Fresh from his ARIA success, Indigenous rap star Baker Boy is pressing pause
He’s the hottest property in Aussie music but rapper Baker Boy is set to take a break from performing, to relax at his Ocean Grove home.
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There is no hotter property in Australian music right now than Baker Boy.
Fresh from wiping the floor at the ARIA awards, the Indigenous rapper has the world at his feet.
History shows that when a breakout artist hits the scene, they seize the moment, capitalise on the window and keep feeding the beast.
Not Danzal Baker – he’s pushing pause.
As he looks at the art adorning the salon walls of the National Gallery of Victoria, where he’ll be the headline act for Saturday’s much-hyped gala to open summer blockbuster exhibition Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Muse, Bakerreveals it will be one of his last gigs before a self-imposed hiatus.
“This is pretty much my last show, then I’ve got six months off,” the softly spoken 26-year-old says.
“I’m looking forward to that. I think our first month will be to just try and relax. Then the next five months is music. Yeah, the second one (album).”
In October 2021, Baker Boy – who raps in both English and Yolngu Matha of the Indigenous people of northeast Arnhem Land in Northern Australia – released his debut album, Gela.
Gela, his skin name in Yolngu culture, went on to win the ARIA album of the year, best cover art, best mixed album and best hip-hop/rap release. Add best solo artist to the list and Baker Boy, the one-time Young Australian of the Year, was the undisputed hero of the night.
Upon Gela’s release Rolling Stone described Baker Boy as doing much more than just dishing up lyrical, club-ready slabs of up-tempo Aussie hip-hop.
“He’s building cross-cultural bridges and making it feel like a dance party,” the music bible wrote. “If a more inclusive, unified, and compassionate Australia has a soundtrack, this is it.”
But unlike artists who feel the pressure to follow up a successful debut album, there will be no sophomore slump for the Yolngu hip-hop phenomenon.
Lyrics and beats are swimming around his mind. He just needs to take a moment to step back, clear his head and make sense of it all.
“It’s hard to try and focus on one thing and then you get touring thrown in there and all this stuff,” Baker says.
“It’s really hard to write music and then go on tour. Because you are trying to practise writing, then practising these other bits. Then I’m like, oh no, what’s the lyrics? What’s the lyrics to my own songs?
“I start freaking out. It’s funny. Sometimes after I have to go back and listen to my own songs again so that I can get my music muscle-memory going. That helps.”
Early next year, just after wet season finishes, he will spend time back in his community where they call him the Fresh New Prince of Arnhem Land.
But first he will kick back in Ocean Grove, down Victoria’s Surf Coast, where he now lives in a home studio amid his yidaki, or didgeridoo, with his fat British bulldog, Djapa, a pooch who has his own Instagram page.
“I love the smell, the sea there. I grew up on an island and the whole atmosphere feels like home,” Baker says.
“Apart from the cold water and the weather.”
He found his way down to the Bellarine Peninsula surf spot thanks to Covid and a compromise with girlfriend-turned-creative-director and stylist Aurie Spencer-Gill.
The couple met at a wedding four years ago in Bali. They dug each other at first sight, but after Spencer-Gill’s mother told her who he was, she cringed at the thought of going after the “celebrity rock star”.
As the days-long celebrations continued it got back to her that Baker was also crushing hard, but this rock star was shy and didn’t make a move.
It was only when she found some Dutch courage after downing a couple of Negronis at the bar that they found their way together.
Predictably, Spencer-Gill’s father had initial reservations. Or as she puts it, “he hated him at first”, thinking Baker wouldn’t back it up after returning home, but she knew he was different.
“He came back to Australia because he was in the middle of a tour but I stayed in Bali for another week and a bit,” Spencer-Gill elaborates.
“I got the red eye to fly back home and went straight to work. He picked me up from work that night, and he just never left my house,” she laughs.
Then Covid hit and the couple moved out of their cramped one-bedroom Melbourne apartment for a tree change to Bendigo to be with her family.
Spencer-Gill senior’s reservations quickly evaporated. Soon the pair were idling away long Covid hours making spears and hunting (unsuccessfully) for rabbits.
When the pandemic lifted, Spencer-Gill started house hunting back in Melbourne.
But Danzal James Baker had other ideas. His creative soul was not going – could not go – back to the city.
“I said, well I’m not staying with my parents forever,” Spencer-Gill laughs.
Ocean Grove was thrown up as the best alternative.
Throughout the interview, Baker looks for Spencer-Gill, maybe to question how many more shows he has, or when they first met high-end fashion label Gucci who he regularly collaborates with, even what year he filmed video clip Meditjin at the NGV (2019).
But mainly just to smile. Their love is strong, but perhaps more evident is implicit trust.
“It’s definitely all since Aurie came along,” Baker says about his swag-style transformation and bringing colour into his life.
“Before her I just used to get around in a black outfit. Oh, and the hat,” he laughs.
“Always the hat,” she eyerolls.
“Now it’s turned into a little fashion thing and it’s just really incredible. It’s incredible to bring in all the colours and stuff because it just adds a lot of vibe. It’s really cool.”
What he also thinks is cool is performing at the NGV gala. He was blown away back in 2019 as a guest watching Grammy-award winning hip hop group Salt-N-Pepa open the Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines exhibition, rushing home to call his dad – an artist in his own right as one of the OG Baker Boys with his uncle – to tell him he had seen their hip hop heroes.
“I was freaking out. It was crazy, just wild. So it’s pretty cool to be doing it myself now.”
Alexander McQueen: Mind, Mythos, Museopens December 11 at the National Gallery of Victoria
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