Close to the Edge

by Sujatha Fernandes

  At the time of Hip Hopera, Khaled was living with his parents in their home in Auburn, on the West Side. His hundreds of crates were scattered throughout the garage and bedroom, stacked in no apparent order but cataloged meticulously in his head. He could find the desired break beat or record in a matter of minutes. It was there that I first witnessed the magic of making a track, as Khaled put down beats for a song that Waiata had written, “Fuck the Brady Bunch.” Khaled imported a simple, sparse drum sample into the thick plastic gray EPS and looped it, then he added a funky bass line. Rummaging through one crate he came up with a well-worn album, Super Bad by Terminator X of Public Enemy. From one of the tracks he extracted Sister Souljah’s battle cry, “We are at war,” adding it at the beginning of the beat and then again at the end. More samples were diced up, rearranged, looped, and then added to the beat, along with screaming horns and lightning shots of cymbal. The result was an explosive sonic amalgam that extended Chuck D’s proverbial black planet to a blackfulla pondering her life on an Adelaide street corner.

  As we continued with the workshops, it became apparent to me that hip hop was thriving on the West Side because these young people had something to say and hip hop culture was the vehicle through which they had chosen to say it. I had also wanted to rap because I felt that I had so much to say, and I too wanted to be heard. I was heavily involved in campaigning around issues from East Timor’s right to independence and a woman’s right to choose to Aboriginal deaths in police custody. Just as rap music had inspired me to political awareness, so I wanted to use it to talk about social issues. The song that I wrote for Hip Hopera was a political tract criticizing the Australian government’s program of nuclear testing in the Pacific. It was more like a master’s thesis than a rap song. I was making one mistake. Just like when I was an activist, I was talking at my audience rather than talking to them. My rap icons, like KRS-One and Public Enemy, may have had a political agenda, but above all they were artful lyricists who knew how to move a crowd. Young hip hop audiences didn’t wanted to be preached to; they wanted to hear someone give voice to their experiences, and they wanted it to be funky.

  But how could I give voice to the experiences of these young people? I didn’t have a personal connection to the issues I was writing about in the same way that the others did. For all my outrage at black deaths in police custody, I had never lost a friend or a relative to the criminal justice system or been brought up in an environment that made jail one of the only options. Part of me was afraid that all my third-person political rhetoric was just a cover for really having nothing to say.

  After three months of workshops, beat making, and practicing our rhymes, in late November we were finally ready to take to the stage in our rehearsals for the upcoming Hip Hopera concert. It was chaotic as groups tried to memorize their lyrics, schedule sessions with Khaled to finish their beats, and then practice with their beats.

  There was an uncomfortable silence in the auditorium of the Casula Powerhouse when two young belly dancers came on stage. Heavily made up, with thick mascara and glitter on their eyelids, the young women wore revealing gold-sequined halter tops with tassels and matching bikini briefs. They came out demurely, shielded behind face veils, gyrating their hips to a prerecorded beledi rhythm. Then the beat kicked in, and they cast off the veils as the belly dance morphed into a sexually suggestive funk dance. A few young men from the audience whooped in appreciation.

  Enter Mohammed W.O.G., a Lebanese-Australian rapper from Auburn. “I’m worshipped so give me respect when I’m on stage,” rapped Mohammed, who wore a chain with a cross studded with fake diamonds, and shiny Adidas trackies. “I never neglect my rhymes since a very young age.” The belly dancers sandwiched themselves on either side of him, grinding their hips together with his. Then they turned their backs to the audience, hands on their knees while shaking their booty in the air. The rap continued: “Every time I turn around I see another brother dead / Either he gets stabbed or shot up in the head.” As he clutched at his crotch, Mohammed repeated the chorus of the song over and over: “Another brother dead, another brother dead.” As the spectacle unfolded on stage, the implications were unsettling. Despite the hope many of us had placed in rap as a political voice for disenfranchised youth, this was the other reality of rap as a commodity that objectified women and glorified conspicuous consumption and gratuitous violence. The American hip hop writer Yvonne Bynoe said that the globalization of hip hop divorced the culture from black American history. The global culture industries promoted stereotypes about black criminality and violence, turned blackness into a fad to be consumed, and exported cultural identities rather than allowing youth to create their own.6 Looking back on the experience, there seemed to be some truth to what Bynoe was saying. For every Brothablack or Khaled, how many Mohammed W.O.G.s were out there, consuming and imitating unrealistic images of African Americans that widened the cultural divide even further? It was impossible to know, but one could only guess.

  The performance at Casula in front of an audience of five hundred people began with a freestyle with all the performers on the stage. Cyphers opened up on the floor. The backdrop was an immense canvas of shadow-style graffiti. Morganics, Elf Transporter, and Baba—members of the hip hop crew MetaBass ‘n’ Breath—started up a human beatbox.

  Young men jostled, gestured, and shoved each other on the small stage in a show of bravado. After a succession of male rappers took the mic, Nirvana, Dr. Nogood, and the Fijian-Tongan rapper Danielle Tuwai made their way to the front and started up a chant: “All the ladies in the house say, ‘Hip Hop rocks.’ “ Then Waiata took the mic and sang in a bluesy, soulful voice, “Aborigines must be free, to control their destiny,” and the beatbox slowed to a deep pulse. “Maybe if I was white, living would be alright, but how can I live in a white world, when my spirit is black.” The room went silent. “This goes out to all the Aboriginal people in the audience,” she said, raising her right arm. “This was and will always remain Aboriginal land.”

  Suddenly, there was commotion in the back of the room. The audience parted as a red car appeared and then inched its way to the front. Accompanied by a funk bass line with some horns, the members of SWS leaped from the car and settled across the stage. “Mr. Speaker, there seems to be an intervention,” rapped Munkimuk. “Fire’n a couple of shots to get attention / We’re doin’ a home invasion on parliament house We’re throwing them overpaid politicians out.” In between, they sampled the P-funk mantra: “If you ain’t gonna get it on, then take your dead ass home.” On stage was Brothablack’s four-year-old baby cousin, who joined them in a squeaky voice. Brothablack came forward. “Got brothas like me behind bars and in the gutter Portraying us as stupid black fuckers The white man’s plan is getting outta hand We’re being hung up in your cells across the land.”

  Next up was Ebony Williams, a fifteen-year-old Aboriginal girl of Wiradjuri descent from innercity Newtown. Ebony and Danielle Tuwai appeared together as Two Indij. “This one’s dedicated to my mother. I love you,” said Ebony. The beat kicked in, and she rapped, “As I look at what I’ve become I’ve listened to my father Tryin’ to run my life from one place to another I listen and I think He doesn’t really know / For god’s sake, he’s never seen me before.” Danielle sang on the R&B-inflected chorus, “You never seem to understand me, you never know how much you mean to me.” She finished up by saying, “I’d like to dedicate this to the woman who’s been there my whole life since day one. She’s been my mother and my father.” Danielle had never met her Maori father, just as Ebony had never met her African American father. The song was a letter to the absent fathers of their generation and a tribute to the mothers who raised them alone.

  The stage was lit up briefly by a strobe light, and then two b-boys entered. In one corner there were turntables set up, and DJ ASK was spinning “Jam on It,” by Newcleus. In a twenty-second segment, the b-boys began with measured footwork around the perimeter of the circle, then spun on the floor, and f
inally dropped into a freeze, legs in splits and facing each other.

  The next set was Notorious Sistaz and Dr. Nogood in camouflage fatigues. Video footage of soldiers flashed on the screen behind them as they performed a military routine reminiscent of Public Enemy’s S1W. “This is for the Gs, and this is for the hustlers,” sang Natalie. “Smoke that fat sack, while we’re singin’ this to ya.” An image of a moving target filled the screen, followed by a red-tipped missile flying through the air.

  A frenzied, hardcore beat kicked in, and Dr. Nogood began to rap in her deep voice: “Notorious Sistaz and Dr. Nogood / Bringing on the beat with a real attitude Notorious Sistaz everyday, I say Getting their men from around the way.” Dr. Nogood pointed the mic down toward her mouth. She sported a baseball cap on backward that read Dr. Nogood.

  The audience at the rehearsal broke out in cheers and whistles. “Sistas with flava They’ll cut you like a razor,” Dr. Nogood continued, crouching at the front of the stage while images flashed on the screen above of soldiers hiding behind a building as explosions from mortars and shells pounded the earth in front of them. “So don’t think of pulling any shit with them ‘Cause they’re the sisters from above the rim.”

  As they rapped, the Notorious Sistaz and Dr. Nogood began a call-and-response sequence with the hyped-up audience. “Just kickin’ the flow so so, yippedy yo,” rapped Dr. Nogood, and the audience chanted back, “Go sistas, go sistas, No good, No good.” Nirvana strode across the stage in her combat boots, and with heads nodding all around she rapped, “In the ‘hood looking yella as we kick it to the fellas / Punk, you better recognize!”

  Waiata and I were waiting in the wings, and we locked hands briefly before jumping on the stage. “We are at war,” declared Sista Souljah on the sample. “I turn the channels over in my head,” began Waiata, “and there I meet the nightmare.” The beat kicked in. “My mum’s bleeding, she’s nearly half dying / Alice cooks a stew and the dishes need drying I woke up with bruises, couldn’t walk to school Marcia gets a boyfriend and my classmates think it’s cool.” “The Brady Bunch, the Brady Bunch,” we chanted on the chorus, “I wanna see a black face. The Brady Bunch, this the way we say fuck the Brady Bunch.” The room resounded as people chanted on the last line with us. For a multiracial generation that was force-fed the saccharine images of white suburban American paradise, it was a moment of catharsis.

  Waiata and the author at Hip Hopera, November 1995

  Many aspiring rappers launched their careers at the Casula show; others said what they had to say and then moved on to other things. Looking back on the basic old-school rhymes, the hardcore beats, and the simple raw truth in the lyrics, it might be easy to dismiss the scene as one of youthful idealism. But it was also a unique place, where multiple histories and landscapes converged through the black American form of hip hop, where the pain and horror of forced Palestinian exile mirrored Aboriginal displacement and genocide. It was a moment before the Australian music industry started promoting mostly white male rappers, when women felt empowered to take to the mic. And it was a statement by an excluded generation that did not feel represented by politicians or by the media it consumed. But could this translate into a political movement?

  Waiata performing at Hip Hopera, November 1995

  The show ended with another freestyle session, everyone up on stage, including Khaled. The eleven-year-old Lebanese rapper Mega D from The Three Little Shits rhymed, “Yo, I decapitate the mic with my skills ya know I can’t wait till the next one tries to step to me Can he really compete with the lyrical dictionary At first glance, ya may say that I’m a criminal ‘Cause of my baggy pants and my shirt that’s original.” He closed out his rhyme with “Now I gotta go, it’s past my bedtime.”

  In the period after Hip Hopera, I moved to Redfern, the innercity neighborhood that was home to a large majority of Sydney’s Aboriginal population. Bordered by a commuter railway station to the west and stretching to the busy thoroughfare of Elizabeth Street to the east, Redfern was a collection of narrow streets with Victorian two-story terrace houses. It was only a few miles from the central business district, and developers had begun to take an interest in available properties.

  Redfern had historically been the site of a local black power movement, as young Kooris moving to the city en masse during the sixties in search of work began to hear about the Black Panthers, the Indians’ occupation of Alcatraz, and decolonization movements in Africa. Rural migrants came from the north coast and western part of the state, and included Wiradjuri groups from central New South Wales.

  Regent Street—with its famous pub the Empress Hotel—was a hive of activity. Inspired by the community service work of the Black Panthers and faced with growing police abuse and harassment in the neighborhood, a group of Koori activists set up a legal services center on Regent Street in 1970, and a year later they started a free medical clinic. In the early seventies a group of Aboriginal writers and actors set up the Black Theatre in a warehouse on Regent Street, and their first activity involved street theater during a land rights demonstration. In the eighties Koori activists started Radio Redfern in a small house on Cope Street, broadcasting under the license of another station. In 1993 Radio Redfern was converted into Koori Radio.

  During the mid-to late 1990s Redfern was undergoing a cultural renaissance of sorts. Koori artists held exhibitions in the empty warehouses along Redfern Street. In 1995 the American rapper Ice Cube visited Redfern to launch Koori Radio, and from then on it saw a constant stream of Aboriginal artists, activists, and musicians.

  Spanning the length of the wall facing the Redfern train station was a mural by local Kooris that narrated the story of their journey to the present. “40,000 years is a long, long time…40,000 years still on my mind,” the mural began, referring to the known period that Aboriginal people had occupied the country. There was a symbol of a ship with several tall masts, representing the First Fleet—the ships that came from Britain in 1788 to set up the colony. Here there was a thick black line down the center of the mural, marking a moment of rupture in the indigenous experience. Juxtaposed with a bush scene of gum trees and a naked Aboriginal boy standing before a Christian mission was a boomerang flying over a series of urban rooftops. There was the profile of an Aboriginal woman dressed as a domestic, with a look of mourning, black and yellow rays radiating out from her. On the opposite wall was a mural that read, “Say Know to Drugs: For The Next Generation.” It contained a black figure behind bars, with handcuffs painted in the surrounding border and the caption “Law and Order.” Next to it, an image of a curled snake creating a yin-yang type of symbol separated a figure sitting alone in a corner from a circle of hands showing “unity.”

  Redfern mural

  Redfern murald

  Adjoining the mural was Eveleigh Street—a section of row houses referred to as “the Block.” It was handed over to a self-organized collective of Aboriginal people known as the Aboriginal Housing Corporation in 1973, after a battle with local residents and landlords. It was one of the first experiments in Aboriginal-managed housing, breaking down fences to create shared living spaces.7 Kooris migrating to the city saw the Block as a spiritual Mecca, an opportunity for affordable housing, and a way to retain kinship with other Kooris in the alien big city.

  At the entrance to the Block, an Aboriginal flag flew from a flagpole, signaling that you were entering Aboriginal territory. There was an enormous mural of the Aboriginal flag painted on the side of a building: half black to represent Aboriginal people, half red for the crimson-brown soil of the land, and a yellow sun, the giver of life, in the center. The narrow houses with their wrought-iron balconies were set amid eucalyptus and tufts of overgrown grass, the skyscrapers of Sydney’s downtown area visible in the background. There would be kids jumping rope in the street, teenagers sitting on stoops with boom boxes, older people outside relaxing in the shade, and, on occasion, people gathered around fires on the pavement at night. While in town to give concerts,
visiting US rap artists such as Chuck D, The Fugees, and Michael Franti all have spent time at the Block.

  At the same time police cars were permanently stationed at the entrance to Eveleigh Street and would make random incursions into the Block. White drug users from Newtown could be found shooting up in the alleyways or in search of the cheap drugs sold by Aboriginal children. When I once went to the local police station to report a bag of mine had been stolen, I walked out in disgust at the racist questioning of the police: “Did you see who it was? Was it a fuckin’ Abo?”

  Awakened by shouts in the early hours of the morning, I would look out from my window onto the back alley at brutal acts of violence, sometimes a taxi driver or hapless drunk being robbed for cash, sometimes only the black leather jacket of an officer visible as he pummeled his fists into a black kid. Every two weeks I would visit the Redfern social security office to collect my unemployment benefits, or “the dole,” since I was trying to finish my degree part time. A room full of jobless brown and black people stared blankly at a booming television set as they waited to be called to a social worker to describe their employment-seeking efforts and then pick up a check for $120.

  It was at this time that the specter of white supremacy raised its head yet again in the form of a red-headed, blue-eyed owner of a fish-and-chips shop who hailed from the northern Queensland town of Ipswich. Pauline Hanson ran for a seat in Australia’s House of Representatives in March 1996. After publicly criticizing welfare benefits for Aboriginal people, she was elected to the safest Labor seat in the state. In her first speech to the House of Representatives on September 10, 1996, Hanson ranted that Aboriginal people enjoyed many privileges that ordinary white Australians did not have, and she claimed that Australia was in danger of being swamped by Asian immigrants.