During what should have been one of the best months of his life, rapper Tasman Keith collapsed. He had been chosen to support Midnight Oil on tour, a dream reservation for a musician about to explode the big moment, but after the shows, he would return to his hotel room and cry.
“I was down and out,” says Keith, sitting in front of a Sydney cafe on a cold winter morning. “After doing the Beds are Burning verse, I would go out on stage, which is wild … But then it was like, damn, I’m really on this solo tour, with a lot of guys who are between 60 and 70 years. It was a stage where I had to be completely for myself all the time. “
Keith, a man from Gumbaynggirr, has witnessed many things in his early years. Alone in those hotel rooms with an overabundance of time, painful memories began to emerge: phone calls to tell him that an aunt or beloved uncle had died, the thought of how many coffins his sister had seen fallen to the ground of school age.
“I would sit there and think about how many deaths I have seen in my life and in my community, or [things like] watching cousins shoot right in front of me as I play them my new single. This is something I think I’ve never felt like before and I’ve been like, that’s not normal, that’s not right. And it’s okay to address that. “
But if you still don’t know Tasman’s name Keith, chances are you’ll soon. The 26-year-old has spent the last few years throwing serious, high-pitched, intelligent raps that have earned nominations for the National Indigenous Music Awards and have been defended by the Triple J youth radio station (in addition to catching the ear of a certain Peter Garrett). . And with his debut album released this week, Keith’s star is just about to rise.
While now living in the west interior of Sydney, in an apartment above the cafe where we are having coffee, Keith spent much of his early years in Bowraville, on the north coast of NSW. That small town rose in its ancient music, as Keith used its bars to celebrate the ancient Aboriginal mission where he grew up as a place of pride and resilience, so that when his cousins search Google for his hometown, the search engine spit something else out. than the shameful murder of three indigenous children in the 1990s. Keith remembers his childhood as a little fun and loving, but, he says, “it also happened a lot of shit.”
During his early years in Bowraville, Keith grew up around a united network of aunts, uncles and cousins. When he was eight, Keith and his immediate family moved to Sydney, where he realized the “little money we had.” He and his siblings switched between public housing flats in the city center while his mother did various jobs to keep them afloat. Finally, when Keith was 14, his parents took them to Bowraville. That return home allowed him to forge stronger connections with the family, which he is grateful for, but it also exposed him to the cycles of imprisonment and addiction that trapped some of his cousins.
It was in Bowraville when Keith began making music. With little else to do in the small town, which Keith describes as “a main street, surrounded by a river,” he and his cousins crowded into the youth center’s small recording studio. They stayed there for hours, writing and recording happy rhymes in a room that had egg cartons and a smelly carpet glued to the wall for impromptu soundproofing. Hip-hop was already the family business: in the early years, his father was a rapper named Wire MC. Although his father is now regarded as a pioneering figure in Australian hip-hop, at the time, there seemed to be a ceiling for artists of color, preventing them from rising higher into the overwhelming local white scene.
“Today I listen to some of his music and say, what a bar, or that line is amazing,” Keith says, reflecting on his father’s career. “I don’t think Australia was necessarily prepared for what I had to say.”
Rap quickly became the expression of teenager Keith. At 17, he made his first mixtape and drove around Bowraville selling it out of the trunk of his mother’s van. At the age of 22, he moved to Sydney and released his innovative EP, Mission Famous, in 2018. Keith’s incisive lyrics caught the attention of Midnight Oil and in 2020 he was selected to collaborate with the band in the nominated Aria Award. track First Nation: a meeting that would finally see him invited to the tour.
In the same year, things began to reach a climax in his personal life. Keith’s older cousin, affectionately known as Knoxy, died suddenly of heart disease. It wasn’t Keith’s first experience of mourning, but with the pandemic stopping the music career that had kept him so busy, he could no longer distract himself from his feelings with work.
“This was the first time death arose in my life where I said,‘ Okay, I have to sit here, because I have nothing to do, and face it, ’” he says.
“I read something a few weeks ago about how you start dealing with trauma and you’re ready for it. I think I was very prepared to deal with it.” Photo: Jordan Munns
Keith began to process the loss by pouring his emotions into the song. In a week, he had “channeled something [higher]”To write the beginning of a raw and startling song called Tread Light, which he describes as a conversation with death, told from both his own perspective and that of his deceased relatives.
“It’s me pulling out a lot of things I’ve always wanted to pull off and making sure it’s okay,” he says of that song. “Like, it’s okay not to be okay. It’s not normal what you’ve seen. All this death isn’t normal.”
Tread Light eventually became the focal point of Keith’s debut album, A Color Undone, which documents the journey of “breaking down who I am to rebuild myself.” He wrote most of it in six days shortly after that Midnight Oil tour, where he was struck by the full weight of his cousin’s death. Writing the album was a way to begin to examine the trauma and loss that have swirled throughout his early life – a job he now continues with tools such as therapy and meditation, after realizing it. that music should not be his only way out. It was a painful but necessary process.
“A few weeks ago I read something about how you start dealing with trauma and you’re ready for it,” he reflects. “I think I was very prepared to face it then. Because I had always been there.”
But A Color Undone isn’t just the story of Keith’s dark soul night. There are moments of joy and lightness, including Jessica Maubouy’s infamous collaboration Heaven With U. The album’s main single is a pop-breaking break song called Love Too Soon, in which Keith takes the heart in the sleeve singing about lovelessness during a high rhythm, dancing down the street.
For a rapper who made a name for himself by writing the fiercest and most incisive bars, it was a curved ball, one that only had the heart to throw because of those difficult nights of solo touring.
“If I hadn’t gone through what I went through, sitting in those hotel rooms, I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable going out the door with Love Too Soon,” he laughs. “Dancing on a dock and doing as much shit as possible from Keith no Tasman.”