omarbinmusa

A Feeling

2011-12-30T23:20:00.000-08:00

It starts with a feeling.

It starts with a beautiful madness.

It starts in the harbour of hearts
where the art is unmasked and you sail just to see if you can.

And each word is a boat, each boat in a storm,
is tattered and torn, battered and worn as the sails above,
patched together out of phantom histories,
alphabets of lovers and the hides of cities we miss.

We live only to say, "I am here. I exist."
we live for the times
when inspiration creeps up and surprises you like love,
when fortune means family
and truth appears as briefly as a whale's back.

So let the the clocks drip,
let us sail through white noise.
as we write letters to our kids of love and war,
of suffering, the shuffling of great feet, the beating of great oars,
of harbours, of beauty,
of dignity.

It starts with a feeling, and ends with a beginning.

ARCHITECTURE

2011-11-23T20:33:00.000-08:00

This is a new(ish) poem I have only performed a handful of times. People seem to dig it so I chucked it up here. I guess it's a love poem. Sort of.

Architecture

She tried to apply her architecture to our lives.

She tried to build our lives along straight lines
of order, ladders, latticework, brickwork and mortar,
and deep aqueducts underneath to keep us nourished with water.

I never told her- "I have travelled unshod
along distant and pockmarked highways
to meet you here my dear.

I sailed on oceans of eggshells.
I camped in deserts of charcoal, burned spinifex and hurt,
resting in hovels and outhouses,
pieced together out of debris making form
outta chaos no payoffs in a life attempting to make joy out of pathos
I travelled unshod for you
my scarred flanks holding histories of love and loathing,
grudges clubs, drugs and cruel liquors, and me here hoping,
all the time with you in the distance,
a dreamlike lighthouse,
the raw glow of an open flame and a siren's song
with that skin a darker shade than bronze, and your promise of
perfectly pieced geometry, mosaics, skilfully drafted architecture of love,
I should have told you how far I'd come to meet you."

But when you told me you had been pregnant
with my child but decided not to keep it,
I didn't think of the airy domes, the picket fence houses where I could raise my
never to be born son or daughter, I didn't think of the women
in my hometown whose faces were inked with loss and the men
who raised the back of their hands or went running.

Instead I built coliseums of amber bottles
to lie in,
like a mock latter-day pharaoh or emperor,
staring upwards.
In the nadir of febrile nights
I would swim up through the sweat, shake myself awake,
and go stalking and
snarling into the cosmos.
I watched the prophets of my age preaching in parks creating myths or
strapped up with Krylon cans painting street hieroglyphs,
smoking spliffs in alleys reeking of piss.
I stared deep into TV screens as if into the black bore of a gun, numb,
I patted the heirloom diamond ring that I would never give you
and under the manifold lights of weeping suns and whirling moons,
neon billboards, halogen lights and blacklit rooms,
You would appear
stepping solemnly like a sleepwalker,
beautiful, wounded and haughty and severe.
I would freeze your tears and crucify you with them.

We both loved to suffer didn't we?

And there are two sides to every poem, aren't there?

You will be my Iliad, my epic.
You will be my Petra, my relic.

The desert is laced with ruins,
threaded with the skeletal remains
of boom and bust cities
once opulent with water
and the architecture of hearts.

Play On lyrics

2011-11-16T20:53:00.000-08:00

PLAY ON
by
Omar Musa

This is a warning to everyone.

Tomorrow is not your friend.

Tomorrow is a visitor whose arrival you cannot prepare for, whose moodswings you cannot anticipate. You cannot anticipate because you never know whether he arrives at your door bearing flowers or a handgun, but you know that he approaches by the hour.

This is a warning.

Never let the fire in the lamp burn low. Never stop making your music, even if the record is scratched, the needle is snapped and the mic is unplugged- play on.

Even when you stand looking out over treacherous reefs, where coral is like the blades of razors, where the sky is glimmering coal above sharks and shimmering shoals. Where you wade through tides of information (some right, some wrong, some plain insane) waves of opinion so powerful they threaten to drown you- play on.

Even when it feels as if friendship is a battleground, where the breeze is rich with ego and mistrust, where the burnished sun is blackened by a billion arrows that sing with the clarity of birds. Where we exchange pugilistic words in bourbon bars and hotted up cars, where we feel as if we are the flotsam and jetsam of marooned ideals- play on.

Even when the rejection letters stack up like a pyramid and they tell you that you have no talent and that no-one wants to hear an Aussie rapper from a small town and no fucking radio station will play you and you scream and scream and nobody hears you- play on.

But I'm not sure why we should, when clearly the odds are stacked against us. And I know that men's hearts are pastures that bloom with darkness. And when I look up at a crystalline structure of stars… I see just that.

All I know is that I am blessed to be here and that some day soon this man of passion and lust will be ashes and dust. And they will sprinkle me back into the soil from which I sprang and I don't want my final whisper to be a lament. I want to say that I sipped from the chalice when it was handed to me, that I leapt from the cliffs when the moment demanded it. That even though the record was scratched, the needle was snapped and the mic was unplugged, I played on.

This is a warning to everyone. Tomorrow is not your friend. So never let the fire in the lamp burn low. Because you never know when today might end.

My Generation lyrics

2011-11-16T20:52:00.000-08:00

Some students/teachers/people have asked for the lyrics to my poems My Generation and Play On. I resisted for a while but since some of the students are studying these poems in class, I thought it might make it easier to have the lyrics than have to transcribe them. Here you go! -OBM

My Generation
by
Omar Musa

My generation sat on the brim of the ocean,
waiting for the tide to bring something in.

My generation
was populated with boozehounds and pillheads,
crude clowns and bedspreads stained with the
neon dreams of cocaine fiends,
I mean
the diamond flooded visions of sex kittens
who sweat bullets, glitter and Chanel
I mean
the ones who
live in debt buy spray cans of fake tan
I mean
the ones who drop out of college to get collagen
hoping to hook with pop collar gen Y men with
copycat tattoos,
footy contracts and right angled jaws.
Hoping to ride
amphetamine horses and red Porsches
into clubs
whose shelf life is over right.
about.
NOW.

My generation
took solace in
false prophets who promised change
and did more of the same,
whose ideologies of optimism
were turned into
fridge magnets and bumper stickers-
YES WE CAN

Yes, we witnessed
prime ministers slain.
Hushed coups in the halls of parliament-
heads rolled over bad polls, tongues lolled,
drums rolled as newspapers harmonised like baying wolves.
New kings and queens smiled for the all seeing camera's eyes
that blink but never flinch.
Freshly anointed "leaders" with polished teeth and long knives-
they would smile
deep down knew that
the guillotine waited also for them.

My generation
bloomed with the blood of artists
who sent messages in bottles
that ended up lodged in bleached coral,
and humanity was a deep fossil to be fossicked
some day by a people other than us.
While the traditional custodians of the land
sweated in the concrete gizzards of govvo flats
left wing activists sipped red wine
and talked of reform.

My generation had hot buttered sex to
cookie cutter music.
We made autotuned love and men learnt how
to have sex on a curriculum of
pixellated pink pornstar pussy
and double D tits and digital dicks.

We made love between oil spills and massacres,
tangoed between
the headlines of history,
flitting between
hush love making and murder,
draughts of cool wine and hellish salt pans wimpling
with dancing mirages
that brought brief joy to our desiccated hearts.

My generation never stopped being children.

We grew wearier, but not wiser,
we grew older, but not up,
and our only possessions were our winged imaginations,
sitting on the brim of the ocean,
waiting for the tide to bring something in.

Gold Dust Woman

2011-11-07T02:58:00.000-08:00

Soooo,
every year, my good friends Michael Nolan, Easy Bee and Sean M. Whelan put on a show called Liner Notes. They get a famous album, give writers of all different descriptions a song each to write spoken word responses to and then get them to perform the pieces to an adoring crowd. It's always an amazing night. The album this time was Fleetwood Mac- Rumours. The song I got was Gold Dust Woman. I wrote this a while back so some of the lines have popped up in newer poems but I got a few requests to put the piece up so here. We. GO!

GOLD DUST WOMAN

Gold dust woman, white powder dreams,
silver spoon nightmares, red neon beams,
blue smoke plumes, black fire hair,
I saw bright worlds in your crystalline stare.

But nevertheless, I asked you,
can we stay like this forever?
like this
weighed down by each other's fingerprints and
garlands of kisses
that you hang on my eyelids
like this
plummeting through wells of wistful nights
making love under the manifold lights of weeping suns and whirling moons,
halogen bulbs, neon billboards and blacklit rooms,
like this
in febrile bedsheets bloom fire and steam swoon perspired droplets afire and soon
hair inkspreads on pillowcases from Sydney to California.
like this, where I worship in awe
that spot on your collarbone scented like driven snow and arctic ice
and we unite from shaking flesh, pinned limbs, swimming linen to the tremulous core.

You called me amor, love and corazon, heart,

And it seemed that like this would last forever

But then time tripped and forever flipped into one single moment,
one phrase of time that couldn't last
and
I saw you smile a slow knowing smile
and I knew you knew
the truth of me
that I would love you forever, even when we weren't together,
I would dance with you on palpitating skylines that beat like a dying heart or tribal drum.

That night, I didn't realise it would be the last time you lead me by the wrist to a bed of nails,
I sweated hail,
read in braille the secret messages you left in the opal scars on me,
a cursive of the wounds of love,
for the last time I set sail on the diamond lake
backflipped into the icy crevasse
with my mistress, my princess, my temptress
temperature went way down and then you were gone.

I couldn't eat, I stopped rhyming,
I vomited comets, black onyx and black diamonds

I went running and shaking through the city
heart drumming and breaking,
draped in flames, like a screaming beserker,
swelling and shaking
shook and shattered like shards of ice
and scattered like cards and dice
into pieces on the asphalt.

Because love like addiction like war,
can be over and not over, you can simultaneously survive and not survive,

so now I roam so alone, in obscure and remote reaches,
left to pick up the pieces
and go home.

The Year of the MoneyKat Mixtape

2011-10-02T22:20:00.000-07:00

Some of you may know I am in a hip hop group named MoneyKat with Californian MC Mighty Joe. It is my main priority at the moment- over poetry, over solo career, over partying, over everything! We just put out a mixtape and people really seem to be getting into it. Check it out and pass it on. It's FREEEEE:

Wishing you TRUE wealth and prosperity in the Year of the MoneyKat.

Thus Spoke the Bullet

2011-09-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

I wasn't going to put this up, but Angie Hart asked me to, so how could a youngblood say no? First performed at Liner Notes 2011.

Thus Spoke the Bullet

Thus Spoke the Bullet

I am him.

My flight spans a breath but ends a life.

I am him.

I contain within my gut starlight and supernovas,

fireworks, eloquent don'tgiveafuckery, origins and ends

balled into lead and jacketed in copper.

I am him.

I enter without knocking, fuck without asking,

I am the slave and the master, shade and light, craze and care, rhythm and rupture, the rapture.
I am the hovering God, tethered by trajectory.
Pearl shanked with an infrared bow tie when you elected me
to dream the dream of trenches
to sing the hymn of drivebys,
to whistle over liquor stained curbs,
podiums, ballrooms
and across the red lines etched by powerful men.

I am him
so listen.

Omar Musa, I have loved you from afar.
My wild, conceited brother,
I have grown enamoured of the spearheads on your tongue and your tinderbox mind.
I have travelled far to meet you,
sailing through the seamless and arcane darkness to greet you.
You and I are pilgrims destined for each other
since you first jotted a line or found an audience to speak to.
Who sent me I cannot say,
and such things are not important anyway so rejoice with me
as I pin red orchids on your lapel,
as your walls are embroidered with rubies and garnets.
My brother- this is the ground zero of you,
the place for an altar, to exalt, to anoint,
to embrace one other just as you knew we would.

This is the rapture of beasts.

Thus spoke the bullet,
before we stepped forward to meet each other
like eager twins, like kin,
separated in the cradle.

The Big O

2011-09-13T05:22:00.000-07:00

Did you know I was on a sextape? Who here likes orgasms? Haha. Here is my poem about an orgasm which appears on The Tongue's new mixtape The Sextape. Enjoy.

The Big O by Omar Musa by Elefant Traks

My Generation

2011-09-13T05:19:00.000-07:00

A few people saw me performing this on ABC Q&A and wanted to see it again. Here it is:

"Nothing is Safe"- our first MoneyKat single!!

2011-05-30T08:34:00.000-07:00

"Nothing is Safe" is the first single from our debut album "MoneyKat". Mad production from Lotek (Roots Manuva, Speech Debelle) and the soulful vocal stylings of Candice Monique. Download it, ride to it, blaze to it, pass it on.

Nothing Is Safe feat. Candice Monique (prod. by Lotek) by MoneyKat

New video- "My Generation"

2011-04-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

Omar Musa x Spader Clothing. One of the coolest things I've ever done. Check it. If you like it, post it, tweet it, blog it, pass it on:

"Multiculturalism or Not?"

2011-04-04T17:43:00.000-07:00

"Multiculturalism or not- should we have Lakembas and Cabramattas?"
by Omar Musa

Speech given at the Manning Clark House Weekend of Big Ideas at the National Museum of Australia, April 2, 2011.

Good afternoon. I am honoured to be here alongside these distinguished guests. I would like to start off by acknowledging the traditional owners and custodians of the land on which we stand, the Ngunnawal people, their elders past and present.

I accepted the invitation to talk here today with a mixture of excitement and great nervousness. Although I studied at university, I have made a name for myself in the world of hip-hop and poetry not academia and have never given a speech of this nature. But I thought that this topic would challenge me to think about the inherent complexities and contradictions of this nation and to question the nature of Australia itself. I come from a mixed heritage. My mother is from a family who moved here from Ireland in the 1800s and were pioneers in Queanbeyan, the town I eventually grew up in. My father is from Borneo, East Malaysia and I was raised as a Muslim. I grew up praying five times a day, fasting during Ramadhan, attending Friday prayers. But besides the occasional racist slur pointed my way, I grew up very comfortable with my religion, my skin colour, the fact that I spoke another language at home as well as English. I was proud to be a Muslim Malaysian-Australian, despite the fact that all throughout my childhood I was asked “no, but where are you really from?” Then September 11 happened, and everything started to get a bit wilder. The angst and outrage in the Australian media and amongst politicians, the almost immediate vilification of Muslim Australians, the casually racist language in bars and on buses about “sand niggers” and “towel heads” and “terrorists” that intensified (and almost seemed to become acceptable) confused me at first and then led to a deep sense of dislocation. It is a horrible sensation to feel unwanted in a country you were born and raised in. Of course then it all came to a head when the Cronulla riots occurred, and I started to question many things about this country, which is why I agreed to talk here outside my normal realm.

Multiculturalism is fundamentally a murky idea. It is fraught with difficulty and chicken-and-the-egg dilemmas, primarily because definition of the word itself is so varied. I’ll start by saying that many people, including many prominent politicians and historians, see multiculturalism as a militant defiance of "mainstream Australia" (which is code for Anglo-Celtic Australia). They see it as people choosing to fraternise only with those of their own ethnic and language groups in ghettoised communities which leads to fracture and disharmony in the nation. The answer to this perceived problem is often a vague “they should be a bit more like us”, “they just don’t quite get it” rhetoric which really amounts to assimilation of sorts- the idea that there is a necessity to conform to the “norm” to achieve homogeneity. But many go even further than that. You may have noticed that recently on Australia Day, it is common to see shirts and hats emblazoned with the Australian flag, but more disturbingly , shirts that say “Fuck Off We’re Full” or “This is Australia- We Eat Meat, We Drink Beer and We Speak English- if you don’t like it, get out!” This attitude has even affected my own musical community, Australian hip-hop, a community that has always been based around the ideas of understanding and accepting difference and of people from all backgrounds coming together to appreciate music. It doesn’t seem to be the artists themselves who hold these attitudes (which is great) but many of us have been dismayed at the racist, xenophobic attitudes of a younger generation of Australian hip-hop fans, who see the value not really in the music itself, but only in the fact that it is “Australian”, a vessel for their nationalism. I can tell you I have received plenty of emails and comments online about going home to where I come from, or "this is supposed to be Aussie hip-hop” or “our country’s full”.

Funnily, I think that this “fuck off we’re full” mentality just a crude way of expressing how a lot of Aussie politicians, media and people in the public really think, evidenced by the way “the dog whistle” seems to be a weapon that is invariably effective in Australian politics. We saw that it worked again and again for John Howard and it nearly won Tony Abbott the last election (and may very well win him the next one). As someone who doesn’t know much about politics, it seems to me that Labor is also guilty of this, especially with regard to asylum seekers. Even hearing Julia Gillard the other day speak about brickies and ordinary people "driven by a love of family and nation” smacks of some sort of dreary and insecure nationalism. The treatment of asylum seekers and that they are labelled as a problem by politicians and the media who then use them as political pawns, and the fact that the public eats it all up, amounts to a portrait of a nation defined by small minded fearfulness, not to a “fair go” and “mateship” and compassion for the safety of desperate people risking life and limb for a better future. We all know this. People are far less concerned about illegal overstayers from Ireland and England than immigrants from Pakistan or Afghanistan. It reminds me of the "Beautiful Balts" ads from the "Populate or Perish" days, that showed images of pretty, blonde Baltic immigrants who were more palatable because they were white. Historical events echo and I think it would be naïve to assume that attitudes like this can be buried in just a few generations. I hate to say it, but as far as I see it, attitudes towards asylum seekers boil down to an almost primal gut fear of those who look different and speak differently, a fear of the other and a really obvious insecurity in this nation that no amount of flag waving and jingoism can hide.

All of this raises the interesting notion that white Australia has indigenised its presence in Australia to the point where all new migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds and ironically, Aboriginal Australians, are seen as outsiders and ought to be measured up against what “Australian” is. It is a sub-conscious sense that the invaders have now become the invaded. This actually allows me to return to the earlier idea of assimilation. How is it that immigrants are expected to assimilate so immediately into Australian society when white Australia never integrated into black Australia, an Australia of hundreds of cultural and language groups? When there was so little attempt by white Australia to understand Aboriginal Australia, a problem that carries on through until today (from the education system to the streets)? If we are to ask if we ought to have Lakembas and Cabramattas, then should we also ask if there should be Port Stephens or Dubbos? As Ghassan Hage cheekily asked, have white Australians fraternised in their own gangs to the exclusion of others for far too long? I’m not trying to play a blame game here, I’m just saying that the argument about multiculturalism should not just be one way traffic against Australians from non-English speaking backgrounds, or those with dark skin. There is no historical precedent for this so called "assimilation", so to me it holds very little water and is fairly laughable.

However, multiculturalism has become a bit of a dirty word to many on the left also, with many people telling me that it is condescending and inherently racist because it creates an insider/outsider divide of a patient Anglo-Australia tolerating those who are different. That until Anglo-Celtic Australian experience and the culture of settlement is seen in the broader spectrum of Australia alongside the history Aboriginal Australia, trade between the Yolgnu and the Makassans, Vietnamese immigration, etc, and not at the epicentre, multiculturalism will always be a hollow notion. As a side note, however, I wanted to point out that I have spent a bit of time in the multicultural arts world and in working class “ethnic” neighbourhoods and found a casual racism and hatred side towards "whites" or "Skips" that I found poisonous and divisive and I suspect didn't exist to that extent when I was a kid. It goes to show that the Southern Cross tattoos, the patriotic car stickers and the taunting racist facebook sites serve no purpose but to make people bitter and more likely to define themselves in opposition to you.

I am not a policy maker or a political junkie, so I can only speak as an artist. I think as artists we need to keep holding politicians and the mainstream media to account, to point out flaws and contradictions in Australian society and question them, but also, as people of non-English speaking backgrounds, to be brave enough to question our own attitudes and prejudices. In a more basic way, I think it is important for people such as myself, with “ethnic” backgrounds, to tell our stories and tell them well, to represent people and communities in Australia who are often vilified but are really just ordinary people leading lives of dignity. This is all in the hope that we can live a bit more comfortably, a bit less insecurely with the myriad ethnicities and cultures of this country.

Writer's note: I originally named this "My first academic speech" on this blog. This was a misnomer and I have subsequently changed it.

New Omar Musa website!

2010-07-06T04:21:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,
World Goes to Pieces is up FOR FREE DOWNLOAD on my brand spanking new website. Please click here to get the chunkiest beats, the best lyrics and a lifetime distilled!

www.obmmusic.com

Much love to the guys at www.continenteight.com
If you want an amazing website, go to them.
Peace, chicken wings and fish grease,
Omar

1st review of World Goes to Pieces!

2010-07-04T19:11:00.000-07:00

Thanks to MusicJourno Bianca O'Neill. Stoked with the first review. Even when she says it is "unfocused" I'm like "right on, that was the point!" Great review. Check it out. And get World Goes to Pieces FOR FREE tomorrow. Excited and nervous.
-ObM

http://writersannonymous.blogspot.com/2010/06/up-and-comer-for-2010-omar-musa.html

World Goes to Pieces

2010-06-29T19:52:00.000-07:00

Party people, politicians and poets!
I'm back in full effect and just in time. I have been away doing crazy, crazy things, most of which involve words and music. I have a brand spanking new album World Goes to Pieces coming out on July 6 for FREE download and purchase at www.obmmusic.com
Even if you don't buy it, I don't give two shit! Download it, burn it, send it to your friends, post it.
I am so proud of this record. It really is the one I've spent my lifetime trying to make. Recorded in Seattle, USA, with the maniacal music genius Geoff Stanfield, it has some seriously weird, chunky beats and topics that range from love to politics to depression. Get it and pass it onnn

Much love,
Omar

tour of indonesia and singapore

2009-11-02T05:56:00.000-08:00

yeh man. was absolutely awesome. felt like i had something to prove, that i wasn't just a novelty for the old, rich folk to bandy about, that i am as good a written poet as i am an MC. and i think i did that. big tings coming your way in the form of my up coming full length album

met some amazing people in indonesia. thankfully the wankers avoided me. or maybe i'm the wanker and the cool people avoided me haha.

you ought to check out the following people's work if you haven't already:

antony loewenstein- my israel question
andrew mcmillan- an intruder's guide to east arnhem land

i loved ubud, bali, and the insane luxury i was living in. borobudur was truly beautiful and up there with tikal and macchu piccu as one of the most beautiful ancient monuments i've seen in person. however, my favourite place was makassar. got to meet high schoolers and uni students who showed a lot of love to the first rapper they'd ever seen! indonesian people were so open to me. up there with my favourite countries in the world, along with guatemala, bolivia, vietnam and the solomon islands.

so have you seen these BET cyphers? i think it's pretty hard to decide who was the best out of mos def, black thought, eminem and joe budden, but i'd lean towards eminem. mr marshall mathers can't help but steal the show, can he?

hope you're all good out therrrrre. i'll be in melbourne and darwin soon if anyone wants to hang.

-obm

maybe i should start this shit up again....

2009-10-25T22:56:00.001-07:00

hmmm...
like masta ace, i got a lot to say.
this is oh so much better than twitter, but more time consuming...

too nice

2009-07-21T10:40:00.000-07:00

this song got me into rap

2009-07-10T22:53:00.000-07:00

this is actually really good

2009-07-08T00:38:00.001-07:00

i'm not the biggest 50 cent fan, but holy shit, this is pretty insane.

my brother bruce dancing at laura festival

2009-07-07T19:08:00.001-07:00

Laura Aboriginal Dance Festival 2009, Aurukun Tribe from Seiji Armstrong on Vimeo.

laura festival

2009-07-04T01:15:00.000-07:00

was an amazing aboriginal dance festival in cape york where all these different communities came together to share their stories and dances. it was truly amazing, especially being there with my closest friends, and a memory i think ill cherish forever. my two friends bruce and john danced with the aurukun dancers, and i think this is a mad photo of them. i was going to dance with aurukun, but felt a bit scared haha. next time, next time.

BRAD STRUT

2009-07-01T06:02:00.000-07:00

brothers and sisters, i'm back from aurukun, cape york. we caught many barramundis, sharks, shot many pigs and ducks and saw heaps of local dancing. my home away from home.

SO. i met the legendary brad strut in london when i was living over there. he was a very intelligent guy who seemed to be sizing me up most of the time. i truly think that he is the best australian rapper and i can't wait til the day that i can pit my skills up against his on a track. that would be some crazy pyrotechnics right there.

many of my friends would testify that i have been going through some dark times lately, and really questioning whether i am cut out for this music biz. it is a harsh game that sometimes feels like a trapdoor to a well of shadows, and i am trying to figure out if i should make my full length album my debut and finale at the same time and then end there. in times like this what you often need is a ray of light into the gloom and that ray for me right now is brad strut's song "believe". this is the realest, most inspiring piece of hip-hop that i have come across this year, and i want to share it with you. love the bit where he plugs the headphones into the earth. amazing.

live from my new home sydney, omar bin musa

AURUKUN!

2009-06-16T01:04:00.000-07:00

party people. you won't hear from me for a little while. i'm off to the laura dance festival and then aurukun, in cape york. can't wait. it is one of my favourite places in the world. hopefully we can get up to/see a little more of this:

2 x Lil Wayne Songs

2009-06-15T18:21:00.000-07:00

this song proves that lil wayne can shred a beat like very few other rappers. i think people have somehow forgotten that he can actually rap. mental flow and too many notable quotables!

this song is one where he uses the dreaded autotune, but to great effect. it has this rad woozy feel and perfectly captures the feel of a one night stand.

new hot shit

2009-06-15T05:15:00.000-07:00

so i saw that there were all sorts of fuckers kicking about at the bliss n eso concert the other night, something like 1500 people, all of whom, no doubt, were saying that they are massive oz hip-hop fans. don't get me wrong, i think B n E are rad, but it made me think, where the fuck are all these supposed oz hip-hop lovers at the local canberra hip-hop gigs?
sooooo, i'm gonna continue to bring you the hottest up and coming hip-hop australia has to offer. and today it's DAZED N FLAWLEZZ. coming with sick beats and thoughtful lyrics, dazed is a lad i went to school with (and is half-malaysian, yehhhhh boi!) and flawlezz is from my beloved hometown QBN. they are bringing the heat right now, and if my sources are informing me correctly are working on an LP. check them out here:

http://www.myspace.com/dazedflawlezz

make sure you also download their EP while you're there. "daydreams" and "all things good" are my favourites. oh yeah, the EP is 100% free- yessss.

-obm

my second favourite music video of the year

2009-06-14T00:40:00.000-07:00

so much cool new shit

2009-06-11T10:05:00.000-07:00

i told you about l fresh recently, the sikh street philosopher/rapper. continuing in that vein, i've found some awesome new australian hip-hop that might have gone under your radar. i was lucky enough to meet a spoken word poet/rapper at the sydney writers' festival called lesson mc. i think he's from brisbane. dude is fucken great. lyrics, flow, thoughts- the lot. he gave me a cd and i'm sorry i only just got to it now. check out "face the world" and "please resist me". rad shit.

http://www.myspace.com/lessonmc

so. now that your ears are nicely watered, here's a new clip from my brothers roshambo and d'opus, currently the biggest thing coming out of canberra hip-hop. they have an extra pimping new video, shot, if my local knowledge serves me correctly, at the hyatt hotel. they are making some rad music right now, and it's good to see some aussie hip-hoppers dressing nicely too. chuuuch. this was one of my favourite tracks off their last LP, so i'm glad they made a clip for it. check it ouuuuut:

ro is the one with the shiny head. d'opus is the one with the hairy face. haha

england

2009-06-11T08:28:00.000-07:00

something i just figured out. no-one i ever met in england (other than non-english people) ever encouraged me with my music. they were ALWAYS negative, always horrible. especially at big dada and ninja tune records, where i worked for a while. now i know how my mother feels about the place. after a while, you DO get sick of being treated like an illiterate, unintelligent piece of shit because you're australian. you know what, england? you don't run this fucking world anymore. stop treating everyone like you do.

haha

Canberra CD giveaway

2009-06-10T21:42:00.000-07:00

I've been up night and day burning and printing CDs. Landspeed Records in Canberra has been kind enough to say that they'll give away Shrappers Mixtapes to everyone who buys a new Hilltop Hoods CD when it's released tomorrow. Go get both Canberra people.
Yess.

Oh, and of course, if you can't, then it's FREE online here:
http://www.mediafire.com/?gkt1zngm0oq

pure beauty

2009-06-10T01:10:00.000-07:00

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hands down the most beautiful type of mosaic- moroccan zelij. if i ever get rich, i will hire people to decorate my house in this fashion.

rad new interview with moi

2009-06-10T01:09:00.000-07:00

http://verygood.com.au/

vaka moana exhibition

2009-06-09T07:49:00.000-07:00

absolutely mind blowing. the ancestors of all pacific islanders developed means of water transport so advanced that they were able to populate the enormous pacific ocean, from PNG to Hawaii to New Zealand. this feat was by design, and definitely not by accident. these navigators were doing things in water navigation THOUSANDS of years ago that europeans only figured out a few HUNDRED years ago. i encourage any canberra people to check out the exhibition at the national museum. free entry. i love the way they arranged the exhibition: they have massive dugout canoes next to interactive video displays and religious artefacts etc to create what i think is the best, most accessible exhibition i've seen there. what a pity people don't think of the ingenuity of pacific history when they look at the pacific islands, instead merely seeing holiday resorts and failed nation states. this exhibition made me think that we need to re-think history, especially in australia. so often people point to aboriginal australians as drunks and useless bludgers, instead of seeing a population of people who have so much to be proud of, a resilient and creative people who thrived for thousands of years in the harshest climate in the world. john howard, i really hope history judges you as cruelly as you manipulated the australian people, for taking us backwards when what we most needed was progression. cunt.

haha, anyway, it's a rad exhibition. check it out.
-obm

rad monroe pic

2009-06-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

L FRESH

2009-06-09T01:30:00.000-07:00

...is a really talented lyricist from Sydney that I met doing a poetry show up there. He is wise beyond his years and I personally think could one day rise to being the greatest rapper in this country (hopefully a year or two after I do!). Get onto his conscious, intelligent music early. It really is a winner. Download his free "One Night Stand Mixtape" here. And if you don't, and he blows up as I hope he will, don't say the OBM didn't tell you...

http://www.l-fresh.com/downloads/ONSM09.zip

ps: in the pic, he is the one in the turban. the other one is a guy called chuck d. you may have heard of him already.

"i robs drug dealers"

2009-06-08T20:18:00.000-07:00

as some of you might know, i don't really watch tv very often. however, my number one television show of all time is definitely "the wire." it really is a work of genius, a mixture of intense social commentary, amazing script writing and spot on characterisation. one of the saddest things in life for me is that i will never watch "the wire" again for the first time. props to yani for introducing me to it. if you've never seen it, do yourself a favour... and see it...

my top five characters are:

5) Snoop
4) Stringer Bell
3) Prop Joe
2) Bubbles
1) ... of course... OMAR!

george kraus- fountainhead

2009-06-08T00:30:00.000-07:00

i'm pretty partial to black and white pics, and this one in particular is extremely dope. it somehow captures stillness and movement in one moment. i was reading a thing that said it combines the vitality of youth with a sense that it was almost a death mask. i love that wanky, paradoxial, duality type shit. haha

beautiful song and video

2009-06-05T15:37:00.000-07:00

animation by lucy dyson. really, really lovely. her work is dope.

coast

2009-06-05T15:16:00.000-07:00

i think i need to see the ocean. this weekend i'm gonna hit up the south coast. yessss!

i don't normally get like this, but...

2009-06-05T01:30:00.000-07:00

...i just wanted to say a massive fuck you to every radio station who wouldnt play me, every label who wouldnt sign me, every snide friend, every person who dropped me from a song or tour, every rapper who wouldn't realise that i run circles around them, every so-called friend who could have helped me out and didn't.

that is all. i'll be cool tomorrow. haha
-omar

my top 5 favourite dizzee rascal songs

2009-06-04T18:44:00.000-07:00

1)Do It

2)Fickle

3)Sirens

4)Jezebel

5)I Luv You

"The Shrappers Mixtape" now available for FREE download!

2009-06-03T21:49:00.000-07:00

Compadres,

More FREE music from me, for you. Another truly international mixtape full of smoothness, featuring talent from the UK, the USA, New Zealand, and of course, Down Under. "Shrappers" is Aussie slang for loose change, and I named the mixtape this because your boy Omar Musa makes world class music on the thinnest of shoestring budgets!

Track list:

1) Spaderwear (remix) feat. The Regiment
2) Indulge Me (remix) feat. David Dallas and Devolo
3) Shake 'Em Up (prod. by Geoff Stanfield)
4) Struggletown Spader (prod. by 2am Club)
5) Felicity
6) So Much to Me (remix) feat. 2am Club
7) Thankyou! feat. Jahnell
8) GO! (prod. by Absolute)

Beautiful pop art from Mr. Cole Bennetts. Download that shiiiit, chuck it in your Ipods, tell your friends to get it.

Click here to download "The Shrappers Mixtape":

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?gkt1zngm0oq

Much love, Omar

ps: If you want to buy some more of my music, The Massive EP is now available on ITunes! And keep watching the "Hemingway" video on http://www.vimeo.com/4878057

what a rad photo!

2009-06-02T21:39:00.000-07:00

this took 26 attempts to get right... awesome

My debut music video "Hemingway". Yesss!

2009-05-28T02:03:00.001-07:00

Omar Musa "Hemingway" (Dir: Tom Spiers) from MRTVIDZ on Vimeo.

Portishead - Mysterons (Roseland Live NYC)

2009-05-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

at about 3:54 this descends into genius insanity...

Hemingway video up tomorrow!!

2009-05-27T03:51:00.000-07:00

Wowwww. This is the big one! Are you ready?

wooooow

2009-05-26T09:45:00.000-07:00

this dude is bananas! so moving, so eloquent, such a good flow. everything most spoken word in australia doesn't have haha...

this is constantly changing, but...

2009-05-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

my top five songs right now are:

1) Movements- Roots Manuva
2) My Darling- Eminem
3) Light My Fire- The Doors
4) Da Art of Storytelling (Part 1)- Outkast
5) Suspect- Nas

Honourable mentions: The End- The Doors, Wake Up Alone- Amy Winehouse, Say Hello- Jay-Z, U Don't Know- Jay-Z, Jezebel- Dizzee Rascal.

what a sweet voice! amazing

2009-05-26T00:20:00.001-07:00

"relatively easy like jerry heller"

2009-05-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

this old jay-z is nice. love the horns on the beat.

hectic weekend in sydney

2009-05-24T17:44:00.000-07:00

but loved every minute of it. thank you so much to those who came out to the shows in parramatta and at walsh's bay. it really went off. so inspiring. so what's next on the omar plate? hmmm. wellllll. finishing up this anthology i'm working on, getting out " the shrappers mixtape" that i just finished (up for free download soon!) and then, most exciting of all, the hemingway vid should be done by the end of the week!! so yeah, it's all massive.

thanks and much love,
omar

bjork lovefest continued

2009-05-21T20:30:00.000-07:00

Soft Sculpture exhibition @ NGA

2009-05-21T07:44:00.000-07:00

This exhibition was the dictionary definition of radness. Ready made, accessible, visceral art. Canberra people- check it out. You know how damn broke I am, but I still shelled out the coin to buy a book about Lauren Berkovitz. Basically, she is a huge gangster. The piece below she made out of plastic bags.

if you don't know, now you know...

2009-05-20T19:27:00.000-07:00

this is how you put on a sarong...

rad music

2009-05-20T04:39:00.001-07:00

portishead- dummy

massive attack- mezzanine

dizzee rascal- boy in da corner (is it just me or is this by a mile his best record??)

(one) dictionary definition of...

2009-05-19T20:18:00.000-07:00

lame (adj): Weak and ineffectual; unsatisfactory.

lameness (n): An affliction that far too many people suffer from.

haha

this is amazing! QBN bridge!

2009-05-19T09:11:00.001-07:00

E.L.K. is my bro and one of the sickest stencil artists ever. Not only sick art but also in my favourite stomping ground. Check this ouuuuuut!

Madonna ft. Lil Wayne... HOLY SHIT!

2009-05-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

holy hell.

http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/?em3106=232372_-1__0_~0_-1_5_2008_0_0&em3161=&em3281=

this is the sickest youtube clip ever

2009-05-18T10:01:00.000-07:00

FREE MUSIC!

2009-05-18T07:23:00.001-07:00

massive music. free. download it by clicking on link below. yesssss!

http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?dzjygnmfkmm

-obm

the blog is back!

2009-05-18T07:10:00.001-07:00

belated i know. but much love to those who came to my canberra "Massive EP" launch. it rocked the fuck out and i love you all. one of the best nights of my life.

i've been away for a little while, but here i am, the original queanbeyan spader himself!

things have been hectic and electric lately. many shows, many new poems, many new songs, many new ideas.

things are snowballing. this is a good thing.

-obm

novel i'm currently reading: blood meridian by cormac mccarthy.
poet i'm currently reading: pablo neruda
rapper i'm currently loving: k'naan