“You’ve got to be yourself, so that’s what I’m focused on,” JK-47 tells Apple Music. The Indigenous rapper from Tweed Heads has the weight of the world on his shoulders: He plans to use his music to send messages and educate his audience, he’s learning to be a new husband and father, and he hopes to give back to the community he grew up in—and it all starts here, with his powerful debut album. “I want to be a part of the solution,” he says. “I want to be there for the youth, ’cause they just run amok. They just want to be out in the streets with their mates, but I want to create a space where they can come and chill out and do programs and stuff. I’ve got my sisters and brothers growing up, they’re not doing what they’re supposed to be doing, so I’ve got to be there for them. But they don’t wanna listen to the big brother telling them what to do, they wanna listen to the rapper, so I’ve gotta put it into my songs.” He first found an audience through big, party-starting hits with Brisbane’s Nerve, but over time he’s come to understand the importance of speaking the truth and delivering a message. “I’m putting stuff in my songs that people don’t wanna talk about, but they should be,” he says. “I put the vibes in there—‘On One,’ ‘The Recipe’—because people want that banging stuff. Then once people want to start checking me out, they can get down to the realer stuff. I can tell the story of what it’s like for blackfellas in the community where I come from. I want to make music that my elder family can be proud of, they can play and can agree with me instead of looking at me and saying, ‘This is not what you’re supposed to be talking about.’” Below, JK-47 talks more about four of the biggest tracks on Made for This. Wings “I’m talking to my little brothers and sisters. We went through a lot of domestic violence growing up. A lot of kids in our community go through that hard lifestyle where your family and home ain’t the best place to be around. But unless you’ve got some hella good friends, which ain’t the case most of the time, everybody drags everybody else down and there’s nowhere else to go from there. There’s a lot of stuff I say in that song—there’s no chorus, it’s just three minutes of me rapping. A lot of times we don’t know who we are, we’ve lost the sense of our culture, but if we hold on to what our elders have to say, we have something to cling to. It keeps you in line. It gives you something to be proud of about yourself, because it’s your heritage, it’s stuff that’s been passed down through your people, from before you were here. It’s not just me speaking to Indigenous people of this country—it’s this country as a whole.” I Am Here (Trust Me) [feat. Phoebe Jacobs] “I wrote that track about Aboriginal deaths in custody. With my people dying in custody and these injustices being done, I feel like I can’t sit silently on the sideline. If I’ve got followers, I’ve got to say something and let them know what’s really happening. These aren’t all people from my country—’cause there are over 250 different Aboriginal countries in Australia. We have to stick together as much as we can. And help people be aware, so they can stand with us and let the government, the police, and the system know that we don’t stand for that. Hopefully we can affect change and do something together. Some people love this track, but for some people, it makes them feel uncomfortable. But hopefully it gives people the urge to stand up and actually do something about it because you can’t just sit there and listen to it.” Outta Time (1-Take) “I say, ‘We don’t need no pat on our backs, we ain’t satisfied with that shit/They say they are genuine but men are straight-up catfish ’cause my people are dying much quicker than average.’ Where I’m going with that is that growing up, when we do something good, or actually show signs of excelling in life, people look at us like, ‘That isn’t normal.’ They give us a pat on the back and say, ‘Good for you.’ But it’s just not enough. The suicide rate—we ain’t happy. We are depressed, we feel like we’ve got nowhere to go. Walking around the city where I’m from, we’ve got the beach there, good views and everything, I’ve got a wife and a kid, and I feel like I’ve got everything I need, but it just isn’t that simple for my people growing up. Even though we live on this beautiful land, we don’t have the necessities to actually make something of ourselves. There’s stuff here that wasn’t made for us to achieve.” On One (feat. Chiggz, Nate G & Nerve) “We recorded that last year, in the same session I made [2019 single] ‘Came for the Lot.’ We saved ‘On One’ for a rainy day and whipped it out when I was getting ready for this album. I had to go back and rewrite some things, ’cause there was stuff I was rapping out before that I’m not rapping about now. When I first wrote it, it wasn’t the same mentality I have now. It’s a good thing for me, because I feel myself growing as an artist. I’m not just being a rapper. You know when you go to museums, you see stuff that make you think about what the artist is trying to portray for you. It makes me feel a different type of way. Originally it was just gonna be me and my brother Chiggz, but I was like, ‘Nah, this song’s a vibe, so let’s get Nerve and Nate G on it’—he’s my little brother, so I’ve got my older brother and my little brother on the track. I thought it would be so good if that song blew up, because my brothers would blow up with me.”