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Hip Hop music was conspicuously absent from the line-up of this year's Splendour In The Grass festival but I remember laying back on the expanse of the Woodfordia Ampitheatre as the sun was shining gloriously the 35,000 inhabitants of the festival when we got an uninvited visit from Australian Hip Hop's biggest act. Flying 3000 feet above us was a plane, dragging behind it a massive banner advertising the impending release of Bliss N Eso's new album Running On Air. It was awe inspiring in its audacity. Balls-out, old-school marketing done with a swagger worthy of a band that a week later would debut at number 1 in the ARIA charts. Just the second Australian Hip Hop group ever to do so.

I wondered at the time whether it was a little too brazen. Expensive marketing strategies like that with no guarantee of a tangible result frighten me. But that's why I'm not in an ARIA number 1 band.

Any Australian act that releases an album featuring members of WuTang, Jehst and Xzibit is intent on taking Australian Hip Hop to another level. Along with The Hilltop Hoods, these guys are taking a genre that was relatively marginalised in this country just 10 years ago, smack bang into the mainstream.

So now, with a groundbreaking number 1 ARIA chart debut, (outselling Eminem and Birds Of Tokyo), sold out shows at large halls in front of 3-4000 people in every city of Australia and aerial marketing campaigns they stand on top of Australia's music industry Bliss N Eso are this counties biggest independent act full stop. Amazing stuff.