Articles tagged with ‘Place’
-
13th Son & MC Brass
We spoke to the Upshot MCs 13th Son and Brass backstage at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre. It was to be Upshot’s last show together, and Brass and 13th Son reflected back on their time as MCs in the live instrumental hip-hop set up of the band. Both MCs also talked a length about the personal hip-hop history; for 13th Son, the meeting of fellow hip-hop lovers through a concert band at the age of 12 which eventually grew into the group Fathom. For Brass, it was his connection with Def Wish Cast’s Sereck and the western Sydney scene, a connection which grew into Celsius (which is Sereck and Brass). Both spoke about the strength of the western Sydney scene and their identification with it.
Tags: Western Sydney, Interviews
-
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
-
A-Love
In this 2005 interview, Melbourne-based FemC A-Love talks to Local Noise about her studies in anthropology and her ideas of hip-hop as mode of cultural and ethnic identification. The eloquent A-Love tells of the rise of females in Australian hip-hop as artists and as administrators, including her own seminal role in some of the first all-female hip-hop shows and displays in Australia.
Tags: All The Ladies, Melbourne, women in hip-hop, Interviews
-
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
Tags: authenticity, MCing, independent record labels, four elements, Tony Mitchell, subcultural theory, community radio, graffiti, Sydney, DJing, breakdancing, Conference Papers
-
Brethren
Backstage at the Parramatta Riverside Theatre we spoke to Mistery and Wizdm, both long-serving hip-hop artists, community workers and dedicated (but not preaching) Christians. Mistery and Wizdm worked their memories hard to recall the early days of hip-hop in Australia in the 80s from Sydney (Mistery) and Adelaide (Wizdm). Having just released their first LP Beyond Underground after years of compilation tracks and EPs, they talked about the process of making the album. They also spoke about their faith in relation to hip-hop, and avoiding being pigeon-holed as ‘Christain rappers’. In a wide-ranging interview led mostly by the loquacious Mistery, almost all topics were touched on, including graffiti styles and working with local government as graffiti advisors, family heritage and locality, the influence of British MCs on the first Australian to rap ‘in accent’, the global nature of hip-hop, the music industry and hip-hop’s DIY answer to it, and being custodians of the culture.
Tags: Christianity, graffiti, Western Sydney, Interviews
-
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
-
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
-
Curse ov Dialect – Video Bio
A short video bio of Melbourne group Curse ov Dialect.
Tags: Raceless, Pasobionic, Artist Bio, Vulk Masedonski, August 2nd, Melbourne, Curse ov Dialect, Atarungi, Video
-
DJ Amy – Video Bio
A short video bio of Sydney-based DJ Amy.
Tags: Artist Bio, DJ Amy, Sydney, Video
-
Hermitude
Hermitude are a two-piece instrumental hip-hop crew from the Blue Mountains, with Luke Dubs on keys and Elgusto on beats. They have performed with MCs such as Ozi Batla and Urthboy from The Herd, and Joelistics from TZU. Their style of production – passing old sounds through new technology – is richly layered and complex. This interview, conducted by Tony Mitchell, Nick Keys and Astrid Lorange at the Great Escape Festival in 2006, is a general catch-up before Hermitude headed off to play in Japan, Norway, the UK and the US for the first time.
Tags: Elefant Traks, instrumental hip-hop, Sydney, Blue Mountains, sampling, Interviews
-
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
-
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
Articles by Tag
You are currently viewing articles tagged with ‘Place’.