Articles tagged with ‘Language and hip-hop’

• 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

• 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

• Crytearia

  Crytearia is a producer and sample-based, instrumental hip-hop and electronic music artist who lives in Hobart, Tasmania. He has made two albums, Create (2003), and LandScrape (due to be released in late 2007). LandScrape features rhymes from Tasmanian MCs Tempest, Crixus and Thorts. In this interview, conducted by Tony Mitchell at Crytearia’s house in Hobart, Crytearia talks about getting into hip-hop via breakdancing at high school, the Hobart scene, crate-digging and beatmaking, his time in Italy and Italian hip-hop, and his love of the French language and French hip-hop.

  Tags: independent record labels, Hobart, multilingualism, breakdancing, sampling, instrumental hip-hop, 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 Language

  A short video on the relationship between hip-hop and language(s).

  Tags: Thematic Video, language, Video

• Hyjak n Torcha

  Backstage at Luna Park for Park Jam, the first international hip-hop event of it’s kind in Australia, we caught up with Hyjak n Torcha. The conversation included their personal stories of getting into hip-hop, influences and inspirations and the process of making an album. They both also talked about some of the wider aspects surrounding Australian hip-hop, including its marginalisation by the music industry, its rise through a DIY ethic and what and who hip-hop represents.

  Tags: multilingualism, Sydney, Obese, Interviews

• 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

• Lecture at University of Sydney - Aboriginal Hip-hop: a modern day corroboree.

  An edited recording of a lecture given by Tony Mitchell to the Koori Centre’s Indigenous Studies class (run by Peter Minter) on the 16th of May, 2007.

  Tags: DIY ethos, multilingualism, self expression, localising hip-hop, Aboriginal language hip-hop, Tony Mitchell, gangsta rap, education, Redfern, language, Sydney, workshops, cultural identity, community work, Indigenous hip-hop, Audio

• Munkimuk

  This interview with Munkimuk, often refered to as the grandfather of Aborignal hip-hop, took place backstage at Sydney Uni’s Manning Bar, before the inaugural Klub Koori gig in 2005. This gig was a watershed, bringing together almost all the most prominent Indigenous hip-hop artists for the first time. Munkimuk talked exuberantly about his 20 years in hip-hop, from the early days in Bankstown and Redfern with South West Syndicate to the release of his debut solo album, called Ten Years Too Late. Munki talked at length about his many adventures into the desert to use hip-hop as a tool of self-expression, especially in Aboriginal languages. Munki also spoke about his time working for the education department and his unconventional but wildly successful methods of enthusing kids to learn.

  Tags: Redfern, education, South West Syndicate, Aboriginal language hip-hop, Munkimuk, community work, Western Sydney, workshops, breakdancing, Indigenous hip-hop, 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