Dirt Child: Sculpting Aus Hip-Hop

Is Dirt Child (aka Sydney-based sculptor Belle Brooks) Aus hip-hop’s finest agent provocateur or just an elaborate prankster? DOUG WALLEN finds out.

How exactly does a sculptor from the NSW country town of Mudgee fall into hip-hop? For Sydney-based Belle Brooks, it began as a joke, but her debut EP as Dirt Child, Ratking, is too fully formed and sharply executed to be just for a laugh.

Teaming up with manager/producer James Woods, who also raps as Jimmy Suit, Brooks really throws her weight around on the five-song Ratking, spouting lewd boasts while dissecting various targets and stoking surreal imagery. She tackles city nightlife, dwells on testicles, and engages in a reference-heavy flurry of recurring themes. And on 'Anthem', Brooks writes off the vast majority of Aussie hip-hop (“A disaster, a farce, it’s daft”), naming names along the way. It’s sure to rub most listeners the wrong way, but beneath Dirt Child’s bratty posturing is a hunger for smarter, more creative hip-hop that’s not so beholden to American trends. During a winding phone conversation, Brooks opened up about realising the unlikely project, the challenge of performing live, dissing Macromantics and the fornicating giraffes in her lounge room.

How long have you been doing Dirt Child?
I started messing around with the idea at the end of last year. Then it was like, “Let’s go make an EP.” [Laughs]. I wasn’t really anything musical before that.

Yeah, your background is in sculpture.
It’s still creative, but it’s not rapping. And it’s still absurd.

You’re also an “aquascapist”?
It basically means [landscaping] aquariums. It’s dealing with plants and interesting forms in a little universe. If you look up Takashi Amano, you’ll see some amazing work.

I had no idea that was a thing.
Yeah, everybody always asks. They think I escape from water or something. It’s a bit nerdy, so it’s not that exciting.

Are you still at uni?
No, I’m done. I finished my honours last year. I did my giraffes and now I’m a practising artist. Have you seen my sculptures? They’re big giraffes having sex in multi-coloured plasticine. At the moment they’re in my lounge room, but they’ve just been up in Newcastle for this festival and over to Perth. They’ve been around.

They look quite tall. How did they fit through the door of your lounge room?
[Laughs] The male’s head comes off and he detaches from the female. The thing is, you can’t actually touch the plasticine, because it squishes. So it’s an absolute nightmare. It’s this incredibly ridiculous thing. But they’re fun.

Is that a common material to sculpt in?
No, it’s kind of my own technique, I suppose. It’s more used in stop-motion animation and stuff like that. But they’re fibreglass underneath.

Is building a song anything like making a sculpture?
I probably approach it the same way, in a mad “put that here, put that there” [way], adding to it and making it bigger and bigger until it’s some four-metre fucking giraffe or some crazy song that has too many references and strange little parts. In that way it’s the same. It’s less physical. I’m quite little, related to the giraffe, so it’s quite hard to manage. But with a song it’s nice and tidy, and you can just send it to your friends. You don’t have to put it in a truck and transport it around everywhere.

Is that one of your sculptures on the EP sleeve?
Oh, yeah, the laser rat head. [Laughs] That’s another fibreglass one. That was on a bicycle helmet, so I’m gonna ride around [wearing it].

There’s a lot of sexuality in your songs. Beyond the giraffes, is there much sexuality in your sculptures?
Well, it’s never actually the focus for me. It just creeps its way in. The giraffes aren’t about them having sex. It’s just about the absurdity of the whole situation. I suppose with my songs, that happens as well. It crept its way in and it’s in no way serious. It’s such hyperbole and so over-the-top that it does become absurd. I quite like that aspect. A lot of people mention the whole sex side, but it’s not something I did to be shocking. I guess it just happened. [Laughs]

You mention misogyny in one song and chauvinism in another, and obviously those are glaring elements in most commercial rap.
The thing is, I’m quite misogynistic myself, if you listen to my songs. I feel like I’m quite a hypocrite.

Well, some of the lyrics I thought you were saying through the voices of the people you’re mocking.
There’s bits of that. I suppose it’s hard to distinguish what’s what, really, in the whole mash of what it is.

But you weren’t trying to reverse those elements of rap?
I wasn’t really trying to, no, but I suppose I did in that I was a woman rapping. And that’s unusual. And a woman rapping about those things … well, it’s not that unusual. I don’t know. When men do it, people don’t seem to notice.

It’s an interesting double standard. If Lil’ Kim or Amanda Blank raps about sex, it’s their shtick. But if a man does it, it’s just him being a man.
That’s exactly it. The guy on [ABC] Radio National said that swearing, or having a potty mouth, was my shtick. They’re just words I use, like you do.

Is it hard writing lyrics?
It’s just such an incredible amount, and they’re all so worked over. It’s not hard, but it’s quite an intricate process that evolves over time when you find a better rhyme. I talk to James [Woods] and he’ll come up with something cool. We try to find as many words and syllables that will rhyme as possible. The thing I think most rappers actually struggle with is writing about things. A lot of songs aren’t really about anything. I think a song should have content, so I try to make my songs say something. It doesn’t have to be anything of worth, but I want them to say something.

“I haven’t really heard any responses from my cheeky disses, but a lot of people hate [Dirt Child], which is quite fantastic.”

Why hip-hop? It’s a strange realm to end up in.
I guess there’s a few reasons. One, I can’t sing. Two, I was hearing all this hip-hop. I just think it’s not very good. Well, I’ve sort of learnt now it’s good to the people who like it. [Laughs] I just don’t find it good at all. It’s dreary rubbish, really, that’s only famous or successful because of the songs they sample. I know that’s a really old argument, and samples in music can be fantastic, but in Australian hip-hop a lot of it just piggybacks on that, I find.

You said you’ve learnt it’s good to people who like it. Have you been taken to task much?
Well, I haven’t really heard any responses from my cheeky disses, but a lot of people hate [Dirt Child], which is quite fantastic. Coming into this project we thought, “This [Aussie hip-hop] is terrible music. Let’s give them something a bit more intellectual and interesting.” And we thought it was that. But they sort of just grunt and say, “Shut up bitch. Stop squealing.”

Underground hip-hop often has this barrage of ideas, whereas the commercial stuff is kept broad and simple, with as recognisable a sample as possible.
And it has little merit. But I guess it’s easy. And I guess it’s good for [being] in the background.

A lot of people don’t want to think too much about what they’re listening to.
I’m probably the same. I don’t listen to music very much, but when I do, I don’t listen to every single word. Looking back, before I rapped, I wouldn’t have listened to my own songs and picked them apart and got every punch line. I would have been like, “Yep, she’s talking fast.” [Laughs]

You also call out Macromantics, who’s much more inventive that most hip-hop acts.
It’s quite awkward now, because I’ve befriended some bands who are quite good friends with Macromantics and think she’s fantastic. But the reason I called her out was because I find that she doesn’t speak out anything. Her rhymes are complex and really rhythmically great, but it’s just hippie gibberish to me: “Apple crumble spider bite.”

It’s very much abstraction.
Yeah.

The other people you diss are some of the standard-bearers of Aussie hip-hop, but James actually defends Drapht and Bliss N Esso on the track
That’s right. Drapht is a clever man. He does very well. Bliss N Esso … I probably don’t share the same opinion. But there are some good acts in Australian hip-hop. I think The Hilltop Hoods are very clever, and they must be doing something right for so many people to love them, but I find them boring. That’s why I made rap; so I would have something to listen to. [Laughs]

How do you feel about Curse Ov Dialect, who are in the opposite direction?
They’re quite amazing. They’ve got a bit of something else. And just their whole presence.

James has a lot of different roles in Dirt Child: he’s your manager and producer, he guests on two songs, and he runs the label Climbing Hills. Has he been an equal partner throughout the project?
Yeah. The whole thing has been the both of us. His beats are amazing, and he sort of acted as a taskmaster. I had no idea how it would go, and we just evolved it from just words to something cool and musical.

You’ve done a few live shows now, right?
I’ve done three. [Laughs]

How did they go?
They’ve been interesting. I maintain that live rap, unless you’re Curse Ov Dialect, is really hard to do. But it’s been quite fun. James is on stage [too]. He plays synths and raps.

Were you billed with other hip-hop acts?
Well, the first gig I ever did was with Quan from Regurgitator, his solo project. So that was quite intimidating. He’s quite big. The second one was with [Melbourne hip-hop collective] Keith! Party. That was probably the best one. The third one was at Pony [in Melbourne]. It was right after this thrash-y, death-metal band. It was the worst performance I’ve done, but it was amazing in that it was so bad.

Given the sheer amount of words, do you have trouble remembering them or keeping your breath live?
I had incredible trouble when I first started. I could not get these words out. They’re quite complex things that go up and down. But through recording them and practising, I learnt them and learnt where to breathe and what to do with this massive chunk of text I had to regurgitate.

Is it just the five songs from Ratking when you rap live?
Well, I have two sort of half-songs. One’s over ‘I’m The Slime’, the Zappa song, and the other’s over ‘A Milli’, the Lil’ Wayne song. So I drop them in there. We make it all join together with James’ musical interludes. We have the Ship To Shore theme in there.

Is there an album you’re working on?
I’m not working on anything Dirt Child-related at the moment, but I have these ideas for a double-disc EP. I guess it will really crystallise what Dirt Child is and what I’m doing with it. Ratking is the first five songs I ever made in my life.

Yeah, I wasn’t sure whether this was an one-off thing or the start of something more.
The whole project started off as a joke and grew and grew as a bad joke might. But then it became very serious all of a sudden. I feel like an idiot quoting myself, but in [‘Golden Tooth’] I say, “I’m not a rapper, bitch, I make sculptures, fuck ya/Yeah, get a bit of culture up ya.” I looked around and there were posters with my face on them. That really freaked me out [that] I’m being seen as a rapper and not as an artist.

It does say in your bio that you’re a sculptor.
I wanted to keep that in. I hate probably 99 percent of performance art, so I don’t want it to be seen as some performance art project or social experiment. But I put a lot of effort and a lot myself in it. It does definitely have that element of art [but] because it started as a joke, there’s still elements of that in there. So it could go either way.

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