Articles tagged with ‘politics’

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Mark Pollard

  We met with Stealth magazine editor Mark Pollard in September of 2005. His knowledge, passion and diplomacy in discussing a huge variety of issues within and around Australian hip-hop was a demonstration of the crucial role he has played in fostering the culture. Mark spoke about his early teens, making tapes with friends in summer and doing gigs at under-18 shows around town. He spoke about he entry into the scene as an 18-year-old through the Cell Block Youth Centre and the 2ser radio program The Mothership Connection, which he took over from Miguel D’Souza. Mark talked about what he considered to be the most significant moments in Australian hip-hop in the last few years, including the solidification of Obese Records, triple j’s Hip-hop Show and the success of The Hilltop Hoods. Mark also had many salient points to make about identity and music, the issue of accent and American mimicry, over-ocker Australian vernacular and the connections between gansta rap and rural Aboriginal Australia. Mark also told us about the distribution of Stealth globally and the feedback he gets from kids in the country as well as the focus of giving coverage to little known scenes overseas.

  Tags: Indigenous hip-hop, Mark Pollard, Stealth magazine, triple j, politics, 2SER, Obese, Sydney, Hilltop Hoods, Interviews

• Monkey Marc

  Local Noise met with Combat Wombat producer and Lab Rats member Monkey Marc after he had finished running a workshop on altering engines from petrol to vegetable oil at TINA (This is Not Art) festival in Newcastle 2005. Marc spoke about the beginnings of Lab Rats at the Jabiluka protests in 1998, where he met Izzy Brown (Combat Wombat MC and other half of Lab Rats) and how initially the Lab Rats were a traveling sound system that went to the front of protests and blockades, running huge parties with solar- and wind-powered sound system and cinema. Marc talked about the evolution of Lab Rats into a mobile hip-hop, circus, video production and performance workshop that tours to the most remote Indigenous communities in the country. Marc spoke about this work, the idea of cultural preservation and continuation of Indigenous languages, recording songs all across the desert and the issues of mimicking American hip-hop. Marc also talked about the recently released album Unsound $ystem, hip-hop as a form ripe for political expression and being written off as a left-wing extremist hip-hop group by the hip-hop ‘mainstream’.

  Tags: Combat Wombat, Monkey Marc, Lab Rats, community work, eco hip-hop, Indigenous hip-hop, politics, Melbourne, Curse ov Dialect, Elefant Traks, workshops, Interviews

• One Step Ahead (Review)

  A review of Reason’s LP One Step Ahead published in Music Forum

  Tags: multiculturalism, environment, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, masculinity, vernacular, Obese, politics, cultural identity, patriotism, Press & Media

• Reason

  Local Noise met up with Melbourne MC, Australian hip-hop stalwart, radio DJ and high school teacher Reason in Melbourne in 2004. In a long and in depth discussion, the voluble Reason touches on most of the central discussions surrounding Australian hip-hop, including identity, locality, women in hip-hop, indigenous hip-hop, the diversity of styles in Australian hip-hop and living it everyday. Reason also spoke about juggling hats of being both a teacher and a rapper. He also gave some great historical background to the Melbourne hip-hop scene, the key players in the early days, the origin of Obese Records as well as the relationships between the music industry and Australian hip-hop.

  Tags: community work, Reason, patriotism, politics, Obese, workshops, Interviews

• Te Kupu

  Te Kupu is a founding member and MC of the Maori hip-hop crew Upper Hutt Posse, who have been on the scene in Aotearoa since 1988. Upper Hutt Posse have recorded hip-hop tracks in Maori language, and are a strong political voice for Maori cultural, linguistic and historical autonomy in New Zealand. They have toured Australia a number of times, performing with Indigenous crews in solidarity. Their most recent trip was in October 2007, when they played a gig at UTS with Aboriginal hip-hop artists in support of Australian Indigenous communities affected by the Australian Federal Government’s controversial intervention. We talked to Te Kupu before the gig, and he spoke about his rapumentary project, Know Your Links, in which he is filming hip-hop in twenty different countries, Maori language hip-hop, politics in Aotearoa and his wariness at the New Zealand ‘Kiwi’ identity.

  Tags: New Zealand, Aotearoa, Maori language, Maori hip-hop, postcolonialism, Maori culture, Interview Transcript, gangsta rap, politics, language, breakdancing, battling, MCing, multilingualism, Interviews

• The Reography of Reason: Australian hip-hop as Experimental History and Pedagogy

  If habitus is regarded as ‘deep seated generative principles of thought, perception, appreciation, and action’, this ‘fit’ seems eminently applicable to the ‘embodied history’ of hip-hop subcultures and the expression of their ‘objectified history’ in practices such as recording, performing, internet interaction, music journalism, and independent radio and television broadcasting.

  This paper, originally published in Media International Australia, looks at the Australian hip-hop culture in terms of its do-it-yourself ethos, which is, in part, a result of a lack of support from the commercial record labels. Tony Mitchell here discusses the artists, groups and independent labels that have championed this DIY ethos and have built a community of practice outside the mainstream industry.

  Tags: Reason, education, localising hip-hop, globalisation, Tony Mitchell, environment, community work, patriotism, Melbourne, Obese, workshops, politics, ARIA, Conference Papers

• The Sun Never Sets (Review)

  An review of The Herd’s third LP The Sun Never Sets by Tony Mitchell, published in Music Forum.

  Tags: Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, multilingualism, protest songs, Elefant Traks, politics, 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