Yung Gravy @ The Fortitude Music Hall

By Bea Warren

I’ve always found the Fortitude Music Hall a little too glamorous, but thankfully Yung Gravy was there to give the crowd an idea of what real taste looks like. The line had looped around the block, back to the hall’s entrance, like a failed game of Snake. I shuddered at the thought of waiting, but once I was in, there was no going back – literally, I could not find my way out, even if I wanted to.

Gravy is a character. He’s a Soundcloud rapper, moulded by the gaudy and melodramatic personality of the digital age. We relate to his music with our most basic instincts, as he goes on about bedding milfs, loving food, and vice versa. The leopard print porno aesthetic and sampled beats he brings gives us this retrospective and nostalgic feel for a time in which we didn’t exist. He shouldn’t exist. He doesn’t exist, not really. But then again, there are more than a few people on the Internet who think that we don’t exist either, here on the other side of this globe. So what better way to spend a Saturday night than to take two mythological figures – Yung Gravy and Australia – and mash them together in an unexpected cultural collision course

Some people claim that Australia has no culture, and they’re mostly right. But Gravy was able to take the very niche and insignificant bead of culture that we have cultivated over the years and heighten it to no end.

Bringing on ground-breaking Meanjin hip-hop duo, Safety Club, as an opener was the best choice made that night. Having seen those two perform in an abandoned warehouse to a fraction of the people, I wondered how the two could even begin to fill all that empty space. But the energy Ronnie Sinclair and Shan shared together is a connection that surpassed Gravy and DJ Tip. Their set was short, and I was sad to see them go, but there was no time to mourn before DJ Tip took centre hold of the stage, hyping the crowd in typical DJ fashion

I expected a glorified Retro’s, a 20-minute set I could get for half the price at a club outside those hall doors. Something else happened, though. Something I wasn’t sure about. As Tip surrounded himself with his equipment, flicking switches and dropping beats to Taylor Swift songs, a screen flicked on. It looked like the opening slide to my PowerPoint Presentation in health class. There were logos, Australian logos, a Vegemite JPEG plopped on the screen at an angle. Gravy’s name was there in Bauhaus 93. There was a picture of Healthy Harold, an ancient relic long forgotten. As Tip played the Bunnings Warehouse jingle all I could focus on was this glorified generalisation of my childhood, and whether or not I was even comfortable with it. Is this how people see Australia? Has our entire culture been delegated to Crocodile Dundee and that one episode of The Simpsons? Are we okay to sit here and just accept our stere—

Oh, yeah, no, we’re all loving this actually. Gravy just did like two shoeys. Yeah sick, alright.

I don’t know what else I expected. Not that I wanted something profound out of his ‘1 Thot 2 Thot Red Thot Blue Thot’ performance, but I didn’t expect him to hand out fairy bread and signed boxes of Crunchy Nut to the audience.

I tried looking through the videos I recorded for reference and it’s all just noise: pure drum and bass to Gravy’s vocals over a backing track. Bras were slingshotting past my head at a rapid pace; the larger ones whistled as they flew past my ear. He played all the classics and all the songs trending on TikTok. Hands were waving in the air during ‘Mr Clean’ and arms were bobbing up and down during new songs like ‘oops’ and ‘She’s a 10’. I was taken aback with myself as I was caught singing all the words to even his less popular songs, like ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’ and ‘Mrs Worldwide’ Tits were out, Fruit Loops were in the air, and it was then that I started becoming mindless. This 26-year-old man from Minnesota unlocked these fruitful larrikinisms within me that I didn’t know were there. The crowd started shouting playful obscenities out of nowhere as Gravy drank someone’s strawberry yogurt. Honestly, I can’t make this shit up.

He ended the set with ‘Betty (Get Money)’, and I was completely encapsulated. I was under some sort of weirdly erotic spell, left wondering when he was going to take his shirt off or sign another bra. I haven’t even listened to his new album, but when he was leaving the stage, I just started singing.

Damn, Gravy, you so vicious. You so clean, so delicious.

I never understood the appeal towards a 6’7 blond dude with an afro and a terrible sense in fashion, and if I’m being honest, I still don’t. However, I’d be lying if I said that hopping aboard the gravy train wasn’t a worthwhile ride. It’s like a cheap margarita: you won’t gain anything from it, and in fact you might be worse off, but it’s tasty and you can slam it quickly.