Who:
Hilltop Hoods
When:
Tuesday, March 4
Where:
Garfinkel’s
When
Hilltop Hoods first entered the hip hop scene in Australia more than a decade
ago, there was only a handful of wordplay artists.
The Perth
hip hop group, made up of emcees Suffa, Pressure and DJ Debris, helped usher
the genre in.
“(Hip hop)
has gradually built in popularity in the last 10 years, thanks to the hard work
of a lot of good people, and the support of our national youth broadcaster
Triple J,” Suffa said.
“Basically,
the main challenge for Australian hip hop artists in the past was to get equal
exposure to other genre’s of Australian music – particularly radio play,” DJ
Debris added.
Hilltop
Hoods, along with artists such as Vents, Pegz and Muph & Plutonic are
taking hip hop to the masses via radio waves and festivals. Hilltop Hoods
writes about this journey in their track Roll Up:
“We paved
roads with our soul and suffering. For the stage coach carrying hip hop to roll
on up in.”
And hip hop
is rolling in with an Aussie accent. Despite many Australian hip hop groups
adopting North American accents, Hilltop Hoods sounds true to their home
country.
“We have
always refused to put on an American accent, which is something that seems
really popular amongst non-North American groups,” Suffa said. “So sometimes
people find it weird when they first hear us, even Aussies, but they usually
get over that.”
The two
emcees’ broad Australian accents run over beats celebrating the traditions of
funk, jazz and soul.
The group
has delivered five albums. Their most recent is a re-recording of their highly
successful album,
The Hard Road
. The Platinum-certified record won two 2006 ARIA Awards
with five of its singles earning honours in Triple J’s annual Hottest 100
accolades. The Hilltop Hoods entered the studio in 2007 to rework their
successful release, incorporating the 31-piece Adelaide Symphony Orchestra into
the soundscape, and earning the Best Urban Release accolade at the 2007 ARIA
Awards.
“We first
got the idea to work with an orchestra when we got asked to perform at the 2006
ARIA Awards,” Debris said. “We thought we’d do something different for such a
big show by employing a quartet to accompany our usual three-piece lineup.”
“We just
thought it would be fun to play around with a less traditional format and get
an orchestra involved,” Suffa said.
Tracks such
as the Monsters Ball and An Audience With the Devil swelled with drama and
emotion as a result.
“The tracks
that worked best with the orchestra were the tracks that had a lot of feeling
to start with,” Suffa said. “They were all really challenging as it was a whole
new way of doing things for us.”
Their music
is traveling near and far with sold out national tours and standout festival
spots at Big Day Out, Splendour in the Grass and The Falls Festival in
Australia, as well as international showings at London’s Shepherds Bush Empire
and Berlin’s Popkomm. Glastonbury and Canadian Music Week will soon be added to
their credits, including a stopover in Whistler on Tuesday, Mar. 4 at
Garfinkel’s.
“I’d say
that Australian hip hop definitely has a distinctive sound – even if it’s just
because of the accent,” Suffa said.
