Winnipeg-based seasoned hip-hop veteran Hellnback is coming at you with another block rocking jam including footage of a Bboy dance battle in his local urban setting.
If you don't already know about this heavyweight native MC, Hellnback aka Kool-ayd of Warparty aka Karmen James Omeasoo of Sampson Cree Nation, you should. This MC has been around "longer than most you cats breathin,' seen 'em come and go, every trend every season."
Since his days as the co-founder of Warparty, Hellnback has joined up with Team RezOfficial to continue pushing hip hop through a native lens. Backed by solid Bboys, a classic but bangin' hip-hop beat, his director and editor Nutman and H_Extended Clip, and his skill as a lyricist, HellnBack's new video is sure to get you moving. Keeps it real fi dem old hip-hop heads.
Thelma Plum has been making some major noise in Australia after winning the triple j Unearthed competition, and now shares some answers to some questions.
The triple j Unearthed competition for the National Indigenous Music Awards in Australia took place last month, and a surprising winner surfaced from its ranks. Seventeen-year-old Thelma Plum took the judges and audience by storm and took the honors of winning the competition and the opportunity to perform at the National Indigenous Music Awards on August 11th in Darwin.
We got a chance to ask some questions of Thelma and she was kind enough to answer.
RPM: What is your name, location and occupation?
Thelma Plum: My name is Thelma Plum, I am from Brisbane and I am a musician.
RPM: How do you do today?
TP: Very well thank you, recovering from a gig last night!
RPM: After winning the triple j Unearthed competition, congratulations by the way, how have things changed for you?
TP: Thanks so much! Things have changed so much - for the better though! I think this was a great thing for my music as it has now opened lots of doors.
RPM: When you started music, did you ever expect such a great reception?
TP: I started when I was very young, so not really!
RPM: Who were your major influences growing up, musical or not?
TP: As cliche as this sounds, my parents. They have always influenced me for the better and inspired me lots with my music! Paul Kelly has also been a huge musical influence to me my whole life.
RPM: Are there any new artists out there that are on your radar?
TP: So many! Brisbane is thriving with musicians at the moment, Steve Grady and Andrew Lowden are two Brisbane artists who are amazing!
RPM: If you could work with any artist, past or present, who would that be?
TP: Paul Kelly! No questions asked!
RPM: What, if any, challenges have you faced as a young Indigenous woman in the music industry?
TP: I don't think I have really faced too many challenges to do with that so much. Though being so young definitely makes it harder to play gigs sometimes as I'm not old enough to get into the venue!
RPM: Do you have any advice for the youth out there looking to enter the world of music?
TP: Just go for it! You are so young, you have nothing to lose!
RPM: Thanks for your time Thelma!
Watch: Thelma Plum - singing her new untitled song
We've got a new video from Six Nations rocker Shawnee Talbot of She King for her acoustic expression This Is Me.
She King, based out of Toronto, is mostly known for their hard-hitting, glam-rock style of music and performance along side the ever-classic rock ballad format. This time we get up close and personal with Shawnee Talbot, the bands lead singer, in this intimate and acoustic performance of her song This Is Me.
She King will be touring with Glass Tiger and Roxette this summer and you can check out the tour schedule at sheking.ca.
Check out this wicked collab of freestylin' from Rwandan hip-hop artistPacachi with traditional Batwa musicians.
From ABC Radio's Into the Music:
On the hills outside Rwanda's capital city, Kigali, traditional Batwa musicians found a new voice in the urban community through an unlikely collaboration with local hip-hop artist, Pacachi.
Pacachi, and two other hip hop guys, Obie and Freddy, spent a day jamming with the Batwa singers, improvising lyrics.
There's an interesting synergy between this indigenous Batwa music and the street hip-hop that is rising as the most popular music genre throughout Rwanda. Both groups use music to express their frustrations, their own hardship and the hardship of others.
After jamming, they decided to do a collaborative compilation, combining traditional Batwa music with street hip-hop. Pacachi took members of the Batwa community to a studio in the slums in Kigali and they recorded songs together.
You can hear the whole story at abc.net.au but first enjoy this jam!
The 2012 NIMA finalists were announced this week with the awards ceremony set to take place August 11, 2012, in Darwin, Australia.
The National Indigenous Music Awards (NIMA) celebrate Australia's most outstanding Indigenous musical artists, from "the Top End to Tasmania." Young newcomers The Medics have scored three nominations, with multiple noms also going to Troy Cassar-Daley, Busby Marou, Gurrumul Yunupunguand Impossible Odds.
Here are the highlights of this year's finalists:
National Artist of the Year
The Black Arm Band
Gurrumul Yunupingu
Jessica Mauboy
Busby Marou
Troy Cassar-Daley
National Album of the Year
Ngambala Wiji Li-Wunungu – Together We Are Strong - Shellie Morris and the Borroloola Songwomen
Winanjjara - Warren H Williams and the Warumungu Songmen
Australia's The Black Arm Band Companyis a music theatre group that reflects and expresses contemporary Aboriginal identity. NPR recently featured the muti-media music company on their work as protest, education and positive action.
A black arm band is a gesture of mourning around the world. But for aboriginals in Australia it has come to mean something else.
The "black arm band view of history" is a version of history that takes a critical — some would say militant — analysis of Anglo-Australia's mistreatment of indigenous people. Much like American Indians, indigenous Australians — who've lived on their continent for at least 40,000 years — have had their land stolen, treaties broken, and children taken away.
That's exactly what The Black Arm Band sings about. ...it's a kind of all-star protest music supergroup, featuring a rotating roster of Australian indigenous musicians who are all successful in their own right.
...Dan Sultan is a 28-year-old aboriginal rocker who's played with The Black Arm Band from the beginning.
"What The Black Arm Band is trying to do," Sultan says, "is open people up, open peoples' eyes up to the situation, just put a big ole mirror up so people can have a bit of a look at themselves."
Together since 2006, The Black Arm Band Company has produced 5 major productions, their most recent being Dirt Song which explored Aboriginal languages, and features both Indigenous and non-Indigenous performers, as well as international guests. In the below video, About Black Arm Band, member and songwoman Lou Bennett describes their work as "an act of reconciliation, that both black and white can co-exist and worth together to create beautiful, high, excellent art."
More from npr.org:
One of Australia's best known aboriginal singer-songwriters is 57-year-old Archie Roach. His most famous composition is his personal story of what have come to be called the Stolen Children. These are the aboriginal sons and daughters — especially mixed race children — who were forcibly removed from their parents by the Australian government to be raised by white foster families between 1870 and 1970. (Roach was 3 when he was taken away.)
..."We can be our own worst enemy," Roach says. "It's no use, us pointing the finger of blame at anybody else anymore. We gotta point our finger straight back at us. We can't blame colonialism anymore. We gotta get out of it, change our mindset."
The summer solstice is welcomed in the highest Indigenous regards by Aztlan Underground in this video for the instrumental track Sacred Arrow Sun.
We just passed the summer solstice recently, which has always been a special event for Indigenous cultures all over Turtle Island since time immemorial.
Legendary Indigenous music collective Aztlan Underground helps us to welcome the solstice and honor its gift of energy and sustenance with this instrumental composition and powerful artistic video production for their song Sacred Arrow Sun.
The tribal instrumentation of Sacred Arrow Sun serves to welcome the summer solstice in the Native way. Aztlan Underground marks the sacred event with rattles, huehuetl drum, pow wow drum, raspers, wooden and clay flutes.
This also gives a sneak peek into their upcoming album project Unearthed which is due to be released upon the next winter solstice in 2012.
The music of Pamyuashowcases the drumsongs from the Inuit cultures of Greenland and Alaska and this song, Tundra Chant, that serenades the northern landscape is as beautiful as the land it sings to.
A handful of Pamyua songs are featured on the new soundtrack for Discovery's Flying Wild Alaska (get the soundtrack here) and this video features stunning footage from the series. Enjoy.
APTN is providing an opportunity for up to six emerging Canadian Aboriginal musicians or musical groups to have a music video produced. APTN First Tracks will provide a contribution toward the production of a music video to be filmed in the spring/summer of 2012. All genres of music videos in English, French or any Aboriginal language are accepted and requests may come from Canadian record companies, record producers, managers or artists. The criteria for selected songs will be based on the overall quality of the submission, with consideration given to music, lyrics, quality of performance and production, and market potential. Applicants must submit a master of the song (only one song per artist or group) to be considered. Please refer to the Application Form for a full list of requirements.
To submit your song for consideration download, and complete in full, the APTN First Tracks Application Form before 5:00 PM Central Standard Time on July 31, 2012. Incomplete applications are automatically deemed ineligible. Be sure to read the Rules and Regulations before submitting your application.
Gemini and Juno award-winning Cree singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie recently sat down with Democracy Now to talk about the origins of her love for music, her early family life, and her life as an activist. CBC Music documentary maker Philip Coulter also recently honored Sainte-Marie and her nearly 50 year-long career with a piece created from over 30 years of archived interviews with the singer, songwriter, visual artist and activist.
Originally from the Piapot Cree Indian reserve in the Qu'Appelle Valley, Saskatchewan, Canada, she was raised in Wakefield, Massachusetts, before being welcomed back to the Piapot Cree during a Pow Wow ceremony in 1964. During the course of her career, Buffy Sainte-Marie has received honorary Doctor of Laws and Letters degrees from a variety of reputable institutions such as the University of Regina in her home territory of Saskatchewan, and Emily Carr University and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC, among others. In the last 48 years she has put out eighteen albums. Buffy Sainte-Marie has been covered by Donovan, Joe Cocker, Neil Diamond, Giovanni, Janis Joplin, Courtney Love and many others.
During these two interviews, Ms. Sainte-Marie recalls memories from the 1960's era of grassroots social movements, when she was just beginning her career as a traveling singer-songwriter. At that time, Ms. Sainte-Marie was traveling to cafes and campuses around North America, writing and performing songs that weren't typically found in mainstream music which, as she describes them, were "original to me, but an absorption and a reflection of what I was seeing on the streets and in college campuses."
It was a time when reactionary political activism in resistance to the Vietnam War and other political injustices had spread throughout student unions and subcultures across North America. Many artists had taken stances on political issues - John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Bob Dylan, and many others began using music to speak out against corruption and human rights violations being perpetrated by both foreign and domestic governments. On the show, Ms. Sainte-Marie performs her 1964 anthem Universal Soldier, a song portraying anti-war sentiment sewn through and through which speaks to the political climate at that time. "I wrote Universal Soldier in the basement of The Purple Onion coffee house in Toronto in the early sixties. It's about individual responsibility for war and how the old feudal thinking kills us all."
It is inspiring to hear Ms. Sainte-Marie speak of her convictions and her motivations for being onstage, as she tells Democracy Now that it was always the messaging in her music that she felt protected by and which gives her the confidence to be on stage. She describes her motivation for writing Now That The Buffalo Is Gone, a song written during the Seneca Nation's battle with the United States in its effort to build the Kinzu Dam, which would eventually flood their traditional territories and force hundreds of Seneca to relocate from 10,000 acres of land they had occupied under the 1794 Treaty of Canandaigua. Ms. Sainte-Marie acknowledges the unbalanced and often biased perspectives offered by mainstream media as a motivating factor in writing the song, which speaks to the damage that misrepresentation can cause in relations between First Nations and surrounding national governments - a challenge which sounds all too familiar 50 years later.
This author has grown up hearing the songs of Buffy Sainte-Marie from the tops of kitchen tables in many family member's homes, and for that reason, it is an honor to present this article and these two interviews for RPM's readers. Enjoy.
Watch: Democracy Now's Full Length Interview with Buffy Sainte-Marie below:
In the course of creating the documentary Still This Love Goes On: The Songs of Buffy Sainte-Marie, Philip Coulter listened to literally hours and hours of the CBC Radio interviews the songwriter gave over the past 30 years. Coulter reacquainted himself with Sainte-Marie's body of work (eighteen albums since 1964) and had his own face-to-face interview with her in Calgary this past April.
Here's a new video from Joey Stylez for his song Take A Picture directed by Laura Milliken of Big Soul Productions.
Showing his diversity as an artist, this song and video takes us into the mainstream style of production and is a great looking video by Stressed Street's most prolific artist.
Be sure to request this video on MuchMusic.
RPM Records
Revolutions Per Minute is a global new music platform, record label, and boutique agency for Indigenous music culture. RPM’s mission is to build a visionary community of Indigenous artists and to introduce Indigenous music to new audiences across Turtle Island and around the world. Our main site, RPM.fm, has featured the work of more than 500 Indigenous artists and shared their music across our social networks of more than 275,000 followers.
RPM Records is the first of its kind: a label for contemporary, cross-genre Indigenous music, run by Indigenous people. Selected by The FADER as one of “5 New Canadian Record Labels The Entire World Should Know”, RPM Records artists include Ziibiwan, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Exquisite Ghost, and Mob Bounce.
