i always think back to the time more than a year ago when i was eating dinner and having a few drinks at the courthouse in newtown with my friends briohny and james. james was interested in what i knew about the role of hip-hop in rural indigenous communities, and he asked whether there was a problem with corrupting or replacing traditional culture. i said what traditional culture? the culture where they wander nomadic through the desert telling dreamtime stories and painting dots on bark.
now james was, understandably, a little taken aback by this. but i explained carefully the reasoning behind this seemingly facetious comment. the nomadic-desert-dreamtime-dots idea of traditional culture is problematic because it’s an idealised notion of pure culture. basically, it’s a white anthropologist’s wet dream. of course, that there was a living culture of incredible richness in this land before white invasion is not in question. but what is questionable is the way the anthropologist brought that culture to us in such an idealised form. anthropology, to oversimplify, is dogged by a total reverence for the myths of other cultures, which in turn, mythologises the culture. just around the time james and i were having this conversation, rolf de heer and the people of ramingining’s had just released their majestic film ten canoes and james, who is a really intelligent and thoughtful guy, mentioned a scene at the beginning of the film. the scene is thus: the party of ramingining men are walking in a line silently through the bush on the way to the swamp. suddenly the last man halts the party, and holds a foreboding silence. something serious is going to happen here you think, and the silence continues, and then the last man says: i’m not walking at the back anymore because somebody keeps farting and the false tension (which is the audience’s tension) is let out as they all (and you) laugh. it was a brilliant observation from james, because this stunning moment of the film deliberately toys with and then collapses this idealised notion of traditional aboriginal culture. you breath out and realise that these are ordinary people, living everyday lives, who gossip and make jokes, who tell each other stories, and who do smelly farts.
i don’t hip-hop to be famous. fuck the spotlight, i’ll steal the cunt and pawn it. i got hungry mouths to feed.
- wire mc.
thinking about the ordinary and the everyday reality (as opposed to the romantic and the idealised) is essential when looking at someone like wire mc and his relationship to hip-hop. having been dispossessed of his ancestral lands, his language and his culture before he was born, as well as having been raised on a mission, of course he’s got no interest in playing the role of mr. traditional aboriginal to please the white crowd’s idealised image of a culture which it feels mildly (though not personally) guilty about having destroyed. instead, as an urban aboriginal, he looks to the tools that are lying around to help him express radical difference, to lyrically heal himself, and most important of all, to feed hungry mouths. hip-hop just happens to be lying around, and it works. he’s said over and over again: i don’t hip-hop to advance hip-hop, i don’t rap to advance rap. i rap to help me and my people, right here, right now. mc for me means my cousin. this is a markedly different perspective from those who have invested their entire being into hip-hop, who have, essentially, become hip-hop. not that wire’s take on the form lessens his authenticity, or stops him enacting his identity through hip-hop. if anything, the opposite: his use of hip-hop as a tactic of survival in the social reality, without bothering to absolutely define himself as the form, is, in my opinion, the very authentic essence (and history) of hip-hop. this is the fundamental mistake made by hip-hop puritans of all stripes, that is, that real hip-hop is the form itself, when actually, and all along, real hip-hop has been what you can make the form do for you.
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indigenous hip-hop (or rather, hip-hop done by people who also happen to be indigenous) has been happening in australia/eora nation since it came here in what is referred to as the first wave. the oldest active indigenous hip-hop artist is munkimuk, and this is a list of indigenous hip-hop artists off the top of my head: wire mc, brotha black (also here), lez beckett, mc-s, ebony williams, jakalene extreme, last kinection, street warriors, radical son, konnect-a-dot.
