Bliss N Eso are one of the — if not THE — biggest hip hop acts in Australia. They've helped make hip hop more palpable to a mainstream audience.
Their last album, 2010's Running On Air, has gone platinum at a time when the genre is bigger than it's ever been. The trio sell out stadium gigs on the regular.
So when they play a string of North American shows over the next month it'll be a starkly different scene, playing to clubs of 200 or 300 people. The massive road crews will be whittled down to a few local professionals helping with stage set up and sound checks. The shows themselves will be free of the bombastic light shows and top-tier sound systems of their down under gigs.
In North America, they're just three dudes from Sydney working out on stage to hold your attention. Will this damage their egos?
Pssssssht. Hardly.
"I think it's healthy, if anything, because to get back over here suddenly there's a reality check," says Bliss, better known to his family as Jonathan Notley. "It's like, 'Okay, we really have to work this crowd.' It makes us employ all those tactics that you had to back in the day."
It's those skills — the high-velocity live show, the beautifully streamlined rhyming, and the emotional depth of the songs — that has earned them considerable success in Australia.
The supporting Down by the River tour was sold out in every city, including 8,000 people in Brisbane, which has been touted as the highest selling local hip hop show ever.
They're also the first Australian hip hop act to tour the U.S., — a market that's notoriously xenophobic when it comes to hip hop — and while the numbers have been comparatively modest, Notley says the crowds seem "refreshed" wherever they go.
"(We're) so far away from the total over-commercial pop, bling, bling candy sound that (has) dominated so much of the radio over there," he says.
Bliss N Eso have tapped into a social and spiritual communion with audiences, one that preaches awareness and personal transformation that's more commonly associated with folk and electronic music than mainstream hip hop. "I'm a soldier of the sun/with a gun that blows roses," is not your typical rap lyric.
"An album for us is a journey and we want to be able to take the listener on that journey, on all its varied ups and downs," Notley says. "We never want to get to where we're making this type of album or this type of song. I don't ever want to be pigeonholed into one thing."
This desire to outdo themselves with each album has been crucial to their success but not fundamental. See, Bliss N Eso have always enjoyed an upper hand over their contemporaries: Notley grew up studying American hip hop in Virginia before emigrating to Australia with his parents, when he was 13.
This was in 1992 when there was virtually no rap scene to speak of in any of the major cities. Notley says he was lucky to find a Public Enemy or Ice Cube record in a music store and even then those were rare.
He met Eso, a.k.a. Max MacKinnon, in high school — one of the few kids he had met who had heard of hip hop. MacKinnon later changed schools when he moved to Queensland, where he met Tarik Ejjamai who would later become DJ Izm, Bliss N Eso's DJ.
They started performing as Bliss N Esoterikizm, slogging it out in small clubs all over the country, wherever they could get gigs. Two-hundred people at a show would have been a huge success.
"In the beginning it was pretty rough and I think it took a long time for people to get used to the Australian accent and embrace that. But really, it took a while to just bubble up and get the momentum going," Notley says.
"You had to build the culture, you had to build the identity, you had to build up the music to where it was good enough that the kids in Australia felt it was cool to speak their own voice in hip hop, and they feel like they can be themselves, and it sounded good. It took so long to get over that hurdle."
By 2006, the scene, and their career, was shaping up. Their album Day of the Dog debuted at #43 on the national charts, making it the first hip hop album to debut in the top 50. The following year, they played their first shows in North America, including a legendary set in Whistler for the Telus World Ski and Snowboard Festival. In 2008, they released their third album, Flying Colours, which became the first Australian hip hop album ever to be certified gold.
"There definitely have been moments where I take it all in and (think) this is not just big for us, this is big for the genre and it's big for everything," he says.
Now, Notley says Bliss N Eso are in the early working stages for their fifth album, having laid down some beats that they'll use to build on while on tour this month.
"We're knuckling down and getting creative again, which is a good feeling. We're working on a new song this week actually. It's good to get into music again," he says.
It's still too early to tell what direction the album will head but Notley is adamant that the sound or quality will not be affected by their notoriety.
"The success doesn't impact how we approach the music. It's always been the same. It's a creative outlet, something that we have a lot of fun with. The approach is always going to be the same," he says."The reason we do it now is the same reason we got into it the first place."
