Australian rap, Modern Australia and Me

First ever substack, what's even the go with this app? 

It might (or might not) come as a surprise to many, but I’ve had a long relationship with Australian rap, a relationship that more than likely sparked my interest in urban Australian culture in the first place.

The first time I ever saw Australian rap was in 2012, I’m using the word ‘saw’ because like most Australians my age  I was very accustomed to the humming background noise of the great white suburban Australian rappers that would generously be chucked into mainstream radio playlists like a form charity by our Australian media overlords.

I'm talking about the first generation of Australian artists from the 2000s that would see some semblance of mainstream success, Hilltop hoods, Bliss n Eso etc. What would later be affectionately known as ‘BBQ rap’.

A very white, very non offensive, very middle class form of rap that was easy on the ears. A type of rap that John Howard’s Australia found acceptable- they wouldn’t need to worry about their kids becoming like those crazy teenagers in America or the UK.

Pez & 360 - Festival Song (BBQ rap anthem)

And my god, please don’t think I’m dismissing the work of these rappers. I love Festival Song on a Friday afternoon as much as anyone and I’ve come to really appreciate the struggle of being taken seriously as a rapper in Australia in 2005.

If most of mainstream Australia isn’t taking Australian hiphop seriously now, they sure as hell weren’t taking it seriously back then. “Australians shouldn’t rap” or “The accent just doesn’t work” was a common thing you’d hear.

A type of self-hate that has plagued the Australian mind since the beginning of time. A narrow, 2 dimensional view on what and what not Australians should do because surely we must be too boring for this foreign rap stuff, we aren’t like those exciting places overseas. We don’t have any struggle and rap is for people that are struggling, is what they think.

But back to me actually looking at Aus rap for the first time. You know that era where you start smoking weed and it becomes a big part of your life because you're a teenager and take every new thing really seriously? For me that was term 1 of 2012 in high school.

Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know was soaring in the charts, the viral sensation of planking was at its peak and I had just discovered that you didn’t actually have to go to school, you could just skip class with your friends.

It was on one of those hot February days jigging class that it all happened. We walked down to Bill's house - he was one of those kids you knew from school, but he never went to school, he just sold weed to everyone in our year because he lived with his grandma and she didn’t seem to really care.

The usual ritual of saying hello to his housing commission friends that also didn’t go to school, followed by nervously passing over a handful of sweaty coins in exchange for his moldy Gatorade bong and half a gram of weed went through smoothly, Bill seemed to do the exchange without taking his eyes of the school issued Lenovo laptop resting upon a plastic outdoor chair. The three of them were more concerned with who got to play the next video on youtube.

“Let me play a song lad! Trust me! You need to sus out  this Kerser guy, the video’s full professional and all! I think he’s from Campbelltown or something”

This was somewhat surprising for me and my mates. In our heads the Aus rap we knew was music made for us middle class kids, not the working class kids, did these guys suddenly get into BBQ rap? - I was curious.

His friend conceded and Billy excitedly typed in Kerser Watch Me Get Em into youtube.

I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

You’ve got to understand, before this the only time I had seen anything to do with Western Sydney was a fight filmed on a nokia, an over sensational  news report or a 1 dimensional character mocking them (see:Trent From Punchy).

This was the opposite. It was unapologetically Western Sydney, but somehow it was cool? From my Inner West bubble  It was so offensive and strange to see a dude from Campbelltown acting like he’s proud to be a Westie.

The polo shirt with the popped collar, the air max, the smoking a ciggie inside the train, everyone knew someone like that, and during a relatively young stage of internet media seeing it in high quality was mind blowing.

From that stoned walk back to school to what would have been a couple weeks we kept chanting the chorus to each other, masked as a joke but each knowing we loved this new Kerser guy.

“I’m on my way up bruva fucken tell’em move out! Don’t need radio the streets are my connection any second watch me wreck’em now the labels need protection watch me get’em!”

Kerser - Watch Me Get Em

For the first time I was taken out of my comfy Inner West bubble and witnessed the hidden world of this city that many in the Eastern half of Sydney will never know exists, whole styles and subcultures which will never make it past Parramatta.

Yes, Kerser was white, it was probably the only “mainstream” thing about him, his attitude, accent and area was a side of Australian rap that had always lurked beneath the surface of the more mainstream ‘BBQ rap’.

Kerser came out of the ‘Gutter rap’ movement, housing commission’s answer to the middle class ‘BBQ rap’. Totally D.I.Y, filmed on phones with beats that were stolen off the internet, songs riddled with pig latin and stories of theft and drug dealing. Kerser was the first to professionalize this usually low budget style of hiphop.

Acts like Sydney Serchaz, Kerser and Fortay would force their sound into the ears of every kid around Sydney, whether by choice or by sitting on the same bus as a lad blasting it off his phone.

Sky High - Poor Junkie

Absolutely no one would have anticipated that this underdog branch of Australian rap that would slowly but surely dominate the Australian hiphop scene by the late 2010’s and 2020’s. BBQ rap was left for the history books to be played ironically by people like me.

Kerser went on to have a decade long career as one of the most dominant forces in Aus rap despite almost total media silence on him. I’ve always found it insane how an artist that is universally known amongst anyone from the ages of 21-35 is almost universally unknown by anyone much older than that.

A very long article could be written about the ups and downs of Aus rap during this rise, but the main point of this article is about what this ‘Gutter rap era’ did for Australia.

It was the birth of a uniquely Australian subgenre. For the first time no one could say, “Oh yeah they got that from America '' or “They are so copying England in this”. The popularization of this subgenre mixed with the location of where it took place made for the perfect storm.

Western Sydney has been the beating heart of the Australian rap scene for 15 years now, one of the most multicultural regions of the country and a part of Sydney where it isn’t very hard to find someone giving rap a try. 

It was 2017 and by now my fascination with this strange and unique style birthed by Sydney’s working class had led me to running facebook meme pages about the scene, I was across pretty much all rap coming out of Sydney and even had a small Ausrap blog, trying my best to force my peers in the city to look at this exciting music scene thriving only 30 minutes drive from us. 

The scene had flatlined somewhat from Kerser and the Gutter rap hype, fortunately their earlier success gave the scene a lifeline as people out west were still inspired and new artists were still coming out every month, one of these new Western Sydney artists would be Onefour.

It’s very surprising that Australia hadn’t really had a successful Pasifika rapper up until this time when you think about how musical their culture is. Artist like Hau and MC Trey had been around since the dawn of time (the 90s lol) but Australia really didn’t have its own equivalent of New Zealand’s ultra-successful rapper, Scribe.

Sydney hiphop pioneer MC Trey

It was around 2016 when I first started seeing Polynesian artists from Sydney really starting to make their mark with acts like Pistol Pete & Enzo from Campbelltown and Hooligan Hefs from Doonside, Onefour came up at this time also.

The accession of Onefour is well known and has been explained by more articulate people than me but what really made Onefour such a culture shifting group was the International attention they received.

Western Sydney and multicultural urban Australia had finally entered the world stage of hiphop.

Australia’s multiculturalism is nothing new to us, it’s apart of our country and something many of us take pride in, but get on a flight to Europe, make your way to a hostel and introduce yourself to a table full of Europeans and Americans as someone that isn’t a white Australian, and you will quickly realize most of the world does not see us in that way.

“You don’t look Australian haha” 

Any non-white Aussies traveling have heard this before.

Australia’s reputation overseas is painfully white-bread and our famous exports are almost always white also, couple that with some conservative politics and crocodile dundee and the Australian stereotype is one of British monoculture far away from the motherland.

This is why Onefours international attention in hiphop circles around the world has been so important. I’ve talked music with people from overseas and I’ve heard many times, “I’ve never heard Australian rap except for those Onefour guys” a quick youtube search for people reacting to them is quickly met with an obnoxious American saying “daayummm they got brown people in Australia?!”

Whole swaths of our youth that had largely been ignored by the Australian media apparatus unless it was a parody like Chris Lilley or Paul Fenech, were finally being acknowledged by people overseas - maybe we do have a modern, urban, diverse culture? Maybe we can be ‘cool’.

Many people reading this might not see the big deal in all this rap nonsense, but like it or not for the last 30 years hiphop has become the cultural zeitgeist not only in America but literally across all four corners of the globe, it bleeds into almost every aspect of modern trends and it’s one of the biggest artistic mediums in the world , every country has its own Rap Star at this point. Australia having a non-white representative in this arena shapes the opinions and views of us overseas amongst young people.

Artist like Dizzee Rascal and Skepta shaped the global perception of the UK for many young people like me and helped turn it into what it is today, and exciting vibrant scene with many creative inner city hipsters, but also many black faces that could find success in those white circles, a dynamic vibrant place with dozens of huge cultural exports.

Onefours rise is as authentic as Western Sydney itself. Their breakout hit ‘The Message’ sits on 18 million views and was inescapable for months if you were in Sydney. The excitement around such a brutal, honest and violent song about the realities of Western Sydney sparked a lot of controversy - It also sparked a new found pride in a Western Sydney identity.

Whats going on in Western Sydney?

A new found interest in the West would grip the nation.

The group would take on an N.W.A like status in Australian society and a newfound interest in Western Sydney would boost other artists and content creators from the West to blow up from the demand in hearing about Western Sydney experiences and characters.

Non-White Australia was finally the focal point for outsiders, even if it was brief. Australia’s identity as a land of blonde beach goers that don’t like immigration and know how to catch live animals was challenged - moments like these are rare for Australia.

Yeah but who the fuck cares Monkeyboy?

It’s important because the perceptions of Australia as an unexciting , boring, white, rich, comfy, cultureless, storyless nation hurts us, we are pretty much the Hills District of the world.

Urban UK’s embrace of multiculturalism in terms of their media is what has maintained them being serious cultural exporters around the world in film, music and art into the modern world, becoming a refreshing light of resistance to America dominating culture in the English speaking world. As the developing world rises in consumer power; they are not going to be as interested in dinky-die Aussie or White English stories as we may be.

England’s population is double ours but their media landscape is far more than double our media landscape, why? One reason for this might be because they have interesting stories that the world is curious about. Top Boy, a show about life in London's housing estates, was a global sensation. We all know how many stories have come out of the UK.

There is absolutely no reason things have to be like that, the talent and the stories are all here.

It’s very clear to me that a unification between East Sydney’s media establishment and Western Sydney’s raw talent is what will be needed to take Australian internet media to the next level - just as it did in the UK.

Despite their legal issues, Onefour have played a role in representing Australia in its true reality, not in the world's dated old school imagination of us. The rise of Western Sydney artists and content creators is here to stay (hopefully).

Thank you for reading my first entry, I might try to make this a monthly thing, just talking about Australian culture etc..

Onefour - How We Livin’