It wasn’t Keith’s first experience with grief, but with the pandemic pausing the music career that had been keeping him so busy, he was no longer able to distract himself from his feelings with work. Keith’s older cousin, known affectionately as Knoxy, passed away suddenly from a heart condition. The same year, things started to come to a head in his personal life. Keith’s incisive lyrics got the attention of Midnight Oil and, in 2020, he was tapped to collaborate with the band on the Aria award-nominated track First Nation – a meeting that would eventually see him invited on tour. By 22, he’d moved back to Sydney and released his breakthrough EP, Mission Famous, in 2018. At 17, he made his first mixtape and drove around Bowraville selling it out of the boot of his mum’s station wagon. Rap quickly became the teenage Keith’s mode of expression. “I just think Australia wasn’t necessarily ready for what he had to say.” “I listen to some of his music today and I’m like, what a bar, or that line is incredible,” Keith says, reflecting on his father’s career. While his dad is now regarded as a pioneering figure in Australian hip-hop, at the time, it felt like there was a ceiling for artists of colour, stopping them from rising higher in the overwhelming white local scene. Hip-hop was already the family business: in the early aughts, his father was a rapper called Wire MC. They’d stay there for hours, happily writing and recording rhymes in a room that had egg cartons and foul-smelling carpet stuck on the wall for makeshift soundproofing. With little else to do in the tiny town, which Keith describes as “one main street, surrounded by a river”, he and his cousins would cram into the youth centre’s tiny recording studio. It was back in Bowraville that Keith first started making music. That return home allowed him to forge stronger connections with family – something he’s grateful for – but also exposed him to the cycles of incarceration and addiction that ensnared some of his cousins. Eventually, when Keith was 14, his parents took them back to Bowraville. He and his siblings shifted between inner-city public housing flats while his mum worked multiple jobs to keep them afloat. When he was eight, Keith and his immediate family moved to Sydney, where he became aware of “just how little money we had”. Keith remembers his childhood as fun and loving, but, he says, “there was also a lot of shit that happened”.ĭuring his early years in Bowraville, Keith was raised around a tight-knit network of aunts, uncles and cousins. That small town loomed large in his early music, as Keith used his bars to celebrate the old Aboriginal mission where he grew up as a site of pride and resistance – so that when his cousins Googled their hometown, the search engine would spit out something other than the shameful murder of three Indigenous children in the 1990s. While he now lives in Sydney’s inner west, in an apartment above the cafe where we’re having coffee, Keith spent much of his early life in Bowraville on the NSW mid-north coast. And with his debut album out this week, Keith’s star is only set to rise. The 26-year-old has spent the last few years releasing serious, sharp and whip-smart raps that have earned National Indigenous Music award nominations and been championed by youth radio station Triple J (as well as catching the ear of one Peter Garrett). (If you’re not feeling particularly in the mood for love today, though, we’ve got you covered there too.But if you don’t know the name Tasman Keith yet, odds are you will soon. Here are our staff’s picks for the 50 greatest love songs of the 21st century - mostly keeping to the more aww-worthy end of the spectrum to keep the energy right for this Valentine’s Day. The form and content may have evolved since the days of The Ronettes and The Beach Boys - hell, since the days of Boyz II Men and Celine Dion - but it remains an essential and inextricable part of the pop experience, and likely will for as long as popular music exists. They all have multiple unforgettable love songs to their credit, earning the artists some of their biggest and most-beloved hits. Still, look at the biggest names in music of the 21st century: Drake, Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Adele, Justin Bieber, Rihanna, Ed Sheeran. Where once the love song essentially marked a sort of default mode for pop music, today top 40 encompasses more subjects than ever: Identity, sexuality, personal struggles, not talking about Bruno, and countless others.
They don’t write ’em like they used to? Well, maybe not as often as they used to - look at the top of the Billboard charts in the 20th century and chances are you won’t find nearly as high a percentage of love songs as you might have decades earlier.
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