OFF GRID is a brand-new documentary series by Melbourne-based videographer, Callan Reynolds, which aims to showcase the lesser known but highly vibrant local hip hop scenes across Australia, and beyond.
Each short film provides a cultural snapshot of a city’s underground hip hop scene, by meeting directly with local music artists to hear in their own words, what the story of their city’s sound and culture is.
“I feel like in underground hip hop, artists don't get the attention they deserve or need for a little bit of shine and connection with other artists,” Reynolds explains.
“OFF GRID's intention is to really build that platform to be able to connect these underground artists between each city and also for the person watching.”
The first film, exploring the Melbourne scene, has already been released on YouTube, while the latest episode, focused on the relatively unknown scene in Tasmania, has already been screened at Hobart’s Theatre Royal and at Melbourne’s Artful Yoga Gallery in recent weeks.
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“I think hip hop does speak on the culture and identity of a place really well,” Reynolds adds. “If you're going to get a music genre that is raw, authentic and to the point, hip hop's the way to do it. In terms of storytelling, it's really ideal. It doesn't really fuck around, you know?
“Hip hop is an interesting one because in each city, it varies a lot. It's obviously started in the United States and branched out through all these different sub-genres since. And it's become an incredibly popular genre since then.
“It's in this weird stage at the moment and it always has, where there's this disparity between the mainstream and the underground,” he continues. “And there's a huge difference between the two.
“Hip hop has a really rich history of the people who haven't had a voice to talk. They haven't been able to tell their story and they've made their own avenue to tell it. Being an underground artist, you still don't really have that platform to get the voice out there.”
Uncovering Hobart’s Hip Hop Scene
“When I said I was going to Hobart, people were like, ‘Fucking Hobart? What are you talking about?’” explains Reynolds. “I think the underground is still incredibly strong, it's just not visible. People in Australia have no idea that there's hip hop scenes outside of Melbourne and Sydney.
“It exists very strongly somewhere like Hobart, but in a different form. It's way more local, you know. It's a lot more authentically true to themselves.
“And then outside of Australia, people don't even know what Hobart is. So, it would be kind of cool for someone to see it and be like, I don't even know this city and click on it and be like, whoa, there's a scene here.
Reynolds describes how the recent screening event drew a crowd of 160 people, to watch a hip hop documentary in a huge theatre demonstrates exactly how popular it is and why he wants to create a more visible platform for local, untapped scenes like these.
“It was an all-ages show. You're looking at this theatre and there's four generations of people who are either doing hip hop or love hip hop,” he notes. “It showed just how grateful and loyal Tasmanians are to their state. Everyone in Tassie just loves to support Tassie Hip Hop. It's incredible.
“If someone goes out on an international trip, everyone's supporting them. You don't see any of this tall poppy syndrome.”
“When I was researching and putting all the pieces together to do the episode on Hobart, the cool thing about Tassie is that everyone's reachable. Everyone's someone's friend or someone's mum's brother.
“We flew in. We got picked up from the artists personally. I had never met these guys before. They took us around. They took us to all the studio sessions, all their friends. We went for dinners. We're legitimately friends with all of these artists now.”
One of the key artists featured in the latest episode is Grace Chia, who is one of the very few female rappers in Tasmania in what is a very male dominated industry.
“She is super active in the community, doing workshops, film clips, running events, doing tours,” says Reynolds. “I think she might be the busiest person in Tasmania.”
Other key artists highlighted include Lockie Hamill, who records and produces for ‘pretty much everybody’ in the hip hop scene in Tasmania and Greeley, who built a name as a battle MC and is one of the best known, of any known names, when it comes to Tasmanian hip hop.
Amplifying Hip Hop Artists Globally
“I want to establish Off Grid as not just an Australian series,” Reynolds notes. “We're trying to draw parallels from different countries”
“I reckon next we're doing Auckland. I love Kiwi hip hop. It's the style, it's the flavour. They just make incredible music.”
“I'm not sure about the rest of New Zealand, but Auckland in particular, I feel like has been struggling in some areas with cost of living and some people there are really going through it. There's some areas, it's really rough and that's where some of the best hip hop is born from really.”
Beyond the Southern Hemisphere, Callan has two spots top of the list for the docuseries.
“If anything was on the table right now, I'm going straight to South America,” he promises. “I'm doing Bogota and Sao Paulo, 100%. But I would like to branch out from those capitals and then go into a little more regional places.”
“I think you're going to be able to draw parallels between them all and that's the intention with the series, to ask artists and locals, what are you going through? What do you love? What are we going through? What do we love? There's gonna be crossover.”
It’s that crossover that Callan aimed to bring when he screened the Hobart episode in Melbourne and had some Tassie artists fly in, simply to connect the two scenes.
“People from Hobart are there to showcase and people from Melbourne are there to learn. It's a very cool dynamic because you have the two worlds colliding,” he says.
“It's probably important to say that some of the Hobart artists live in Melbourne, seeing their film being screened in Melbourne is super dope for them because they're like, ‘Oh, my home is being put on the map.’”
Why The Underground Supports Like No Other
“If you're going to the grassroots level, the support is infinite,” Reynolds enthuses. “You walk into Hobart and the support for hip hop and for each other is just incredibly, incredibly rich.
“They need to support each other because they're not getting the support from those big entities.”
Reynolds feels there is a lack of wider support in the mainstream.
“There are different sounds in Australia,” he points out. “The popular one in Australia has been the Aussie hip hop sound. There's so much more than that. But the people who make that alternative stuff, it's super difficult for them to get anywhere because they don't have an identity here.
“Melbourne has a lot of different pockets culturally. And you naturally just get different sounds, different languages coming in, coming out of the music. And it's really cool. It's really incredible to see that people are embracing their cultural identity and putting it into their art form. Great examples being Sampa the Great or Mammoth.
“The more that OFF GRID can shine a light on those sounds, the more that we can normalize that into the underground. Like it doesn't need to be Aussie hip hop. Like you can do whatever the f*** you want to do.
“I come from Far North Queensland and when I was there, I felt like I loved hip hop but there was no scene there as far as I could see. There was, but I just didn't know about it.
“And when I moved to Melbourne, I was like, "Oh, it's going to be really easy to find the best artists."
“I came to Melbourne 10 years ago. It took me five, six years to really start tapping in, understanding where these artists perform, who they are. And I'm still now learning. There's so much. It's not easy to tap into the underground scene and especially into the best of the underground.
“So, my intention with OFF GRID is essentially just to bypass that discovery process and being able to teleport people straight into it. If we're able to do that in every city, for the people who live in that city and for the people who live outside, I think that's the bigger purpose.”
The OFF GRID series can be viewed on YouTube, with new updates appearing via their Instagram page.
This piece of content has been assisted by the Australian Government through Music Australia and Creative Australia, its arts funding and advisory body
