Articles tagged with ‘Culture’

• 2nd Generation Migrant Expression in Australian Hip-hop

  “Lebanon ain’t got no money, but there’s no land more greener, So proud to be a child of the cedar. Some Aussies can’t believe it when I look ‘em in the face. Proud to be a wog, I mentally laid them to waste. They say ‘But wait, you’re Australian’. ‘You wait and stop your speaking, I am, but I’m descendant from Phoenicians.’ … What we gotta do is not forget our culture, Yallah my brother, your culture given from Allah, remember your history, it helps you work harder, Helps you respect more your mother and your father, Your parents or grandparents came from another land, You might be Australian now but it’s not your mother land.”

  – Sleek the Eilte, ‘Child of the Cedar’

  This essay focuses on 2nd generation migrant hip-hop artists including MC Trey, Maya Jupiter, Sleek the Elite and Hau from Koolism and their distinctive use of hip-hop as a tool of expressing their status of being in-between their ethnic heritage and Anglo-Australian culture.

  Tags: Maya Jupiter, MC Trey, hip-hop and migrant experience, Sleek the Elite, self expression, Tony Mitchell, localising hip-hop, multilingualism, multiculturalism, South West Syndicate, Curse ov Dialect, Downsyde, Western Sydney, TZU, Koolism, breakdancing, Hau, Conference Papers

• Aboriginal Hip-hop: a modern day corroboree

  This is my lyrical healing. I can’t go and get scarred any more and I can’t become a traditional man. I’m a modern day blackfella, this is still Dreamtime for me. Hip-hop is the new clapsticks, hip-hop is the new corroboree.

  - Wire MC

  This paper was given at the Hip-hop meets Academia conference in Chemnitz, Germany, in August 2006. It is a longer and more developed version of the essay published in Meanjin’s ‘Blak Times’ issue in 2006, and draws on all the Local Noise research and interviews with indigenous hip-hop artists.

  Tags: Lez Beckett, South West Syndicate, education, Klub Koori, Aboriginal language hip-hop, Tony Mitchell, Local G, Brotha Black, Munkimuk, Morganics, language, Western Sydney, Wire MC, workshops, breakdancing, community work, Indigenous hip-hop, Local Knowledge, Conference Papers

• Australian Hip-hop as a Subculture

  Originally published in the journal Youth Studies Australia in 2003, ‘Australian Hip-hop as a Subculture’ is an essay that applies ideas from subcultural theory to Australian hip-hop, relating the defining features of Australian hip-hop to the theories that the ‘Birmingham School’ applied to subcultures like Punk in the 70s.

  Tags: authenticity, MCing, independent record labels, four elements, Tony Mitchell, subcultural theory, community radio, graffiti, Sydney, DJing, breakdancing, Conference Papers

• Circus Maximus (Review)

  A review of Unkle Ho’s second LP Circus Maximus published in Music Forum.

  Tags: authenticity, multilingualism, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, multiculturalism, hip-hop and folk music, world music, sampling, Elefant Traks, instrumental hip-hop, production, Press & Media

• Compass: The Mistery Of Hip-hop

  A story run by the ABC’s TV program Compass looking at hip-hop and it’s localisation in Australia. Compass filmed an interview with Tony for the show, which focussed particularly on Brethren MC and graffiti artist Mistery, and the intersection of his Christian faith with hip-hop. A full transcript of the program can be viewed on the Compass website.

  Tags: Tony Mitchell, external media, ABC, localising hip-hop, Christianity, Brethren, Mistery, Press & Media

• Curse ov Dialect

  Curse ov Dialect is an experimental hip-hop group from Melbourne. Its live show is a more like an avant-garde theatre performance than a gig, with each of its five members dressed in elaborate costumes and engaging in on-stage histrionics. Musically, Curse describe themselves as ‘sonically utopian’, borrowing samples of folk music from around the world to create a richly layered sound. They are signed to the US label Mush, and have toured Australia, Japan and the US, where they played with other Mush and Anticon artists. In this interview, conducted on the ground at the noisy intersection of Abercrombie Street and Broadway in Chippendale, the Curse boys talked to Local Noise about their multi-faceted, globalised, anarchic philosophy of hip-hop, and their eclectic influences: from John Cage to tropicalia, Surrealism to Macedonian folk tunes.

  Tags: cultural identity, hip-hop and folk music, world music, sampling, Melbourne, Interviews

• Doin’ damage in my native language: the use of “resistance vernaculars” in France, Italy, and Aotearoa/New Zealand.

  This essay was first published in the UK journal Popular Music and Society (vol 24, no.3) in 2002, and subsequently published as a book chapters in both Bennett, Hawkins and Whiteley’s (eds) Music, Space and Place: Popular music and cultural identity (2003) and Berger & Carroll’s (eds) Global Pop Local Language (2004). Using examples from across the gobal hip-hop world, this essay explores the use of local vernacular’s in hip-hop as a form of expressing and embodiying resistance.

  Tags: Language and hip-hop, Tony Mitchell, globalisation, localising hip-hop, Culture, New Zealand, Maori culture, Maori hip-hop, Maori language, glocal subcultures, multilingualism, politics, refugee, language, cultural identity, vernacular, hip-hop and migrant experience, multiculturalism, hip-hop and folk music, Conference Papers

• Global Noise Rap

  This rap was written by Tony Mitchell for the launch of his book ‘Global Noise: Rap and Hip Hop outside of the USA’. He also performed this rap again at a symposium in Adelaide on indigenous hip-hop. In it’s entirety, the piece is over 3000 words long and must be a world record for the most amount of names dropped in one rap. Those names and the places they come from exhibit the full scope of the book. The rap itself stands as testament to the fundamental argument of the book: that hip-hop is undeniably global, and its globalism is not just a consumption of African American hip-hop, but rather as reproduction of hip-hop as a form for decidedly local expression and identification.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, multilingualism, self expression, world music, language, vernacular, Conference Papers

• Hip-Hop and Contemporary Australia

  A look at the place and role of hip-hop in contemporary Australia.

  Tags: Thematic Video, localising hip-hop, cultural identity, Video

• Hip-hop as a “glocal” subculture

  “…in relation to postmodernism’s decentring relativity, displacement and fragmentation, I think one of its most idiotic embodiments is McKenzie Wark’s mantra ‘We no longer have roots, only aerials’. This expression, parrotted at monotonously regular intervals, and borrowed from the Brazilian musician Gilberto Gil, was expressed in a context of which Wark seems to be entirely ignorant, epitomises the exact reverse tendencies of hip-hop, which is almost always about the celebration of roots in place, neighbourhood, home, family, roots and nation. It is this dominant aspect of topos and geography which makes rap such a fertile area of study, particularly in its manifestations outside the USA.”

  - Tony Mitchell

  Given as a seminar talk at UTS all the way back in 1998, this talk/paper represents the beginnings of the Local Noise project and contains – to this day – its main areas of concern: hip-hop’s multicultural history, it’s diaspora, indigenisation and the importance of place, rapping in langauges other than English, and hip-hop as a form for the marginalised. Present at this talk were future Local Noise partner Alastair Pennycook and MC Trey.

  Tags: hip-hop and academia, localising hip-hop, Ian Maxwell, Tony Mitchell, glocal subcultures, MC Trey, Western Sydney, education, multiculturalism, Conference Papers

• Hip-hop as dusty foot philosophy: Engaging Locality

  Dusty foot philosopher means the one that’s poor, lives in poverty but lives in a dignified manner and philosophises about the universe and talks about things that well-read people talk about, but they’ve never read or travelled on a plane.

  - K’Naan

  This paper aims to open up an understanding of the ways in which localised hip-hop can on the one hand still be part of a global, digital world and yet at the same time have its feet and fingers in the dirt; how it can participate in the global spread of hip-hop and yet at the same time be part of the critique of those forms of global media that participate in the denigration of African and Aboriginal people; how local hip-hop can be both part of international popular culture while at the same time articulating local philosophies of global significance; both dusty-footed and philosophical. This article is to appear in: H. S. Alim, A Ibrahim and A Pennycook (Eds) Global Linguistic Flows: Hip Hop Cultures, Youth Identities, and the Politics of Language, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

  Tags: localising hip-hop, politics, globalisation, gangsta rap, Alastair Pennycook, Tony Mitchell, refugee, Somalia, philosophy, Wire MC, K’naan, Canada, Africa, Conference Papers

• Indigensing hip-hop: an Australian migrant youth culture

  “…far from representing the loss of Australian national identity in the face of global capitalism, Australian hip-hop artists are engaged in the project of attempting to build a multicultural national identity in place of a racist monocultural model that is now gaining strength in Australian national politics.”

  - Kurt Iveson

  Published in Melissa Butcher and Mandy Thomas’ (eds) Ingenious: emerging youth cultures in urban Australia, this essay discusses, from a Sydney perspective, the history of hip-hop’s localisation in an Australian context. In particular, the essay looks at ways in which ethnic and migrant youth have used its naturally syncretic form to express a hybrid sense of self and place.

  Tags: globalisation, localising hip-hop, Hip-Hopera, Tony Mitchell, MetaBass ‘N’ Breath, multilingualism, multiculturalism, Western Sydney, 2SER, breakdancing, Indigenous hip-hop, Conference Papers

• Joelistics

  This 2005 interview with Melbourne-based TZU MC Joelistics took place in Sydney while he was taking part in a Sydney Festival hip-hop event bringing together artists from The Herd, The Bird, Resin Dogs and TZU. In a lengthy conversation, the ever-articulate Joelistics covered a huge range of issues. He spoke about the early influence of Eastern philosophy and its splicing with the influence of hip-hop and freestyle rapping. He also talked about hip-hop as a form given to political polemics and Empty shows (held in empty warehouse and industrial city spaces where artists would converge). Joelistics spoke of the influence of Terrence McKenna on his ideas about language, both in the way that the world forms language and how language forms and structures the world. He talked also of hip-hop workshops, the influence of Jack Kerouac, the orthodoxy of hip-hop and Curse ov Dialect, music labels and the industry, the history of hip-hop and appropriations of the form in terms of aesthetics, identity, place and self-pride.

  Tags: workshops, empty shows, politics, freestyling, language, Melbourne, philosophy, Interviews

• K’naan

  K’naan is a Somali refugee who now lives in Canada. His family escaped Mogadishu on the last commercial flight to leave the capital before the airport shut in 1991. He got into hip-hop by memorising rhymes from records by Eric B and Rakim that were sent to him by his father from the US. He considers hip-hop to be the ‘poor people’s weapon’, an art form that is present where ever there is struggle and oppression. His lyrics deal with the superficial, glorified notion of the ‘gangster’, often contrasting the commerical image of the ‘gangster’ with the young people in Somalia who are the victims of extreme violence and bloodshed. In this interview, conducted at the Enmore Theatre cafe before he supported Xavier Rudd, he talked to Local Noise about the Somali tradition of poetry, the inherent connections between hip-hop and Africa, and his notion of the ‘dusty foot philosopher’.

  Tags: politics, Islam, multilingualism, refugee, Somalia, philosophy, Canada, Africa, Interviews

• Lazy Grey

  We caught up with Lazy Grey backstage at the Big Top in Luna Park, as part of the Park Jam hip-hop festival. Lazy was very welcoming and humble in his manner as he talked about his influences and growing up in the early days of the Brisbane scene, and the role of graffiti and breaking in this early gestation of hip-hop in Australia. His also spoke of tape culture and 80s influences from America. Whilst always humble, Lazy is also very much a straight talker, articulating excellently his views on the rise of Australian hip-hop, being a product of one’s environment and the different vernaculars in Australian cities. He touched on (of course) the accent debate, but also discussed the role of swearing in ordinary everyday language, hip-hop and masculinity, and the complexity and contradiction of patriotism and flag-waving in relationship to hip-hop. Having just released his first fully-fledged album, Banned in Queensland with Crookneck records, he talked about the making of the album.

  Tags: masculinity, vernacular, Ken Oath, Bias B, Brothers Stoney, patriotism, breakdancing, graffiti, Lazy Grey, Brisbane, Crookneck Records, Interviews