Abstract
This article focuses on migrant youth in regional areas of Australia who write and perform hip-hop. Hip-hop music serves as a means of ‘juggling’ the contradictions in the sense of belonging experienced by these young people, who identify as both ‘Australians’ and ‘migrants’, while also addressing regional inequalities that affect a young generation. The article examines the regional cultural context in which migrant youth create and engage in cultural practices of self-expression, reimagining and ‘localising’ global hip-hop culture. Regional practices of hip-hop can be seen as indicators of transformations in regional cultural identities brought about by gradual changes in demographics and the growing presence of non-Western migrants. The article draws on the potential wider cultural and social impacts of migrant youth's music-making, urging policymakers to utilise these grassroots practices in regional cultural, migration and settlement policies.
Introduction
During the mid-1980s, when hip-hop first rose to global prominence, its hands-on quality as a style that emerged quite literally from the street gave it an instant appeal for youth in many parts of the world (see, for example, Bennett, 1999; Mitchell, 1996). Despite its urban roots (Rose, 1991), youth in regional spaces have also appropriated hip-hop, fusing new musical and lyrical elements into its translocal soundscape (de Paar-Evans, 2020; Poliakov et al., 2020). As part of hip-hop's dialogic relationship to issues of space, place and belonging, it has become an essential resource for the youth of displaced migrant communities (Soysal, 2004). In this article, we focus on the significance of hip-hop for migrant youth in two regional Australian cities, Wagga Wagga in New South Wales and Cairns in Queensland. Using findings from ethnographic research conducted in these locations, we demonstrate how migrant youth use hip-hop to negotiate their hybrid identity (Back, 2008; Williams, 2018, as cited in Scheding, 2018) to solve the ‘contradictions’ of simultaneously belonging to Western and non-Western cultural traditions and practices. We discuss how hip-hop is utilised by migrant youth to negotiate cultural identity and establish career pathways using a music genre that remains unorthodox in these locations. We also highlight the potential wider cultural and social impacts of migrant youth's music-making, advocating policymakers to utilise these grassroots practices in regional cultural, migration and multicultural policies.
Hip-Hop, Regional Migration and Cultural Diversity
Research on hip-hop's significance in expressing marginalised cultural ‘otherness’ within multicultural urban areas covers cities including London (Williams, 2018, as cited in Scheding, 2018), Berlin (Kaya, 2001), Vancouver (Creese, 2015) and Sydney (Mitchell, 1996). The findings of this work illuminate the cultural meaning of hip-hop in the context of global cityscapes where hip-hop's symbolism and iconography are recontextualised in localised spaces of urban inequality, exclusion and associated patterns of racism, violence and precarity. Such issues closely relate to hip-hop's origins as an urban street culture in the US. To date, however, significantly less attention has been paid to regional hip-hop scenes. A recent study (Bennett et al., 2020) notes that regional music scenes frequently lack the hard and soft infrastructures (Stahl, 2004) crucial for sustainability. This situation has a particular bearing on hip-hop, frequently considered an outlier in regional music scenes where music genres such as rock and country are often favoured by local audiences. This prompts further investigation of ‘regional hip-hop’ and, more pointedly, its significance as a medium for migrant youth cultural expression.
The practices of hip-hop music are embedded in a relational and intersectional understanding of the youth's cultural belonging. Regional migrant youth's belonging can be understood as a ‘dynamic process that involves a negotiation of the axis of difference, including race, class and gender’ (Kalemba, 2025, p. 3). Theorisations of migrants’ cultural identities and relational and constructed aspects are explored in migration scholarship – for example, the concept of DIY identities (e.g. Lundberg, 2009). As such, these identities are seen as constructed through local and global influences ‘from available choices, patterns, opportunities on offer from semiosphere and media-sphere’ (Hartley, 1999, p. 178, cited in Wilson, 2012). The concept of migrants’ cultural hybridity (e.g. Back, 2008; Hall, 2000 [1988]) elaborates on the roles of transnational connections and intercultural interactions. As such, migrants construct, maintain and negotiate collective identities attached to multiple places and cultures, which Stuart Hall (1988 [1988]) discussed as ‘new ethnicities’. This phenomenon of cultural hybridity has a particular bearing on the younger (second) generation of migrants (Back, 2008; Vukojević, 2019). Despite having a higher level of acculturation than newly arrived migrants through learning the English language from childhood and receiving education and professional training within institutions of the ‘host’ country, the second generation is defined as belonging neither to the country of origin nor to the host country, but somewhere ‘in between’. Their ‘third place’ cultural belonging is constituted by a ‘hybridity of identity’, in which cultural practices and upbringing within non-Western migrant families ‘clash’ with the institutionalised cultural traditions and social practices of the Western ‘host’ countries in which young migrants were brought up. The particular idiosyncrasy of ‘being in between’ cultures is the ability to negotiate contradictions among conflicting ideas, feelings, and ways of life. By doing so, young migrants are likely to find the ‘middle term’ obscured from the major cultures.
Music in this context can be understood as a practice of demarcation of various cultural identities and, at the same time, the practice of claiming and negotiating cultural belonging. Mhurchú (2016) argues that music should be seen as a vernacular practice of negotiations and obtaining citizenship, in which citizenship, following Isin's (2009) argument, should be seen not as a status but as a practice. Citizenship, therefore, is ‘the process of claiming and performing rights to belong; it thus enables us to rethink “who” can be a citizen beyond the already-existing rights-bearing liberal subject’ (Mhurchú, 2016, p. 157). Music's significance as a space of re-enactment of cultural citizenship is evident from other studies examining popular music genres – for example, British hip-hop artists of British citizenship and Pakistani ancestry, vocalising this dilemma of hybrid belonging through lyrics formulated as ‘Englishman amongst Arabs and an Arab amongst Englishmen’ (Williams, 2018, as cited in Scheding, 2018, p. 448).
Existing research shows that, based on their histories and predominant norms, regional areas in Australia and elsewhere are more likely to stereotype young people who display stylistic allegiance to musical genres such as punk, goth, and hip-hop (e.g. Farrugia, 2020). This can also impact negatively on the mental health of these young people due to feelings of being ostracised as outsiders. If regional locations in Australia frequently work to exclude youth whose appearance aligns with stylised forms of urban youth culture, given the dominance of white Anglo populations in these locations, such stereotyping is apt to become more intense towards youth who originate from outside of Australia and are non-Western or whose parents are non-Western migrants (Tetreault, 2015). For the youth of such migrant communities, the impact of exclusion can be keenly felt, particularly as their emerging identities acquire new sensibilities from the host community.
The case studies presented in this article illustrate how migrant youth utilise hip-hop as a creative practice to negotiate cultural exclusion, invent new images of self through unique accents, languages and metaphors which address an agenda of hybrid identities in regional Australian settings. This process can be seen as a regional Australian ‘localisation’ of global hip-hop (Bennett, 1999) and an effort to construct and vocalise new forms of hybrid identities in regional settings.
Methodology
This article draws on findings from a three-year research project examining the roles of music practices in regional migrant settlement in Australia. Overall, 98 online semi-structured and in-depth interviews were conducted, 50 of which were with ‘migrant musicians’ – music practitioners of various ethnic backgrounds, ages, genders, and migrant pathways (skilled migrants, humanitarian migrants). This article particularly utilises stories of five young people aged 19 to 32 who participated in the study and were actively involved in local hip-hop scenes in Wagga Wagga and Cairns. These artists possessed distinctive cultural and social backgrounds. Four out of five identified as male and one as female. Four out of five consider themselves ‘first-generation Australians’, having relocated at a young age to Australia. One of the artists was born in Australia; however, he strongly identified himself with his Hispanic migrant ancestry. All five participants belong to various ethnic backgrounds, such as Liberian, Hispanic, Sudanese, Kenyan, Indian, and New Zealand Māori. The pathways of their parents also varied, including students, skilled migrants (e.g. university lecturers) with established family ties in Australia or humanitarian migrants who had fled from zones of military conflict. Two of the artists did not finish high school. One had graduated from a local community college, while two of the artists studied at university, one in a regional university and one at a university in Brisbane. Participants are anonymised, although several consented to the use of their professional artist names. In addition to hip-hop musicians themselves, interviews were conducted with local music stakeholders (festival organisers, arts organisations, and musical education bodies such as conservatories or colleges) as well as providers of migrant settlement services. Analysis was conducted on migrant musicians’ song lyrics, as well as their presence in digital spaces, including personal websites, digital streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud) and social media.
Regional Towns of Migrant Hip-Hop Presence
Wagga Wagga is the largest inland city in New South Wales. It is located 500 km from Canberra, Australia's capital city, and approximately 500 km from Sydney, the largest metropolitan area in Australia. Wagga Wagga's population is around 67,000 people (ABS, 2021), with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander people comprising about 6.6% of the population. Overall, 9.5% of households speak a language other than English at home, including Kurdish, Malayalam, Mandarin, Arabic, and Punjabi. Wagga Wagga established one of the first regional cultural support services in New South Wales and has been accommodating humanitarian migrant entrants since 1988. Over the years, Wagga Wagga has seen arrivals from Afghanistan, Bhutan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Myanmar, Tibet, Pakistan, the Philippines, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Syria. The Multicultural Council's role is to support migrants’ transition into Australian life through English language and employment support, and the management of everyday living needs of newly arrived humanitarian settlers. The region has also seen an influx of skilled migrants from India, China, and Southeast Asia. They play a vital role in the regional economy, contributing to healthcare, social assistance, agricultural production, and manufacturing.
Cairns is situated in Far North Queensland, approximately 1,695 km from Brisbane, the state capital. The population of Cairns is about 167,000 people (ABS, 2021), including 10.6% Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander individuals. Overall, 15.8% of households speak a language other than English at home, including Japanese, Italian, Punjabi, and Cape York Peninsula languages. This significant influx of migrants to Cairns can be linked to its geographical proximity to other countries in the Asia-Pacific region. International tourism, based on Cairns’s proximity to the Great Barrier Reef, is vital to the city's economy. Humanitarian settlers from countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia also form a part of Cairns's migrant communities. Despite being an Australian gateway to the Asia-Pacific region, Cairns remains a ‘provincial town’ that is very remote from major urban centres.
‘No one Came from Africa in my School’: Setting the Context for Multicultural Youth’s Music Practices
If migrant communities in regional Australia are small and scattered across large geographical areas, the number of peers from the same cultural backgrounds can be even smaller for migrant youth. The absence of culturally relevant age and gender role models significantly impacts how their identity crisis is experienced and resolved. In the Australian regional context, non-Western migrant communities are represented by small yet highly diverse cultures, which can be subdivided into various ethnicities, spoken languages, and faiths practised. However, this cultural complexity may not be recognised by the host community. Instead, migrants are often re-grouped into nominal ethnic and cultural categories, stereotyped as ‘Africans’, ‘Filipinos’, or ‘Indians’.
Furthermore, for some migrants from refugee backgrounds, the lack of a complete family with immediate relatives, a mother or father, plays a crucial role in fostering a sense of non-belonging. Equally, the issue of non-belonging can have intergenerational implications, in which a family history of exclusion often influences a youth's sense of self within the local community. In other words, parents’ relations with the community, and their sense of belonging, define migrant youth's feelings of acceptance and impact their social trajectories.
Often, migrant youth portray themselves as being the only ‘visible’ teenagers in their school, underlining the sense of exclusion: My accent was different because I went to the International American School; my accent was like a mixture of American and African, now it's mixed with the Australian one … I faced a lot of racism, especially in my first school, everyone was always making fun of me because I’m from Africa, no one came from Africa in my school, they called me ‘an African kid’ – ‘it's an African kid!’ But when I became more mature and grew up, I thought that I’m actually proud of being African, why am I ashamed of it?! (Ben Jones, Cairns)
The significance of similar cultural images of self is crucial in the context of youth, where feelings of difference or ‘otherness’ can trigger an identity crisis. According to some scholars (e.g. Erikson, 1968) the youth identity crisis acts as a mechanism that facilitates transitions from one life cycle to another, characterised by distinct physiological growth, mental maturation, and attitudes towards social responsibilities and interactions. The period of adolescence is seen by some as ‘almost a way of life’ (Erikson, 1968, p. 128), with meaningful ideas and trustworthy relationships, during which personal unification with traditions is sought and tested.
This ‘formative time’ occurs in specific regional settings, affecting the biographies of migrant youth. They can be characterised through colonial histories, creating a specific set of social and cultural power relations based on cultural and racial difference. Regional areas are demographically characterised by ‘whiteness and dominance of Anglo-Celtic population’ (Radford, 2017, p. 498), and, therefore, established cultural identities and practices based around these demographic characteristics. The cultural and racial homogeneity of regional and rural areas may be seen in the image of close-knit communities with a strong feeling of local belonging, resulting in resistance to ‘outsiders’ and hence exclusive social and cultural practices (e.g. Udah & Singh, 2018). Although regional areas in Australia had previously experienced the settlement of non-Western migrants (Collins et al., 2020), the cultural impact of such migration had left a relatively light footprint given the dominance of Western communities and Western socio-cultural practices. The era of multicultural national policies, which began in the 1970s, had a tangible impact on metropolitan areas as epicentres of multicultural population growth, forming urban areas as cosmopolitan places. Regional areas, however, had a historical handicap in the widespread implementation of multicultural principles, as the growth of Australia's multicultural population from the 1990s (Hugo, 2008) and more in the beginning of the 2000s, coincided with the government's withdrawal from multicultural policies and their gradual dismantling in the 2000s (Levey, 2019). Instead, the ‘nation first’ approach to migration more explicitly required culturally diverse migrants to conform to mainstream ‘white space’ as a condition of integration (Uptin, 2021). International migration into regional areas coincided with ‘post-multicultural policies’ (Levey, 2019), characterised by the regional competition for migrant labour and the elimination of the state role in the provision of multicultural rights and intercultural dialogue (Forbes-Mewett et al., 2022). In this context, regional actors found themselves responsible for governing multicultural relations through narratives of diversity, welcoming attitudes, and celebrations of regional diverse cultural heritages. Despite these efforts to accommodate growing multicultural populations, these often symbolic initiatives tend not to be sufficiently effective in addressing the historically established social and cultural hierarchies, resulting in migrant inequalities in access to employment, services, or social networks. Therefore, the regional context is not only characterised by a physical absence or scarcity of non-Western migrants, but also by a lack of infrastructures, spaces, and institutional practices that legitimise cultural diversity as an everyday norm. These factors influence social relations of power today and are likely to shape the life trajectories of multicultural youth.
Hip-Hop as a DIY Practice of Cultural Belonging
The lack of local cultural images of non-Western people makes hip-hop a significant cultural resource for migrant youth in appropriating an image they consider relevant to their ethnic minority and often marginal cultural status within a regional Australian context. Hip-hop becomes a medium through which regional migrant youth acquire knowledge relating to history, politics, and race relations from a perspective that connects with culturally or socially marginalised voices. This utilisation of hip-hop as a cultural medium develops Farrugia's (2015) notion of youth using global communication technologies (TV, videogames) to connect various distant cultural geographies and rework regional symbolic inequalities, where regional areas are portrayed as culturally peripheral compared to urban settings. Similar to digital communication, hip-hop has become regional youth's way of connecting with ‘metrocentric economies of cool’(Farrugia, 2015, p. 8), where urban areas are associated with glamour and cultural sophistication. By utilising hip-hop as a global ‘media’, regional youth connect with cultural identities absent in their geographical areas, sourcing the images of marginalised voices. The presence of global hip-hop in the local cultural landscape facilitates the adaptation of global images and languages, serving as a means of articulating belonging to global cultural geographies: I was going through all that stuff with bullying, there was stuff at home that was going on, you know, my dad was pretty abusive and stuff. Pretty much, I would hang out with my homies, and they were into rap, and I was relating more and more to music. Because it was more and more like ‘Fuck the system’, ‘fuck everything’, and I was about that. Like everything in the world, fuck the world. I remember listening to Tupac, and I started studying his lyrics, really heavily. Tupac is a great lyricist, and there is no doubt about that. Eventually, you started to write your stupid little lyrics. I had no concept of how to write anything like that, I just kind of started. (Aztec Flow, Wagga Wagga)
Through this articulation of hip-hop as a space of expression, via the creative writing process, rappers describe hip-hop as a pivotal point in their biographies, which some define as a transition from ‘nothingness’ of non-belonging into ‘being something’ (Interview). This moment of self-recognition is underscored by the capability of creating a piece of art as an act of self-reflection. The notion of hip-hop as a space of self-affirmation is closely related to the topic of music and well-being (Bennett & Nikulinsky, 2019). The research reveals that, in remote areas, music for young people can be an essential tool for finding solace and expression of vulnerability. As a mirror, ‘music enables one to recognise oneself’ (Bennett & Nikulinsky, 2019, p. 192).
Due to its hands-on nature, hip-hop proved accessible to youth in a way not possible with genres such as rock and pop, where participation involved the mastering of a musical instrument such as guitar or keyboards (e.g. Bennett, 1980). This, along with hip-hop's suitability as a platform for social commentary, resulted in wider participation among youth and also sparked interest among youth workers and others in the value of hip-hop as a means of promoting well-being among young people (Tille Allen, 2005). As hip-hop's global reach has continued to expand, so have the range of challenges facing youth. Elongated transitions from education to work (Wyn & White, 2020), combined with a precarious labour market (MacDonald & Giazitzoglu, 2019), create anxiety among youth, as do ongoing experiences of stigmatisation and exclusion, including those based on racial and gender stereotypes (Creese, 2015).
As the foregoing account illustrates, the creative function of hip-hop is often linked to mental well-being, with hip-hop being perceived as a safe space where meaningful answers can be found: It's rap. It started with me not being able to talk with anyone about my issues and realising that they won’t understand. I started here from a poetry slam here in Wagga called Raw Poetry. I just started with myself and felt that I had buttoned up and that I couldn’t talk to anyone. My friends wouldn’t understand, they wouldn’t react the same way as I would want my mum to react, or my dad. I don’t feel comfortable enough to go somewhere and talk to someone or explain something to them, so they would not understand. So, if I put it in my rap, I assume that few will understand, and it gives me hope. I know that I said this thing, and there is a beat to it, it's catchy, and someone can come and listen to my lyrics. And they can say that ‘this guy went to [through] some things’. This is what it's all about. They are more engaged, rather than me saying ‘hey man …’, this kind of way, and ‘blah-blah-blah’, ‘get over it, mate, you will be alright’, you know … (Robmokot, Wagga Wagga).
This process of self-affirmation is reflected through invented metaphors and images of self, as well as native accents and languages. Research on the localisation of hip-hop has demonstrated how this often involves the adoption of local languages and/or dialects in the writing and performing of rap lyrics (e.g. Mitchell, 1996). Similar patterns emerge in the data collected for our study. The use of accents and languages become part of cultural innovation and, at the same time, deliberate social acts of self-representation. For instance, rapping with an accent can be perceived by other, non-migrant hip-hop musicians as something that won’t succeed in the ‘Aussie’ hip-hop scene. I do feel Australian, definitely. But I also feel Liberian. I had a lot of criticism from people who were saying that my music won’t go anywhere because I don’t rap in the Aussie accent, which is a bit awful for me here, because there is a language barrier, I can’t fully commit to one side. I can’t do it, it can’t happen. I can’t rap with the Aussie accent. (Robmokot, Wagga Wagga)
For young female hip-hop artists, hip-hop improvisation provides opportunities for finding new definitions of self, which play a significant role in constructing gender identity. In the case of female rappers, creating an image of black femininity and sexuality is more complex, entangled in and stereotyped by popular culture images, historically entrenched politics of respectability, refugee origins and regional cultural (white) landscapes. African women, historically facing subjugation on multiple fronts, deployed the politics of respectability to combat racism and sexism by visually and culturally identifying themselves as ‘white, bourgeois, “pure” women’, whose respectability was opposed to ‘irreverence’, associated with exotic, hypersexualised and objectified images of black femininity (Chepp, 2015). These stereotypes, resulting from social and racial injustice, however, are exacerbated within black hip-hop culture, portraying black females in misogynistic and sexualised forms. A hip-hop feminism as a cultural movement appears as a creative practice allowing for a re-thinking of sexist overtones associated with ‘patriarchal hip-hop’, to explore black femininity as powerful, authentic and creative in order to combat objectified or victimised discourse (Henry, 2010). Even though young women may have a ‘love-hate’ relationship with hip-hop, where ‘women rappers’ raunchy, debaucherous, and sexually explicit discourses were understood to maintain – rather than challenge – the status quo’ (Chepp, 2015, p. 215), at the same time, hip-hop is utilised as a space of resistance to the racism and sexism they experience. In regional settings, it can be seen as an attempt to claim a space by blurring the dichotomy between respectful (white, middle-class, virtuous and pure) images of femininity and imposed images of black irreverence, often aggravated by class stereotypes associated with a ‘refugee background’. One female hip-hop artist commented on her music as being a ‘relaxed’ hip-hop style, defused of the aggressive masculinity often associated with the genre. At the same time, the lyrics gravitate more towards poetry, claiming hip-hop space as a high art (respectful) form of expression. Chepp (2015) notes that female rappers utilise hip-hop specifically to blur the border between the entrenched dichotomy of ‘respect/irreverence’ to challenge patriarchal and racist discourses of black sexuality. However, in the case of regional female hip-hop, this ‘respect’ can be claimed through metaphors of colourfulness, picturing its femininity through the beauty of elements of nature and avoiding gender or racial references: Powerful I’m a woman I’m wonderful Full of wonder I’m colourful! I’m sure I’m not a drop in the ocean I’m the ocean you try containing In the drop that you are waiting for Not realising I have no fear Of falling with no ferns on the ground One fails to catch me Amongst the flowers I will be found (A female spoken-word artist, Wagga Wagga)
These lyrics can be seen as a plea for more complex and multifaceted representations of black femininity in a white-dominated cultural space. The song claims a uniqueness that cannot be easily understood (‘I’m the ocean you try containing’, ‘one fails to catch me’), but cannot be ignored either (‘I am not a drop in the ocean’). Rather, it reclaims its right for respect by being beyond definitions and embracing ‘colours’ without fear. Such a statement can be seen as a powerful attempt to create definitions of self despite the heavy weight of cultural, media and class labelling.
Utilising the creative flexibility of language afforded by hip-hop's rhymed and improvisatory poetry, migrant musicians ‘juggle’ languages and accents, historical events and their biographies, cultural stereotypes, and crafted metaphors in order to find definitions of ‘authentic selves’. As Aztec Flow points out, his personality can be viewed as a ‘sum of temperament, upbringing, personal taste, and dramas’, rather than nationality, race, and ethnicity (Interview). Through juggling identities and languages, images, invented metaphors and definitions, migrant youth rework the conflicts and contradictions of cultural belonging, suggesting alternatives to public perceptions and narratives of ‘otherness’.
Practising Hip-Hop in Regional Areas: Juggling Regional Inequalities, Inventing New Musical Pathways
Live music scenes in regional parts of Australia (Bennett et al., 2019) are frequently patronised by audiences who prefer genres such as rock, country and folk. Due to an out-migration of youth from these areas, such styles often retain a monopoly among music taste cultures in regional settings. Consequently, hip-hop and other genres such as punk and indie tend to be excluded from regional scenes. This problem is exacerbated due to the lack of hard and soft music infrastructures (Stahl, 2004) in regional settings. Music venues are scarce and are already incorporated into the fabric of existing music scenes. Such inbuilt bias creates palpable barriers for hip-hop artists, exacerbating their exclusion from community participation on the basis of their race and culture in regional areas, where dominant cultural narratives of ‘white Australia’ continue to be prevalent.
In response, young migrants invent creative pathways to practise hip-hop music through creating regional hip-hop spaces and reworking geographical and symbolic inequalities 2 . This includes the utilisation of arts spaces in other locations that are friendly to hip-hop. For instance, the existing slam poetry movement in Sydney, Canberra and, eventually, regional New South Wales has become an opportunity for beginning hip-hop artists to master their improvisatory and artistic skills in Wagga Wagga. For some, slam poetry networks provided the opportunity to build a ‘soft’ regional infrastructure of hip-hop, based on individual networks and contacts. Young hip-hop artists often participate, as MCs or musicians, in existing multicultural events, such as Multicultural Festivals, Refugee Week or Harmony days, arranged by the local government for the settled international migrant communities. The utilisation of such platforms, however, is often accompanied by a compromise, as young migrants are frequently positioned as part of a local ethnic minority rather than local examples of the contemporary global hip-hop scene.
Regional multicultural services and state art programs for migrant settlers that occasionally expand their activities beyond urban areas remain a critical avenue for migrant youth to access pathways into music-making. In Wagga Wagga, the lucky combination of local music activists from Multicultural Council Wagga Wagga and Riverina College allowed for creating long-term musical workshops for newly arrived migrant children in the 2010s. This collaboration with visiting musicians from Sydney introduced them to the basics of hip-hop, including lyric writing, using samples and recording software. Those urban expeditions to regional areas became a pivotal point for the appearance and growth of young hip-hop artists from migrant backgrounds in the mid-2010s: I think we made like an EP with them, they helped us with a release party, and we also went up to Sydney twice for performances. We went to the club in 2013, and then we performed at the Red Dwarf Theatre. They also would hold yearly showcases, which would include Sydney artists, and I think that Wagga was the only place to go up [to Sydney] to make showcases. Through these showcases, I actually met my best friends, my friend Anu, he is from the Islander [Pacific Islands] background. I started building up connections with people; I started to look at stuff seriously and look at the business aspects of music. Then I had to leave Heaps Decent because they are … a charity, basically, they do non-profit stuff. They were there to work with kids, but they weren’t there to give me a record deal! [Laughing]. (Aztec Flow, Wagga Wagga) As a first-generation Australian, or even as a young refugee in Australia, it's a new culture you are adjusting yourself to. And if you find that you are good in music, you are good in arts, it's very few people you can turn to, who can help you to nurture your talent. And even if you go to your parents and they support you, they are also new to this culture, they are also new to this country and this town. They might not know where to go with it. They like – ‘Oh, you are good at this, but how do we make this go further?’ And this is what we are missing here, that little ‘in between’. Yes, we can build talents to a certain point, and then we need to go further. There are not many resources for that. (A female spoken-word artist, Wagga Wagga)
Expanding Regional Geographies Through Digital Networks
As noted earlier, a defining characteristic of global hip-hop culture is the network of translocal connections existing between hip-hop scenes across the world. While physical location is an important resource in creating meaningful narratives in hip-hop lyrics, in searching for a distinctive identity, hip-hop artists often transcend the limits of their own physical locale. This can be particularly important for hip-hop artists in regional and remote areas where access to resources and music industry infrastructure is more difficult than in urban locations.
Several of our research participants noted this, and at least one had managed to establish a profile through promoting his work outside of Australia. For musicians in Cairns, being remote from urban areas in Australia might mean being closer to hip-hop scenes and audiences of the Asia Pacific. For instance, D’Crae utilises his cultural connections with the Pacific Islands (Samoa, Tonga) and Papua New Guinea to collaborate with local artists and access local hip-hop scenes. In attempting to mitigate the geographical disadvantage of place, regional hip-hop youth use digital media to position themselves as a part of the global hip-hop landscape. Ben Jones notes he is ‘puttin’ a city on a map’ through his songs ‘Cairns to LA’, ‘CNS’ (which is an acronym for Cairns), and ‘Up North’. Digital platforms, such as YouTube, Soundcloud and Spotify are a major way of connecting with global audiences and attempting to monetise music or find new career opportunities. When I look at my stats [on Spotify] I can see that my audience, a lot of my thousands and thousands my fans they are coming from a worldwide, like Brazil, Germany, Turkey … Turkey is actually my number one country. It's so weird! I was expecting Australia would be my biggest audience. Don’t get me wrong, I still have a big audience in Cairns. (Ben Jones, Cairns) The first thing I did was to contact my radio stations that I had here; I have contacted papers that I had [in Cairns]. I wouldn’t [have] been able to put the song out there. Nothing at this time. Everyone was like – ‘oh yeah …’[unenthusiastically]. So, I had to get more support from outside Australia, and I found out that I got more support in America than I did in my own country, and that was a problem. It is very hard for people in regional isolated areas to get out there, to have that support, to push forward, because I think, like I said before, music is going mainstream in America, so if you are noticed over there, you’re going to get noticed over here, which is a problem really because you know … I’m of an Indian background. It shouldn’t have taken [becoming known] in America to be noticed here in Australia … To notice me here, when I’m [already] here. (D’Crae, Cairns)
Discussion and Conclusion
Regional migrant youth hip-hop music practices can be characterised in terms of several interrelated crises. The crisis of identity, particularly for young people, becomes a quest to resolve the contradictions of their hybrid cultural identity. Regional settings, characterised by colonial histories and scarcity of multicultural spaces, infrastructures and practices, together with scarce migrant populations and existing role models for multicultural youth, intensify migrant youth's identity crisis.
Hip-hop practices serve as a significant space for self-reflection, a venue for experimenting with identity through innovative metaphors, varied accents and languages, or reimagined historical events. Composing lyrics and songs offers a sense of liberation, as socially imposed racial or ethnic constraints can be transformed into relevant descriptions of self. Hip-hop music-making is enacted as a creative practice to alleviate the crisis of migrant youth's hybrid identity, providing a safe environment where frustrations can be articulated and reshaped into productive narratives. Importantly, hip-hop is employed to renegotiate social hierarchies, repositioning migrant youth from a ‘cultural minority’ as creative artists within a global popular culture and a thriving industry crafted by culturally marginalised voices.
However, artists’ pathways in regional Australia present several overlapping challenges, stemming from their cultural marginalisation within regional music scenes, distances and symbolic inequalities between urban and regional areas, lack of social and financial capital to practise music, scarcity of spaces of inclusive arts, and the general fragility of regional music scenes. To mitigate these challenges, migrant hip-hop artists utilise homes as arts spaces, as well as local niche art spaces, such as multicultural events or spoken-word competitions. Migrant hip-hop artists utilise hip-hop to overcome local limitations by establishing translocal networks and connections worldwide through digital streaming platforms to address regional music's structural inequalities and the scarcity of spaces for ‘other’ expressions of identity. Consequently, in some rare instances, regional migrant hip-hop artists attract international audiences and markets, forge collaborations, and release songs played by overseas radio stations. However, the most common pathways for migrant musicians involve out-migration or finding a profession within the existing regional job market while practising hip-hop in their leisure time, in the ‘hidden’ private space of their home. Despite these challenges, migrant hip-hop practices can be seen as a space for creativity and as an effort to reconfigure regional spatial identities, reimagined within a global cultural context.
Regional migrant youth set their ambition as promoting Australia within a global hip-hop scene (which they regard as a ‘black’ cultural movement that they represent locally; Interview, D’Crae) and to challenge the notion that regional areas are those where ‘nothing happens’ (Farrugia et al., 2014, p. 13). Such a repositioning points to a need for cultural policymakers to recognise the potential of migrant youth in enriching regional music landscapes and creating accessible pathways for emerging regional artists from multicultural backgrounds. Even though the national multicultural strategy ‘Revive’ (Australia’s National Cultural Policy, 2023) acknowledges the necessity to democratise the arts sector and make a ‘place for every story’, the implementation of such a promise is unclear. As O’Connor points out, this is not only the question of ‘recognition’ of marginalised voices as a form of identity politics, but also ‘redistribution’ – addressing inequalities of access and practice within the arts sector (2022, p. 45). The implementation of a ‘place for every story’ principle for regional migrant youth means the creation of spaces for musical experimentation and ‘alternative’ genres for regional areas; shifting the focus beyond the conventional cultural infrastructures to other spaces of multicultural encounters and creative sharing (small venues, local youth-led initiatives, settlement organisations, community spaces). ‘Redistribution’ means creating accessible pathways for artists by negotiating social and cultural hierarchies within regional areas and regional music scenes. These ‘methodological’ steps are inevitably embedded in a discussion of the values of the local arts in the communities, questions of youth mental health, well-being, and their connections with cultural belonging. Beyond cultural policy, the conversation about youth's cultural belonging and representation is shaped by a broader frame of reference, encompassing the structural inequalities of multicultural populations based on their visibility and migration history.
The musical practices of regional migrant youth also generate an inquiry into migration and multicultural policies. For instance, opportunities for migrant youth's music align with questions about the attraction and retention of multicultural populations in the regions (Boese et al., 2020). Migrant youth's participation in local music scenes can also lead to stronger intercultural communication within regional communities, impacting local social cohesion, migrants’ civic participation and well-being. Migrant youth's grassroots music practices can be perceived as intervention opportunities for integrated health, cultural and migration policies, in which hip-hop should be seen as a space of youth's well-being, cultural belonging, and regional multiculturalism.
Footnotes
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.