Hiatus Kaiyote on the meaning of "Nakamarra"

Last August, I caught up with Australian 'future soul' band Hiatus Kaiyote when their North American tour stopped off in Toronto to play an entertaining show The Garrison. They'd already been generating a huge buzz from music fans and musicians alike. The group can count Erykah Badu, Questlove, and Q-Tip as musical peers that are also fans of their music and evidently this support has snowballed into genuine acclaim. Hiatus Kaiyote's single "Nakamarra" was nominated for Best R&B Recording at the 2014 Grammys. Before that Toronto show, I sat down on the grass in the parkette across from the venue and chatted about the music on their Tawk Tomahawk album. "Nakamarra" was an instantly striking song for me, yet I could sense there were deeper layers to the song that belied its immediacy. I asked the group what the song was about, why Q-Tip needed to be informed of its meaning and if it was linked to an Aboriginal artist (Doreen Reid Nakamarra) I'd read about through googling the word. Singer Nai Palm broke down the personal nature of the song and contextualized the specificity of the song to Aboriginal people in Australia. ----

NAI PALM: "Basically, like Nakamarra is a skin name, so it’s a tribal name you get given. There’s a series of different names and it places you in a different part of the family tree. Because there are so many nomadic tribes in the Australian desert, you come across somebody from another tribe that you’ve never met before and their skin name like all the skin names relate to other skin names.

So you can meet somebody and just based on what their skin name is and your skin name they could be -- even if they are younger than you -- they could be your grandmother or they could be your cousin or they could be your sister. So...just meeting someone there’s less warfare because it’s like you know what kind of respect level to treat them with, almost.

And it also ties in with breeding. You have the right skin name to breed with and stuff and it’s associated with land and animal totems and stuff like that. So that’s why Nakamarra is the name of this artist, but also there’s about seven skin names and everybody has them. Well, not everybody, but the indigenous people have them. And a girlfriend of mine , Hannah who is working in central Australia in a really remote community with indigenous artists and she was given a skin name and the song is about her.

But it’s also it’s kinda like, it’s pretty rare for a young artist living in a really rich cultural city to just drop everything and like, go out there. It’s a real extreme environment to put yourself into that not a lot of Australians are really educated on because it’s not really brought up in the media and stuff , so for me it was a song about her courage to go and explore that and do that for a while. I really respected her for that. And I really wanted to do something like that but it was kind of like my band was the priority.

I think it’s really beautiful that it’s the song people pick up on because it’s so Australian-specific, whereas we’re not really a patriotic Aussie band, y’know what I mean [laughs]. And the reason I wanted Q-Tip to really know about it is because if he just rocks off and he’s like ‘Yo, y’know we’re partying, blah, blah, blah...,' the song has got some pretty… [trails off]. I mean even the word "Nakamarra," like if he doesn’t even know what that is then I didn’t feel comfortable with him just spitting anything on it, so yeah, it was important for him to be aware about that."