Articles tagged with ‘Western Sydney’

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Peacefender

  Peacefender is a sound artist and hip-hop producer of Lebanese background who has been working in western Sydney for 20 years. He formed C.O.D. in the early 1990s, and did production work with veteran Westside group Def Wish Cast, among others. He was also a key figure in Death Defying Theatre’s 1995 Sydney Community hip-hop project Hip-hopera, and has run numerous hip-hop workshops with young people of non-English speaking backgrounds at the Liverpool Migrant Resource Centre, Bankstown Youth Centre and elsewhere. With Information and Cultural Exchange (ICE) in Parramatta he has co-ordinated exhibitions and workshops with Australian visual and sound artists of Arabic background. He has done sound installations, hip-hop workshops and visual arts projects in Sydney, Beirut, and Berlin. He has also released several CDs of his own work and compilations of hip-hop by young people of Arabic and other backgrounds, including Unit 5 Welcome You to the Camps, recorded in Arabic in Beirut with Palestinian refugees. In this interview, Peacefender talks to Tony Mitchell about running workshops, combining hip-hop with theatre, visual arts and sound design, and using hip-hop within Sydney’s Arabic speaking communities.

  Tags: Arabic hip-hop, youth work, juvenile justice, Hip-Hopera, multiculturalism, Western Sydney, workshops, community work, Interviews

• Sereck

  Paul Westgate, also known as Sereck from Def Wish Cast and as the graffiti writer Unique, has been involved in the hip-hop scene in Australia since 1983. He was a key figure in the western Sydney hip hop scene, and Def Wish cast produced what is acknowledged as the first Australian hip-hop album in 1993,Knights of the Round Table, which included the track ‘A.U.S.T. Down Under Comin’ Upper’, the video clip of which has become an anthem of early Australian hip-hop. Sereck also narrated the first Australian hip hop documentary, Basic Equipment, in 1996, and later formed a record label named after the program. After going their separate ways in the two crews Celsius and Kilawattz, Def Wish Cast reformed in 2001 and released their second album, The Legacy Continues, in 2006.

  In this interview Sereck reminisces about the early days of western Sydney hip-hop, the emergence of Def Wish Cast, their style and the people they represented. He also talks about his interconnection, via train travel and graffiti, with all the others local scenes in Sydney (Burwood, Campsie, Ryde, Redfern, etc).

  Tags: MCing, self expression, independent record labels, Hip-Hopera, Interview Transcript, Stealth magazine, production, graffiti, Western Sydney, cultural identity, vernacular, masculinity, Interviews

• Sydney-centrism, Parochialism and Popular Music Studies: a review of Ian Maxwell’s book “Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes”

  A review of Ian Maxwell’s book Phat Beats, Dope Rhymes: Hip-hop Down Under Comin’ Upper (Middletown, CT:Wesleyan University Press), 2003, 294 pp. ISBN 0-8195-6638-1), published in the UTS Cultural Studies Review.

  Tags: subcultural theory, Ian Maxwell, four elements, Tony Mitchell, Music Forum reviews, Place, localising hip-hop, hip-hop and academia, Sydney, Western Sydney, 2SER, cultural identity, self expression, masculinity, Press & Media