April 25, 2004
Regionalism & music
This guy keeps on moving from Sydney up to Byron Bay, then back to Sydney. Recently, he went to hear the music played by these musicians. Whilst cruising the endless highway back to Sydney from Byron, CS listens to Eric Clapton. CS and Eric share a metaphysical fix with Robert Johnson, the King of the Delta blues. He is in heaven.
Now CS just loves Byron Bay, that is so lovingly depicted by Judy Cassab
CS says:
"Byron Bay is my favourite place on the whole earth. Forget all that crap about counter-cultures, celebs, trendies, property prices and the rest. This is just flotsam and jetsam on the big scheme of things. I’ve been stopping over to surf Byron since the 60s, when the only other people who knew or cared we were in the place were the local cops. I've long since stopped staying in Byron itself, but the surrounds remain my heaven on a stick. With the surfing breaks of your wildest dreams, with water those few delicious degrees warmer and cleaner and more dolphin filled than Sydney, with rolling Irish-green hills trimmed by blissed out cows, with that semi-tropical air, and with that crucial psychic gap from the big metropolis and … well, the place is a complete aesthetic spirit, mind and body bath … a stark reminder that the protestant work ethic is the most grievous mortal sin ever committed by humankind against everything that's truly meaningful in and about life."
That love of place which celebrates a Dionysian life is an affirmation of regionalism in a global world. CS expresses a critical regionalism, as he affirms and respects the specific quality of a region and its cultural identity.
Judy Cassab, Surfers, Byron Bay,
If the love of place is an affirmation of regionalism in a global world, then CS says nothing about the architecture of this regional place in northern NSW. Is there an environmentally sensitive regional architecture developing in and around Byron Bay? Or is the same standardized two story glass rectangle/square that you see everywhere along the coast?
To be fair, CS is more a budding music critic than an architectural one. That is to be welcomed, given the lack of critical music reviews in Australia. There is a nascent music criticism going on in Australian weblogs, but it is more concerned with classic rock albums or the greatest Rolling Stone song, rather than exploring the contribution of rock music to our sense of place; or its relationship to our broader culture.
What lies outside the horizons of this type of music criticism is whether this music have a critical edge in relation to the world of utilityand instrumental reason? Was is its relationship to our changing mode of existence? CS does not tell us how the country blues can affirm critical regionalism in a global world; or why this music has a critical edge in a world of utility.
Maybe these are not the right questions to ask about rock music. Rock music is all about the guitar licks and lines? The questions about regional identity in a global world are questions that can be properly addressed by the visuals arts and architecture.
Brett Whiteley, The cricket match, 1964
Music should be judged on its own terms as music. CS places the emphasis on aesthetic experience.
I do not accept this this line of argument. Greil Marcus' Music Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music, says otherwise. If the Americans are exploring this, why not the Australians? In a global world it is critical regionalism, not Luddism, that is the way to go.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 25, 2004 12:24 PM | TrackBack