Close to the Edge (17 page)

K
haled was a storyteller. He was born in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, but his family was forced to flee in 1978 during the civil war, and they came to live in western Sydney. Khaled tried to fit in, but he couldn't relate to the staples of Aussie culture—cricket, pubs, and rock music. From the early days, when he listened to hip hop on the national youth radio station 2JJ's black music night, Khaled was transfixed by the technologies of sampling and break beats. The reception of 2JJ— which broadcast through the emergency low-power transmitter from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) tower at Gore Hill—was erratic in the northern and eastern suburbs but somewhat better in the western ones, especially at night. Tuning in to the AM dial at 1540 kHz, Khaled recorded the songs on cassette. These tapes would be copied and recopied, passed from hand to hand, the dull and static-ridden sounds a shadow of their former vitality but nevertheless treated as artifacts from a faraway civilization.

Along with a number of other kids in his neighborhood, Khaled started out by rhyming. But they had no one to make beats for them. So he turned his parents' garage into a music studio, making beats with basic analog methods like direct drive turntables or cutting tape. Khaled's first piece of equipment was a four-track tape recorder that allowed him to record four tracks on a quarter-inch cassette by combining sides A and B and splitting the left and right channels. He found the break beat that he wanted to use, recorded it on track one, and looped it by manually inserting it over and over. Then he rewound the tape and played track one while recording another sample on track two. He worked with the precision of a surgeon, manually quantizing tracks one and two in order to maintain a coherence in the overall tempo and rhythm. He would repeat the procedure for track three. Once the three tracks were completed, they were combined on track four. For a three-bar sample of six seconds, he needed to loop it thirty times on each track to have a three-minute beat. A one-bar sample of two seconds would need to be looped ninety times. It took almost a week to lay down a three-minute beat.

Khaled Sabsabi

Like DJs and producers everywhere, Khaled was obsessed with “digging in the crates”—searching for vinyl records—and always on the lookout for the hottest break beats in the most unexpected places. He started out using his dad's record collection of disco and Arabic music. Then Khaled borrowed records from his circle of Arab friends in western Sydney and also began to frequent a store called Disco City, which specialized in funk and early hip hop. At this time the shift was taking place from analog to digital, so people were throwing out entire collections of records. “There were secondhand record shops, like Ashwood's on Pitt Street and mission-run stores like the Salvation Army, where I spent many hours and days going through thousands of records,” said Khaled. “I limited myself to not spending more than two dollars per record.” Over the years he accumulated a collection of more than seven thousand records.

As a producer, Khaled recognized the power of sound to narrate a life shaped by war, displacement, and exile. Like many other Lebanese youth, he had grown up in the shadow of the fifteen-year civil war in Lebanon that began in 1975 with hostilities between the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Lebanese political parties, and Lebanese Muslim and Christian militias backed by Syria and Israel. As tensions between Israel and the resistance mounted, Israel invaded southern Lebanon in 1978 and again in 1982, causing massive casualties and an exodus that saw many Lebanese flee to Australia. Khaled began to incorporate the derbukka drums and the melodic buzuq into beats, meshing the sonic landscapes of his childhood with the hardcore pulse of the urban periphery.

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.

A
s 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.

A
fter 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.

T
he 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 finally 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, hard-core 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.”