Hip-Hop’s Brave New World

Is it time we embraced Australian hip-hop’s broad church? CHRIS JOHNSTON looks at two new records – 'The Great Divide' by Gully Platoon and 'Concrete Jungle' by Diafrix – that bust the old perceptions about the genre wide open.

This is the whole world of Australian hip-hop right here. All its dreams and sonic signals drawn from ancient pioneers and ideas about the future and even its reasons for being in the first place. That they are both very Australian records – and both Melbourne records – isn’t close to the whole story. Nevertheless, they are, and at a crucial time. This world is crossing over.

I had a look at The Australian newspaper the other day, a big, conservative thing, “The Heart Of The Nation”, nominally of the Right, very much the mainstream, and they were offering as a marketing tool free downloads of local hip-hop guy Phrase (who has major label support) which seemed to be a complete and very instructive reversal. Not only were “they” (as in “us” and “them”) not ignoring it, they were using it. Times change.

It now seems unfortunate that the term “skip-hop” came to be used as a catch-all title for a whole uprising of music and also for the name of a prominent documentary (“showcasing Australian hip-hop culture”) in ’06, screened in at least two big film festivals, because it seems like the term is fast becoming redundant and probably was then as well.

Is it a pejorative – skip-hop – or a term of endearment? I think maybe in relation to some of the more unreconstructed suburban Aussie white-boy rappers – who celebrate and champion those “skip” things about themselves not with a brainlessness as such, but with a deeply Australian middle-class reluctance to expand their horizons – it’s probably alright.

Elsewhere though it’s too narrow. The old perceptions about Australian hip-hop, which came largely from rock powerbrokers and the rock media, were always that it was siloed – the bogans, the peaceniks, the wogs, etc etc etc – and that it could never move ahead as one. That it was worthless and, like Vanilla Ice, was just pretending. This has been the struggle since Sydney’s Just Us and Melbourne’s AKA Brothers (featuring Ransom) released the first local hip-hop records in 1988 and ’89.

Too narrow by far. Australian hip-hop is now a broad, broad church where everything from the cheapest, most terrible pop (Pez and ‘The Festival Song’) to combative Aboriginal arch-activism (Wire MC) can exist, with both of those extremes and everything in between not in the shadow of America or “rap” or Tupac or anything like that but simply expressing itself through beats and rhymes and telling stories of Australia in an Australian tongue.

What the best hip-hop does is what folk used to do: narrate and instruct in the local context. There was a socio-linguistic survey done out of the University of Queensland in 2003 which found, even then, that Australian hip-hop used much more Australian lexicon and grammar than other local music genres, which it found on this basis were more influenced by American or European forms.

“Diafrix is fundamentally of this country but in a way that makes the idea of Australia and localism dissolve. Rather than being indigenous or suburban or conscious it’s about something bigger – the global movement of people.”

What these two records do is fling open the doors still further. The Great Divide by Gully Platoon in particular – a supergroup of sorts from the Obese Records roster involving Pegz, Dialectrix, Plutonic Lab, Joe New and Jase – is a mad record, the kind that Australian hip-hop has deserved to produce since these golden days began. Diafrix? Well, Diafrix is fundamentally of this country but in a way that makes the idea of Australia and localism dissolve. Rather than being indigenous or suburban or conscious it’s about something bigger – the global movement of people; people running from terror, running from poverty, running from corruption, running from all manner of things to places like Melbourne, where they start again.

Khaled Abdulwahab from Diafrix was an asylum seeker in Footscray for six years; he moved from Eritrea on his own at 18. He told me he was “sometimes legal, sometimes not” while he was waiting for permanent residence. Now that he is, he has a poster of Bob Marley on his bedroom wall in Flemington because Bob is about “survival and maintaining strength”. He says it’s relevant that Diafrix took a Marley title – Concrete Jungle – for their own album and says it’s also relevant that the album was made over most of 2008 through the worst of the recession.

Diafrix makes hip-hop without innovation but with great spirit and soul, but also what they do – to their credit – is bravely emasculate themselves in the manner of Michael Franti or Wyclef, or indeed Bob Marley. It’s a statement about hip-hop just as much as it is a statement about a new way of life as a migrant in Melbourne: no gunz, no thugz. Just rainbows and hopefulness and music rich in trans-global rhythms (African, Polynesian, Jamaican).

Gully Platoon are similar in that they – to a lesser extent – ignore hip-hop idioms from America and, in fact, seem driven to take what was known about the tough, politically incorrect Obese style (“the suburban battlers and red rattlers”) and build on it spectacularly, using ideas from rock‘n’roll and digitalia as well as straight up hip-hop, the beats and rhymes and turntables of their way of life.

The themes are deeper too, mostly. The jeopardy here is not how to bomb an Eltham train in secret. Instead Gully Platoon wonder about surveillance and paranoia and whether death is the final word or whether in fact our utterances and speech bubbles and words written down can burn on and float on after we have gone: “A message in a bottle or a memory stick.”

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Gully Platoon’s The Great Divide and Diafrix’s Concrete Jungle are out now through Obese and Illusive, respectively.