While playing her largest solo show to a sold-out, packed-out Northcote Theatre, Miss Kaninna was brought to tears. The rumbles of the crowd’s collective stomps reset my heartbeat, and I’ve truly never heard cheers clash into each other like they did. The whole room was buzzing to be there.

Kaninna’s humility addressing the crowd combined perfectly with her music. She was a woman who had earned her damn place on the stage but didn’t take it for granted for a second. The crowd could feel her gratitude and shone it back onto her, creating an environment of energy and fun when grappling with the heavy subject matter of Kaninna’s music.

The rapper has toured with the likes of Kneecap and Amyl and the Sniffers and has truly cemented herself among these disruptive and raucous voices of contemporary punk resistance. While Mob Ties adopts a smooth, cheeky tone to talk back to the colony, Handout’s disorientating and resonant echoes buzz with anger and meaning, flowing from Kannina’s assertion that money to her people isn’t a handout, “it’s fuckin’ reparations”.

Her presence onstage was mesmerising for such a new artist, and despite her emotions at facing a 1500-strong room, her performance told me she could have done it a hundred times over. She danced and sang in heels as high as her extensions were long, creating a dominant effect on the stage that commanded the crowd’s attention. 

Kaninna’s music asserts the right for a Blak woman to get angry, to get rough, to get powerful. Her music seeps a passion that I felt reverberating through the crowd. Further, between each song was a heartfelt and staunch political statement. Miss Kaninna told the crowd she always wonders if she’s using her hour on stage the best she can, but I’ve never seen such a commitment to using one’s live platform to hammer home the message. Even in this early stage in her career, Kaninna has undergone a confidence boost and an emboldening of voice. As she interspersed tracks for the new EP, Blackprint, with her older music, it was evident that her assuredness has solidified, her sound truly found. I can’t wait to see what comes next.

The show closed out with Stolen Wages, punctuating the performance with everything the record stands for. The song is punctuated with Koori words to talk back to the colony, and I felt so inspired to hear those words be given modernity and power by Kaninna on stage. While we are the oldest living culture on the planet, Australia has been determined to leave our languages and our voices in the past. Kaninna’s music stamps its foot in the here and now, standing on her land and keeping the fire burning.

The track’s use of saxophone to fade out ended the show with reverberance and charm, keeping the crowd’s attention captive and percolating on the lyrics’ message. Likewise, I leave you with the introduction to Stolen Wages, for I could not sum up better the way I feel when I listen to Miss Kaninna with hundreds of other blackfellas around me singing.

Being Blak is a wonderful thing, something you cannot hide
I'm a Blak person myself, but I never questioned why
I can say I'm proud of my culture and my heritage and my skin
But it's not the outside that counts, it's the soul that lives within
For being Blak, I'll shout it aloud, for being Blak, I feel so proud.