Miss Kaninna is loud – very, very loud – and we need to listen. She is a proud Yorta Yorta, Dja Dja Wurrung, Kalkadoon and Yirendali woman who is making music that defies genres and that demands to be heard. She is the first independent Indigenous woman to be ARIA nominated for a debut single in 30 years, with the most ARIA nominations ever for a debut single by an independent Indigenous woman. RUSSH had the honour of speaking to her the morning the news broke, the day after her birthday, even before she had called her mother, about authenticity and legacy.
Miss Kaninna’s mother was a musician, and although she said she would play lots of gigs, the main takeaway for her daughter was about “seeing how music is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to feel” – aside from all of the marketing and self-promotion most artists have to do now to be heard. Like many artists, she cut her teeth performing covers in Tasmania, becoming known for her unique interpretations of songs. “I feel like a lot of the girls down in Tassie are very, I would say, oppressed. It’s very conservative in Tassie. If you’re dressing like this [gesturing to her outfit] you’re a slut or whatever. So, when we would get up and we would scream that shit and make sex noises on the mic, the girls would just go fucking crazy.” Naturally, alongside covers of Lauryn Hill, the self-proclaimed Blak Britney covered Spears’ Toxic, in a more jazz influenced way, with the help of some of her fellow musicians. When it came to writing her own story, she had creative control, and now, she wants to speak her truth about “what I’m experiencing, what my community is experiencing, and what my parents experienced”.
“When I think about politics, I think about really hard-hitting shit. But for me, obviously being a woman, that’s my every fucking day as well. We have to constantly explain to people why it’s okay for us to express and to express our body.”
From a young age, Miss Kaninna recognised how to approach audiences who just wanted to dance and not listen. She realised songs that presented as a ‘good time’ pop song can have a much more powerful meaning and require more than dance as a response. Her solution was to create separate spaces within her music. “I feel like it’s really important for me that I don’t blur the lines too much; where I’m just making music for people to dance to, and they’re not listening. I really don’t want people to forget what the message is.” So, whilst Push Up sounds like an exploration of sexuality and feeling good, a song like Pinnacle Bitch or Blak Britney needed to carry more weight, to make people really listen and engage with the message. “When we’re talking about politics… the beat sounds fucking hard because the message is hard. I wanted the beat to match the message, not the message to match the beat.”
However, that’s not to say Push Up, for example, is not political, when you consider the sexualisation of women in pop culture. “When I think about politics, I think about really hard-hitting shit. But for me, obviously being a woman, that’s my every fucking day as well. We have to constantly explain to people why it’s okay for us to express and to express our body.” Whilst Push Up might sound ‘softer’ than Blak Britney for example, Miss Kaninna explains that “it still is political in the way that we’re liberating women, and we’re making it okay to feel ourselves. It’s okay to be sexual, because you know, men are going to sexualise us regardless. We might as well do it right. We might as well do it right and make some money off of it.”
Writing protest songs, or dealing with traumatic themes, as Miss Kaninna does, is not for the faint of heart, so I’m curious to know how, as an artist, she oscillates from the more vulnerable moments of trauma into an antiracist battle cry. The key for her is time.
“I find it much easier to articulate myself on my own time. I think I can speak for most people in that, when you’re met with racism, genocide, homophobia, transphobia – any of that – when it happens to you, you’re not prepared. It creates something inside you that makes you feel like you have to speak on behalf of everyone that’s gone before you and everyone that will come after you. You have to say exactly what is going to encompass your emotions and how to best tackle this. I find it really overwhelming and I can’t do it. Usually when somebody is racist toward me and I’m not prepared for it, it hits me like a tonne of bricks. But when I can articulate myself in my own time, I find it really therapeutic, because I don’t feel like I’m having to justify myself. I feel like I’m just talking to myself and I’m talking to the people around me that want to listen.”
“Watching these women get platformed so we can talk about our truth makes me feel like I want to be a part of this. I want to speak up because, when we speak up all together, we’re so much more.”
Places where people are present for Miss Kaninna’s experience, such as a seminar or being in the studio, allows her to heal, rather than simply revisit her trauma, which prepares her for an often far less supportive experience. Perhaps an even more traumatising experience for Miss Kaninna, aside from the racism itself is the complete denial of racism in Australia.
“Not only do Indigenous people, every single day, have our intellectual capacity questioned, and put under the microscope, we have to constantly tell people, hey, we’re actually humans. We have the capability of emotions. We have the capability of intelligence, and we have to justify that. But then we also have to justify that we experience racism.” Even when Miss Kaninna explains her personal experience of overcoming institutionalised racism and sexism to her audience on TikTok, she is denied her own truth and experience, being met with comments saying that it simply didn’t happen. “How are we supposed to heal as a country when the country can’t even acknowledge it’s in denial? If we acknowledge the racism, we acknowledge the history. We’re going to go nowhere and nobody’s going to learn and there’s going to be continued pushback if people can’t take responsibility...”
Miss Kaninna knows that this is a problem that needs to be shared and discussed openly, and one that requires support from all angles, whether it is speaking to Barkaa, Uncle Fred Leone or Auntie Emma Donovan, her wider community of Uncles and Elders, her family and her ancestors. “The overall thing with racism is, you have to reach out to other people who have experienced racism to be able to learn how to deal with it.”
Truly authentic, Miss Kaninna doesn’t have a pre written script before heading out on stage, and up until a couple of months ago, she felt like she was having to educate her audience as to what she was talking about – “shove it down their throats” – even though she may have been, like all artists, a little nervous. However, the words always come. “I find that when I’m on stage and I’m thinking about what it is I’m going to say, sometimes I just open my mouth, and I feel like I’m not the one speaking.” Although it’s hard to explain where this comes from, she feels she has inherited so much “intergenerational knowledge and Power”, stemming from conversations she heard as a kid. “I feel like my Nan. A lot of people say that I sound like my Nan,” she tells me. This becomes a lot more powerful when you understand how important her Grandmother was in fighting for Indigenous rights in Tasmania as the first State Secretary of the Aboriginal Centre. Even though her Grandmother passed when she was young, the resilience and call to justice is clearly still present in her Granddaughter’s work. Miss Kaninna continues to explain: “I feel like my Nan was really great at speaking and talking and levelling with people. I feel like maybe I’m a little bit more aggressive, because I feel the years are coming on now, and we’re not seeing any serious change. I feel like my Mum’s generation, my Nan’s generation, and the three generations before them had that huge stereotype: don’t be angry and Blak, because if you are angry and Blak, you’re going to get killed. And so, to me, I am raising my voice and being loud because they weren’t allowed to.”
"I find that when I’m on stage and I’m thinking about what it is I’m going to say, sometimes I just open my mouth, and I feel like I’m not the one speaking.”
Listening to Miss Kaninna talk is an empowering experience in itself, so I’m curious to know how she maintains such power. “I feel like it’s in the name. I think definitely having Miss before my name – being Miss Kaninna” she says, “that name for me is a little bit sassy, a little bit dominating. It shows my title and says: I’m important. That’s how it makes me feel when I am on stage.” Whilst she tries to be as authentic as possible, as well as an accentuated or amplified version of her true self, she reminds me that she is still only human, explaining that she feels insecure like we all do. When met with those fears, she remembers that she is “exactly who [she] wants to be right now”, and to perform that confidence for her audience, who might just take it away and put it to use in their daily lives.
Miss Kaninna has had Elders come to her and congratulate her for her confidence and authenticity, saying that the child in them was experiencing a kind of healing, seeing the next generation say what they couldn’t, or wear what they couldn’t. When it’s suggested that Miss Kaninna’s voice is ‘unfiltered’, we laugh. “I just mean like, it’s so funny how, as women, we have to always say when we’re speaking our truth that we’re unfiltered. Like women are supposed to be seen, not heard? It’s just such a hectic thing to wrap your head around. And I’m so glad that I’m meeting more and more women who are unfiltered.”
Miss Kaninna’s team, who care deeply about First Nations people, women and the community she is in. In an at times unkind industry, she feels optimistic but assured that her success is due to her doing the right things. One of those things is the rule that “if you don’t believe in Land back, you can’t sit with us”. Miss Kaninna wants her future to be one of power, and one where more women are in positions of power, whether that be the CEO of Sony for their ability to care about artist’s needs, First Nations journalists assisting in artist storytelling, or punk musicians like Amy Taylor hosting seminars. “Watching these women get platformed so we can talk about our truth makes me feel like I want to be a part of this. I want to speak up because, when we speak up all together, we’re so much more.”
“I feel like it’s really important for me that I don’t blur the lines too much; where I’m just making music for people to dance to, and they’re not listening. I really don’t want people to forget what the message is.”
As for her legacy? Miss Kaninna wants to create more opportunities for others. “I hope that people say that I’ve created more opportunities for mob,” she says. “And that I’ve contributed to the expansion of Indigenous music. I think what we’re seeing here, right now, is the birthing of a new culture in music.”
“Warumpi Band, Uncle Archie Roach and Yothu Yindi – these bands were some of the first to push down the barrier. And now we’re seeing the most Indigenous artists that we’ve ever seen coming up. I’m really holding down the fort…”
“I hope that by the end of my career, we see a lot more Indigenous women owning their identity and not having to always explain themselves and to justify why they belong there. I just want people to say, ‘Yes, she belongs there because she’s good enough’.”
