Articles tagged with ‘hip-hop and folk music’

• 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

• 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

• Sonic Allsorts (Review)

  A review of the Cyclic Defrost compilation Sonic Allsorts published in Music Forum.

  Tags: globalisation, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, multilingualism, hip-hop and migrant experience, cultural identity, hip-hop and folk music, multiculturalism, Press & Media

• 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

• 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