Rapper Briggs giving voice to a struggling relationship

RAPPER Adam Briggs is on a mission to bring indigenous hip hop music into the mainstream.

Rapper Adam Briggs in Port Melbourne before he goes on tour with his new album Shep Life, about Shepparton, which also features indigenous star Gurrumul.

RAPPER Adam Briggs is on a mission to bring indigenous hip hop music into the mainstream, and his latest video is certainly helping his cause.

The 28-year-old from Shepparton, who calls himself Briggs, has made a dent already on the local hip hop scene with two ­albums, but the clip for his song Bad Apples, from his new album Shep Life, is raising his profile, while also giving voice to his concerns about social equality and multiculturalism in Australia.

The video, which has attracted 22,000 views on YouTube since its release last month, was shot in and around his north Victorian city with Briggs’s friends and family and depicts a tough world of few opportunities for indigenous Australians.

“I wanted to touch on the ­issues of disenfranchisement and disillusionment in society and in indigenous communities.

“I wanted to talk about the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people within my environment. I’d never touched on it so directly before. It was on my chest and in my head, so there was nowhere else I could take it,” he said.

Briggs’s new album centres around his home town, although he has just moved to Melbourne for the second time. He said he wanted to highlight some of the problems for indigenous families in Shepparton and issues of race in the population in general.

“It’s predominantly a working-class town,” he said. “It’s a town with a mindset that’s very stagnant. It doesn’t like to budge. It’s a multicultural community in the sense that a lot of cultures live there, but there’s a difference between tolerance and acceptance. People tolerate it but they don’t ­accept it.”

Briggs is one of the rising stars of Australian hip hop and has been helped in his career by Australia’s biggest hip hop act, Hilltop Hoods, who signed him to its label Golden Era and asked him to tour with it in Europe in 2009. He has been support act to overseas hip hop stars such as Ice Cube and KRS-1.

Now he’s hoping his success will encourage other young indigenous rappers, many of whom, from remote areas in central Australia and the Top End, don’t get the opportunity to present their music to city audiences.

“I hope I can help create a sense of entitlement among other young rappers who didn’t think they had a voice that belonged within mainstream hip hop” he said. “That’s one of the issues. They think their voice doesn’t belong within a predominantly white genre. What I’m trying to bring home is that their voices are as important as any others.”

Briggs begins a national tour to promote Shep Life on Friday.