In the late 1980s, Danzal Baker’s grandparents, Djandjay and Robert, honeymooned in Hawaii and Los Angeles. They returned to their home in Arnhem Land with souvenirs that would reverberate through generations: a Fred Astaire film on VHS and some early hip-hop vinyl records. Baker’s dad and uncle, Josiah and Jeremiah, would mute the TV and watch Astaire dance to Grandmaster Flash, a pastime that inspired them to found the Baker Boys dance group. Later, Josiah showed his son Danzal the mashup. Now Danzal is widely known as Baker Boy – one of the country’s most innovative, successful and beloved hip-hop artists.
“[Djandjay] was the matriarch in the family. She was always the loud one, the proud one. Always boisterous energy and had no shame. When there’s music on, she stands up, starts dancing,” says Baker. “I definitely inherited her will, being positive, bringing everyone together and having no shame, sharing language and culture. She was the reason that I fell in love with hip-hop.”
Baker and his family are Yolŋu, with some Scottish heritage through Robert. His pioneering multilingual flow, that alternates between Yolŋu Matha and English, won him five Aria awards in 2022, including album of the year, for his debut album, Gela. After completing his long-awaited sophomore record, and with his late grandmother having passed away, it only felt right to name it after Djandjay.
Djandjay is also the name of a Yolŋu octopus spirit that guides souls forward. For Baker, that means guiding audiences towards new expressions of his art: an album which contains his most overtly political music.
Baker, his partner, Aurie, and bulldog, Djapa, live in the peaceful Victorian coastal town of Ocean Grove, where the Guardian meets him at his home. His live performances are known for being exuberant and galvanising, but in person he is quiet, gentle and thoughtful, and feels the world deeply.
“I’m not always happy energy, excited, party vibe,” says Baker. “I want to show you the boldness, the anger, the vulnerability.”
When the Black Lives Matter protests raged in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd in the US, people Baker described as “allies” (not mob and not people of colour, he says) began questioning why he hadn’t yet spoken out.
“As soon as craziness happens in front of me, I process it a lot slower than everyone else,” says Baker. “To have it on an album is my way of being able to have a voice … I feel most of the time when I speak, no one listens.”
His answer is War Cry, a bracing production featuring martial brass and clattering snares, in which Baker defiantly rejects those absurd criticisms. “What are we really fighting for, if we don’t leave hate at the door? I bring a country together. Still, it tears me apart,” he raps on the track.
“There’s a lot of deaths in custody in Australia. I feel it because I live it every day. I always have it in the back of my head,” says Baker. “When I get messages [questioning my silence], it’s like, do you understand that I’m black too, that I feel these things?”
The album’s centrepiece, Thick Skin, is Baker’s response to the “eerie dark energy” he felt in the wake of Australia’s rejection of the voice to parliament referendum, and the ugly rhetoric surrounding the vote. The track opens with a snarling guitar riff, as a distorted Baker reprimands his opposition: “You should be ashamed, we all know, it’s easier with ignorance.”
“It felt like the country dehumanised me,” says Baker. “When there’s negativity around me I always brush it off … but it was lingering because it wasn’t just towards me, it was towards people like me. I wanted to build music that gives courage and confidence to people like me – to go chin up and chest out, and move straight through.”
Djandjay has some deliriously fun moments too, like the dubstep drop on Mad Dog and the reggaetonesque beat on Peacekeeper, in which Baker adds Spanish to his multilingual arsenal. But tracks with something to say like Thick Skin have a habit of finding their moment and standing out. Its release was coincidentally two days after Melbourne’s “March for Australia”, which concluded with neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell allegedly leading a group of about 30 men in an attack on Camp Sovereignty, a peaceful vigil held at a sacred Aboriginal burial site on Boon Wurrung Country.
“[Thick Skin] was just waiting, it knew that something was going to happen and the people were going to need it,” says Baker. He remembers mob approaching him at a Camp Sovereignty event a few days later: “People were coming up to me saying, ‘That song makes me feel proper deadly.’”
Two weeks ago, and less than 2km from Camp Sovereignty, Baker performed in front of 100,000 people at the AFL grand final, lending the rumble of his yidaki to the famous opening notes of Still D.R.E. as US rapper Snoop Dogg sauntered on stage. Not for the first time since Djandjay returned home with a Grandmaster Flash record under her arm, US hip-hop and Arnhem Land’s finest came together again, sharing their biggest stage yet.
But more significantly, before Snoop came out, Baker performed Thick Skin to thousands in the stadium, there to watch a sport that has seen the Adnyamathanha and Narungga player Adam Goodes racially abused into retirement and some First Nations players accusing their club of separating them from their families. Baker on his yidaki, not even 30 years old, shared his stage with the soul matriarch Emma Donovan, who brought the performance to a close with the track’s defiant chorus:
When we walk, it’s our song
I fought through thick and thin
I won’t be broken
You can’t tear my thick skin
Djandjay is out on Friday 10 October (Island Records Australia/Universal Music Australia)
Baker Boy’s songs to live by
Each month we ask our headline act to share the songs that have accompanied them through love, life, lust and death.
What was the best year for music, and what five songs prove it?
I’m gonna say 2003. I remember I’d get up and watch Rage as a kid, more for the dancing than the music, but these are tracks that have stuck with me. If they got released today they’d go just as hard I think: Crazy in Love by Beyoncé and Jay-Z, Hey Ya! by OutKast, Seven Nation Army by the White Stripes, In Da Club by 50 Cent, and Work It by Missy Elliott.
What’s the song you wish you wrote?
Hanumankind’s Big Dawgs. It’s just one of those tracks that as soon as you hear it you’re moving, it’s got this powerful vibe to it.
What’s the last song you sang in the shower?
The Neighbourhood’s Sweater Weather. Low-key embarrassing, but it’s good for practising my vocals.
What song have you listened to the most times this year?
Blackpink’s Shut Down. I think everyone loves Blackpink at the moment. It’s catchy, multilingual, it’s got attitude and just mad vibes.
If your life was a movie, what would the opening credits song be?
Do I Wanna Know? by Arctic Monkeys. Because of the slow heavy guitar riff, it’s kind of building anticipation.
What is your go-to karaoke song?
Always something Michael Jackson but I think Beat It is probably my favourite. I’ve always loved MJ since I was a kid.
What’s a song you can never listen to again?
It feels mean to list a song I never want to listen to again but if I had to pick one it would be Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. I just remember when it came out, I was in year 12 at boarding school and everyone was just playing it on repeat. It was just getting too much.
What is a song you loved as a teenager?
I was obsessed with Timbaland’s The Way I Are. It came out five years earlier but when everyone else was blasting Call Me Maybe, I was still playing The Way I Are on repeat.
What is the first song/album you bought?
Michael Jackson’s Dangerous. I remember I was in Darwin for the Darwin Show and we went to the shops. Milingimbi and Maningrida are remote communities so you can’t just pop down to the shop and buy a CD. They just weren’t things that we had lots of, which made this really special.
What song do you want played at your funeral?
The Akatsuki theme song from Naruto: Shippuden. I’m an anime guy so I’d probably be happy with any anime track, but this one is just so dramatic and powerful.
