“Listening to your album,” a cool but tired voice breaks, “it just reminded me so much of those old days”. A guitar strums and feedback crackles. “And it brings back that time when we did pump our fists in the air. Cause you had to be,” the voice stammers, “you had to be in their face.” A blunt strum and the guitar stops. The voice repeats; determined. “You had to be in their face.” What follows is the only seconds of silence where you feel safe for the entire duration of A.B. Original’s Reclaim Australia.
Crunchy strings twang over sinister horns straight out the Jaws soundtrack as an organ slides and a fiercer, younger, angrier voice answers the call, “The brothers are back!” Faint hearts stutter and the Right wing clutches their pearls as two pissed off black men ball their fists in the air. More than a hip-hop supergroup, this Indigenous rap pack embodies generations of their black brothers and sisters as they call on Australia, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, to plant its feet in the red dust and pump its fists towards the black sky as the sun kisses its back.
Hip-hop has always been a soundtrack for fighting oppression. Born in the slums of a torn apart New York City, it is a culture which granted a voice to the voiceless. African-American and Hispanic teenagers made sense of a parentless childhood courtesy of the Post-Vietnam drug epidemic. They did so on the streets with spray-cans, drum-breaks, microphones and cardboard mats.
Since then, hip-hop has been adopted by the world’s lost youth as a tool to fight aimlessness and to find autonomy. It allowed Yorta-Yorta boy Adam Briggs to travel from the streets of Shepparton to arenas in Europe to becoming Briggs, the winner of the 2015 National Indigenous Music Awards Album of the Year award and founder of the first Indigenous Australian hip-hop label, Bad Apples. It allowed Ngarrindjeri boy Daniel Rankine to travel from the Coorong River to become Trials, one quarter of Australian hip-hop royalty The Funkoars and an ARIA award winning producer for Drapht, Illy, Hilltop Hoods, Seth Sentry and more. Now hip-hop allows them both the methods and the means to say to other Indigenous kids across the country: you can do this too.
This invitation is first extended in the aforementioned spoken word ‘Foreword’ featuring Indigenous Australian recording legend Archie Roach, passing the baton to A.B Original. After that, the tone for Reclaim Australia is immediately set with, ‘2 Black 2 Strong’. “It’s the blackout! Brothers in the area! Smart black man with a plan; nothing scarier!” Trials hollers over rattle snake percussion and cuts by Jaytee Hazard in a song of defiant identity.
These boys aren’t new kids on the block. They rap like teenagers with the experience and tenacity of men who have lost the glint in the eyes but not their spark. Their words conjure the past like a medicine man’s chant. When Trials verse breaks midway to sample Malcolm X giving birth to the phrase, “Too black, too strong”, it draws parallels between America’s sordid past with slavery and racial genocide with our own country and illuminates the sickening longevity of this message. 53 years since ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ in Detroit, the contention still rings true, one that informs the start of the record with brute force.
This intertextual breadth and self-awareness lends the record an additional pang of bitter sweetness. The same artists who inspired a generation of hip-hop and post-civil rights warriors are now the meta-reference points for a new generation: sadly meaning that not much has changed. But Trials and Briggs use this to elevate and highlight their message, rather than reduce them to token hip-hop references.
In ‘Call Em Out‘ the boys post a unified call to action of naming and shaming of historical proportions, featuring horrifying audio of proposed plans to “solve the problem” of the Indigenous population. The song features Detroit underground juggernaut Guilty Simpson whose African-American perspective mirrors the soul and pain of Briggs and Trials over lazy keys and a screeching guitar and mourning brass stabs. When his thick Mid-Westen drawl utters, “speaking for victims, many don’t have a voice, shuffled in the system”, you know he uses his kinfolk as an example for more than one nation, a sentiment echoed on ‘The Feast’ when Compton’s very own King T cameos, a soldier of the West Coast rap sound which permeates these 12 songs and binds them with a sonic aesthetic and the tonal palpability of the record’s purpose.
By paying homage to their American predecessors and peers, A.B. Original don’t parody, rather they posit insidious irony. On ‘Strong Arm’, Trials and Briggs trade lines inspired by 50 Cent’s ‘Wanksta’ (“I said damn homey/ you walking on my fucking land homey”) to deliver a courageous war-cry and nightmarish chant of vigour and brute force. These references satirically underline the principle of appropriation.
Referencing Ice Cube’s classic ‘Today Was a Good Day’ in ‘Firing Squad‘, Briggs mimics his idol; “Scoring points on the court they was trouble/ last week fucked around and got a triple double”. As well as framing it as dark satire, by flipping the punchline in the context of unjustified court dates Briggs demonstrates respecting the pillars of the history and culture he draws from to inspire and motivate him, unlike our government on the land they call home.
The fortitude of such messages makes it too easy to mistake the pained cries of frustration as hatred. On ‘Sorry’, Caiti Baker bellows, “I might just kill somebody”, continuing the subversive twist of “I know you’re sorry, and I’m sorry but I gotta”, ironically and sarcastically apologising to the country’s past and present politicians: “Dropped so many S’es off my chest they call it Abotage!” The ‘sorry I’m not sorry’ middle finger to the apathetic and indifferent mimics the same message Indigenous Australians heard for too long, and is simultaneously reminiscent of political-rap pioneers Public Enemy, referenced by Briggs with, “I got a letter from the government/ took it where my oven is!” This is but one of many ways the group flips the table. On ‘Firing Squad‘ the marching music of Hau’s layered prayer atop syncopated synths and stuttering hi-hats paints a picture of a squad staring down the soon to be fallen in a subversive tale conjuring images of slaughtered Indigenous Australians.
That’s just one of many guests spots who illuminate that the outrage and torment A.B. Original embody isn’t one perspective, but an old-new world of silenced perspectives. On ‘ICU‘ Thelma Plum’s voice cracks amidst haunting trickling keys, “You’re too busy watching me/ When you need to watch yourself”, addressing the intensive big brother scrutinising the one side but ignoring the other while Briggs roars, “I never hesitate to burn a bridge/ sometimes I just remind them what a furnace is”, delivering a call to live despite the watching eye that suffocates a nation of Indigenous Australians and Torres Strait Islanders.
In ‘Dead in a Minute‘, vocalist Caiti Baker once again appears and trills, “I will always begin knowing I will never finish/ I got too much to do/ I could be dead in a minute” and you can see the clock ticking backwards, mocking the mirage of freedom. It’s one of many sentiments that Indigenous Australians have whispered to themselves or felt traverse across their minds and A.B. Original immortalise and verify its poignancy, much like the lead single ‘January 26‘ featuring Dan Sultan. It’s ironic that, with its digestible G-Funk bass synths and sound effects, it’s the most palatable song on the record, its warmth and party vibe painting a dark parody of a day that will always represent invasion and massacre for this nation’s first people.
Pity, however, has no business on this record. When the duo aren’t going ham on Australia’s racist past and present they are elevating themselves and their kin to echelons of worship which they have for too long been denied. ‘Take Me Home’ feat. Gurrumul, the theme song to Aboriginal superhero TV series Cleverman, sees ritualistic chanting on top of claps, climbing synths and pounding drums where the duo make it apparent if it wasn’t clear, “if things don’t change somebody’s getting buried”. A.B. Original elevate themselves not as saviours but as guides and exemplars to lead their people back home to a land that was robbed from them over 200 years ago.
Many have spoken about Reclaim Australia’s message, and it’s impossible not to, but as much as this record casts a light on this country’s history of racism, discrimination and inhumanity, it also casts a light on the culture and the craft whose sound and identity has been watered down courtesy of bubble-gum friendly diatribes and appropriated sensibilities of first world problems delivered by privileged voices with hip-hop as the cash cow delivery system.
Rap music will always be different to hip-hop. The latter is an all-encompassing elemental movement, the former is a mechanism of character, mettle and finesse. We know Briggs and Trials can rap. But what’s vital in noting is that the skill and professionalism of their craft disregards any claim that this album is just shock value for shock value’s sake. Reclaim Australia is Rap-101, which sees the duo delivers some of the verses of their career.
On ‘Dead In a Minute‘, Trials completely snaps, detailing the perspective of “mixed-breeds and hybrids” by mixing viciousness with cross-rhyme transitions, switching compound multi-line patterns with Biggie-esque singular internal rhyme prowess: “Nothing sweet as winning when you always got to start last/You Jar-Jar big mistake, cokeheads lick the plate”. Briggs answers in kind with a mastery of assonance and wordplay: “It’s the awesome force within, thing I’m forced to win/ Jesus, you crossed me once but never crossed again”. Throughout the entire record both Trials and Briggs showcase a cadence where the flow is free and effortless but each internal and end rhyme are the keystrokes of a master plan.
However, the element of rap where both soar is by effortlessly blending it with good old fashioned songwriting. No form or structure becomes bland. The pair shake it up with bridges, hooks, choruses, pre-hooks, two verses and three verse structures and spoken word interludes with inventive instrumentation devoid of hackneyed straight sampling.
All elements of which are on display in the soul of the record and the bone shattering call to arms, ‘Report to the Mist’. In between verses of double-time fury, A.B Original scream, “We got a team with us! You thought we were them good ones! Stepping on our side that’s where you put a foot wrong! Roll call! Report for duty!” Here the duo marry unfuckwithable candour with nothing but hard-body, anthemic, screw-face, step back before you get hurt rap music. It’s a concept which flips the tables once again as the accompaniment to ‘Firing Squad‘, painting the disenfranchised as the military order with lines like, “Mr Policeman, muthafuck you and that whole precinct”. This song is Australia’s ‘Fuck the Police’, and it’s long overdue.
In saying so, it’s vital to acknowledge that Briggs and Trials have bravely taken it upon themselves to publicly release the nature of all private conversations and carpool confessionals that are being uttered country wide. ‘Report to the Mist’ represents the spirit behind the message of the album. It posits the energy of why this message is so significant. It paints an alternate reality to exemplify why unity and inclusion is so vital. Because if division and discrimination and profiling and police brutality continues, this is the cry that will answer back whilst also echoing the shameful history which informs it: “The blacker the berry the bigger the charge/ the whiter the lies/ the deeper facade/ the whiter crime the looser the cusp/ and the blacker the skin and that noose is for us”.
The ignorant have suggested that these two Indigenous Australians have co-opted hip-hop culture and style, and their use of the West Coast G-Funk sound is the same appropriation they accuse Australia’s history of committing. This is naively false. What Trials & Briggs do is paint an intertextual representation of a culture born from fighting political and socio economic oppression. The G-Funk sound itself was pioneered during a time of turmoil in ’80s and ’90s America, torn by racial violence and discrimination which, unfortunately but ironically enough, still continues today. The same artists of that era who lifted themselves above their painful origins inspired their generation and now A.B are flipping that to inspire the next generation of young Indigenous boys, girls, men and women.
The breadth and thematic density of this record is immense. It’s a concept album and simultaneously not a concept album. The slaughter and mistreatment of Indigenous Australians is not a concept – it’s a fact. This record is historical artefact. This record is protest music in the purest meaning of the word. This record has been waiting to be made for over the past two hundred years.
The message is raw, it’s undeniable, and its context is unprecedented. It’s something that Australia has been missing. This is if Run The Jewels made It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back with M.O.P writing every hook. However, one thing above all can’t be understated: this is really good rap music. I mean, really fucking good rap music.
10/10
Reclaim Australia is out tomorrow through bad Apples Music/Golden Era Records, and available for pre-order now.
