ICYMI Urthboy Released A Clip For Father's Day & It's Too Adorable For Words

Urthboy

We know that Father's Day was yesterday — and it's a day of varying emotions for a lot of people — but put aside your cynicism for the next five minutes or so, because Urthboy has put out the cutest freaking video clip we are likely to see this year, and it's simply too sweet to ignore.

Accompanying his track Little Girl's Dad, the clip intersperses footage of the acclaimed rapper performing with, and reading to, his ecstatic three-year-old, Jetta, alongside some pretty dang pure and wonderful home footage of her being picked up from daycare, an event he's been filming every day since she started attending — partially, one suspects, because he's come to understand how fortunate he was in the months immediately following his daughter's birth.

"I took an unintended break from touring and releasing music when my daughter was born," Urthboy wrote in a statement to his mailing list. "It stressed me out wondering if I'd be lucky enough to continue making music in this cut-throat industry. It plagued me, but fuck I loved being a new dad. In retrospect it was a blessing, I enjoyed her first few years uninterrupted by tours and time away. I was luckier than I could've known."

Little Girl's Dad is the latest track to be taken from Urthboy's recent album, The Past Beats Inside Me Like A Second Heartbeat, which was released earlier this year to broad acclaim and steered the Aussie stage veteran to another sold-out run of shows around the country back in June.  

The song itself comes with an important lyrical message not just to Jetta but to fathers and their daughters in general, on the pursuit of equality and not suffering simply on account of gender; unfortunately, it was a message apparently lost at a show in Hobart during the June tour, when Urthboy received an email from a fan to recount an incident that had happened during his performance of the song.

In a statement to his mailing list, Urthboy explained that the woman "confronted the guy but was not only laughed off by him, but also his female friend".

"She went to a security guard and complained, who then took the offender aside, only to be seen him laughing with him," he wrote. "She then told her friend, who sympathised, but then cracked a joke about it showing that the guy liked her. The sentiment of the song was not lost on her and I wrote back to her saying that I'd be more explicit about doing what I could from stage to prevent that harassment. It's sexual assault.

"From then on, before I performed the song I told audiences that I wanted my shows to be the kind of place that my daughter would feel safe at. There were some gigs I almost barked at men in the crowd to join me in making sure that the venue was a harassment-free zone. I wondered if I went too far and turned some of them on me, but every night they'd yell in agreement. The problem isn't solved from stage — sexism runs so deep in our society — in ways I'm still only getting my tiny head around. In ways that I know I've been guilty of in the past and ways that I'm trying my best to address in how I behave now. It shouldn't be about 'somebody's sister', 'somebody's mother', 'somebody's daughter' — it should be about mutual respect, nothing more, nothing less."

Watch the clip below; The Past Beats Inside Me Like A Second Heartbeat is available now.