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When rap outfit A.B. Original won the $30,000 Australian Music Prize for their uncompromising debut album Reclaim Australia, The Australian was less than impressed.
"Album containing a song attacking Australia Day wins national award," read a tweet from the newspaper's official account, posted moments after the band was announced last month as the winners of the prize, which "exists to discover, promote and reward new Australian music of excellence".
"That's the least aggravating song that someone could get upset with on the album," says Trials, otherwise known as Daniel Rankine, one of the two members of A.B. Original. "That's the party jam."
Adam Briggs, the Melbourne-based rapper, music producer and Bad Apples hip hop label owner better known by the mononym Briggs, agrees: "That's lazy journalism, that's what that is."
The song January 26, featuring Dan Sultan on guest vocals, throws down a challenge to flag-waving, right-wing nationalists — including Reclaim Australia supporters who use the Australian flag as a mask at their demonstrations.
But even more broadly, the song questions the meaning and legitimacy of the national day, and why anyone with a clear-eyed view of Australian history would commemorate it on January 26 — when the maritime flag of a foreign power was planted on Gadigal country in 1788, a week or so after the first landing at Botany Bay by the ships of the First Fleet.
Almost 20 years earlier, the British colours had been hoisted by Captain James Cook and the crew of the Endeavour, first at Botany Bay and again on Possession Island in Far North Queensland, when Cook claimed the entire eastern seaboard in the name of his Britannic Majesty, George the Third.
For A.B. Original, January 26 is the least controversial and most upbeat song on the 12-track album, which features guests such as Gurrumul, Archie Roach and Thelma Plum.
"Briggs wrote a whole tweet on there saying, 'Well, here's other things we tackle as well: dispossession, black deaths in custody — there's so many of these other things that deserve oxygen but you choose to come at it from that angle,'" says Trials.
Predictably, and perhaps by design, Twitter flared up.
Most of the replies were critical of the way The Australian dealt with A.B. Original's win.
But for some, Reclaim Australia probably makes for uncomfortable listening.
The next single, Report To The Mist, also riffs on some tough subjects — racial profiling, police brutality, skyrocketing incarceration rates and Aboriginal deaths in custody.
The forthright, explicit song has echoes of Da Lench Mob's Guerillas in Tha Mist, and Ice Cube's AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted and We Had To Tear This Mothaf***a Up.
For Briggs, the song is a call to arms against the real enemy: complacency.
"It's so hard to discuss [a death in custody] with diplomacy and calmly, when it's so unfair and it's so final: it's like, this dude doesn't get another chance," he says.
Another song off Reclaim Australia — Call 'Em Out — dwells on the need to stand up to racism.
Briggs says he will continue to call out racism, like incidents of blackface published on social media, because to not respond is to normalise abnormal behaviour.
"My whole thing is: if I don't do it, who will? People look to me now to call out some of these fools, you know what I mean? Hopefully someone else will take the mantle and start calling people out," he says.
"I don't want to normalise racism. I don't want people to be like, 'They're just doing blackface again, whatever.' It's like, 'No, it's not whatever.'
"It's not just about me and how I feel, it's about the people who don't have my platform, who can't say anything, who don't have the presence to be able to speak out about it.
"The way racism belittles and dehumanises and humiliates us is the exact feeling I drive back at these people.
"Some things are just wrong."
Topics: music, indigenous-music, music-industry, music-awards, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, indigenous-culture, melbourne-3000