I’m a bit late to this one so you’ll have to forgive me. I got back from a weekend away and was checking my Twitter feed for anything interesting.

One particular tweet from Wikileaks caught my eye;

Hilarious WikiLeaks rap gets it right. Is comedy the only honest commentary?


Hilarious Wikileaks rap? What did Wikileaks have to do with rap?

There was a link included in the tweet so naturally I clicked on it to check out what this rap business was about. Within seconds of the video starting and host Robert Foster taking the screen, I struggled to remember where I’d heard the all to familiar voice before.

About a half minute later it clicked, Robert Foster sounded a hell of a lot like Melbourne rapper Hugo Farrant. But surely I was wrong…

…was I?

Hugo Farrant first flew onto my radar after collaborating with the Treats on Keep Pedalling. Keep Pedalling was nice enough to listen to and the lyrical connection with bicycles resonated with me, but I had great difficulty not writing Hugo off as just another freeloading northern suburbs waste-of-space hippie.

With that said, Hugo seems to have completely reincarnated himself in this new clip from Juice Media. Having graduated from the backstreets of Brunswick and Fitzroy and abandoning the supporting cast of crazy no hopers, Farrant shines as the sole star both lyrically and visually.

Here’s the clip Wikileaks linked to in their clip, titled ‘Rap News: WIKILEAKS vs Censorship – INTERNET WARS’:


Now Rap Wars is a far cry from the fist pumping infectiousness of Rage Against the Machine I hold fond memories of, but it certainly puts an interestingly creative spin on the news of the day.

From one wordsmith to another it’s with great appreciation that I salute the work that Farrant and his partner, Giordano Nanni, have put into creating the rap news clip. So complimentary are the caricatures and general production quality of the clip itself to the music and lyrics, that I find the track incomplete to listen to without the video playing.

Once you get over the fact that Hugo’s pronunciation is impeccable, the fact that he’s not black and that his vocal register is a tad higher than the norm, you begin to appreciate just how much modern hip hop or rap has lost its political message. Not that I’m an avid follower of the genre(s) but Farrant’s effort is clearly the most politically driven production I’ve seen in a long time.

Since first hearing Rage Against the Machine all those years ago, politics and hip hop’s rhyming vocals have always had a special place in my heart.

Farrant and Nanni undoubtedly have the talent to hopefully turn this into a regular thing so here’s hoping that they do. The Wikileaks rap video isn’t the first production they’ve done under their Juice Media production company. Thus far four rap videos have been made and each is as entertaining and lyrically complex as the Wikileaks one. Definitely compulsory viewing and I’ve embedded the remaining three clips below.

Unfortunately date wise the rap clips are appear to be quite sporadic. I’m assuming this is due to the creative complexity needed to creat the beats but also the development of the lyrics themselves. I find it often a challenge to express myself exactly how I want to in a written sense, I can only imagine the compounded difficulty of trying to do so via rhyming lyrics set to music.

Anyway, whatever the reason take this as me sending my heartfelt encouragement to you guys. The fact that they live and work out Melbourne is just a bonus.

Here’s the other three clips Juice Media have produced to date;

Nasa Bombs the Moon, 4/10/2009

Obama wins the Nobel ‘war is peace’ prize, 11/10/2009


Climate Change: Lord Monckton rap battles Al Gore, 17/11/2009


Tweet

1. Juice Media’s Rap News vs News World Order falls short
2. JuiceMedia’s Rap News 9: The Economy
3. Hey news.com.au, where’d my BREAKING NEWS go?!