An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (2025)

Cameron White, "‘Rapper on a Rampage': Theorising the Political Significance of Aboriginal Australian Reggae and Hip Hop” Transforming Cultures eJournal, Special edition on Music and Place, Vol. 4 No 1 April 2009.

Hip hop is a powerful vehicle for the expression of identity and resistance in contemporary Aboriginal popular music. This paper examines the origins of Aboriginal hip hop and explains the reasons for its cultural and political significance. By looking at the influence of reggae in Aboriginal hip hop, especially in the work of CuzCo (Wire MC and Choo Choo), it locates hip hop’s history in terms of the reggae tradition in Aboriginal popular music, represented here by the work of No Fixed Address in the early 1980s. In this way hip hop is understood as part of a longer history of Aboriginal transnationalism. The paper seeks to understand how and why transnationalism is such an important element of Aboriginal political expression. It concludes by arguing that transnationalism represents a speaking position from which Aboriginal Australians can negotiate the cultural hegemony of the state.

From Our Brother: Reggae Downunder

World Music: Global sounds in Australia, 2010

“Making A Noise In This World”: New Sounds From Canada's First Peoples

canadian-studies.net

This article explores the expression and affirmation of the cultural identities of Canada's indigenous peoples through the medium of popular music, and specifically in the form of a new genre of (Canadian) popular music here labelled "Aboriginal Rock." As exemplified in recent work by Robbie Robertson (whose song "Making A Noise" is used as a paradigmatic example) and other artists of Aboriginal descent, including Susan Aglukark, Kashtin, Buffy Sainte-Marie and Laura Vinson, Aboriginal Rock is defined musically by the blending of elements of indigenous music and culture with conventions of modern rock and popular music, and lyrically by the articulation and expression of the social concerns, political claims and/or cultural identities of Canada's many and diverse Indian, Inuit and Métis peoples. The analysis situates the emergence of the new genre in the late 1980s and early 1990s in the context of a model of musical syncretism which emphasizes the importance of changes in popular music/popular culture and in the wider socio-political environment among the conditions for such musical syntheses to occur. Finally, the discussion turns to the politics of Aboriginal Rock in terms of its functions and its location in a "negotiated space" between cultures and musical traditions.

Popular Music, Race and Identity

The SAGE Handbook of Popular Music, 2015

“I Rep for My Mob”: Blackfellas Rappin’ from Down-Unda

Lobby Loyde - The G O.D. father of Australian rock OLDHAM Oct 21 2010

The political limits of the conscious MC brand: Ladi6, Urthboy and K’naan

2018

The contemporary hip hop MC faces a commercially powerful and globally established hip hop culture. To be successful in this field requires a distinctive brand, deployed across multiple media types. Within the hip hop culture there is a ‘conscious’, or socially engaged, style that emphasizes communal identities and is in tension with the imperative to develop self-branding in a neoliberal era. This thesis aims to show (a) how selected artists construct their own personal brands as ‘conscious’ performers, and asks (b) whether self-branding limits the political critique of the ‘conscious’ artists. The thesis examines the self-branding activity of three politically engaged artists: Ladi6 (Aotearoa-New Zealand), Urthboy (Australia), and K’naan (Somalia-Canada). The process of self-branding includes management of online videos, websites, social media, live performance, cover art, costume, body movement, recorded hip hop tracks and merchandise. As I show these personal brands draw on nati...

"More than a Music, It's a Movement": West Papua Decolonization Songs, Social Media, and the Remixing of Resistance 1

The Contemporary Pacific, 2019

The Easybeats: From power pop to Oz rock

Thesis Eleven, 2023

The Easybeats' 1960s career is viewed as being in two halves. In the first, they played pop songs composed by Stevie Wright and George Young. The group was incredibly successful in Australia spawning the term Easyfever to describe the adulation heaped on them by mainly teenage girls. In the second half, the group go to England and Young starts writing with Harry Vanda. The group had one huge international hit 'Friday On My Mind' and then their popularity declines as their audience loses interest in the group's more complex music and seemingly sophisticated lyrics. In this article I argue that the earlier songs can be read in terms of power pop avant la lettre and that a continuity can be discerned between the earlier songs and certain key later songs as Vanda and Young begin to develop a harder melodic rock sound anchored in power pop aesthetics that will be the template for AC/DC, a group that included Young's two younger brothers, and which helped define the generic form of Oz rock. I argue for the importance of Snowy Fleet's Merseybeat experience in the creation of the early sound, analyse the group's appeal for teenage girls and discuss the later song 'Good Times' as a melodic hard rock precursor of the kind of music played by AC/DC.

From Nimbin to Mardi Gras: Constructing Community Arts, Australian Cultural Studies, Allen and Unwin: Sydney

Perfect Beat, 2015

She has contributed to various journals and co-edited the 1989 anthology Australian Communications and the Public Sphere.