MC Trey: ‘Hip Hop Is The Voice Piece Of The Area’

More Zion Garcia Over the last couple of decades, hip hop music has solidified its place within Australian society, infiltrating the mainstream gradually as we entered into the new age of hip hop. Much like our American counterparts, hip hop and rap in Australia is utilised as a language misunderstood by the majority, unattainable by some, and the only means of communication for people of colour to express their hardships. The experiences of bla(c)k and brown folk in Australia were and continue to be told through brash, hard bars that slice through boom-bap beats from the first utterance of a hook. The sacred bond between story and storyteller, lyric and beat, old school and new school still runs free within contemporary Australian hip hop and rap. For Fijian/Samoan-Australian hip hop and soul artist and community leader MC Trey, “it seems like yesterday” when she started seeing its importance and emergence come to life. Trey has witnessed first-hand the rapid evolution of Australian hip hop from her upbringing in Western Sydney. While she notes the length of her journey through the ways her music was distributed when she started releasing, first through cassette tapes, then through vinyl, CDs and MP3s and...