Sampling Ceremony: Hip-hop Workshops and Intergenerational Cultural Production in the Central Australian Desert

Abstract

Hip-hop workshops have become a key feature of youth-focused community arts programmes in regional and remote Indigenous communities in Australia over the past twenty years with music videos being a primary output. While literature on Indigenous hip-hop in Australia has demonstrated that rap music provides a powerful medium of expression for representing identity, there has been little research on hip-hop workshops. In the early 2000s Indigenous hip-hop artists, many of whom co-facilitated the first hip-hop workshops, demonstrated an understanding of hip-hop as a new form of ceremony. This paper makes a case for hip-hop-as-ceremony as a framework for understanding what Indigenous communities might be utilising hip-hop workshops for, moving beyond lyrics and images to the collective public performance events that music videos depict. This article analyses two music videos produced through hip-hop workshops in the central Australian desert to point to the possibilities hip-hop culture provides for maintaining ceremonial practice.