Trials ‘will not be broken’ on his long-awaited solo LP
After 25 years of making music, the Funkoars and A.B. Original emcee’s entirely self-produced solo album is both a ‘guilty pleasure’ and a survival story filled with his most personal material yet.
To say that MC Trials has a varied discography is an understatement. For Adelaide hip-hop fans who grew up seeing the Funkoars rapping about going on benders and chasing women in the 2000s, it was a surprise to see him tackling systemic racism alongside Briggs in the ARIA Award-winning duo A.B. Original. Since then, he has collaborated with artists including Archie Roach, Thelma Plum and DZ Deathrays, as well as composing scores for a range of TV and film projects.
And now, more than 25 years after he first picked up a mic, his first solo record has finally dropped. The fully rounded version of Daniel Rankine that audiences hear on hendle encompasses every facet of Trials, while also telling the story of how he got here. The title comes from Rankine’s middle name (which he shares with his paternal great-grandfather), but the deeply personal chronicle of the struggles he faced as a young man could just as easily bear his stage name.
Tackling displacement, domestic violence, mental health issues and encounters with the carceral system over ten tracks, hendle is the product of an extended musical apprenticeship as well as “five solid years of sober time and a lot of time to have introspective deep dives on myself.” In addition to writing, producing and mixing the entire record, Rankine played every instrument himself, and he calls the result “the most guilty pleasure record of all time”.
“It’s all my favourite sounds, talking about all my worst memories in the best ways possible,” Rankine tells InReview.
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That wasn’t always the plan. “All my friends have heard various versions of this record for years,” he says, and some even had verses or choruses on the tracks. But it never felt quite right, and some of the tracks have had “some serious panel beating to get where they’re at.”
The most notable of these is ‘six letter word’. Named after “that sweet six-letter word starting with ‘n’”, the song was inspired by the racism that the young Rankine experienced after moving to Wales with his mother.
“My memory is very compartmentalised from lots of trauma and lots of fight or flight emergency reactions as a child, so it’s difficult for me to recall a lot of that stuff,” he says.
“But one of the main things I had in my brain was that when I was a kid landing in Wales, before they even knew my name, they knew that word to call me, and it just fucked me up as a child who was going through identity and displacement from the domestic situation that we were running away from. I just couldn’t comprehend how they knew this one fact about me so quickly, so I wrote a song about it, and particularly that part of my life.”
"There is no struggle I can’t go through anymore. I’ve been through it. There’s nothing worse I could put myself through."
The central sample came from the spoken word intro of Curtis Mayfield’s ‘(Don’t Worry) If There’s a Hell Below We’re All Going To Go’, but the rights holders wouldn’t grant permission to use it.
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“That puzzled me for a little while,” he recalls.”Because there was this word that everyone had used and had free rein over forever, that I was no longer allowed to use. And it was really fucking me up that I just couldn’t use that song.”
His response was to write down alternative six-letter words that evoked a similarly strong feeling. Rather than reclaiming the racial epithet by placing it at the centre of the song, he omitted it entirely from the procession of two-syllable words that unfolds percussively in lines like “moving abroad, forgot racist crowds / landed direct inside higher amounts.”
Other tracks see Rankine rapping about running away from his abusive father in the middle of the night over melancholy strummed guitar (‘run to the river’); throwing out punchlines over a bouncy soul sample that throws back to his Funkoars days (‘cool world’); and addressing the challenges of sobriety over an upbeat syncopated guitar and catchy whistled melody (‘whistle while I walk’).
But one line that appears across several tracks reinforces the fact that his is a story of resilience: “I will not be broken; I was raised broke”.
“[It’s] not only the mantra of those songs, it’s the ethos of the record, of myself. I think I came to terms with that a long time ago. There is no struggle I can’t go through anymore. I’ve been through it. There’s nothing worse I could put myself through.”
hendle is Rankine’s way of sharing that strength with others. The album is the centre of a three-part project alongside an autobiography (“Very much the liner notes, the supporting story to the whole album,” he adds) and an exhibition of 20 acrylic paintings. The ambitious scope means that he intended it to be “my White Album” that would never be played live, but the opportunity to join the Hilltop Hoods’ Never Coming Home tour earlier this year was an opportunity too good to pass up.
But while crowd work and party-starting beats have long been part of Trials’ onstage repertoire, he admits he doesn’t have the same appetite for it any more.
“You can have that instant gratification moment for the audience and the performer, but it’s the conversation after the show that I’m trying to get; that’s the real estate that I want. That’s why I’m up there being as honest as I can. I want people to know these are real stories, and I’m a real person.”
It’s why one of his proudest memories of the tour came offstage, when Rankine donated all the proceeds from his t-shirt sales to Full Stop Australia, a charity supporting survivors of abuse. After selling out of the shirts, he continued to mention the charity and later received a message telling him that they had seen a swell in monthly donors after the shows.
“To have that response means the world to me these days,” he says. “It’s hard enough for someone to see a post and then engage with the clickable link there, but to be able to find this organisation that I’m talking about of their own accord and donate money on a recurring basis… that’s beyond worthwhile to me; it means so much more than ‘cool set, bro’.”
hendle will be released on May 1, with the official album launch at Sydney’s City Recital Hall as part of Great Southern Nights on May 14
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