Close to the Edge

by Sujatha Fernandes

  “Um, we’re looking for the rap workshops by Death Defying Theatre?” I mumbled to nobody in particular.

  There was silence. I studied my fingernail. Khaled didn’t look up from his papers. After what seemed like a very long time, the boys turned their attention back to their noisy conversations. One pair started to wrestle in the corner.

  I looked over at Waiata, and we exchanged desperate glances that said, “ What are we doing here?” I turned and walked quickly out of the room, followed closely by Waiata. Outside, in the warm spring air of early September, we shook our heads and sighed. We were too old for this—I was twenty-one and Waiata was twenty-four. Khaled trudged out soon after, his shoulders hunched over and his hands dug deep into his pockets. “Hey, listen,” he said, encouragingly, “this here is more of an after-school activity for some kids of the community. But next week we’re starting to work with young people out at Casula Powerhouse, if you wanna come out there instead.”

  To get to Casula we caught the South Line train from Central Station, passing the Granville, Fairfield, Liverpool, and Cambelltown stations. At the stops we saw school kids in their uniforms with bulky backpacks, some of them standing in circles and rhyming or b-boying. As the train whooshed in and out of pitch-dark tunnels, extended landscapes of graffiti pieces were visible along the concrete walls facing the tracks. Bombers played a game of cat-and-mouse with the transit police, tagging ten places for every piece that the “transits” destroyed. There was graffiti on the steel platform supports, across the sides of houses—one piece of graffiti even graced the base of a lone gum tree. At one section of the tracks was a state-commissioned “Australiana” mural. Angry scrawls of silver tags contemptuously covered the beatific scenes of the Harbour Bridge, beaches, koalas, and kangaroos.

  Just a few dozen feet from the Georges River in the southwestern suburb of Liverpool—once a key manufacturing hub—the imposing structure of the Casula Powerhouse loomed large against the gray-blue sky. A former power plant, the Casula Powerhouse was a newly refurbished public arts center, complete with galleries and large open performance spaces. The long concrete cylindrical cooling towers framing the building were a quaint reminder of the industrial past. The whole construction—testament to the new priorities of investor-driven arts councils—stood in stark contrast to the decay of the deindustrialized landscape and the vast surrounding public housing estates created during the 1960s urban renewal schemes that relocated low-income families from the innercity slums to places like Liverpool.

  On the lawns of the Casula Powerhouse, twenty-three-year-old Sharline Bezzina, aka Spice, a graffiti artist and an arts worker of Maltese descent, had laid heavy-duty canvas sheets out on the grass. Kids with spray cans painted pieces in stylized block designs. Even on the inoffensive precut canvas, the letters careened off the page and assaulted the observer with hard-edged three-dimensional outlines and fillins of red, blue, and yellow fading to white. They sat uneasily on the manicured lawns of a former industrial power plant.

  Waiata and I wandered past several open gallery spaces. We paused when we came to the central amphitheater that had been converted from a boiler room. We were in awe of the airy spaciousness, the squeaky laminate floors, and the metal beams high overhead. Following the tones of a sampled drum loop, we cautiously approached what looked like an enormous dressing room. In preparation for the first workshop, Khaled had set up an Ensoniq EPS sampling keyboard, a four-track cassette tape recorder, a microphone, and turntables along several trestle tables joined lengthwise. Khaled was one of the Australian pioneers of the idea of hip hop workshops as part of a community arts model to bring together people of different backgrounds in support of social change. His own group, COD (Course of Destruction), united Lebanese and Turkish rappers from Auburn at a time when there was significant tension between these ethnic groups. Their shows were attended by young people from both communities, creating new lines of solidarity and connection. After remixing a show soundtrack for Death Defying Theatre in the late 1980s, Khaled proposed the idea of the theater’s doing a big media event focusing on hip hop, using the idea of opera to emphasize the grand scale of the event. The idea was funded, and Khaled—along with Morgan Lewis, event director, and several other arts workers—worked to make their vision a reality.

  Khaled was going through vinyl records in some crates to the side. He selected a record and put it on the turntable, manipulating it with one hand. Girls and boys of different ages and ethnicities milled around the room. Some watched Khaled with a timid curiosity and others hung back, whispering to each other.

  Just then, two young men swaggered to the front of the room, where a few microphones were set up on tall stands. One of them, a Lebanese guy, wearing baggy jeans and a bandanna across his head, grabbed a mic and starting rapping into it, even though it was not connected. “One-two, one-two,” he repeated pointlessly, mimicking a sound check. “Yo, my niggaz in da house, I’m tha mutha-fuckin’ gangsta,” he rapped in an American accent. The other guy pulled his baseball cap to one side and took the other mic. “I don’t like fake hoes, so all you bitches in the house take note.” “Oh, yeah,” responded the Lebanese guy, two extended fingers gesturing from a bent arm close to his body. They turned to each other and bumped shoulders in a congratulatory hug.

  Khaled had still not looked up from his drum machine, and for a few minutes, while the wannabe gangstas bounced around on the makeshift stage, he appeared to be concentrating intensely on his task. Then he turned off the drum machine and fixed his eyes on the Lebanese kid.

  “Do you have a sister?” asked Khaled.

  “Um, yes.”

  “Do you have a mother?”

  “Yes,” the Lebanese kid answered slowly, not sure where this was going.

  “Are they bitches?”

  “Nah,” the Lebanese kid scowled, “‘course not.”

  “Every woman is someone’s sister or mother or daughter. If we’re doing hip hop here in Australia, it can’t be about imitating what you hear on the radio or see in the music videos. It has to be about your experiences and the issues facing your communities.”

  “Yeah, alright,” nodded the Lebanese kid, chastened. “I feel you, nigga.”

  Munkimuk, an Aboriginal hip hop producer and founder of the crew South West Syndicate (SWS), was walking along the Hume Highway with a few of his boys when a beat-up Honda pulled up alongside them, and Khaled stuck his head out of the window.

  “Brothers, I got something for you, man.”

  “Yeah, whaddya want, bro?”

  “There’s this hip hop gig. It’s got, like, all of Sydney and Melbourne hip hop-type people. Are you guys in or what?”

  “Yeah, we’ll throw something together, no worries.”

  SWS was a self-described “criminal associate” rap group whose turf stretched from the whole Bankstown area down to Canterbury, all the way back to Liverpool, with connections in Redfern. There were thirty-odd members of SWS—Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, Lebanese, and white. The key Aboriginal members of the group—including Brothablack, Munkimuk, Dax, and Naz—had moved to the Bankstown-Punchbowl area with their families through the Housing for Aborigines relocation scheme in the 1970s. Relocated families often lacked the networks of support that they had in the inner city, as well as community centers, public transportation, and other amenities. Brothablack, Munkimuk, Dax, and Naz were from some of the first Aboriginal families to move to the area, and they all lived along the same bus line. They found in hip hop a way of building community in the new environment of Sydney’s west.

  Among the Lebanese members of SWS was Mohammed, a young man who had been shot in the neck and was in a wheelchair. “We’re all coming up in the same social, economic situation out west—Lebanese, Aboriginal, whites,” said Munkimuk, “that’s why we came together through hip hop culture.”

  Munkimuk, dubbed the godfather of Aboriginal hip hop, was twenty-seven, a lanky, light-skinned Koori. He began producing in the 1980s with a fou
r-track tape recorder, a guitar, a keyboard, and a mic. The record button on the four-track was broken, so he had to sit with one finger pressed down on the button in order to record. “I had to figure out, how do you put this stuff together? No one told me,” he said. “It was all trial and error, pulling apart tracks and figuring out, hold on—there’s, like, a bass line, and a guitar part, keyboard part, singing. How does it all work? I taught myself guitar, keyboards, and then started figuring out how to put it together. When I started out, I didn’t sample at all; it was all my original compositions. I would listen to a lot of old funk records, listen to the Bootsy Collins bass lines, and then work out how to play like that. Then, in 1994, I got loans from Mohammed and from my brother, who was working full time at the scrap metal yard, to buy a sequencer and a Roland DJ70 sampler. It had a scratch pad, so that I could do the cuts on the scratch pad.”

  For Munkimuk it all started in 1984 with Beat Street. “Jiggin’ school, getting some money, and going and watchin’ Beat Street every day, ‘cause I wanted to see how they did those windmills and all those mad moves,” he said. “First time you saw it, it was like, ‘Whoa, wait a second, I want to do that, man. That looks pretty cool.’ So next day I’m back at the cinema again. Next day I’m back there again. It’s like a religion, going there every day to watch Beat Street.” He and some friends started going to innercity Redfern, a densely populated Aboriginal enclave where some of the local kids were b-boying. Later they also joined a local graffiti crew from Redfern called Black Connection. From b-boying and graffiti, Munkimuk began rapping, and he created SWS in 1992. “I wasn’t that interested in school,” he said. “For English class I was in the English-as-a-Second-Language group, when English was my first language. The only class that I ever did good in was art, so I hardly ever bothered to turn up to school. The people in our crew were not really school goers. So we started hanging out, and the hip hop evolved from that. It broke the boredom.”

  Shannon Williams, aka Brothablack, was fourteen when he joined SWS a few years later. Brothablack, a tall Murri, was listening to hip hop—Big Mike from the Geto Boys, Run-DMC, Public Enemy, NWA—rapping over the top of it and then coming up with his own rhymes. One day he and his older brother went over to Munkimuk’s place, and Munkimuk gave Shannon four lines to rap in a song called “The Syndicate.” He kept going back and soon became part of the crew. At that time Munkimuk’s small apartment, on Harcourt Street in East Hills, was a hub for hip hop.

  “Back in those days there wasn’t too many outlets for us to turn to for hip hop or for self-expression,” recalled Brothablack. “We had to make our own little communities.” Munkimuk was the conductor of the whole operation. He would write rhymes and direct the ensemble, thinking about which kind of raps would bring out the strengths of each member. The group was more than a rap crew; it was an extended family—the members knew each others’ parents, brothers, and sisters, and their mothers even used to catch the bus together.

  For young people out in western Sydney, hip hop was a means of survival. “We’re not doin’ it to piss our parents off. We’re not tryin’ to fit into a scene,” Brothablack told a reporter from Radio National. “Hip hop is our life and it’s what we do. We’re rapping for our lives.”

  “If it wasn’t for hip hop, most of the members of our crew’d be in jail,” added Munkimuk.4

  Munkimuk and Brothablack weren’t the only ones who credited hip hop with keeping them away from crime and drugs. At seventeen the Aboriginal rapper Chris Amtuani was in the Minda Juvenile Justice Center and charged with armed robbery. He says he had been holding up stores since he was fifteen, and one day his shit was outta luck. Khaled and another arts worker, Vahid Vahed, made trips out to the Minda JJ to produce a song by Amtuani. Amtuani’s song portrayed the bleak world of the lockup where, he said, he was “writing rhymes to stay alive.”

  Deejaying, b-boying, and graffiti writing drew on a language of sound, bodily movement, and images that could move relatively easily across regional and racial boundaries. Rapping was not so universal. Munkimuk recounted the time he met with the rap legend Ice-T on his Sydney tour. Munkimuk escorted Ice-T to a few local events and at one there was an Australian rapper who was rapping in an American accent. Ice-T wanted to take on the guy because he thought that he was making fun of them. Munkimuk had to explain to Ice-T that it wasn’t a parody. American rap was the only variety available at the time; there were no other models.

  Why was it that, as we tried to rap, the words came out in American accents? Because rapping in an Australian accent sounded ridiculous. For example, in the phrase, “You don’t stop,” Americans draw the vowel out to sound like staaap, in contrast to the short, clipped stop of an Aussie accent. We all admired the smooth lyrical style of Baba Israel, a white emcee at the Death Defying Theatre workshops who had grown up in Brooklyn with an Australian mother and an American father. While most of us had old-school flow, rapping in basic rhymes that fell on the beat, Baba was already taking it to another level, with complex and layered raps.

  But others had a different explanation. “If all we ever listen to is American rap, how are we supposed to rap in our own accents?” asked Sahar Ekermawi, aka Dr. Nogood, of the all-female Lebanese trio Notorious Sistaz and Dr. Nogood. Dr. Nogood was a fresh-faced young woman with a deep voice; her father was from Jerusalem and her mother was Palestinian, born in Lebanon.

  “It just doesn’t sound right, rapping in an Aussie accent,” countered Natalie Serman, one of the Notorious Sistaz, alluding to white Australian underground rap groups from Sydney’s west like Def Wish Cast. The latter had pioneered a style of rhyming in the truncated and guttural bursts of a broad working-class Aussie accent. “That doesn’t fit the way that most of us here speak, either.”

  “Well, how do you guys talk then?” asked Khaled.

  “I guess that most of us didn’t speak English till we came to Australia,” replied Natalie. “And we speak mostly Arabic at home. At school they say we have a ‘wog’ accent and we have to learn to speak right. But this is how we speak.”5

  “Then why don’t you introduce some Arabic into your rapping?” suggested Khaled. “If language is about who you are, then English is only half of you, right?

  The next week the Notorious Sistaz and Dr. Nogood came to the workshop, proud of the new rhyme they’d come up with. “You don’t have to stand on the corner and slang / ‘cause you got your own thang We’re gonna zig-zag you in a way you never knew Smile ma-shi [walking] and feel the junoon [madness],” rapped Nirvana, one of the Notorious Sistaz, to applause and whistles from everyone in the workshop.

  Khaled was a storyteller. He was born in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, but his family was forced to flee in 1978 during the civil war, and they came to live in western Sydney. Khaled tried to fit in, but he couldn’t relate to the staples of Aussie culture—cricket, pubs, and rock music. From the early days, when he listened to hip hop on the national youth radio station 2JJ’s black music night, Khaled was transfixed by the technologies of sampling and break beats. The reception of 2JJ— which broadcast through the emergency low-power transmitter from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) tower at Gore Hill—was erratic in the northern and eastern suburbs but somewhat better in the western ones, especially at night. Tuning in to the AM dial at 1540 kHz, Khaled recorded the songs on cassette. These tapes would be copied and recopied, passed from hand to hand, the dull and static-ridden sounds a shadow of their former vitality but nevertheless treated as artifacts from a faraway civilization.

  Along with a number of other kids in his neighborhood, Khaled started out by rhyming. But they had no one to make beats for them. So he turned his parents’ garage into a music studio, making beats with basic analog methods like direct drive turntables or cutting tape. Khaled’s first piece of equipment was a four-track tape recorder that allowed him to record four tracks on a quarter-inch cassette by combining sides A and B and splitting the left and right channels. He found the
break beat that he wanted to use, recorded it on track one, and looped it by manually inserting it over and over. Then he rewound the tape and played track one while recording another sample on track two. He worked with the precision of a surgeon, manually quantizing tracks one and two in order to maintain a coherence in the overall tempo and rhythm. He would repeat the procedure for track three. Once the three tracks were completed, they were combined on track four. For a three-bar sample of six seconds, he needed to loop it thirty times on each track to have a three-minute beat. A one-bar sample of two seconds would need to be looped ninety times. It took almost a week to lay down a three-minute beat.

  Khaled Sabsabi

  Like DJs and producers everywhere, Khaled was obsessed with “digging in the crates”—searching for vinyl records—and always on the lookout for the hottest break beats in the most unexpected places. He started out using his dad’s record collection of disco and Arabic music. Then Khaled borrowed records from his circle of Arab friends in western Sydney and also began to frequent a store called Disco City, which specialized in funk and early hip hop. At this time the shift was taking place from analog to digital, so people were throwing out entire collections of records. “There were secondhand record shops, like Ashwood’s on Pitt Street and mission-run stores like the Salvation Army, where I spent many hours and days going through thousands of records,” said Khaled. “I limited myself to not spending more than two dollars per record.” Over the years he accumulated a collection of more than seven thousand records.

  As a producer, Khaled recognized the power of sound to narrate a life shaped by war, displacement, and exile. Like many other Lebanese youth, he had grown up in the shadow of the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon that began in 1975 with hostilities between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Lebanese political parties, and Lebanese Muslim and Christian militias backed by Syria and Israel. As tensions between Israel and the resistance mounted, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, causing massive casualties and an exodus that saw many Lebanese flee to Australia. Khaled began to incorporate the derbukka drums and the melodic buzuq into beats, meshing the sonic landscapes of his childhood with the hardcore pulse of the urban periphery.