Matt Okine Takes On Blackface, Australia Day And Border Force Over Kanye’s ‘Heard ‘Em Say’
"How they still not know that it ain't okay to paint your face?/And how we still having fights about Australia Day?/Like it's that fuckin' hard just to change the date."
2016’s still fairly fresh, but it’s already managed to conjure up a pretty formidable number of garbage moments. January 26 was a flashpoint for all the usual debates around changing the date, with some added doses of foul racial abuse directed at Aboriginal people for good measure. People are desperately trying to convince the government not to send newborn babies to live in stylised concentration camps, our hyper-militarised Border Force are giving themselves more medals for conducting “random” airport security searches than the Army does for being the Army, and people are still wearing fucking blackface.
Performing at Sydney’s Giant Dwarf last week, comedian and triple j host Matt Okine gave a pretty good summing up of the state of the nation right now. Rapping over Kanye West’s ‘Heard ‘Em Say’, Okine delivered some angry, witty and brutally honest thoughts about where the country’s at, and where it’s headed.
“How they still not know that it ain’t okay to paint your face?/And how we still having fights about Australia Day?/Like it’s that fuckin’ hard just to change the date/Guess that’s why I gotta drink, just to get away/See, I can’t give Mabo the time/’Cause they say the Queen’s blood is better than mine.
“…Sit around while the lawmakers watch us/And Border Force wanting this amount of papers/The government’s just trying to make us safer/But wait, ain’t the Church full of systematic rapists?/ So who’s supposed to be dangerous? The ones covering up crimes or covering their faces?
“…See, I know that there’s racists in the news/And they talk about places in the queue/But all they ever really had was a taste of silver spoons/And they’re flying first-class to Nauru/Tell that rape victim in her face that what she say, it ain’t true”.
It’s not the first time Okine’s made headlines for getting serious, winning praise for calling out the lack of female representation in Australia’s entertainment industry at last year’s ARIAs. His performance at Giant Dwarf last week is reminiscent of one from last year in a similar vein by slam poet, author and rapper Omar Musa, whose ‘Ranthem’ explores racism, politics and identity in even more unapologetic terms.