New Waver: "Bohemian Suburb Rhapsody"
This album is about the inner suburbs of Australia's major cities and their great transformation during the past 30 years from slums via boho villages to suburbs for the wealthy. It focuses on the DIY artists and musicians who, without realizing what they were doing, kick-started this wealth-creation scheme, only to be expelled from it penniless at the end.
Money for Lugging
Dire Straits' early-80s hit expressed an implied blue-collar workers' view that rock stars did a minimum of work for a maximum of money and sex. The situation in 2010 begs for this old truism to be debunked. With the demise of cd sales, the rise of file-sharing and the democratization of music-making, there is no longer anything like an insatiable demand for product. Add to this: the trend towards a majority of school-leavers obtaining university degrees in order to join a large pool of semi-employed low-level white-collar workers. As tradesmen have become rarer, demand for them has increased, leading to the phenemonon of the 'cashed up bogan' who flaunts his wealth and girl-getting muscles. There is little money in music today, and a typical player gets by on the dirty work that others prefer not to do, such as dish-washing, table-waiting and phone-sales. This was always true for aspiring stars starting out - now it is true of many 'full-time musicians' at any stage of their career.
Party Like it's 1979
It is a common complaint that all pop music made since 2000 is a rehash of some classic style or another. Every station sounds like Gold-104 as new bands mine old trends, hoping to quickly bang out a career during their chosen revival's short shelf-life. What is less obvious is why. Is it the post-modern condition? Do up-and-coming musicians really have no ideas? Here we suggest that part of the reason for revivals is nostalgia for a golden age when musicians were god-like creatures of wealth and power, held in awe by the population and feared by governments - in other words, the 70s, more or less. Revivalism then is a cargo-cult: a belief that if we make songs that sound like the Clash, Joni Mitchell or Led Zeppelin (or John Cage), we'll be successful like they were.
My Memory-Stick Weighs a Ton
The basic idea comes from the book "The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information" by Alan Liu. One of his innovations is to place cultural products like literature and music with workplace documents, creating a new category of 'things built in offices with computers', which we paraphrase as 'white-collar culture'. The ubiquity of PCs means we are flooded with their output: novels not read, music not listened to, documentaries not watched, games not played and spreadsheets not studied. There is such an over-supply of culture that in polite company it is considered a duty rather than a pleasure to consume it. The music here is borrowed with kind permission from Dave Graney's classic and funny single "My Schtick Weighs a Ton".
Hey Dude
This is about hipsters' unwitting role in the thirty-year transformation of inner Melbourne from ghetto to real-estate bonanza. A visitor to Melbourne who'd not seen how the inner city once looked would be shocked at the change. There are stories of families who, desperate to get out of Fitzroy, sold their terrace-houses around 1980 for about a twentieth of what they're worth now. Now that gentrification is dotted all over the globe, we understand it and how it gets started. DIY artists form part of the initial engine, and are now courted by land-owners and governments: "come and rent our suburb, work hard, make culture for no reward, and transform the area into something you can't afford to live in, after which we'll move you on to the next suburb". The rockers who got this ball rolling thought they were subverting capitalism. But the wealth created by gentrification is staggering: when a thousand homes appreciate by a million dollars each, a billion dollars of real estate value is created. There are city councils who have formalized this as an urban-renewal process, setting up schemes in which artists are loaned unrentable shops to work in until the area is thriving. Some artists have figured out why their governments suddenly are temporarily friendly to them: see for example this manifesto from Hamburg.
Philosphers Zone
This is from an ABC doco comparing rock music (they mean current indie/emo) to 19th century Romanticism, delivered in the ABC's genteel style. The main speaker works at JJJ - we love the way that broadcaster's listeners and announcers are quietly shepherded to the ABC's more obviously middle-class stations when they are graduated and approaching 30. We were going to call this track 'Radio National' and the last track 'Triple-M' to highlight the class skirmish that occurs in Australia's inner cities, when tradesmen call and on weekends when suburbanites drive in to party or shop.
Inner City Drug Use
Fitzroy/Newfarm/Darlinghurst's great transformation into culture-creation HQ and bankers' dormitory has meant that its drug of choice is now coffee. This legal stimulant powers the white-collar world, by making unrewarded drudge-work seem temporarily interesting. A key Fitzroy cafe advertises itself semi-ironically as a 'caffeine dealer'. Booze and junk food are popular everywhere. We used to do this song live - the joke was how many of the words could be kept identical to the original love song, changing only 'honey' to 'coffee'. For this version we changed a few more.
Media I Gave You All the Best Years of My Life
This is about the role of fans in cultural economics. While many culture-producers are semi- or un-paid in these internetworked times, the fan occupies an even lossier position, devoting hours and dollars to boosting the fortunes of celebrities who despise them. Fans have a saintly, defeated air about them - we know we're doing the world a favour by evangelizing some piece of media or another. We constantly proclaim or exhort acts of culture-consumption as though we expect a medal.
Paying the Bills
Most of us wind up here eventually. (Everyone whose parents didn't get on the good side of the real-estate system.) All that varies is the path we take and the age at which we arrive. The 'king' verse occured to us when thinking about why underlings (employees, fans, voters) don't overthrow their oppressors. Can you spot the Cramps reference in the coda? Scientists will not get this song, because we mucked up the zoology - we should have said 'worker bee', but without checking, went with the usual meaning of 'drone'. The drones in a real bee hive do no work and live only to eat and mate - they are analogous to celebrities - doh.
The Cars That Ate Melbourne
After the high-brow glamour of indie art and humanities research is over for the week, a different organism descends upon Australia's inner boulevards. Beginning at nightfall, especially on weekends, young suburban males spend hours driving their techno-blaring mating machines up and down Lygon and Brunswick streets, trying to impress women and each other. The sound of a kick drum driving by is a part of every coolsie's evening, a reminder of the great unwashed suburbs that lie beyond Bell street and of the coolsie's fragile existence, protected only by police and the fact that they have little worth stealing. The main speech sample is a porn actor proclaiming what we hope sounds like "all the dames love my car" but is of course something else. Other bits include a sample of Australia's most infamous poet, John Laws. The song ends in a chorus of triumph.
... so there you have it - another piece of amateur culture which will be forgotten in a week as a hundred new products desperately clamour for attention. We helped make Melbourne slightly more marvellous, for which we will pay slightly more rent.
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