June 27th, 2005 what is australian music?
sadly some of the replies to the question seem to suffer from the same problems with the idea of the ‘melting pot’. in those instances, music is confused with the expression of multiculturalism as a national identity, but recorded and performed music displays little of what we would characterise as a shift to a non-anglo saxon core identity.
i would also argue that some of the replies mirror debates about essentialist views on what consists australian identity. we are defined by mateship, we like having a beer and going to the pub, so it goes. there’s probably a band playing at the pub too. so does the search for the stable australian identity in the national discourse extend to music? perhaps so, if exclusivist qualities are being brought to the table:
Australian music has always been more real, more in the face, more shaking arms and kicking ass than any other music in the world. phil tripp - inmedia
and the final shot from tripp: Oh yes, it helps that our lyrics are in English. well, i’ll sing in chinese and and french if i want to - does that make it (or myself) any less australian? how does the english language help to define us, because an awful lot of people around the world speak it, thanks to cultural imperialism?
we might be an island continent, but while a band like the saints could have developed the punk sound in the early 70s unaware of similar sounds across the atlantic, we are no longer in isolation: TV, websites, import stores, radio, downloads, Google, cheap airfares, bootleg t-shirts, swapping mix cd’s, Ebay… all the obvious stuff… mercifully plug us in to the big bad world. (steve cross, remote control records)
the way the world is plugged in at the moment it is impossible to (ignore) what the rest of the world is doing / into at the moment, like tom larnach-jones (trifeka records) suggests, though we can certainly pretend what we are doing is uninfluenced and by extension somehow unique.
cross suggests that with this approach we are …clinging on to a world that’s long gone. If there was/is such a thing as Australian music its probably just sad music that draws on tired old clichés.
the way i see it, i like music, and i like watching performances, so i go to venues to see bands play. sometimes they are from the same city i live in; sometimes from interstate or overseas. i probably have their records as well. what i liked yesterday i might not like today, and if i think it’s crap, regardless of origin, i’ll do my best to avoid it. there really isn’t much else to it.
this is one of those rare occasions i agree with andrew bolt - if we really have to come up with a definition, maybe it could be this: simply, music created by Australians. Anything else is an argument that’s rather pointless, and leads to people being far too closed-minded.
