SUBJECTS: English
YEARS: 7–8, 9–10
Many hip hop artists have expressed concerns about the world through their music.
The Northern Territory's Kylie Sambo is no exception. Listen to her protest against the construction of a nuclear waste dump on her people's lands in Muckaty, near Tennant Creek.
Could you write or record a similar story about yourself and/or your community?
The ABC's Heywire competition calls for stories from 16-22 year olds in regional Australia. Enter to get your story featured on the ABC and score an all-expenses-paid trip to the Heywire Regional Youth Summit in Canberra. More: https://www.abc.net.au/heywire/
Things to think about
- 1.Think of hip hop or rap songs that you've heard. What are some of their features? What would you say is generally the hip hop audience? What sorts of themes does this genre of music typically explore?
- 2.Identify the track's purpose and audience. What sense of her own and her community's connection to their land does Kylie express? How does Kylie represent the government's response to her community's concerns about the waste dump? Listen again to identify poetic devices such as point of view, rhyme, repetition and meter (recurring patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables).
- 3.Write a review of Kylie's song for a music website, evaluating its construction and messages. In your review, consider how effective you found the song and the advantages and/or disadvantages you see in protesting through music in this way.
- 4.Find out more about the origins of hip hop music. Although remote Tennant Creek is a world away from the streets of New York, can you identify any similarities in the situations faced by Kylie and her community and the African-American youth who developed this genre? Time to get creative! Write your own rap song about an issue important to you.
Date of broadcast: 2010
Copyright
Metadata © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia Ltd 2012 (except where otherwise indicated). Digital content © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). Video © Australian Broadcasting Corporation (except where otherwise indicated). All images copyright their respective owners. Text © Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Education Services Australia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).