Australian Indigenous Hip Hop

The Politics of Culture, Identity, and Spirituality

Chiara Minestrelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317217534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

This book investigates the discursive and performative strategies employed by Australian Indigenous rappers to make sense of the world and establish a position of authority over their identity and place in society. Focusing on the aesthetics, the language, and the performativity of Hip Hop, this book pays attention to the life stance, the philosophy, and the spiritual beliefs of Australian Indigenous Hip Hop artists as 'glocal' producers and consumers. With Hip Hop as its main point of analysis, the author investigates, interrogates, and challenges categories and preconceived ideas about the critical notions of authenticity, 'Indigenous' and dominant values, spiritual practices, and political activism. Maintaining the emphasis on the importance of adopting decolonizing research strategies, the author utilises qualitative and ethnographic methods of data collection, such as semi-structured interviews, informal conversations, participant observation, and fieldwork notes. Collaborators and participants shed light on some of the dynamics underlying their musical decisions and their view within discussions on representations of 'Indigenous identity and politics'. Looking at the Indigenous rappers' local and global aspirations, this study shows that, by counteracting hegemonic narratives through their unique stories, Indigenous rappers have utilised Hip Hop as an expressive means to empower themselves and their audiences, entertain, and revive their Elders' culture in ways that are contextual to the society they live in.

1 “The Black from Down-Unda”

Contact Zones and Cultures of Black Resistance

These stories first and foremost are about the uneven rewards, the unsettling representations, and the complexly entangled desires that lie underneath the commercial rhetoric of global connection, that is, the rhetoric of “free” flow and “greater” access. They present stories of how music’s forms of local, regional, and social distinction are more and more tensely poised, living the contradictions encountered through embracing and resisting dominant hegemonic trends in the global popular music industry.

—Steven Feld,¹ ethnomusicologist

‘Australian Indigenous Hip Hop’ is a complex phenomenon that needs to be framed within the socio-cultural and historical context of the relationships between Aboriginal people, settler society, temporary or permanent immigrants, and global forces. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld has captured the tensions generated by such encounters focusing on the global and globalized context of ‘free cultural flows.’ The international circuits of exchange that have framed the reception of the expressive cultures diffused among Indigenous people in Australia over the last two decades are part of a dialectic tension between local sensibilities and global aspirations rooted in a long history of transcultural connections.

Primarily, the durable and fruitful interaction between African American people and Australian Indigenous activists is one of the most prominent factors in the development of a certain rhetoric peculiar to ‘Australian Indigenous Hip Hop.’² Elaborating on some of the ideas and the historical background that I have briefly delineated in the introduction, this chapter retraces some of the most relevant moments, historical periods, and personalities that shaped the formation of an Indigenous collective identity rooted in the politics of ‘Indigenous liberation’³ from hegemonic powers. In particular, I look at the first transnational contacts in the early years of the twentieth century, the two World Wars, and the 1960s and 1970s as an extended moment of global socio-political ferment. This picture is enriched and complicated by the role played by music and sport, and their interplay in inspiring action, or simply providing a social occasion for the formulation of political discourses.⁴

It is mainly through these contact zones that Black people from overseas and Australian Indigenous people had a chance to connect and exchange ideas. In this chapter, I thus investigate the factors that have sustained the relationship between Indigenous Australians and African Americans, and the ways in which African American culture has impacted—and is still impacting—upon discourses (principally on politics and identity) produced by Indigenous people, particularly Hip Hop artists (see, for instance, the discourses about ‘Blackness,’ global citizenry, and ‘Black power’ that I explore in this and other chapters in the book). By exploring the transnational⁵ and transcultural influences that have been impacting upon Indigenous people in Australia, I shed light on some of the most evident historical reasons behind the connection between the Indigenous and African American community and the resulting diffusion of Hip Hop across Indigenous Australia. From this historical overview on the transnational connections that have contributed the most to the development of the ‘Indigenous Hip Hop’ movement, I successively explore the impact of globalizing forces upon the artistic choices and the marketing strategies adopted by the rappers in crafting and promoting their art.

Reading the Past to Understand the Present

The politics of Indigenous identity in Australia are inextricably interwoven into the narrative of Australia’s history of colonization. It is pivotal then to understand the historical background against which Indigenous people construct their ideological discourses, how they align to a certain political rhetoric, and in what way they engage with the politics of ‘Indigeneity.’ A shared view of the ‘Indigenous urban experience’ has come to constitute a significant aspect of how Indigenous people perceive their identity—that is to say, in political terms.

In the context of this book, and within the argument of ‘Aboriginal music’ as intrinsically political, it is important to retrace the historical events that have accompanied and inspired the evolution of Aboriginal music as a form of protest, without wanting to restrict its uses to this specific realm. The 1960s and the 1970s unquestionably played an active part in the constitution of political discourses in music. The history of Aboriginal people in Australia has often been silenced, but music has, in many ways, provided Indigenous people with the most appealing and productive avenue to reach the masses with political messages in less canonical ways.

Australia’s foundational stories have been characterized by a historical oblivion concerning colonial practices and the Indigenous people’s genocide. Such a void in the ‘official’ records of the country’s history is reflected in the ‘History Wars,’⁶ a debate on the veracity of historical claims of the negative ramifications of colonization. The controversy culminated in Keith Windschuttle’s book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History Volume One: Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847, where the historian disqualifies all evidence documenting the mass extermination of Aboriginal people throughout the history of the encounters between settlers and First Nations.⁷ In particular, Windschuttle extends an accusation towards those historians who, according to him, have exaggerated, to the point of fabricating, narratives of frontier violence.⁸

A crucial historical shift in the way Australia’s history is narrated started to take place in the years soon after the Second World War, as a reaction to German nationalism and the attempted genocide of Jews in Europe, and more prominently, from the late 1960s on. The change in ‘historical focus’ brought about by the Civil Rights movement, together with a renewed awareness about the critical conditions in which Indigenous people were living, prompted a change in historiographical scholarship and placed Indigenous people at the center of historical narratives. Historian Bain Attwood, among others,⁹ contends that “since Aborigines became the subject of historical investigation in the late 1960s,”¹⁰ three main schools of thought intervened in the discussion on the past by providing either an ‘oppositional,’ a ‘revisionist,’ or an ‘Aboriginal’ perspective. The historians I refer to in this chapter, particularly in relation to the influence exerted by African American leaders on politically minded Indigenous people, can certainly be viewed as part of the ‘Aboriginal’ strand, as their research highlights the importance of a neglected ‘His-story’ of Indigenous activism and transcultural connections. John Maynard, Heather Goodall, Ann Curthoys and Marilyn Lake, and Gary Foley, most prominently, have revealed the history of a ‘pan-Aboriginal’ social and political activism strongly inspired by the transoceanic deeds of the ‘Black brothers’ from the United States of America and from the islands of the Caribbean.¹¹ The ways in which this influence occurred have been scrupulously recorded by Maynard, whose grandfather, an Indigenous leader and self-educated man, set up one of the first Indigenous political bodies, the Australian Aboriginal Progressive Association (AAPA), founded in 1924 in Sydney.¹²

First Transnational Contacts and the Birth of an Enduring Relationship

Indigenous people in Australia were exposed to other cultures a long time before the encounter with the European settlers. Starting in the eighteenth century, coastal Aboriginal people from the northern part of Australia had frequent exchanges with the Macassan traders from the Indonesian islands. Prompted by commerce, this relationship also resulted in linguistic exchange and intermarriage. Yet it is only after the colonizers settled in that the global flow of people and goods assumed large proportions, thus favoring the encounter between ‘Black’ people from different parts of the world. The dynamic and unrelenting excitement that characterized the African American community throughout the twentieth century struck a chord with the first organized Aboriginal political movements in Australia, initiating a period of productive transcultural communication, thanks to the accessibility of the African American messages and political strategies. Indigenous political campaigns had taken place since the 1830s, when the first organized revolts were led by Aboriginal people who felt the need to protest against the unfair conditions and the discrimination they were enduring.¹³

Evidence of contacts between Indigenous Australians and African Americans dates back as far as 1788, with the presence of African American convicts on the First Fleet.¹⁴ Yet, while the presence of leading figures of the African American community (musicians, sportsmen, and intellectuals, for instance) visiting Australia was reported by the media in real time throughout the twentieth century, the reality of a ‘multicultural First Fleet’ is largely unknown. Relegated to the ‘historical footnotes’ of the Empire, this narrative did not find exposure, nor did it gain any popular currency outside of small academic circles.¹⁵ A ‘White only’ fleet approaching the shores of New South Wales, with its history of encounters between British and Aboriginal people, is the most popular and accredited image within the national imaginaire. Such a simplistic and homogeneous account of the first landing reduces the complexities that had already been leveled out, and in some cases erased, by historical distance.

Research and historical records on the first ‘White’ settlement’s expedition to Australia¹⁶ confirm the presence of Black convicts, African slaves from the States, who arrived in Australia with the First Fleet. Cassandra Pybus explains that “[Black] slaves flocked to the British lines when they were promised their freedom for supporting the king,” and those imprisoned for minor crimes were successively sent to Australia as convicts.¹⁷ Historical characters (who came with the First or successive Fleets) like the African American convict John Caesar,¹⁸ whaling seaman Thomas Johnson,¹⁹ and musician John Randall from Connecticut, who was reported to play for the British regiment,²⁰ have fallen into the historical oblivion that has surrounded the most marginalized groups in the history of Europe’s imperialistic expansion. The paucity of recorded evidence about this part of history and the desire to fabricate custom-made foundation stories that function to legitimize White dominance, paved the way to the ‘official history’ of Australia.

Contacts between Aboriginal people and African Americans occurred at intermittent historical points from the time the First Flee...