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Place is in the music
Published on 05/10/07
by matt
A panel on Australia’s critical culture (around music) featuring Emmy Hennings, Jon Dale and Gail Priest took place at Newcastle’s TINA festival last weekend. I couldn’t be there. But I wanted to find out more. Fortunately, Emmy was on my show last night so we got a chance to talk about it – radio set list to come when I manage to negotiate the tangled computer drives at FBI over the weekend (now done) – but that, and Emmy’s blog post on the subject, got me thinking.
Apparently Jon and Emmy had some diplomatic disagreements. Emmy summarised it as:
Jon spoke about his problem with the criteria of ‘Australian’ as it applied to thinking about cultural production, arguing that we should try to vacate the term and think instead about what is produced and created here as existing on an international continuum.
However, I personally have derived a lot of creative drive over the past few years from trying to think consciously and write quite explicitly about Australian music and its relationship to place, location, geography…
Which should be immediately clear to anyone who read her intense Art of Fighting piece from a while ago.
Place is vital to understanding the music – and sometimes the geography jumps out of the music as well, consider for a moment Ed Kuepper’s ‘Electrical Storm’: it blows me away just thinking about that palpably, intensely evocative song. ‘Cattle and Cane’ by the Go Betweens is another Queenslander that does the same thing.
I guess people worry that locally focused coverage, quotas at radio stations and so on lead to protectionist tendencies. But tentative first steps need nurturing and encouragement. They need protection.
Posterity (or blind luck/discovery by crate diggers?) seems like the ultimate musical arbiter in the global music system. But, really, music mostly develops in a very localised and incremental process. If you don’t get that you’re missing a lot.
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Comments on Place is in the music
5 Responses
richard
07/10/07
yeah, i feel like im obsessed with place and music. especially in new zealand and australia. i feel that flying nun bands of the 80s and 90s are so inherently NZ sounding. it’s nice, in a place where yr growing up trying to grasp or find some concrete culture, listening to the verlaines on yr christchurch veranda in the winter makes a lot of sense
richard
07/10/07
‘new zealand music month’ in nz is pretty obscene though. is there one of those here? an australian one, that is
adrian
07/10/07
are there many music ‘scenes’ from the last 50 years not intrinsically tied to place? from the east-west coast hiphop wars of the early 90s, to london 76-77, san-francisco in the first summer of love (67), manchester in the second (88), seattle grunge, memphis in the 50s. all of those, and many more, offered music that was vital because it reflected local cultural concerns. it’s when those small scenes start to globalise that they dilute and the crap music that tries aping the originals kicks in. yeah, there’s an international continuum, but it dies if there’s no localised distinctiveness continually inputed from different places. the ‘internationalism’ argument is directly analogous to saying that we should all just embrace mcdonalds and kfc otherwise we’ll fall behind the in the world of cuisine.
is this a problem specifically related to australia? is it a cultural cringe that says we have to be ‘international’ to be successful? i just can’t imagine too many american musicians concerning themselves with trying to be ‘less american’!
and the quota issue doesn’t lead to protectionism. it means that we are forced to dig deeper than the biggest 50 songs in the world at the moment with which to be entertained. it actually creates much more diversity rather than the opposite. our community radio is surely the best indicator of that.
Neil
07/10/07
Interesting post. Place is the big problematic in music for me. It’s often a major part of music production at all levels and is often, if not always, in the UK (where I’m based) used to locate bands/sounds beyond and above the subjects of the songs. Consequently, in the UK popular music discourse has allowed the creation and maintenance of plausible and implausible music locations. When The Darkness said they came from a place near Lowestoft on the Suffolk coast, it merely added to their comedic value.
Does music always reflect place context — as it reflects class concerns and so on?
Instrumentals often provide bands with a way of narrating themselves out of place-bound notions. You can call an instrumental anything…
On a related point, I was a little confused on visiting Australia a couple of years ago to see that Aboriginal artists — even those doing heavily Australian culture and place-related songs (for example, the many artists featured in the movie Buried Country — see http://www.api-network.com/cgi-bin/reviews/jrbview.cgi?n=1864031522) were to be found under “World Music”.
Is there really no conception of a place for race in music in Australia? There’s certainly a problem in the UK at the moment with class being denied and popular music being dominated by those with a middle class sense of entitlement to culture.
matt
08/10/07
What about the complement: music that sounds like it came from another place. For example, this thread on CW Stoneking continues to attract heated debate from CW’s family/friends and others. What about Australian junglist or dancehall heads rapping in patois; indie rock bands with a NY slant to their vocals?
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