“It's all about regionality,” Rydeen told me on the Miscellania rooftop at sunset.
Most will probably tell you otherwise, that the internet has collapsed geographic barriers and thus discarded location-informed musical contexts too. Resulting in a ‘post-genre’ landscape carrying an ever-increasingly enshitified danger of a hollow everythingness (just wait for the inevitable Ed Sheeran sexy drill song). Ok, but there’s liberatory implications to this too.
koreancrashout is a new rapper/producer project of 1300 member Nerdie. He describes Sydney as a ‘gutter rap’ record, and while it doesn’t necessarily share much aesthetically with the sonics of that era of Aus hip-hop, it does carry over a similarly raw sense of authenticity, to both people and place. With its own specificity though – less eshay, more LB; billies are out, menthols are in (the TNs stay, but they’re pink). There’s a sense of desperate urban romanticism throughout Sydney, the spirit of the city itself: hyper-masculine but also kind of camp, glamorous but actually kind of empty. The yearning ‘Friday Night’ is the most despondent pre’s song ever. The boys in the back of the Uber are already ready to ark up, the hardstyle DJ doesn’t want to sell drugs or make ‘everybody hakka.’ Yet the Emerald City demands it.
Unlike traditional ‘gutter rap’, Sydney is more in tune with modern underground hip-hop globally, specifically jerk music. The sedated sounds of genre kings like xaviersobased are captured faithfully, as is a panorama of regional jerk verities: the emo, FearDorian-esque ‘Chongqing,’ a camera-flashing, bass-boosted UK-style on ‘Indie Sleaze.’ Beyond jerk, there’s references to Soundcloud era Atlanta cloud rap and also snap/ringtone rap, Datpiff-style producer tags and all. It’s all part of the same lineage – jerk itself a mutant hybrid of these latter genre strands. Sydney’s allure comes not from cheap imitation, but an understanding of the DNA flowing through this genealogy, where pioneers and peers are studied and built upon.
Sydney is attuned to a frequency shared amongst the most considered artists in its namesake’s underground, where the contradictory and corrupted context of their location is a basis to dissect regionality and locality itself. What sounds are actually genuine to this place, and if we do borrow from others, why and how do we? That same intention in Sydney hip-hop is present in its DIY emo scene; it’s there when Salllvage chops & screws Barkaa, or when Rydeen samples _____ (not going to sample snitch sorry!) Music is still goated because context is still everything. And whatever you want to do has probably been done already– it’s all g though, because maybe you still have something interesting to say.
Words by Lindsay Riley