October 27, 2003
Strange fruit?
My last post on Brian Wilson's abandoned Smile album lead me to thinking about rock criticism in Australia. Whilst doing the evening walk with Agtet in the Adelaide Parklands yesterday, I wondered if there is a culture of rock criticism in Australia. Is is this mode of criticism alive and well in Australia? Or has it become the consumer-guide approach that we now see in our broadsheet newspapers.
There seems to be a lack of criticism judging by the vacuity of the ABC's Love is in the Air.
That documentary celebrates Australia's pop music and its role in our culture and it understands that pop music is the soundtrack of daily life.
But the content of its replay of the soundtrack to Australian life is lightly sketched on the cliched duality's of rock v. pop; high culture versus popular culture; a provincal Australia versus comopolitan overseas.
What is absent is the art versus commerce duality.
I missed the Strange Fruit episode last night. From what I can gather from the transcript it traces the pop television show Countdown to its roots in vaudeville, variety, comedy, music theatre and travelling tent shows. The Countdown of the 1970s was colour, movement and appearance it was a pop variety show with lots of media hype and payola. Countdown was show biz on a public broadcaster concerned about national identity and Australian culture. That pop culture has been re-branded the seventies with an ironic nineties celebration of camp as in Priscilla Queen Of The Desert.
Okay, so that account establishes backward and forward links and the cultural connections and that takes it one step away from celebrating showbiz.
So where is the rock criticism that explores and interprets the meanings of the "replay of the soundtrack to Australian life"?
Rock criticism does not have a voice in this program.
Why?
Is it not mentioned because Australia did not nurture a Lester Bangs, or a Greil Marcus, (more here) or a Dave Marsh? Is there an Australian equivalent?
We need a rock criticism to explore the way that popular music is a soundtrack to our daily life rather than entertainment. Thus the Beach Boys, as an American band, created a mythology of teenage surf culture. So what did Skyhooks do? I mean they did entitle their debut album Living in the Seventies, which was sprinkled with Melbourne place names and Australian themes. That means Skyhooks saw themselves as more than strange theatrical fruit creating novelty numbers:
"Yeah I'm living in the seventies
Eatin' fake food under plastic trees
My face gets dirty just walkin' around
and I need another pill to calm me down"
Living in the 70's (G.Macainsh. Mushroom Music Aust.)
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 27, 2003 08:42 AM | TrackBack