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This past month’s celebration of the 50th Anniversary of Hip-Hop, which occurred on August 11th, 2023, marked the anniversary of when DJ Kool Herc threw the first Hip-Hop jam at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx in 1973. Herc created the indelible ‘merry-go-round’ technique which entailed mixing the percussion breakdown of two records, resulting in extended periods of music with no words, just beats, where dancers would breakdance to the new musical innovation created by Herc that fateful day.
Over the next 50 years, Hip-Hop would become the dominant musical form practiced throughout the world. Hip-Hop’s global influence first broke during the late 1990s, when the faces of rap stars like Tupac Shakur, Lauryn Hill, Method Man, Biggie Smalls, and Snoop Dogg, to name only a few, were plastered across magazine covers like never before. The explosion of Hip-Hop in the 1990s birthed a plethora of interesting musical outgrowth as local scenes developed across the U.S. Many American ‘underground’ Hip-Hop scenes of the 1990s into the 2000s, like L.A.’s Good Life Café and later Project Blowed, spread the message of Do-It-Yourself Hip-Hop to other countries like Australia through artist-run labels and pioneering tour networks.
For most of these 50 years of Hip-Hop, both listening fans as well as the DJ’s that created the beats had to go out to physical record shops and search for the music. This journey to find the perfect beat is an apt metaphor for life. A major part of the joy in Hip-Hop, and of course all genres of music, is the discovery. In today’s Internet-drenched world, where one only needs to strike a few keystrokes and discover that sample or drum beat you were searching for, the effect has been a short circuiting of the physical journey of finding cool new music.
On the flip side, all this instant information allows for some serious rabbit holes of Cyberdelic musical discovery. It may not hit the same as going out and searching for a song, but at the end of the day great music is great music and more people are making great music at increasing speeds and volume. For instance, I was recently contacted by an Australian producer who goes by Ourobonic Plague. I don’t think I’ve met anyone from Australia who is involved in a local Hip-Hop scene there, so it was cool learning about some new music from him. In conversation I was hipped to a handful of artists who represent some of the more interesting Australian artists making music today.
There is Def Wish Cast who, I was told, are considered some of the O.Gs of Australian Hip-Hop. DWC began in the early 1990s and had close to a twenty-year run as musical leaders in the burgeoning scene. With three emcees and one DJ, skilled in the art of proper turntablism, DJ Vame, DWC lit the torch for many in the local scene. Other artists followed, like Class A, who released interesting concept albums like Me, Me, Me & Him: The Secret Life of a Receptionist (2010), then Murph & Platonic, and Ivens who kept the scene moving during in the 2000s to 2010s. Ivens has a Def Jux quality to his music and one can hear the influence that U.S. underground Hip-Hop was having on Australia at the time. I learned from my guide that Australian Hip-Hop is influenced by both the American and British Hip-Hop scenes, which makes for some creative contributions to the overall global Hip-Hop experience.
My guide did a good job next of bringing the musical sounds of more recent Australian hip-hop to the fore when he showed me a song from Sampa the Great, the Zambian rapper, once based in Australia, called “Final Form.” The song and video are both bangers and showcase the skills of this artist. I actually hear a possible influence of Mos Def, specifically The New Danger in her linguistic styles, regardless of whatever her influences, the Great Sampa is a fitting name for this exciting artist. Ourbonic Plague tells me that the Australian Hip-Hop scene “has become much more diverse musically and way less white,” in the last bunch of years. The result is a dynamic reflection of the ethnically diverse peoples who have settled in Australia. As Sampa represents African settlement in Australia, Kid Pharoah reflects how many Egyptians have settled in Australia since the birth of Hip-Hop. His song ‘British Museum’ is a classic boom bap story about the legacy of British colonialism and imperialism which led to Egypt being robbed of cultural artifacts and then displayed in places like the British Museum.
Another artist OP hipped me to was Tkay Maidza, whose style is exciting. The aesthetics of her video, “Silent Assassin,” made with the producer Flume, is reminiscent of Mad Max, as a Jeep zooms through the desert at high speeds as a leather clad Tkay is grinding her body joyously through the air. Her musical vibe seems to sit at the intersection of Witch House and Hip-Hop, all delivered with a desert goth flavor. The beat is dope, and her lyrical expression matches it perfectly. The “Silent Assassin” video was just released one month ago and shows how far Australian Hip-hop has evolved since the early Boom Bap years of DWC.
Perhaps the artists whose music I found most mesmerizing from Ourobonic’s list was a duo named Teether and Kuya Neil. After releasing an EP, the two released their first album STRESSOR in February of this year. The beats and rhymes are haunted, mysterious, and hypnotically engaging. The beats remind me a bit of the music of Amon Tobin, but they are personalized and properly elevated through Teether’s vocals. Songs like “Reno,” “Myth,” and “Process” really display their talent for creating music that speaks to one’s unconscious while still encouraging one to bang their head to the beat.
Over the last decade Australian rock and punk groups like Tame Impala, The Chats, The Skeggs, and King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard have created amazing music and become known all over the world. However, if you ask most people about Australian Hip-Hop they may only be able to mention the name of Iggy Azealia and the quizzically scratch their heads wondering if Australia indeed has a Hip-Hop scene. Hopefully, this short list provides a proper launch pad to really start exploring the many talented and fun Hip-Hop artists who call Australia home.
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