Hip-hop is the biggest musical genre in the world right now, and one of the fastest growing locally, but in Australia it still feels like it hasn’t quite broken through and dominated the mainstream yet, in the way it has overseas - especially in the US and UK.

Acts like the Hilltop Hoods and Bliss n Eso helped popularise Australian hip-hop in the mid-2000s, but while they were achieving commercial success, a much grittier and raw kind of hip-hop was coming out of housing commission estates in Sydney and Melbourne.

Known as gutter rap, or lad rap, this underground subgenre never saw much airplay and didn’t sell heaps of records, but it influenced a generation of artists redefining hip-hop in Australia today.

Writer, journalist and contributor to The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, Mahmood Fazal, joins The Culture to discuss the history of Australia’s underground hip-hop scene and how it feeds into the music being made today.

Guest: Writer, journalist and contributor The Saturday Paper and The Monthly, Mahmood Fazal

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The Culture: How Western Sydney is redefining hip-hop