Live Review: Sampa The Great, Birdz

By the time Sampa The Great and her band take the stage (three back-up singers, three band members), NT raised MC Birdz has the floor tightly packed and in a frenzy. Like the evening's headliner, Birdz feels urgent; his music delivers searing, injustice-born anger (Black Lives Matter: "this shit keeps happening") and, also like the headliner, his music is generous to those willing to listen.

When it is time for Sampa The Great's set, the lights go low and a projector flickers on. HERoes (The Call) plays over a moody Sydney cityscape, and the footage wraps on an image of Sampa gazing over the city, Batman style. When she and her band take the stage, Sampa has a cape tied around her neck and even though, as she will tell you, "not all heroes wear capes", she drops some more wisdom as clouds swirl behind her on the screen: "reality is what you make it".

Sampa is a furious MC with what seems like bottomless vision. She is in debt to Kendrick Lamar's cool, jazz-funk sounds and to his effortless, playful and slippery bars, but she makes these completely her own with a brazen optimism. Her flow is dexterous, she moves in and out of character, sometimes she's almost growling, sometimes she's sweetly coo-ing, but she never loses the beat.

She premieres some new music, including Mona Lisa ('Mona' means 'look at' in Bemba, one of her native Zambia's Indigenous languages) which picks up on the fempower vibes that define HERoes. With the help of her back-up singers, this track and others are filled out with a real sense of community and chorus. In the end she's right: she might be the one in the cape, but she's there for all of us.