Omar Musa Quotes

People think of hip hop as a very angry art form and in many ways that’s true – there is a certain type of danger and aggression – but there’s also a coolness and a funkiness from back where the breakbeats started. I was drawn to its ability to allow you to let free the tempestuous emotions within you, whether they be anger or pain. All of us have those emotions and feelings within us and there was something about the chunky, bodily beats of hip hop that drew me into expressing myself in that way…

I think Australia’s sense of itself is very insecure, very shaky. And what I see around us is constant simmering tension and some kind of violence beneath the surface of this country.

We try to portray ourselves as a very egalitarian society, the land of the fair go…But I think that we are quite segregated. And class exists in Australia – it’s much more slippery and hard to get your hands on than in other places where it’s more structured and stratified. But it’s there.

I’ve always grown up as an in-betweener…Malaysian hyphen Australian, between really a working-class town, ‘struggle town’, and a really privileged private school, between secular and religious – even Queanbeyan is known as part city, part country.