Review by Vince Leigh
MC KREWD’s experimental theatre background has come in handy. The Canberra based artist utilises this, along with her amalgamation of burlesque, comedy, and rap talents, to project a larger-than-life feral caricature that dissects as it digresses and decrees.
Her new release Single Mother Malady is an entertaining swipe at class, all classes it seems, from the workers right up to the upper, while extolling the virtues of stimulants and sex with a three-minute parody that stretches the rap genre to an absurdist point; a configuration that honours this style’s origins while conflating it to hyperbolic proportions.
The humour is down-home. It’s refreshingly local, when MC KREWD announces, ‘I love this community’, we are as doubtful as we are doubled over by the inference of such a virtuous statement. The puns employed do their job; we snigger and we might even sing along to the oft-repeated line, ‘I love it’.
There are hooks here, scattered over the nineties hip-hop feel, the soulful background vocals threaded throughout, the piano trickles, the funk edged bass and guitar, as well as the curious double-time quasi-jungle groove of the chorus and these are all reinforced while watching the video.
Here the scenes are vividly brought to our attention; the zany, fellow leaf lovers, the quintessential incongruous old guy gyrating to no apparent time signature, a general cast of characters who bump and grind with MC KREWD in slo-mo convulsions that provide some light relief from the light relief of the actual track.
And just like experimental art, it doesn’t need to ‘work’. That dubious process is not the point here.
What is the point? There doesn’t need to be one. Single Mother Malady will amuse and beguile, but based on its attempt at satire alone, it’s worth a look and a listen.
