Native Ryme

When you're representing a culture that has lasted 60,000 years, it doesn’t matter that your debut album has taken a mere 20.

"We’ve always prided ourselves on coming from a culture that’s been a song and dance culture for millennia, you know," says C-Roc, whose rap group, Native Ryme, are only just releasing an album a generation after he formed the band in 1994.

Native Ryme’s journey has been every bit as epic, in its own way, as that of the first Australians. 

Native Ryme were the first nationally recognised Indigenous rap group in Australia. In 1998, they became the first hip-hop group in the country to win a certified national music award. Under the management of multi-ARIA Award-winning artist Martin Lee of Regurgitator, the group released their first single, “Together”. A collaboration with Australian rock legends Tex Perkins and The Cruel Sea, it gained Native Ryme gold/platinum sales and extensive radio play when it featured on the ARIA-nominated 2001 Mushroom Records album Corroboration, which also featured Kylie Minogue, Dan Sultan and others. Native Ryme toured with The Cruel Sea until 2003, which led Tex Perkins to exclaim: “It’s either you have it or you don’t. Native Ryme have it.” In 2004 they went on tour with US Grammy Award-winning rap icons Naughty By Nature, gaining the Aboriginal group major label offers in Australia and in the US.

It was all a bit much for two kids from remote Australia, as C-Roc and his writing partner DeeKay are. They stepped back from the limelight, instead running hip-hop workshops in remote communities right across Australia at a prolific rate - 176 in just 10 months at one point. They found it so emotionally rewarding that they kept it up for eight years.

"You know, I came from a simplistic lifestyle," says C-Roc.

“It was rough, then to win an Australian music award and be told by Grammy Award winners that what I have is world class, it's pressure in the sense of, well, what shall I do? The industry gave us everything on a platter, you know, the biggest stars in the country were at our parties, it was there for the taking, whatever our hearts desired, it was there, whatever it happened to be back then, but it didn’t satisfy what mattered.

“A true artist will always be a conflicted being, because you walk a fine line between sanity and insanity. You can go on and do whatever you need to do in your life, but if you’re not happy with 1 million, you’re not going to be happy with 2 million and you’re not going to be happy with 10 million. We’d never be where we are today if I didn’t find myself on the bones of my arse in the gutter, losing my mind. That’s what happened to me when I started losing it. I had to go away personally and find out what was making me sick - and what was making me sick was I had to make peace with myself and start bringing more compassion.”

Sitting on a park bench on Sydney’s Oxford Street at 1am, having just completed Native Ryme’s first show of a three-year album tour, C-Roc finally seems at peace with himself. As he speaks in his quiet, clipped, but contemplative way, he is approached by old friends, fans and well-wishers who drift up to say hello, shake his hand, and praise him about that night’s superlative performance.

He’s come a long way from his traumatic childhood - a subject he comes out swinging against on the album’s opening track, “Same Song”, whose proceeds are going to educational programs against domestic violence. 

The classy and classically-driven track wastes no time in establishing that Native Ryme are in a class of their own.

The morning rises
She gets up with her kids
To make sure they’re all right
She’s got her make-up on
She says it helps her face another day
Then her kids look up and say,
'Mummy, why we gotta stay? We can run away.’...

"I come from the Gulf of Carpentaria in a remote community," says C-Roc. 

“My mother had me when she was 15, my father was 15. He was around for a little bit. I knew of him when I grew up, I knew who he was, but he didn't really want too much to do with me, that was my perception. My grandmother, his mother, would invite him to interact with me, but you’re in the same house with your father for a weekend and you see him once around the corner, as a kid you take note of that, you know. You’re a sponge, an emotional sponge, so you take that quite personally.

“So my whole experience - which built my soft spot now - is I don’t like seeing people belittled. I don’t like seeing someone put down because someone wishes to feel stronger about themselves, which actually means probably they’re weaker than the person, you know what I mean? I have a really weak point for bullies, I don’t like bullies.

“I grew up in a really, really violent household, really violent. As a kid, I examined what was going on, why it was going on, my perception of why it was going on. I had an aunty who was actually murdered by her partner. That’s why I wrote 'Same Song’. You know, I have a four-month-old daughter now, so I’m her first example of what a man should be. And I can be a part of the problem or I can be a part of the solution. So me being a part of the solution is I be an example to her of what she should look for in a man.

“I had to think, how do I want to end this song, does the lady die, or does she get away? And I thought it would be more empowering if the message was strength and empowerment, you know. A song that ended with promise and a new day. I try to write music that stimulates the human being rather than encase them into something that’s going to imprison them.”

It’s dark now, no sound
Tiptoe and brown bag
Baby sleep, baby’s hush now
Yellow cab, ‘Sir, drive now.’
He sleeps, snores sound
Cellphone, ‘Sis, you come now.
You’re all right, you’re strong now
He cries, and you smile now
He cries, and you smile now.’

It was that freeing of the human spirit from all forms of abuse, both intimate and institutional, that drove C-Roc to work in remote communities.

“I knew first hand that you can treat a child so badly and bury them by truckloads of negativity, but if you feed them a teaspoon of positivity the right way, it’ll outweigh - it washes clean - the negativity,” he says. 

“And that’s what I experienced as a child, you know, my uncle, who was my father figure, would come back about once every six to 12 months and I could put up with 12 months’ worth of negativity, of seeing my mother being bashed.

“I used to walk out and find an uncle with, you know, a .303 barrel in his mouth and saying to me, ‘You don’t need to be seeing this.’ And by the age of eight I was, like, you know, ‘Point it at your head. Don’t point it at your jaw. If you’re going to do it, do it properly,’ you know, because my mother told me to say that. ‘If you wake up in the lounge room and he’s got a gun in his mouth, tell him to put it through his head, not his mouth.’

“That numbs you, you get numb to what it means to be human. And a lot of the Indigenous youth these days have such depth when it comes to their emotional capacity. They’re such compassionate and caring young people, but they’re conditioned to lock that in their shell, you know, and be hard because that’s what society expects them to be and that’s what they have to do to protect themselves.”

Many Indigenous people lose that battle to protect themselves, and C-Roc has written a dedication to all those lost in the struggle - a heartfelt and heart-breaking love letter titled, “We’ll Always Love You”.

“I wrote ‘We’ll Always Love You’ a long, long time ago and it was a track that was directly connected to my personal experience,” he says. 

“You can’t really write about someone else’s loss, because everyone perceives things from their own angle. So ‘We’ll Always Love You’ was about my life and how I’ve lost a lot of friends, you know, a lot of friends. It’s a tragedy what’s happening in Indigenous communities, the amount of suicide. From us leaving Brisbane to coming to Sydney, we got three phone calls from three brothers committing suicide. I know friends who aren’t Indigenous who have never buried somebody...”

He laughs a bitter, empty laugh.

“...and it shocks me, you know? Then you start realising, ‘I’ve got a pretty shitty end of the stick here.’ What my culture is going through is pretty bloody bad and it’s a human rights issue. The Australian government hasn’t addressed anything in recent years, like black deaths in custody. None of the recommendations that were put were followed through.”

The Aboriginal remand population has increased by more than 500% since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody two decades ago. Today, Australia jails black males at a rate more than five times greater than South Africa did during the dying days of apartheid - and in Western Australia, more than eight times. Shortly after we speak, C-Roc escapes a four-year jail term after a three-year trial. Indigenous incarceration is an issue he unlocks in the towering “Black Phantoms Weight In Gold”. The song showcases the band’s ability to control a stage show, building and building on level upon level of emotion until it hits the audience right in the chest.

Words as weapons
Keys to unlocking the gate
People from everywhere
Hold me from unlocking the gate...

"Oh yeah - whoah," says C-Roc when asked about the song. Then he draws in a sharp breath and exhales. 

“I've got a cousin-brother - I call him my cousin-brother because my mother and his mother are sisters - he’s doing nine years right now, all for something stupid. 'Black Phantoms Weight In Gold’ is about the mentality, the psyche, that tells someone to make a decision on the spur of the moment that in return is going to lock them in a cell for nine years, you know.”

I think about your fate
What’s my cousin-brother doing lately
Stay strong
Murri stay strong
I send you spirits
From the ancients
That walk along with me

Several days’ worth of beard growth obscure a tattoo on C-Roc’s neck that reads “Property of...” It’s a reminder that he also served time in the past for doing what he calls “just something stupid”.

“Just, you know, having misdirected aggression towards the system,” he says. 

“I didn’t really know which part of it was actually my enemy, or why it was my enemy. So I went in for, you know, just assaulting police officers and stuff, just meaningless stuff, you know. And they tend to slam young black people with 10 times harsher sentences. I wear white when I go to court, because white is saintly, angelic. I never wear black when I go to court.”

He laughs.

“At the end of that track there’s actually a speech by a black activist in Brisbane called Coco Wharton and he talks about the Palm Island riot."

The riot flared up after the death in custody of Aboriginal man Mulrunji Doomadgee on the island in 2004.

"He says, you know, if they wanna take your rights, they’re going to come in your home and take your rights. Then you need to fight them. You need to fight them, and you need to fight them, and you need to fight them. If you’ve got to go to jail, then you go to jail for something that’s worthwhile.

“It’s a track that sort of flips its meaning. It talks about the mentality of prisoners, but it also talks about how silly it is. It’s a beautiful track, it names the prisons and it’s meant to be a message also to them to say that, you know, we haven’t forgotten about you, you know, we know you’re in there and just know that we’re thinking about you.”

Woodford, Lotus, Stewart’s Creek, Palem
Young Murri I feel your pulse
Got you up on this phone now
SDL, Wolston, Arthur Gorrie, Townsville
Young Murri I feel your pulse
Now sit back and hear the song
Bathurst, Broken Hill, Silverwater, Cessnock
Young Koori I feel your pulse
Got you up on this phone now
Cooma, Grafton, Long Bay, Metro
Young brothers I feel your pulse
Now sit back and hear this flow

In the same week that Native Ryme’s tour started, the corporate media ran a story hailing a surprise reduction in the NSW prison population. There was no mention of Indigenous jailing rates. To C-Roc, such coverage is of little surprise. He rails against the corporate media in the track “Conspiracy Theories”, which he wrote after watching the coverage of the so-called Australia Day “riot” on January 26, 2012.

The Federal Opposition Leader at the time, Tony Abbott, had told the media it was time Aboriginal people “moved on” from the Tent Embassy, which was celebrating its 40th Anniversary that day. A group of Aboriginal activists and their supporters then went to the Canberra restaurant where Abbott and then-Prime Minister Julia Gillard were eating. When the protesters banged on the windows, Abbott and Gillard were bustled out of the restaurant by a phalanx of police and Gillard lost her shoe in the process. The media called it a riot.

"I like seeing myself as somebody that doesn’t take mainstream media at their word,” says C-Roc. 

“I like to look at it, then look at all the different things that could have possibly happened - and I had question marks from the get-go. And it just reminded me that every election time it’s boat people and Indigenous people, they become the whipping post, you know? And it’s all conspiracy.”

If a “conspiracy” can be taken to mean two or more people conspiring to achieve a certain outcome, then that is certainly the case with the corporate media. The outcome is the news story, the conspiracy is the arrangement the time-pressed journalists and their corporate bosses have with governments and corporations to run their press releases more or less untouched.

News agencies such as Britain’s Press Association require their reporters to file 10 stories in an eight-hour shift. One reporter for the Australian Associated Press boasted to this writer that his “record” for churning out a story was a 1500-word feature in 25 minutes. How is a reporter meant to even think in that time, never mind check any facts?

That lack of time - combined with an alignment with the establishment, mixed up with media bosses who sit on the boards of the corporations on which they are supposed to report and topped off with an inability to think outside the box - makes for woeful output.

“'Conspiracy Theories’ is about that,” says C-Roc. 

“It’s all conspiracy. There’s partnerships the media have with the government to bash Indigenous people and immigrants and boat people, whatever suits their political agenda. It’s to drum up support and take the population’s minds off real issues.”

But Native Ryme are not all about dark and heavy issues. Their great strength is in their range of dynamics - and there are plenty of fun moments on the album, too.

“Look, if I had my way, it’d all be up, you know, just by how my heart beats,” says C-Roc. 

“But the inner core of me is a writer so I like to write about different things and it’s an album that reflects the human spirit. We all go through things and we have good times and bad times and loss and love and deprivation and promise, you know? When I make my music, I make music that has a certain place in the human experience, you know what I mean? We’re all here to experience it. I mean I could always be an angry black man, it’s quite easy to do that, but I choose to expand people’s consciousness, you know? Think bigger.”

Reflecting the human spirit means the album veers from dark, heavy subjects and radical politics to party tracks and even unashamed love longs, like “Heat”.

“Yeah, we need the baby-making, you know, we need to boost the population,” smiles C-Roc. 

“I grew up on R&B, you know, my uncle introduced me to R&B, in the late Seventies and Eighties, so to make a track that was slick like honey and nectar and cupids and the sensuality between a man and a woman is a mutually balanced moment of energy where nothing else matters, you know, it’s an escape.

“And everybody knows that feeling when you totally adore someone, you’re totally in love with somebody, how when you’re with that one person time just stops, you know, the heat of that moment in time where when you don’t have it you long for it, and when you have it, it goes so quick, you know.”

He has also written “Boss”, about the kind of person that might inspire such feelings.

"Yeah, I wrote it about a female that I actually know, who is young, stunning, beautiful, Indigenous - she didn't need to be Indigenous, but it just so happened - and it was about her governing what she does with her life, you know. She goes out, she’s seen maybe as, you know, something - not another gender - but she governs that conversation, that man wants to come to her and say something, she governs what he says to her, you know what I mean?

“She’s strong and her own boss, she’s stunning and beautiful. Her mind is just as strong, as strong temperament-wise as her physical body is, she’s the new thing, she’s... Maybe it’s a subliminal thing for me, now that I have a daughter, that I hope that she grows up knowing that, you know, people treat you how you allow them to treat you, so you live your life in a manner that doesn’t demand respect, but people can’t help but give you it because of how you hold your shoulders back. Yeah."

The way C-Roc and DeeKay hold their shoulders back, and push musical boundaries forward, certainly commands respect.

"DeeKay comes from an angle that's very militant in the sense of he gets involved with the community and plays a strong role," says C-Roc. 

“Not in an intimidating role, but DeeKay is a respected song and dance man, so he teaches traditional song and dance and people take their children to him. He has a right, the traditional right to teach certain songs and dance.”

That musical ability, passed down through thousands of years, comes to the fore in the slick hip-hop of “Bounce”.

“’Bounce’ is real Jay-Z,” says C-Roc. 

“Real jigga, real homeboy, you know, it’s slick. It’s the ability to feel rhythm, you know. We’ve always prided ourselves on coming from a culture that’s been a song and dance culture for millennia. So we wanted to do a track that showed our ability to hit that slick a little bit more than most groups could attempt to do - but quite easily.”

He smiles.

“It was a little bit of a statement.”