"Make a Way"

(lyrics and easter eggs)

You know...

There are people who make a killing...

On decisions made for us...

That are not for us...

And about us... without us.

And while we watch them eat from these decision-making tables... 

Here they come around asking us for feedback on their menu options...

Take these takeaways...

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

Or you can make a way

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

But better make the way

--------

Here we go another survey 

New buzzword craze

Power points and power plays

Public exhibition days [daze]

G'day 

Come in, have your say!

Charrets or charades?

Democracies on display

[formalities on display; for maladies on display]

Your dough’s too low 

To hold the property sold 

But here’s a box for the road

Your nibblies are getting cold

[left overs getting cold]

Thanks for your attendance

Even the resistance

Count engagement as acceptance 

Whether for it or against it 

Job makers danglin' wages

Wrangling politicians locked in profits raked in

Housing stock tips

Option margins leave no room for movement movers

Just rabid abusers & captive consumers

A pre-prepared pity cause charity scares cities [scarcities]

These bars a rarity, bare witty, bare with me

Collective action traction

changes neighborhoods

The highest and best use

Can’t refute the greater good 

——

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

Or you can make a way

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

But better make a way

—————-

What if instead of a survey

And tokenistic wordplay

And trying to have have a say 

We trailblazed our own way

Talking CDC’s

And CLT’s

CDFI’s intentional communities

Each one of these provide ample examples

Of how neighborhoods might thrive and not get trampled

Extracted on loop like a rap tune sample

The status quo canceled when big business gets handled 

Build local capacity

To navigate travesties

Go from common tragedies

To unified strategies 

Grow our own food

Build our own homes

Localize economies

Cooperative zones

The Wealth of Nations claimed from 

Painstaking land

For sustainable equity we need a different plan

And

Yes indeed it starts with the seeds 

To proceed [pro seed] take heed and tap the wisdom we all need.

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

Or you can make a way

Have your say 

Or make a way

You can have your say

But better make a way…

Rap Technology for Socializing New Imaginaries

Douglas W. Belton II

I am a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University where I conduct collaborative research and experiments to progress sustainable, community-led innovation at the intersection of food and housing justice. This work involves global case studies and contributions to relevant community organizing efforts in Western Sydney, Australia, and Minneapolis/St.Paul, U.S.A.. Part of my work compares the socio-cultural and structural barriers, and enablers, of sustainable development as defined by racially minoritized communities in these two English settler colonial societies. Unpacking the term “sustainable” is a project for another talk, but I use it here as defined by Dr. Julian Agyeman, professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University who coined “just sustainabilities” as “the ability of people as individuals and communities to have a good quality of life and wellbeing, delivered in a just and equitable manner while living within the limits of supporting ecosystems”. 

This talk will focus on the context of my work in Western Sydney, where one of my key project partners is a community service provider named Mt Druitt Ethnic Communities Agency (MECA), which offers settlement service support for refugees and other new migrants to Australia, as well as youth development services. MECA is located on Darug Country, in what is now known as Blacktown, Western Sydney, Australia. Blacktown is so named for the Black Town Native Institution, which was established in 1820 by a Wesleyan methodist missionary tasked to “procure” Aboriginal children from around the greater region and instruct them in agriculture and Christianity. The institution was abandoned 13 years later due to inter-denominational political rivalries, children escaping or dying of disease, and the withdrawal of government patronage. In addition to Aboriginal children, the Institution also held Māori children who were brought to Australia from Aotearoa/New Zealand and positioned as ‘models’ of assimilation and considered well adapted to the colonial subjugation and extraction of Indigenous land, labor, and wealth. (https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/parramatta_and_black_town_native_institutions)

Blacktown is home to more than  435,000 people (2023), including the largest inter-tribal, urban Aboriginal community in Australia. Blacktown is also known as one of the most culturally and linguistically diverse local government areas in the nation, with 44% of city residents born overseas, hailing predominantly from the Pacific Islands, South, East, and West Asia, and Africa. Blacktown is also a place of comparative socio-economic disadvantage in comparison to the affluent coastal suburbs on the eastern and north eastern parts of the city. These inequities are evinced variously in terms of income disparity, fresh food affordability and access, diabetes prevalence, surveillance and over-policing of community members, and variable COVID lockdown enforcement procedures patterned to the demography of race and class across the city. 

MECA also offers youth development and mentorship in local schools attended by many Aboriginal, Pacific Islander, African, and Middle Eastern students. One project I have been asked to lead with my experience as a performing rapper/poet is Lyricist Lab, a monthly youth-oriented open mic event where local poets, rappers, and singer/songwriters eat together, network and talk about a creative topic of mutual importance, engage with a guest speaker on a topic of professional interest, and ultimately share new lyrical art with peers and audience members for feedback. Lyricist Lab’s programmatic intention is to help develop the capacity of emerging lyricists in Blacktown to use their talent to more effectively communicate the social and/or environmental issues they see as important, the alternative realities they want to see, and the ways people can get involved. 

Raygun breakdance memes aside - the multi-sound genre of rap music - and by association, the broad tent of hip hop culture - has been largely demonized in Sydney by the police and corporate media for associations with youth-perpetrated community violence. In fact, a documentary film titled ONEFOUR produced and released on Netflix tells the story of a rap group of the same name composed of four young men of Samoan descent from the Blacktown area who quickly established a sizeable international fan base in the late twenty teens within the subgenre of rap called “drill”. Two members of the group had previously been involved in violent crimes, and had been incarcerated as a result, while the domestic and international demand for booking the group continued to grow.

The New South Wales state police perceived ONEFOUR’s artistic and commercial success as a significant threat to public safety, to the extent they deployed an organized crime ‘strike force’ unit to surveil, disrupt, and harass the group and their family members without what might be described in the U.S. legal system as “due process”. The NSW police went as far as to apply pressure on authorities and promoters in New Zealand to cancel ONEFOUR’s international performance bookings there, in an apparent attempt to repress the group economically and geographically, confining them to the conditions of Blacktown’s economic disparities and the apparatus of state surveillance, law enforcement and incarceration. Another example of this artistic repression occurred in 2023, when at Sydney’s Easter Show - one of the largest annual public gatherings in the state - NSW police banned what they called “rapper type music” from being performed at the event due to an incident of youth violence occurring at the previous year’s event. The poorly defined ban made no provisions for rap music that does not feature violent lyrics, nor did it include banning non- “rapper-type” music that does feature violent lyrics. As a narrative frame, quote “rapper-type music” constructs and identifies a trackable human target, embedded in an art form, to which NSW police can deploy surveillance and interdiction resources. One could hardly imagine the dedication of police resources to interdict ‘folk singer-type’ music, despite the subversive and violent lyrics in Australia’s unofficial national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, which romanticizes an incident of theft and suicide in response to food insecurity, class inequality, and colonial law enforcement. The state’s targeting of “rapper-types” in Australia is a localized extension of a stigmatizing practice identified in 2009 by young participants of Dr. A.D. Williams’ critical social theory research, who noted the use of hip hop - and by extension, rap music - as “ a scapegoat for society’s ills […] used by critics to promote their own agendas.” (2009).

One of the aims of the aforementioned Lyricist Labs project is to help supplant the racialized, parochial story in colonial Australia that “rapper-types”, and their music, threaten public safety. Instead, we aim to lift up other more socially transformative sounds within what the rapper-cum-Harvard fellowship co-founder Nasir Jones refers to as the “multi-sound genre” of rap; sounds that hearken to the art forms origins and are intentional about promoting a politic of liberation from structural racism and classism, and that inspire new social imaginaries toward community empowerment and self-determination. Lyricist Labs, enabled by my university partnership with Mt Druitt Ethnic Communities Agency in Blacktown, is an intervention that harkens to what Dr. Tania Mitchell advocated for at the 5th World Conference for Remedies to Racial and Social Inequality: A mode of university-community partnership that can “partner with movements and involve students and other institutional actors in a variety of roles that respond to the different skills, interests, relationships, identities, and experiences those individuals bring to the project and to the work… [and that] can enhance civic, democratic, and political engagement. Accordingly, researcher and educator Dr. A.D. Carson demonstrates in his seminal dissertation titled Owning My Masters: The Rhetorics of Rhymes & Revolutions, the recent academic turn from rap music being a mere object of study, to it becoming a veritable mode of communicating and disseminating scholarly findings, observations, and reflections. Dr. Carson’s dissertation was published in 2017, in its entirety, as a 34 track music album, and is the first known PhD dissertation in the social sciences to be published as an audio recording.

Now I will bring together my research interest in mission-led food and housing system innovation, critical social theory, the place, histories and social contexts of Blacktown, my work with Lyricist Lab, and the unique political and mnemonic capacity of rap music. Acknowledging the critical importance of translating mission-oriented innovation research for audiences outside the academy, I have prototyped an arts-based social technology designed to help instigate more interest and knowledge sharing in participatory planning for sustainable, community-led urban development. And, I wrote a song about it... This demonstration offers in the first verse an acknowledgment of the cynicism many community members feel about the role and practice of governments and people in local land and economic planning practice. The second verse offers frames and tools to construct alternative modes of public participation in these processes that are more democratic and empowering for racially and economically minoritized community members. I wrote the lyrics and recorded the vocals. The beat and recording facilities were created and provided respectively by my friend J Bullz, who is a Blacktown-based, multitalented music producer, audio engineer and singer/songwriter of Māori descent. My intention is to test and iterate this prototype into a “knowledge rap” album that can be used to popularize findings and recommendations generated from concurrent research into the barriers and enablers of community-led food and housing system innovation.

As you listen, please read along with the lyrics. An attempted innovation of this prototype is the “packaging” of the music and lyrics as a research project blog post, whereby reader/listeners can learn more about the key terms and entendres in the lyrics as they link to relevant wikipedia articles that pop up in a new window. The intentional use of Wikipedia serves both a functional utility to harmonize link results and formatting, and also to integrate democratic principles into the communication and learning experience via the use of Wikipedia’s knowledge commons architecture. I would very much value your reflections and feedback on the efficacy of this arts-based social pedagogy technology in the comments. Thank you.