“We Got Laughed At”: Bliss N Eso On The Early Days Of Aussie Hip-Hop

Australian hip-hop has never been as diverse and important as it is right now. You’ve got A.B. Original winning the Australian Music Prize, Sampa the Great promoting gender equality, L-Fresh The Lion representing Australia for YouTube’s Creators For Change program, and Remi opening up about mental illness and substance abuse — and that’s just in the last few months.

But it wasn’t always this way — it took years for the genre to prove itself and for the local hip-hop scene to build itself up from scratch. Bliss N Eso have been around since the start.

The Sydney trio were some of the earliest pioneers of Australian hip-hop, and certainly one of the first to attract mainstream attention. They’ve seen it all, from physically handing out CDs at tiny gigs and relentless regional touring to major label deals and international shows. This month Bliss N Eso returned with the new album Off The Grid, their sixth full-length since 2004.

To mark the release we had a chat to Jonathan Notley (the ‘Bliss’ in Bliss N Eso) to find out how Australian hip-hop made it to where it is today.

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Let’s start at the very beginning, the earliest days of Bliss N Eso and the Australian hip-hop scene. What was it like?

[The scene] was virtually non-existent. There were a handful of acts doing their thing. It was an underground scene, but it was very, very underground. There was no real internet, so we found out about stuff through tiny little columns or mentions in street press.

Going to high school in Australia, there was nobody to ask simple questions like, “How do you make tapes? How do you record songs? What’s the technology? What machines do I need to get?” There was no one to ask. There was no instruction manual. It was just us fumbling around in the dark, teaching ourselves, slowly gaining knowledge over those first few years.

We literally started out recording our cassette tapes with two beat boxes. If you imagine our head is in the middle, we’d have two boom boxes on our shoulders. So one on each shoulder: one playing the beat, you’re rapping in the middle, and you’re recording onto the other one. That’s how primitive it was when we first started making tracks.

“There was no instruction manual. It was just us fumbling around in the dark, teaching ourselves”

Obviously we also got laughed at. We were white MCs, this was pre-Eminem. Vanilla Ice was around, but there was still the misconception that white guys can’t rap. So we had to deal with all the ridicule that came along with that, especially in high school.

We’re lucky to be one of the very, very few acts to pioneer the scene with a couple others, and really forge the way for a lot of artists now. It’s cool to be a part of history in that sense.

Totally. At the time radio wasn’t even playing US hip-hop, let alone Australian.

Certainly not. Community stations would have one show a week for one hour, which was a local DJ who played hip-hop, maybe a couple of local songs. If you got lucky. You’d go into a CD store, a record store, and you’d try to find the hip-hop section, but most didn’t have an “urban” or hip-hop section. We had to make that happen.

So when did you notice it starting to change and people paying attention?

It didn’t happen overnight. It took years and years, relentless touring. When we had our first CD, we’d have to go and create opportunities for shows. We’d try and get on any kind of support we could.

We were the first hip-hop group to ever make a promotional mixtape in Australia. Our DJ made it and we used that as a promotional tool, we’d literally hand them out. We’d find fans during the early stages of the internet, maybe one person in each town that liked us, or was willing to help. Or was a friend of a friend and we’d send them a hundred CDs and get them to hand it out all around town and create some buzz before we came to our show.

Those shows became successful. We’d get like two hundred people in, which was huge for us back then. It was all about creating your own groundswell, and hustling hard.

We were the first band to bring hip-hop to a lot of regional locations around the country. They were pretty starved for live music so it became a big deal. We built our fan base one fan at a time. Meeting them, taking photos, shaking hands, signing CDs. Making a connection.

“We were the first band to bring hip-hop to a lot of regional locations”

It’s paid off over the years, but it took a very, very long time for us to quit out day jobs.

And hip-hop slowly began to built up a real audience around the country.

It was a gradual process. You got your stamp of approval with things like the ARIAs. The Urban section never used to exist, that was created. That was a big moment.

Honestly it’s always bugged a lot of hip-hop artists because “Urban” means R&B and hip-hop and rap, but we all kind of keep it in our own lanes. Anyway, we weren’t complaining. We were happy we were included.

It’s changed so much. Now you’ve got fully fledged platinum artists doing really well, commanding big crowds, touring nationally and even overseas. At first it was just us and the [Hilltop] Hoods. Now you’ve got other acts coming up under us and doing really well, like 360, Illy, Seth Sentry and Thundamentals. The quality of the music has gotten so much better over the years.

“I don’t count Iggy Azalea”

It’s now at an international level, I feel. And that’s why it’s an exciting time for the genre here, for the first time I really feel like we’ll get an artist who makes it overseas. I don’t count Iggy Azalea.

Yeah. It’s not just that the local audience has grown, but the quality has become so much higher.

The music is like another world from what it used to be, and that inspires younger acts. You’d be amazed how it used to sound in some of these cassette tapes back in the day. But that’s not a diss, it’s a natural progression. There’s more healthy competition, more technology, and there’s more knowledge, and you understand how things are happening. You can connect with so many different people around the world.

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Bliss N Eso’s new album Off The Grid is out now through Illusive/Flight Deck. Details on their upcoming tour can be found on the Frontier Touring website.