- by Peter Farmer
- The Guardian
- Issue #2161
Does loud aggressive metal have to have a particular politics? The answer is obviously ‘no,’ but the genre has something of an image issue – and metal titans Rammstein did a song just to protest that although both metal musicians and Germans, their hearts are always on the left (the song is ‘Linke-2-3-4’, it’s a good one. This reviewer is a fan).
Punk and nu-metal are usually assumed to be bit on the lefty side. Naarm/Melbourne punk/hiphop hybrid MUDRAT are definitely that. ‘I don’t care about poor people’ is a scathing, funny banger about ‘naarmcore’ tossers who make all the right noises and don’t show up when it matters, using the Indigenous name for the city as a form of virtue-signalling. For the record this paper is very supportive of using Indigenous names. Mudrat is too, but the song is about the signalling from the people on the other side of ‘trickle down economics.’
MUDRAT started as a solo artist, but formed a band called THE MISCHIEF with Emile Battour (Ocean Grove) on drums, Noah Sole on bass, and Javier Langham (Dancing Water) on guitar. MUDRAT shifts between MC and punk/nu-metal frontman duties. It’s not really metal, it’s not bog-standard punk, it’s a great beat with lots of metal noises.
MUDRAT’s Social Cohesion tour will be in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne this month.
