, Sydney, Interviews

• Urthboy & Ozi Batla

  Urthboy and Ozi Batla are two of The Herd’s MCs, and members of the Elefant Traks record label. They both have other endeavours, Urthboy with two solo albums so far (Distant Sense of Random Menace, 2004 and The Signal, 2007) and Ozi Batla with his group, Astronomy Class (Exit Strategy, 2006). In this interview, conducted in 2004, Urthboy and Batla talk about the reaction to The Herd’s second album, An Elephant Never Forgets, particularly the lucid, political tracks ‘77%’ and ‘Burn Down the Parliament’. They talked about their discomfort as being pigeonholed as straight-up political rappers, commenting on the innateness of politics in everyday life and the desire to express opinion and to encourage dialogue in art rather than engaging in polemics. They also talked about the way that The Herd and Elefant Traks work as collectives, and the idiosyncrasies of the Australian hip-hop scene: its fans, artists, styles and practices.

  Tags: Ozi Batla, Astronomy Class, hip-hop and folk music, authenticity, Urthboy, The Herd, Sydney, Elefant Traks, politics, Interviews