
HIP HOP REVOLUTION
The good ol' Australian pub scene has a true, home brewed competitor in hiphop. Chris Johnston found a local scene on the rise.
As the decade fades, all the talk is of Oz Rock's death. The talk is that yesterdays heroes- Cold Chisel, Midnight Oil, AC/DC, INXS- mean nothing anymore. That, instead, a new breed of musicians have taken over. That they're broaching bold new topics and embracing new music. That they have usurped our rich musical history.
Savage Garden, they say. Sappy and fey, maybe, but effective and very pop. You Am I, who last week made history by becoming the first-ever Australian band to have three consecutive albums enter ARIA's charts at No. 1. So cool, they say. So urban. So tight. And Silverchair- so modern, so heavy, so intense. So grunge.
But in reality there' s a lot more going on than just these things. And it's got nothing to do with rock music or guitars.
It's hiphop- once the very notion of Australian hiphop was considered a self-contradiction, an oxymoron. Then, when it started happening anyway in the 80's and DJs and rappers across Australia began actually producing the music, it was considered fake. Not real, or not real enough. A pastiche. Hiphop was black music after all, from the mean streets of Los Angeles or New York, not the white-bread suburbs of Canberra, Melbourne, Brisbane or Sydney.
Now there are strong enclaves in every city, backed by a resurgence in the associated 80's cultures of breakdancing and graffiti, and although still disenfranchised in the main from major record companies and commercial radio, it enjoys more passionate underground support.
The music is, literally, booming. Australian hiphop is on the rise. It has found some validity. And it's getting closer to finding its own sound, divorced, finally from the spectre of US rap's aggressive bravado, and, almost the traditions of good old-fashioned rock'n'roll.
"You can turn on Triple J now," says Heidi Pasqual, from the independent hiphop label Creative Vibes, "and hear You Am I, then the Whitlams, then Australian hiphop beats like DJ Soup or Trapezoid. It's beyond the point now where people can only identify with the music if they are part of the sub-culture it comes from"
Creative Vibes, with a roster including Soup, Sleek the Elite, and Moonrock, who are among the key adventurers in new Australian hiphop, have released three 24- track compilation CDs of local music in two years, indicating the volume of new music they are able to source.
Homebrewz, funded by an offshoot of Mushroom Records have done likewise. They've put out two exhaustive collections to date. In Sydney, the group Meta Bass N Breath have risen from Oxford Street buskers to an eight- piece psychedelic hiphop band with an American record deal. In Melbourne, producers like Prowla, Bias B and Ransom constantly cut home-produced vinyl; the city's club scene, too, is heavily influenced by new styles in hiphop.
"It's always seen as a struggle, making hiphop in Australia," says Ransom, a Melbourne DJ for more than a decade. "But now people just do what they want to do. It's generational. The kids from the 80's are making the music now. The technology's cheaper. Everyone knows a geek with a computer."
The hiphop revival and the local boom has also been fuelled by club culture and a wider acceptance of dance music. It's beats now, not riffs, and with electronic music mutating fast, new variations on the hiphop breakbeat have emerged, using the core of it, the rhythm, but ditching a staright ahead rap for a more complex soundscape.
The DJ with two turntables and a crossfader is central to all dance music, but never more so than in hiphop where the cutting, scratching and overlapping is fiercer and more dynamic.
"Hiphop today doesn't have any borders," says Matt Heywood who, until recently, managed the Sydney label One Movement. "It's moved on from where it started. The best stuff now is fat beats and sampling and no rapping. But it's still hiphop and could be from anyewhere. It could be English, Italian, French, Australian."
Some Australian hiphop producers now make this instrumental, beat driven music, thereby avoiding a fake accent in rap. But rappers and MCs are still essential to the culture and many Australian rhymes are full of references to the suburbs and local issues. Sleek the Elite, particularly, raps proudly of inner-city life, multiculturalism and racism in a thick, Lebanese-Australian accent. Sydney crew, The Brethren, on their track '2 the streets', sample railway announcements, listing all Sydney's train stations, one by one.
Australian hiphop, in general, avoids the cliches that have marred the American sound- there's no mention of guns or gangtas.
"It hasn't quite found its own sound yet," says Sydney's Trent Roden, who manages The Brethren and Meta Bass. Roden, 25, also recently organised the 10-day hiphop festival Urban Expressions, which culminated in a breakdancing party in Sydney's Hyde Park. "But it's getting closer all the time- closer than it ever has before. It's going to gain its own identity real soon."
Early Australian hiphop, released through the 80's and early 90's after the initial explosion of the culture in America, was typified by either the glossy sound of Sound Unlimited Posse, whose 1992 album A Postcard From The Edge Of The Underside is still the only local hiphop release on a major label, or by the roughneck MCing of a group like Def Wish Cast, a trio of hardcore rappers from the Western suburbs of Sydney.
Despite a massive increase in releases since the beginning of last year, the sounds, and the diverse influences are now much harder to pin down.
The major players include DJ Soup, a former Sydney Kings basketballer called John Blake, who makes fluid, futuristic hiphop beats with few raps but layers of soundbites from lost jazz and easy listening records. And Moonrock, formed from the ashes of Sydney crew Easybase, who use jazz and avant-garde references to create extremely delicate, original rap -less hiphop. Ransom's Melbourne productions, meanwhile, can be anything from reverent old school electro beats to a newer, more club oriented sound.
He agrees hiphop is now harder to define. But he also agrees Australian producers are finding their niches within the mystery of the beats.
"I've been making this stuff for a long time," he says. "And still, every week, I'm making hiphop. Every week I'm looking for beats and listening to rhymes."