Voices of the future: Griff to Polo G
“My dad talks about the feather and the sledgehammer,” says Ziggy Ramo. “You need to know when to hit someone over the head, but also when to be as gentle as possible. And for me, my art is my sledgehammer.”
Born in Bellingen to a Wik and Solomon Islander father and a mother of Scottish descent, Ramo began making music in his teens. But when his first album, Black Thoughts, arrived last year at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, it hit the Australian music scene not just like a sledgehammer, but like a meteor. “Black Lives Matter, that’s the subject matter,” he raps on the album’s title track. “Tell you to climb, then they burn down your ladder.”
The album is both a passionate attack on the systemic racism faced by generations of indigenous Australians and a celebration of the oldest civilisation on earth. It won an International Indigenous Hip Hop award and found fresh acclaim when he performed it at the Sydney Opera House. But Ramo knows this is just the start. “One single performance is not going to change the world,” says the artist, whose next album will drop this year. “But it can be a catalyst for something bigger.” Jake Millar
Photographed by James J Robinson in Little Bay, Sydney. Styled by Harriet Crawford. Grooming by Gillian Campbell
GQ Mexico nominates… Natalia Lafourcade
>>>TAKE NOTES>>>How to Deal With Family Members That Dislike Your Spouse:
1.Observe how they treat your spouse…. http://t.co/8YHz0Jyu2W
— Slam 100.5fm
Sun Mar 10 13:57:42 +0000 2013
Mexico’s link from past to futureAge 37Hometown CoatepecKey track ‘Mi Tierra Veracruzana’
In addition to her career as a singer, Natalia Lafourcade also takes another job very seriously: that of recovering Mexican folk’s bygone traditions. The winner of two Grammys, Lafourcade has worked to revive elements of historical genres such as nueva canción and ranchera, prying their old codes out of oblivion and then running them through her signature hazy folk soundscapes.
“The path I have walked led me to get closer to the past and reinterpret it with the help of many musicians who walk the same path,” she says. “It has been a passionate journey to discover so many types of Mexicans that exist – their different ways of loving and suffering throughout our musical history.”
Though Lafourcade has orbited the Mexican pop scene for more than two decades, this phase of her career has been a pivot. Now she’s a bridge between past and present for a country that seems to have left many of its roots – and its songs – behind. In May, she dropped the second volume of her album Un Canto Por México, recorded to support the Son Jarocho Documentation Center, destroyed in the 2017 Puebla earthquake.