WATCH: Tasman Keith Raps About Life, Death, and Aboriginal Identity

"I've only been to one wedding in my life," Tasman says, walking through the cemetery in his hometown of Bowraville. "But I've been to like—I can't even count the funerals."

In many ways, much of Tasman's music can be distilled into this one line. He raps about anger, about life and death, and about his complex relationship with Bowraville on New South Wales's northern coast. He was born there, but moved to Sydney as a kid, where he grew up watching his dad rap as Wire MC. Tasman was then attending festivals from the age of eight, and spent his childhood thinking that sort of lifestyle was completely normal.

But at the age of 14 his family moved back to Bowraville. He admits he wasn't thrilled at the prospect although it suddenly meant living among his cousins, who he recruited into a six-piece rap group. They covered the walls of a small room in carpet and called it a "studio," and practiced writing and rapping there every night after school.

But this memory only describes half of Tasman's relationship with his hometown. Because Bowraville is also site of one of the state's most notorious missions, where Indigenous people were ordered off their land and corralled into government-run housing. And it's this mix of pride and anger that today informs so much of his music.

In this episode of VICE Raps, we meet Tasman in Bowraville to discuss the town's light and shade, and to see how he channels these extremes into writing.