There’s not much in the way of hip-hop alumni from Queanbeyan, NSW. Even fewer with legitimate claim to being a critically acclaimed, award-winning novelist, a slam poetry champ, a lauded TedX speaker, an ambassador for the Emerging Writers Festival, and a semi-regular guest on ABC’s The Book Club.
The 32-year old Malaysian-Australian Omar Musa is all those things. Does he need to rap as well?
Here’s the thing: those accolades he has accrued aren’t currency to Musa’s constituents the way that hip-hop can be. “This EP is about people who are considered to be marginal taking centre stage, telling their stories in a fearless and ferocious way,” he says in the accompanying press release. “It’s about taking frustration and pain and turning it into hard-hitting bangers that can make you both THINK and PARTY.” He might as well just say it: there’s no bangers on The Book Club.
Musa has self-released a smattering of EPs and mixtapes in the past few years, but Sydney’s Big Village Records are calling Dead Centre his debut. Considering it’s the first since his acclaimed novel Here Comes The Dogs put him in touch with the mainstream, perhaps that’s true. But with Poncho (Thundamentals) and Joelistics handling production duties, Musa initially seems to lose himself in the form.
LAK$A, the most likely qualification of a “banger”, is a sunny ode to the spicy broth, but wilts under the giddy recall of DJ Snake and Lil Jon’s batshit track Turn Down For What. The clanging club-groove of the title track, meanwhile, is lumbered with Musa veering between old school braggadocio and defiant resilience. This early testing of ancient hip-hop tropes seem to deplete him. “I been trying to figure out what I represent,” he raps on floaty opening track Freedom, featuring Mataya. “Let me welcome you to my world: the caps, the cabs, the poetry and fly girls.” Ho hum.
Cast that against this sing-song passage from his flagship poem CAPITAL LETTERS, about growing up in Queanbeyan:
“There was beauty in the streets. You could see it everywhere. In fishtails and donuts, the silver cursive that slanted off tyres. In spraycan fumes and opals of oil, in kickflips and crossovers, cuts and kebab shops. In sneakers that cluster-hung like grapes on powerlines. And in that – something.”
The contrast is stark. Musa is the rare rap newcomer that doesn’t have to find his voice, but preserve it.
And then there it is. The Fisherman Song is a stunning, perfectly weighted masterclass of storytelling, welded to an irresistible snake-hipped, tumble-down beat by Joelistics. Over ghostly female vocals, Musa crafts the vivid story of a fisherman duped into working on a fishing boat: “The ocean in a thousand pieces when the moon is bright / he was just waiting for a girl to walk into his life / fate has got his mind made when you shake the dice / he saw her walking in and drank his bourbon through the ice.”
The song ends with the battered soul having escaped the horror of slavery, but now stuck working for a pittance far from home.
It’s wonderful. It swings and shimmies. But it also succeeds because instead of talking to us about a refugee – a noun Musa knows has been divorced from its own meaning – the poet paints us the person. “Tell my people to wait / there’s a million different ways to get tricked by fate.” Finally his flow sounds completely present, thrilled with the tale it gets to unspool. The Fisherman Song is both a clear highlight of the EP, and one of recent hip-hop.
The glow from it seeps into The Past Becomes You, featuring Lior, L-FRESH The LION, and Hau – a breezy feel-good jam that opens with a passage about Musa’s dad (Maylasian poet Musa bin Masran) hearing his son freestyle, and recalling memories of his own youth in Malaysia. L-FRESH and Hau each contribute confident, revealing passages of displaced race and its far-reaching consequences, hinging on the refrain, “Kinda funny how the past becomes you”.
Strong Soul swishes on a melancholic groove, featuring Kate Miller-Heidke and a smattering of lovely lines (“Now she’s looking for the answers / thinking back, back before her daddy had cancer / back before she lived in her Lancer / way back when she was a sweet soul singer and a killer dancer.”), while the metallic, cymbal-clashing stomp of The Razor’s Edge unleashes Musa’s raw-throated fury at the state of the nation: “I’ll tell Scotty Morrison to his face / you’re an uncompassionate national disgrace / they tell me I have no manners / but I’ll spit the fuckin’ profane truth until they close Manus.”
Spittle transitions to standalone notes under a stark poem, The Fear (unfinished), which closes:
“Today,
A man would not serve me at the supermarket.
A woman crossed the street to avoid me.
An anonymous email wished death upon me.
I, too,
became afraid.”
These are words and sentiments worth sharing, certainly in 2016. Dead Centre might be uneven, but Musa’s work deserves – and for the most part earns – any forum he chooses for it.
