Munkimuk

Mark Munk Ross says he has learnt to make his music more appealing by injecting a big dose of humour into his hard-hitting songs.

"I try to make them humorous, which then makes it accessible to fans that might not be that political," says the man better known as Munkimuk, the "Grandfather of Indigenous hip-hop".

"But they are still digesting it, whether they know it or not," he says. "Smart game plan I think."

From an early age, Ross – who prefers to be known as Munk - learnt not to take himself too seriously.

"Put it this way - my name at home would be 'Dickhead'," he laughs.

It wasn't a pampered childhood. His father played rugby league, wrestled, rode motorbikes - and came very close to winning the Australian Speedway championship. But when it came to feeding his family, Munk's dad did whatever he could.

"A bit of a scrap metal dealer, a few odd jobs here and there," says Munk. "I think that's pretty up my alley in the way of ingenuity of getting by."

His Aboriginality comes from his mother, an athletic woman who was a hurdler until she had Munk, the eldest of three boys. His unusual-sounding moniker of Munkimuk - "just a bit of a play on my name, Mark Andrew Munk Ross" - resembles the language of his grandmother's people, the Jardwadjali.

"Jardwadjali is from down in western Victoria," he says. But his grandmother was raised in Junee, NSW. "Her father worked on the trains, so that's how I think he ended up from down in western Victoria up into Junee.

"It was around the Great Depression time, no one would pay. And the famous story is that they used to get the Aboriginal guys to go around and be the ticket guys, because they knew that they'd be getting into punch-ups all the time. It was a job that whitefellas didn't want to do."

Half a century later, little had changed in the way of race relations. So it was no surprise that hip-hop appealed to the young Munk partly because it had jumped the hurdle of skin colour.

"Back in '81 I'd seen Blondie doing her thing," he says. "That's the thing that people don't understand about hip-hop - the first fans of hip-hop were the punks. Punks were always looking for something new. So that's where you got Blondie doing 'Rapture', which is really a hip-hop song, she's rapping. And that was the first thing that got me excited, because I'd seen the graff, the colourful painting and all that sort of stuff and I'd just gone, 'Wow, that's pretty cool.'

"And seeing Malcolm McLaren do 'Buffalo Girls' - of course that had all elements of hip-hop involved - it had the graff, the breakdancing, it had the rapping, it had the beats, it had the deejaying - and he was the manager of the Sex Pistols. Of course you had Adam Ant doing rap as well. So those were the people that were taking hip-hop to the outside world."

Munk started out breakdancing, catching the train from his home in south-west Sydney down to the Opera House, carrying his roll of linoleum over his shoulder. He would throw down his lino with his friends and impress passing tourists with headspins, backspins, windmills and a unique, spider-like move that he still does to this day: "The clock - in which I basically run around myself."

When his friends found a power point they could tap, the breaking jams grew huge - and started to be raided by the police. To avoid the heat, the jams moved to Martin Place and started attracting thousands of people every weekend - until two crews got in a blue.

"Then the cops shut the whole thing and it turned into a riot because - you know, coppers turning up, all guns blazing," says Munk. "The next day in the newspaper they called it 'Ethnic riots in Sydney CBD' with no explanation of what was going on or whether it had anything to do with anything. You know how the media put their spin on a thing. So that kind of shut that down."

But hip-hop's ethic of being open to all elements had already taken hold of Munk. He was imitating the big-name rappers, but was still trying to work out how the music was made.

"You want to know how I got into making music? I reckon I spent a good two, three years from probably about '88 until '90 working it out," he says. 

"I went to my mate, he taught me how to play guitar and his name is Bassam Hassam - a Lebanese fella - he used to live down the road from me at Punchbowl. Bassam could play all the Midnight Oil songs and he showed me a few easy little licks on there. I was like, 'Man, that starts me off then, let's get this guitar thing happening.' I was pretty good at it. He was like, 'Man, you pick it up so quick.'"

Munk picked it up freakishly fast, learning bass, keyboards, drums - and how to manipulate a sampler with a scratch pad. Today, we are sitting in his home away from home, Redfern's plush Gadigal studios, a hermetically-sealed sound capsule where he spends most of his time producing bands. "Yesterday I did an interview while playing the drums," he laughs, pointing at the kit through the glass partition. Back in 1991, though, he was still being laughed off stage.

"Most of the places that I'd do these gigs were all African American guys, rapping. I was completely different because I was rapping in my own accent. They were like, 'Woah man, what's this? Hillbilly rap?!' So I thought, 'I'm not gonna go out there by myself and be the laughing stock. Next time I'm gonna go with 30 of my mates and we're all gonna go for it - and see who laughs then!' I had all my mates – including Big Naz, who's like 6ft 10 - and all of a sudden no one's complaining!"

The 30-strong crew called themselves South-West Syndicate and were soon invited to play a big gig - Hip-Hopera, at Casula Powerhouse.

"We ended up going to the gig at Casula and going, 'We're going to drive our car into the venue and we're all going to get out and then we're going to go on stage and we're going to do our song.' Big Naz got his big XD Falcon rolling in and we all rocked up and half of us came from the side of the stage and we just annihilated this gig. People were just raving, like, 'Mate, what is this?'"

In the process, the crew were also introduced to Tim Carroll, the director of Bankstown Youth Development Service.

"He said, 'How would you like to do what you're doing, but bring it to the youth centre and do it here? And we'll pay you for it.' I'm like, 'What? Pay us for it? Mate, you're on! So we started recording other artists."

South-West Syndicate ended up touring Australia for 11 years, with Munk honing his production skills as he recorded everyone from at-risk kids to established artists.

"So it took off from there," he says. "But people dropped off and filtered out and it ended up just being the blackfellas left! By about '97 it just became like an Aboriginal band. From there we were throwing traditional stuff into our shows and people were really interested in that, like 'Wow, this is something that we haven't seen before!' We'd incorporate traditional dancing, didge playing, clapsticks and we'd be doing our hip-hop songs, the singing and the breakdancing - it was like a complete experience."

When he was in central Australia working for the ABC's Triple J radio station, Munk also had an experience that would change his life and countless others.

"Vibe 3on3 had just started," says Munk of a sports workshop that was finding its feet. "They were doing their first event, which was in Alice Springs. There wasn't that many kids turning up, so I had a meeting with the guy that put it all together. I said, 'I'll bring you some kids here tomorrow, man. We've gotta add some hip-hop element in there and they'll all turn up.' Obviously, that evolved into what it became for all those many years - hundreds of events all over the country - a basketball and hip-hop thing."

The highly successful Vibe 3on3 events ended only after Vibe Australia had its funding cut by Prime Minister Tony Abbott's government in June 2014, shattering its founder, Gavin Jones. A month later the 47-year-old Jones - whose organisation had also given birth to the hugely successful Deadly Awards and Deadly Vibe magazine - was found dead.

"With Vibe 3 on 3 and Triple J we'd be travelling to all these different communities where people weren't speaking English," says Munk. "English wasn't their first language and it wasn't their second or third language. I was like, 'Oh, wow. Man, this is kinda cool. I'm gonna learn some of this lingo and try to throw it into raps.' So I started doing that just to show the kids in these communities that, 'English isn't your first language, so guess what? You don't even have to rap in it! If you wanna rap in your language, just do it. Look, watch!' And then I started going round the different communities and everywhere I'd go, they'd go, 'Hey, lingo rap! Do the lingo rap!' All of a sudden I was known as 'the lingo rapper'."

He laughs. He'd picked up all the elements of hip-hop and he'd picked up all the instruments. Now, Munk began picking up all the languages with remarkable ease, even releasing how-to-rap books that included lingo.

"I think I pick up the language side of things pretty well," he says. "Everything's very phonetic. Once you know the phonetic side of things and what letters don't exist in different languages and what ones do and what sounds do as well, it's kind of very universal, I think, in all languages. I thought, 'Man, I'm rapping in all these other languages, I need to learn more of my own language.' So I got onto that side of it and started writing proper songs."

Munk raps in his own language, Jardwadjali, on his solo track as Munkimuk, "Shades of Grey". For Indigenous people living in a country that has broken world records in linguicide, it was empowering. But it had a bigger impact because Munk was rapping about his skin colour in his traditional language.

Since the first contact, between white and black
Whether right or wrong, liaisons were had
Decade after decade, babies were raised
These days Aboriginal comes in many shades
Gubbariginal, people unaware
Skin that is fair, blue eyes and blonde hair
By the 1900s, people of part descent
Well their population growth was a problem so they said
Whitefellas in places were outnumbered
They wondered how they were gonna get the mothers
To hand over the kids that were forced, intimidated
Half-castes, quadroons, octoons were separated
Pre-assimilated, so it all began
To breed the black out of them, that was the plan
This was the government policy of the day
Now shades of grey will never fade away
These shades of grey will never leave this place
These shades of grey will never fade away

The song was a hit with fans. Brad Cooke, National Rugby League caller for the ABC and former manager of Koori Radio, still names it as his favourite song of all time.

Munk says: "You've gotta remember that even way, way back in the mid-1800s, in some areas of this country there were more 'half-castes' and 'quadroons' than there were white people - and that was a problem to the government at the time. So if that was a problem back in the 1850s, think of how that goes down the track, nearly 200 years later. If 'half-castes' and 'quarter-castes' are a problem, and they're outnumbering white people in many, many places, think of where all the descendants of those people are now - assimilated into white society, most of them."

So, the oft-cited figure of only 2% of Australia's population identifying as Aboriginal could be hiding a far larger figure, because a lot of people out there had forebears who did not identify.

"Yeah, of course," says Munk. 

"It's very interesting - and I've copped it from both sides of the fence. On the positive side there is blackfellas saying, 'Yeah man, you're like a role model for our community', and whitefellas saying, 'We're comfortable to learn off this guy about issues.' On the negative side, for whitefellas you're too black because of your thinking and for blackfellas you're too white because you don't look black. And if you're not comfortable being in that middle, you can take one side or the other. But man, I'm comfortable to roll in both directions."

Unusually, when it comes to colour, Munk's eyes can also roll in whatever direction.

"Yes, there are people that have no eye colour, like myself," he laughs. "When people ask for my eye colour or to write it down, I don't say anything. People say, 'Oh, you forgot this question.' I say, 'Nah, I didn't forget that question. I have hazel eyes, grey, blue and green and on a daily basis, it could be a different colour.' People that look in my eyes go, 'I'm sure you had green eyes the other day! Now they're like brown-grey, man. What's going on?'"

On his track "Mighty Rabbitohs", a fanatic's fanfare for the South Sydney Rabbitohs Rugby League team, Munk plays on the attribute by matching his eyes to the team's colours.

The Rabbitohs are based in Redfern, the political heart of Aboriginal Australia - and have a huge Indigenous following. To outsiders it may seem incongruous to see First Nations people plaster themselves in the team's emblem of a rabbit - one of the many colonial invaders that have vandalised their previously carefully managed land. But the Rabbitohs are said to have got their name when impoverished South Sydney players used to trap the animals and sell them for their meat and pelts. Often still wearing their team jerseys, they would copy the milkman's cries of "milk-oh!" or "bottle-oh!" with "Rabbit-oh!". The name spread like a plague. These days, when Indigenous people flaunt the emblem on their chests and shout the name to the skies, there may well be revenge in their hearts and resistance on their lips.

There has been plenty of Rabbitohs flaunting going on. We are talking just days before the Rabbitohs slaughter the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs 30-6 in the NRL Grand Final - the Rabbitohs' first premiership win in 43 years. Yet Munk also shouts out the Bulldogs in one of the many passing sports references that shoot through his new album, which was recorded with what he calls his "live disco band", Renegades Of Munk.

Always in the middle of some controversy
Stuck in Cronulla in a Doggies jersey

"That, 'stuck in Cronulla in a Doggies jersey' was just the Bankstown, the Bulldogs team," he says, "and Cronulla, where there was riots with people that were coming from Bankstown."

In 2005, Australia hit world headlines when riots broke out in the the south Sydney seaside suburb of Cronulla between white racists and people of Middle Eastern appearance - many said to be Lebanese who had come in from Bankstown.

"It's just like a mad little pun in itself," says Munk. "So as you see, even with those songs that aren't about too much, and are a bit more fun and a bit more skill-based, I just slide that in! Have that one!"

The Renegades Of Munk album also makes light of Munk's skin colour, but is unlikely make anyone's skin crawl. Lines such as, "Here comes the brother that's looking like a gubbar", "No need to adjust your eyesight, I'm like Michael Jackson looking quite white", and "Well I don’t look black, fat or look back - the good fact is that I’m a Koori that can cook tracks", are more likely to raise laughs than hackles.

"Now, I'm at the point where I can make light of it in songs and enjoy it," says Munk. "I'll still throw in things that make it so that those little bits of political sarcasm are funny and I can just laugh at it and keep the whole vibe still fun."

Native American comedian Will Rogers famously said: "I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

But, of course, it's not as easy as that - especially when it comes to music. Munk's blending of politics and humour on the album is a rare accomplishment - and some lines even put listeners though the unique experience of laughing and wincing at the same time. "I'm out of control like a copper with a Taser", for instance, brings out a jolt of snorting laughter while conjuring up horrific images such as that of Kevin Spratt, the Aboriginal man who was tasered 13 times by nine police officers in 2010, or Sheila Oakley, the Aboriginal woman who lost her eye after being tasered by police in 2014.

But there are also moments on the album when the politics come unleavened, as in "Help Is On The Way".

There's lying, there’s crying, cos residents are dying with Presidents trying to put the evidence behind them
I got no patience for intelligence agents, that are thinking that they’re replacing the United Nations
There’s millions waiting, as we’re taking it to the streets, while these creeps are headed straight to the beach...

"It's not a hidden track politically," says Munk. "Because it's one that we've thrown out there as a single. It's in your face.

"Of course, lyric-wise I have always been political and have always been a fan of politically charged music. I am a huge fan of bands like Midnight Oil, Roaring Jack, vSpy VSpy, Billy Bragg etcetera. So that has always spilled over into my raps. I think it was around 1997 or 1998 that I started performing at rallies and such for about 10 years. So not only did I like to write politically enhanced raps, but taking it to the streets and performing.

"Also I have been a huge fan of alternative media since I stumbled across it in the late '80s. I think I first came across Green Left Weekly by heading down to the Sandringham Hotel every Thursday night for Roaring Jack gigs and a bit of stage diving with a bunch of friends, which was a great place to meet and have a yarn to people."

But even "Help Is On The Way" has "a little punchline on the end of it", says Munk.

So if you're tired of unscrupulous behaviour - and looking for a saviour, from Australia
Wait on, well this ain’t gonna take long - I just got to go and get my tights and cape on

However, the rare moments where the album does get serious are also its most sublime. They come in "Coast To Coast" and "What A Place", when Munk stands back in blissed-out awe at the beauty of his country.

"I've travelled all over the world, but I think there's places in this country that are the most beautiful places on the planet," he says. "Most things in this world are depressing. Look at the landscape of this country - that ain't depressing. It's like a work of beauty. It's an honour to even see it. It's about being respectful to the land as well. It's like your finger, it's like another extension of your body. So I had to pay my respects that way by doing a couple of tracks that talk about the beauty of this country."

It's a connection all but lost on the colonists. In 2014, Deutsche Bank pulled its funding out of a huge coal port expansion that threatens to destroy the Great Barrier Reef, yet Australia's banks and political leaders remained committed.

"I've been to places where mines have ripped up pieces of land," says Munk. 

"People have said, 'Oh we're going to go on this little tour of the mine now.' And I'm like, 'Nah, thanks.' So I'll be just there sitting under a tree while a whole bunch of people are going on a tour of mines and stuff. There's no way that I could even step foot in one. Even though I respect blackfellas that are working in those mines because they're earning themselves some money, it's not something I could do. I'd rather concentrate on the beauty of this country, because that just saddens me. Instead of doing a song about the destruction of the environment, it's more like, 'Man, look how beautiful it is and then people will say, 'Well, that's fucked! To destroy that landscape is just fucked up!'"

In the time scale of pop music, "What A Place" is as old as the hills. It rose up from the dust of the central desert 15 years previously, when Munk was spending time with country music legend and sometime Green Party candidate Warren H Williams.

"'What A Place' was a song that Warren and myself have had hanging around since '99, when I was there in Alice Springs doing stuff with Triple J," he says.

"Warren had his chorus and that's all we had at first, when we sat down together, and then he wrote the verses later and of course John Williamson did a cover of that song as well, it's in a few different entities. And Warren's always been like, 'Man, when's your interpretation of this song coming?'"

Munk used his "amazing" keyboardist, John Gauci, to reinterpret the song.

"Johnny plays beautiful piano and also does an electric piano part which gives the landscape feeling around the whole thing," he says. "With that electric piano doing the landscaping, it just sounds like you're out in the desert. It's got these eerie sounds that are going all across the song, that just sit over the top of the whole thing."

Munk says the big difference with Renegades Of Munk - a band made up of seasoned musos who have played with some of the biggest names in the business - is that they are creating "soundtracks to concepts".

"A lot of the songs that I get into usually start with a concept," he says. "Some people just make a song and make it about whatever. The music is a soundtrack to that concept. It's not, like, pick a beat and rap over it. Each piece of music is specifically written for the concept of what that song is about - that's a very important thing on the album. The music that's on there is soundtracks to the lyrics."

The lyrics are also pored over. Munk is a modest man, rapping that he's been "misled, never had a big head". Few would realise he plays drums on every track, along with keys, bass, horns and some beautifully fluid guitar, nor that he even did the album's artwork - a sleeve that could easily pass as a work by art activist Arlene Texta Queen. But he is uncharacteristically assertive about his poetry.

"The raps on the album show that you can be very technical and stay on subject, which is a hard thing to do," he says. "A lot of the guys that are very technical rappers and into the multi-syllable stuff sometimes stray off subject. Something that I'm proud of on that whole album from start to finish is there's a lot of tricky word play and multi-syllable stuff going on through the whole album.

"I'm not really into the one-word rhyme - the end-type rhymes. Even with that one, 'MisLED, never had a BIG HEAD, KIDS SAID that I'm excited like I'm BIG KEV.' That's two lines of a rap and it's got four double-syllable rhymes. I've put a lot of work into those lyrics. Most of those songs I'm writing five foolscap pages' worth of rhyming words on each line."

On the album's 12-minute-long closing track, the band have put just as much care into matching their music to the style of the 35 guest rappers - count them - on there.

"What we did was change up the groove with every rapper," says Munk. "Every rapper's got their own thing, so some of them break down to more reggae type stuff and some of them go full funk and then we strip it back for some."

The rappers also do a great job of staying on subject, spitting out references to Munk's long and colourful career, as in the line from western Sydney's Sesk:

Most Fly, Sesk, Munkimuk on your playlist
Pump it up loud and annoy all the neighbours

It's a tribute to the Indigenous Hip-Hop Show Munk had been running on Koori Radio for the previous eight years, opened in the style of a manic horse-racing announcer and ending with the show's motto: "Pump it up loud and annoy your neighbours!"

Munk started the show after a collection of songs he recorded as a demo - called Ten Years Too Late - was seized upon as a real album and started getting radio airplay.

"I've always been involved with Koori Radio, since probably '94, '95," he says. "And people had always been in my ear, saying, 'Ah, you should do something on Koori Radio.' And it finally got to a time, after the whole South-West Syndicate thing, I'd been overseas and done a bit of freestyling around Canada and America and did some gigs over in Europe and Switzerland, places like that. But I came back from overseas with a little demo of a bunch of songs that I had - and it was always only meant to be a little demo thing, but then people jumped on it and said it was an album. To this day I don't really call it an album. But I got some airplay on Triple J and I got some airplay on Koori Radio and then a few people picked up stuff and then I got nominated for a Deadly Award for Song Of The Year for a song that was like a demo off a CD!"

He shakes his head and laughs, but the song, "Dreamtime", showed how appealing Munk could be with hard-hitting political tracks.

In 1967 we all got citizenship
But citizenship didn't mean shit
It didn't alter the persecution
Low living standards and prosecution
No solution, no revolution
The conclusion is confusion and we're the ones that's losing
It's a sad situation all across the nation
Only 2% of the total population
Over-representation in prison casualty
Of a higher rate of black deaths in custody
Once the corroboree's gone, we're finished
So the importance should never be diminished
Nor should the songs or the stories from the old days
We shouldn't have to surrender
Our culture or old ways
Total disrespect for our culture
In the meantime, I wish I could go back to the Dreamtime

"It was just like, 'All right, yep, it's an album now'," he laughs. "Even though there's some cringeworthy singing on there by myself, on that whole thing. But I was like, 'Oh, I'll roll with that.' But the general manager of Koori Radio at the time, Brad Cooke, was like, 'Come on brother, time to stand up for your mob, mate! What can we do for you to get you here and keep you here?' And I'm like, 'Well, I'm not really doing much. I've just come back from overseas, I've been recording my little bits and pieces and stuff like that, so yeah.'

"But then I went away and thought about it and went back and said, 'Mate I've got it. Look, for years, all these young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rappers have been giving me their demos - and guess what? They're sitting in my room doing nothing. So what I want to do is do a show, and I'm just gonna play 'em. That's it. I've got enough there to go for months!' It was more about giving mob a platform. Because at that time there was only the Triple J Hip-Hop show, which I'd been on a few times and hosted a couple of times. So I was like, 'Oh, man, I'll do one, because all these mob aren't getting a run.'

"There's so many people all over the world that take the show and so many stations take it here as well. It's on so many different nights on different stations. And the quality is fantastic isn't it?"

The quality is world class, yet it gets little attention from the mainstream music industry or media. It's a problem C-Roc of pioneering Aboriginal Hip-Hop group Native Ryme planned to address at a forum to coincide with the meeting of G20 leaders - dubbed the #Genocidal20 by Aboriginal activists - in Brisbane in 2014.

"The whole thing that C-Roc was going on about, I'm 100% behind that," says Munk. "Honestly, there's no band out there that's on the chart or out there in the mainstream that aren't paying a publicist, that aren't paying a management team. You've gotta have a booking agent for your gigs - if you're trying to book your gigs yourself, most of the promoters or organisers won't even talk to you. The publicity side of it is the same thing. And the reason why you see stuff in magazines and online music sites and 'Rolling Stone' and places like that, is because you're paying a publicist to do that and these places are only going to accept stuff that comes from a publicist - they're not going to accept stuff that comes from the artist.

"All these acts that are in the mainstream have got the management, have got the publicist, have got the booking agent, have got the record label - you won't get into the shop without a label behind you. And blackfellas don't have money for that. You've got to find enough money to eat yourself, rather than having to pay four people for your music career to exist.

"There has to be some sort of a solution at some point. It can't go on and on and on and on and on. Which is I think why it's good that people sit down and have a yarn and bring their thoughts to the table - there has to be some way that some of our artists can break into that."

Until then, the Indij Hip-Hop Show offers a vital lifeline in just getting the music heard. Munk finally relinquished the show on September 23, 2014, in typically modest fashion, playing down the fact that he was needing to spend more time overseas as his production skills were in demand. Asked why he never speaks of successes like the recent number one hits he produced in the Philippines, Munk says dismissively: "Ah, no one would believe me!"

As he handed the reins over to hand-picked co-hosts Renee Williamson and Frank Trotman-Golden, Williamson - a long-time journalist and blogger who has no fear of weighing into controversial topics - brought up the problem of hostility to Indigenous hip-hop.

"You know that old debate that gets brought up all the time," she said. "Do you have any kind of take on that? Because you get a lot of people in Oz hip-hop that kind of go, 'Ah, you know, don't rap about Aboriginal stuff because we don't get it and we can't understand it and we can't relate to it.' Or, 'It's too angry.'"

Munk replied: "I suppose in the past I've been a lot more political than the stuff that I'm doing at the moment and that's probably where doors have closed - many doors have closed over the years! And that's probably another reason why I started doing the Indij Hip-Hop Show is that so many doors close for our mob, you know, once they see that it's Aboriginal hip-hop or Torres Strait Islander hip-hop, or whatever you want to call it, doors just instantly close. But with all the new stuff, the Renegades stuff, I'm more in a band, so it's not just my thoughts any more. With the raps, I've still got the political puns in there, but I kinda make them funny in a way that people will nod their heads and go, 'Oh wow, that was pretty funny' - but once it sinks in and they actually think about it, go, 'Man that's totally messed up!'"

Williamson replied: "And I think that's part of your progression as an artist - you know, would you have been able to get to that point if you hadn't had such political content in the stuff that you'd done before?"

Munk replied: "No - and now I can just throw little political puns in every couple of bars and get away with it! I think it's very political in that there's a whole heap of little punchlines in there that go, 'Bang!'"