On the Rise
Miss Kaninna

It’s a clear and mild night in Brighton, with the town bustling for the first night of one of the most notable music discovery showcases in the globe, The Great Escape. I’m sardined into a tiny dark room in the North Lanes, admittedly late to the set owing to the snaking line out the front of the venue. Apparently I’m not the only one with a tip off of a boisterous act, co-signed by Amyl And The Sniffers and Kneecap, that is set to be a highlight name in the festival’s programming.

After managing to plead my way in, I’m confronted by an audience of industry and press abstaining from their usual half-chatter while an artist showcases, but instead eyes locked and unmoving on Tasmania-born Miss Kaninna.

Dress in black jeans and a keyhole cutout long sleeve top, Kaninna is spitfiring lyrics for those “who have been told they can’t say anything, wear anything they want and just plain told what the fuck to do”. 

“It’s your mouth and it’s your fucking choice,” she says before launching into her track ‘Pinnacle Bitch’. Hair whipping around the stage, she raps, “Put my fist in the sky / fuck the system / Don't comply / If I ever met the king / Break his neck with a string,” and the crowd cheers. It’s a gamble in the country of The Crown, but the audience is on board - a testament to Kaninna’s unwavering confidence, likeability and unwillingness to censor based on the audience. There is no mincing her words.

A week prior to embarking on her UK tour, I catch up with the Melbourne/Naarm-based artist over Zoom. Hailing from the remote Bruny Island, one of Australia’s most southern points, Kaninna grew up in a homelife she describes as ‘not the easiest’. 

“We didn’t have wifi at home and we didn’t always have food at home," she tells me. The isolation, connection to country and living off the land down there really shaped my values in a way as a person. Like we don’t have buses, trams, trains, any of that transport shit… It was very very bushtrack,” she explains. 

Her rural life on Bruny is also where she fostered her love of music, surrounded by powerful women who introduced her to song and storytelling: “My nan was a singer, my mum was a singer. My whole family get the guitar out and sit around the table when we’re having a cuppa or a drink or whatever, and play country. I was always exposed to music and always wanted to be a performer because I love to be the center of attention.”

This love of performance was nurtured into her fledgling career when, at 15, she moved off the island to attend a prestigious private boarding school on a full scholarship in Tasmania’s capital, Hobart. The school offered a drama, singing, dancing course that solidified her love of being on stage, but even then she thought it was a pipedream.

“I always thought [performing] was going to be a dream of mine because you know there’s not many people who look like me on TV," she says. “There’s not many people who look like me on the radio or in magazines, and so for me, I thought it was a very far away dream that wouldn’t happen to me because things like that don’t happen to girls like me in Tassie.”

It was at that point the pandemic struck, and Kaninna thought she’d squandered her only opportunity, believing that that was the death of live music and it was never coming back. “That snapped something within me that I missed my chance and I blew it away and why did I do that?” she recalls. “If the world ends next year, what am I going to show for it? Am I going to say that I gave it a go and I tried, or am I going to say that I didn’t?”

This newfound yearning sparked her to take the poems she’d been writing her whole life, and transform the practice into songwriting - a saving grace for a depressive slump she found herself in during the Melbourne lockdowns (the longest locked-down city in the world, totalling 262 days in isolation).

A few months later, when the opportunity to open for her friend’s gig at the local uni bar came her way, Kaninna leapt at the chance despite having written one song and 30 minutes to fill. But her covers of Britney Spears, The Fujees and Sneaky Sound System paid off, booking 12 consecutive weekends of shows off of her debut performance.

Her early sound of neo-soul and RnB quickly transformed into her iconic rambunctious hip hop, after realising that she had something bigger to say. “I’ve been raised by some really staunch blackfellas who don’t compromise who they are for the sake of getting along," she tells me. They are very staunch and believe very much in human rights so I think that’s why I’m so loud and boisterous about my rights and rights of minorities in this country.”

Her lyrical topics including sexual liberation, indigenous segregation, incarceration rates and deaths in custody outgrew the conservative Tasmanian crowd, with Kaninna realising there wasn’t a space for her music on Australia’s southern island. That’s when she relocated to Melbourne/Naarm and put out her debut hit ‘Blak Britney’ - a highly-anticipated self-described “anti-establishment anthem” that saw support from the likes of Rolling Stone Australia, Triple J and TikTok Australia.

Fast forward only two years later, and Kaninna is taking her message global, with three performances at The Great Escape and a small run of UK shows - her first international headline tour that Kaninna sees as a momentous opportunity to educate.

“A lot of people are saying to me, ‘Oh you’re going to the UK, that must be super hard’ and for me, I’m just very grateful for the opportunity because I think the people who need to hear it the most are the Brits. It is the Europeans that need to hear what I have to say, because they are the reason why my people are so oppressed still,” she says.

“It’s illegal to drink alcohol for some of my people, we don’t have our own money we can spend, and I think that Australia has done a very good job at hiding the truth. I think it’s really important to be able to go to the UK and say it with my own mouth, ‘This is what’s going on,’ and I think the people of the UK deserve to know what their country has done to mine.”

Back on the Brighton stage, Kaninna is driving the message home. “People constantly try to put me down for who I am," she tells the crowd.. "The reality is, I come from the oldest continuous living culture in the fucking world and I deserve some fucking respect… Oppression of Aboriginal people has to stop and it starts with people like us. Grassroots people. We can’t wait for the government to change policies, we have to be human and I need you to care about Aboriginal people.” 

In front of me, a greying man pumps his fist high in solidarity, swept up in the power of Kaninna’s words before sheepishly hiding it back down as though to remember himself and where he is. It’s a physical confirmation that Kaninna has cut through, that the crowd has listened and that they’re walking away changed from when they entered.