MC Raceless now known as The Maltese Well Monster from Curse Ov Dialect discusses hip-hop, politics and growing up in Sunshine.

TRANSCRIPTION OF AUDIO

Alienation is that a disease of the nation manifestation of segregation causes hesitation.

Curse ov dialect formed in 1994 with myself and DJ Paso Bionic and MC Malice. The three of us, we started off as a normal hip hop group. All of us come from different backgrounds. We all we're into anti-racism. So that's what we would rap about in all of our songs. And we started off as a straight up, I guess you call it straight up hip hop group boom-bap rappers. And then we developed into this sort of over the years into this experimental performance art hip hop group, where we wore the folk costumes of our particular backgrounds and rap on stage. We were the first Australian hip hop group to get a record deal in the United States in 2004. And that was quite a big thing for us at the time. We ended up touring Europe twice or three times America, Japan, twice. So, you know, it's funny that a lot of people don't know our history, even in Australia because of being more popular overseas. And also because our music was so weird, a lot of the hip hop community ignored us for being outsiders when we were definitely insiders.

I'm from a Maltese background, but, you know, Maltese people are European. So, um, you know, I was so into the hip hop music that I was sort of had had a bit of a… at the beginning…quite a, quite a knowledge of history. So I was very at the beginning I had a bit of an identity crisis. [laughs] I actually started just, you know, looking for racism everywhere, l wanted everyone around me to know that I wasn't racist. So I do ridiculous things like……I made a stop racism t-shirt that was in Chinese and Arabic and in English. And I was so paranoid of people thinking that I was racist. I'd carry a Chinese tea on my lap. [laughs] I didn't drink it on the train, but I did drink it. Yeah. I intentionally go into any store. This is, we're talking, you know, 19 years old here…now I'm 44….. So a long time ago.  I intentionally go into stores where… you know…it was only one….like a Turkish place where people playing cards or you'd go Vietnamese restaurants, but places where no one that looked like me would be going to, and I'd go in there intentionally just to like hang out [laughs] with people. And I have friends from those cultures taking me along to these places as well. So a lot of it was accidental…..I just think meeting…you know..meeting people and, trying to..you know, just, I guess, building a bridge and just learning about cultures. I ended up speaking English in a slow way because a lot of the people I spoke to, were people who are learning English as a second language. 

So I would actually, speak like that'd be lower. And like around the corner from my house, there was my friend Raghe who's Somalian background, one of the earliest actual African families around in the West at that time. But you get a lot of East Africans, you know, uh, people around and he was really into hip hop as well. And we connected on that and I got my MC my original MC name from him, my original MC name was Raceless, which I've recently changed… Raceless because I wasn't racist [laughs] the opposite. So, that came from that. It was quite a naive time, you know, just, you know, in context of the way the world is today, it's very far from that, but, you know, that was, my original sort of…where I was going with my life at that early stage.

The huge difference because the shift, well, look, it's sort of come back around again a little bit, but, all the white kids that I knew that were into hip hop back then were extremely anti-racist because that's the type of hip hop  that was coming out at that time. So, you know, the kids, the kids of different cultures that weren't, you know, Anglo, would also…it wasn’t…it was more your friends with; the mates you had were into the same music as you were. So they, they will happen to be of all different cultures. Hip-hop’s changed because after that initial area of social conscious hip hop, it became more about, I guess, materialistic subject matter. And a lot of gangster rap become more popular than socially conscious hip hop at that time. And then it went through a massive change from the socially conscious to the negative gangster rap type of stuff.

I would say that very, very recently, it started to go back to the socially conscious, hip hop today because of the internet back then…..the internet wasn't around. It was an organic sort of thing. But now, I think it's true of all elements of the internet…people find particular strains of particular beliefs and they follow those particular strains because of the internet and the influences, and I guess YouTube algorithms. So what's different about it is a lot of the kids that didn't grow up with hip hop like that…have got more of …the younger people are more, I guess, I guess more segregated in terms of culture. I've noticed like the possibilities of white kids getting into hip hop now is more challenging than white kids getting into it back then. You know what I mean…like the nuances and that dialogue on a strong now the need for social change.

Catching public transport, you can have more of an observation of like social, the vibes, you know, of people. I would say that Sunshine's become lately probably more, I wouldn't say the word gentrified, but there's different types of class people living here now. There's more of a mixture now than there was before. So me growing up here when I was younger, I'm going to say Sunshine, slash, St Alban’s..Deer Park because I sort of grew up all around, you know, this area. I was one, one of many..you know, kids that just grew up in an organic sort of multicultural sort of environment. Were now it's sorta like, you know, you get on the Sunshine, there'd be like Sunshine forums on the internet where people would be like, “I don’t want to go..Sunshine doesn’t have real lattes.” They would perceive Sunshine in a Anglo century or a Eurocentric, maybe Eastern Suburban sort of context, not in an organic way that it's always been. So in a way I've seen a lot of changing the way, the way certain people want to develop the area and develop the area usually means make it more white. 

There's a difference between becoming an anti-racist person by going to university or going to rallies and actually…or being an anti-racist person that's organically grown up with other cultures around you. Like you would, if you lived in Sunshine from early on. It’s more…I just believe it's a more authentic interactions then more about, well, “I'm going to go to this African restaurant because that's really exotic.” There's a major difference in the perspective of how you perceive multiculturalism, because certain people are very condescending when it comes to that, even though they might not realize that they they're being that way. 

With our music, like, you know, we'd sample all the music of the cultures around us and throw it into the mix for our tracks. It was normal for us to be sampling, you know, Cambodian records and, you know, African drums and throwing that in sonically into the beats that we've been making with Curse ov Dialects. So it was very organic the way it developed as a sound and it reflected the environment around us.

I'm working on my solo album at the moment, which is my new MC name, which is the Maltese well monster. Lyrics are about the same stuff that I've always talked about. The anti-racism also, you know, we go into the subjects of homophobia, sexism, materialism, internet brainwashing, you know, lots of subjects. So I've been writing a lot of lyrics about the way people are easily swayed by whatever floats their boat, instead of doing research. These days, sometimes you'd get, for example, some information about race relations from one website that's right wing. And then people don't realize that if they share those things, you can find the exact opposite story somewhere else. So what I'm, what I was trying to say is people aren't considering nuances; they’re not considering grey areas and they're not, they're just on the internet and they're getting all their information from that. They're creating a false narrative about reality. And that, that that's true of a lot of different subjects, like in the context of racism especially. Like I've seen people, not necessarily living around here, but people who would be left-leaning who go down the yellow brick road of ignorance by being enticed by a negative.. Even stuff about Black Lives Matter, for example, because the media will focus on one negative thing about Black Lives Matter and amplify it to mean the whole movement. So I'm trying to explain not to, you know, not to be swayed and always remember what the actual movements about what it is, how to stop racism and how to expose it and not to take things personal. 

I went to Malta, did a lot of research into the folk law and things like that. So coming back, I felt like, well, you know, there's no way I can be accused of cultural appropriation when it comes to hip hop, if I'm drawing from my own culture. You know, so it was a way of, it was a way of speaking from that. But the problem is when people think about representing cultures, they, they see it in an exclusionary way. The Curse ov Dialect and myself, I've always seen it as a, like let's all be together and all fight racism together. Not like it's a private prejudice movement, not a pride with prejudice movement, if that makes sense. I think people of all cultures, respect other cultures when they know that they're not trying to be condescending and try and co-opt another culture. So, you know, when I was a kid, that was the thing I was really into hip hop and I was into the African-American stories. I thought… if I want to be anti-racist, I've got to reach people as well, that look like me and bring them over. You know, I'm doing it in a different way.

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