L-Fresh The Lion: South West | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Hip hop, as any good student of music history can tell you, started in The Bronx. The more nerdy history students, in fact, could pinpoint the exact block where Kool Herc started spinning breakbeats. From that point on, the history of hip hop is often the history of localities. Compton, Brooklyn; East Coast and West; the Dirty South. Often new developments in the genre are traced back to one location - trap from Atlanta, grime from East London.

In Australia, where rap music has now established itself firmly in our cultural mainstream, we mostly haven’t had that same sense of locality. “Skip hop” mostly hails from the curious placelessness of interchangeable suburbs or rapidly homogenising hip inner-city neighbourhoods. It’s hard to imagine most high profile Australian rappers giving a shoutout to their hood - such a move would be seen as embarrassingly cheesy, even though it is an indisputable part of hip hop tradition.

There’s a social hierarchy implicit in this. The middle classes are geographically as well as socially mobile - not attached to a sense of place as much as the poor who spend more time in one location. The dictates of consumer trends also mean regions that can afford it are often so often on the make they lose any sense of local distinctiveness.

It’s interesting to note then L-FRESH The LION proudly naming his third album South West. Sydney’s west has had a vital role in the history of Australian hip hop, from Def Wish Cast and Sound Unlimited to ONEFOUR. The South West has played its own part - the first recorded aboriginal rappers in the country were part of a multicultural crew called South West Syndicate; and Kerser became the country’s biggest genuine underground hip hop star while proudly repping his home suburb of Campbelltown.

Most of the country’s established media of course never venture out to those unfashionable and somewhat unpicturesque western suburbs. Which is why L-FRESH has a tone of defensiveness in his song Forever Rising: “I’m reminded to focus on positives/We come from a part of the city that’s got a lot to give”

But coming from a place alternately marginalised and demonised isn’t the only locality that informs L-FRESH’s music. Every brown skinned man with a turban knows well the question “where are you really from?” And South West is full of another theme familiar to Sydney’s west - the experience of the second generation migrant. L-FRESH The Lion’s family descends from Punjab - not only somewhere far from Australia culturally and geographically; but a place arbitrarily but irrevocably divided by the colonial partition of India and Pakistan, and divided in L-FRESH’s psyche by the dysphoria of life as a brown skinned Aussie kid. Mother Tongue is about his attempts to hold on to the culture and language of his ancestors - he raps “Nothing is sacred, even the tongue is gentrified”. The samples of bhangra music sprinkled through the album are his attempt to fuse that past with the American hip hop that inspires his music.

“Where I come from it don’t get no realer”, L-FRESH spits: “South West Sydney didn’t raise no quitter”. The localised parochialism of hip hop should always be seen as a resistance by the marginalised to the homogenising forces that seek to strip places and people of any distinctive characteristic outside the lowest common denominator of economic value. It’s worth remembering the birth of hip hop in The Bronx came just after city planner Robert Moses had put an expressway through the borough, partitioning the area and wiping whole neighbourhoods off the map. MC’s proudly embracing their hood was an act of defiance.

South West then, is acting in a long and proud hip hop tradition - in its old school boom-bap beats, simple and positive rhymes, it’s pride in where it comes from, and in its belief in the power of hip hop to harness the potential of places others had written off - “They count us out full of doubt it seems but we out here counting dreams.“

- Andy Paine.
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