Dylan Voller has turned to music to heal from his traumatic past
"Shackles and chains, I break away the stigma, scared little boy, I didn't see the bigger picture."
These are lyrics from Dylan Voller's song Break Through.
"I've never really got counselling, I've never really got therapy, so I guess jumping in the studio … it's like therapy for me," he told the ABC.
When Voller's treatment as a child in the Northern Territory's Don Dale Detention centre was exposed in 2016, it sparked a royal commission.
"All everyone really wanted to do was push me in front of cameras to talk about it and be this big spokesperson," he said.
"I love fighting for my people, I love fighting for the other young people but what I realise is, at the time, I wasn't ready to do all that stuff.
Now, the 27-year-old says he is using music and songwriting to try to move forward from his traumatic past.
"Music's more than just becoming a famous rapper, more than trying to make money and stuff like that, it's a way that I can tell my story and actually feel safe within the way I tell my story."
He recently performed at Tasmania's Dark Mofo festival, which he said was the first festival to pay him to fly out and play.
Caleb Nichols-Mansell is the Tasmanian Aboriginal cultural advisor for DarkLab, the organisers of the festival.
"Like so many, I watched this boy grow into a young man with an incredible talent for performing and storytelling … including Dylan [Voller] seemed obvious," Nichols-Mansell said.
"Too often, First Nations artists and performers are undervalued and offered exposure over actual payment … I've been able to set a standard within the festival and hopefully the arts and cultural scene more broadly for what First Nations artists and musicians should be paid."
Voller was in and out of detention as a child and has faced court since.
"Only a couple of years ago, I was relapsing on drugs and I was back at my lowest again," he said.
"I guess music got me away from that and it's put me back on a positive path that I'm actually doing something with my life," he said.
Nichols-Mansell said using music to heal from past trauma is a sentiment he thinks a lot of First Nations people would relate to.
"The medicine of music, arts and creativity … it has sustained our people, culture and stories for millennia and it continues to do so."
Voller said he always loved freestyle rapping as a child, but his dream was to be a professional AFL player.
He began producing music with the team at Heaps Decent in 2023, which is an arts organisation working with under-represented and marginalised youth to produce their own music and visual media activities.
"More funding for programs like that because not every kid wants to play sport … there needs to be more options and more things out there for young people," Voller said.
Voller is returning to Alice Springs in July for the Dream Big 2025 festival, which is a youth event aiming to inspire social change with music, culture and mentorship.
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In sleuthing out the source of the alleged imitators, Gould's hunt led him to digital distributor Ditto Music, (which, it should be noted, is not on Spotify's list of "preferred" digital distributors). But all attempts to communicate with Ditto's Australian office and manager were met with "absolute crickets". Reverse-engineering a search on the artwork for one song revealed it to be a stock image used across several other tracks, including one on Spotify supposedly featuring pop star Camilla Caballo but credited to one MC Rhymes. A "22-year-old American rapper, songwriter, and record producer", according to his Spotify profile, MC Rhymes has 1 million followers on Instagram, yet only 826 monthly Spotify listeners. The numbers don't add up. "I was trying to work it out," says Gould. "He's actually ripped one of Caballo's songs ['U Shaped Space'], changed it slightly, retitled it. But it's not appearing on her profile, it's appearing on his — it's there and getting streams." 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Bender has been creating memes as a coping mechanism, but the punchlines only work because "this isn't a complex problem to solve. Every streaming company is filled with developers who could figure out how to solve this in a lunch break. But have they?" He and Gould believe there's no incentive for streamers and distributors to "create greater protections … it's just going to drive labour hours and it doesn't increase profits at all". The Sweet Enoughs' plight has found an ally in Michael League, leader of respected jazz fusion group Snarky Puppy, who has taken the issue to Grammys senior executive Nick Cucci. "Who was horrified and just flabbergasted," notes Bender. The plan is to escalate their complaints to Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr and take it all the way to US Congress, "because this is absolutely a lawless environment", Bender emphasises. "I would say the entire streaming industry is operating on criminal levels of negligence. 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Gould has been "following the breadcrumbs around that" and wants to combine their efforts but is "trying to understand what the road map looks like. "What sort of timeline are they on? Are thy facing certain roadblocks that we could assist with? "Or actually, are they just a corporate shell and everyone's just wading water until they can just blast AI and push all the musicians out of the way?" He quotes his friend Stuart Grant, from Aussie punk band Primitive Calculators. "It seems like, for the longest time, the biggest problem for the music industry has always been musicians. And finally, they don't need to worry about them anymore." Bender has been working on a new Sweet Enoughs record, due "sometime this year", which expands it "from a little insular project into a very wide collaborative effort" involving some famous friends — whose names he can't reveal just yet. But the positivity of the process has been soured by his recent experiences. "There's already so many problems in the streaming sphere and the music industry in general. But this one? This one could absolutely be solved. "There needs to be regulations in place. There needs to be at least some dignity afforded by protecting the identities and the intellectual property and the likeness and the idea of all these artists. "That you can guarantee that, 'Yes, this is their music.' Not some robot pretending to be them. Not some scumbag with a bot farm producing garbage to scrape literal percentages of pennies from a million directions at once."
News.com.au
an hour ago
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