Melbourne rapper Seth Sentry announced his 1969 Campaign Trail tour in April this year, and we're not far off the candidate emcee making his way across the country and spreading the word starting June 30. As it's the last tour for his most recent album Strange New Past, and having wrapped up the previous one at 55 dates, Sentry has decided to give crowds a whole new show if they're joining him on the campaign trail.
"We wanted to do a bit of fan-service and completely switch it up. So, we've brought in a drummer who's been able to give it a fresh perspective and really pull the songs apart, restructure everything, add a lot of songs we've never played live before, put a lot of songs to bed, and just have a whole brand new sparkly show," he said.
The presidential concept comes from his song "1969", which relays the story of a nation's leader preparing to blow up the moon, which is very possibly just a predictor for what a Trump presidency might look like. With that in mind, Complex AU asked Mr. Sentry what his campaign promises would be for the people of Australia, and here's what he came up with.
"I promise I'll get people way smarter than me to take care of the country's financial situation. Because this is coming from a dude that recently bought a fucking toy Batmobile."
"I worked in hospitality for 11 years – it was horrible. You can cook food at home, that's fine, but if you want to walk into a restaurant, and eat in a restaurant, you have to have served a compulsory week. It's like conscription, you've got to serve a week in hospitality just so you understand what it feels like. Because, my god, some of the fucking douchebags you get in the industry – it's insane. I think it would just help people develop a real sense of empathy. Just a week, easy."
"Fuck science."
"Stop sending all our good product overseas, start paying our farmers what they deserve. And more organic food, and more competition for organic food because some of the prices you pay for organic shit is insane. The fact that it's like fucking five bucks for an avocado, that's insane. For a normal organic piece of fruit that comes off a tree. There's less to it, but they're charging more, that's insane. And if they don't do that, I'm gonna make it mandatory that everyone has their own avocado trees to drive them out of business."
"Growing up, I had no idea about indigenous culture. All I found out about was stuff that I had found out on my own and studied outside of school – it wasn't really a part of our schooling. So indigenous studies definitely, and just getting an understanding of where the people that own our land came from.
The structure of school is really teaching kids to work within the framework of our society, it doesn't really encourage creative and critical thinking, thinking outside the box. I remember when I was a kid my mum got called into the school because we had to draw these penguins on little plates with little paper feet. And the teacher came in and she was real upset and she said 'Look what your son did!', and she's like 'Look at that!', and there's one that stood out that had these little paper puddles underneath it. And mum's like, 'Oh, it's the drips from the penguin, it's been for a swim'. She's like 'Yes, but we didn't ask them to do that, why couldn't he just do it like all of the other kids?". And that just really is a reflection of schooling, that you must fit into this kind of framework. So I guess, better encouragement of creativity and creative thinking."
"Reinstate funding to Sounds Australia. And it's crazy they've still got lockouts in Sydney. They don't work, we did it here for like a week. The studies came out last week or something and they haven't made a difference. They've lowered incidences of violence in the CBD of Sydney, but who the fuck was even in the CBD?"
"Friends that had depression found it hard once they'd made the decision to seek help, they were kind of left to their own devices. A lot of the time they'd go to a GP, and get a referral ,then with that came just a list of psychs that they should hit up and just a 'go for it'. The thing about mental health is, if you're depressed you don't want to do fucking anything, you don't even want to get out of bed.
So, it might be 6 months, a year or more before they actually summon the courage to start ringing around. You can't really assign someone to each individual person but it'd be nice if someone checked up, 'how you doing, you doing alright?'. If you became part of a database where they would just keep checking up on you until you were in the system somewhere. I guess just more of a focus on mental health."
"The four day work week. Scrap Monday, Monday just becomes Tuesday, and then you just work Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday's like a free day. We're gonna bite Sweden's style and just work 6 hours a day, four days a week. Here's the thing; when you're a musician full-time, you have so much free time. People think that you're working really hard, and you do, but it's short sprints. A lot of the time you're doing fuck all, and I play a lot of video games online and I've never got people online to play with because they're all at work. It'd just mean more friends to play online with."
"Everyone should fire all of their nukes simultaneously at the moon, just 'cause. Just for fun."
"I absolutely promise that I will not run again, and after I run this country into the ground, you're gonna be very thankful for that."
Tour dates and tickets can be found at www.sethsentry.com
