Underrated, overlooked, suppressed, discarded: canonical discourse and 1980s rock music from Australia and New Zealand

ABSTRACT

In canonical narratives of rock music emanating from the global North, the music of Australia and New Zealand continues to be overlooked. This article considers the international critical reception of a range of 1980s bands from Australia and New Zealand, both at the time and subsequently. The analysis shows how the music of the Antipodes largely has been rendered historically irrelevant in canonical terms, highlighting the general importance of subverting conventional narratives by giving voice to marginalized cultures and foregrounding alternative critical arguments.

KEYWORDS:

• Rock music
• cultural studies
• music criticism
• global South

Introduction

n the realm of artistic achievement, there are three core elements distinctive to the canonical dialogues that have circulated ad infinitum over the last few decades. First has been the identification of those texts most acclaimed in the various fields: the literature, films, sound recordings and so forth which, through unremitting praise, have ascended to the upper reaches of the ‘list of greats’ and are destined to stay there. Second is the coterie of critics – in some art forms mostly academic, in others more commonly journalists or public intellectuals – whose judgements have become central to how eminence is delineated within their sphere of influence. And third is the inevitable circumstance of these commentators, and the texts they extol, being situated almost exclusively in the global North, that centre of the developed world which has long dominated in terms of the production and dispersal of knowledge (Collyer 2018; Kumar 2014).

When it comes to Antipodean culture, this has led to some awkward cases of historicizing from afar. For example, the formative period of the New Australian Cinema has been well chronicled by such local authors as Stratton (1980), Rattigan (1991) and Murray (1992), with Caddie (Crombie, 1976), Newsfront (Noyce, 1978), My Brilliant Career (Armstrong, 1979) and Gallipoli (1981) among the films inducted into the shared catalogue of classics from the period. However, (in)famous New Yorker critic Pauline Kael took a quite different view on many of these decisive works. Although Kael (1993) was in accord with Australian reviewers and their esteem for the early films of Fred Shepisi – The Devil’s Playground (1976) and The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978) – she was flippantly dismissive of Newfront and unsympathetic to Caddie, My Brilliant Career and Gallipoli. Such views may be seen in the context of the generalized difficulty that the US has had in engaging with Australian cinema, from the absurd renaming of Wake in Fright (Kotcheff, 1971) and Evil Angels (Schepisi, 1988) to Hollywood’s inability to tolerate the ambiguous ending to Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975).¹

Then, in literature, there is the strange case of Harold Bloom. In his 1994 book The Western Canon, this (largely self-appointed) paragon of literary judgement provides lengthy appendices setting out those texts that in his view constitute said canon, with his fourth and final catalogue on ‘The chaotic age’ (roughly the twentieth century) including a section specific to Australia and New Zealand. Setting aside the puzzle of how one person could assimilate so many thousands of volumes within a single lifetime of reading (and re-reading),² Bloom’s list of consecrated works from the Antipodes presents as disconcertingly random. Australia’s most heralded literary export, Nobel Prize winner Patrick White, has only three novels from his oeuvre counted: Voss (1957), Riders in the Chariot (1961) and A Fringe of Leaves (1976). David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life (1978) is in, but not Johnno (1975) or Fly Away Peter (1982). Poets Judith Wright and Les Murray are included; James K. Baxter and Gwen Harwood are not. And Shirley Hazzard, Thea Astley, Janet Frame and Randolph Stow are absent altogether.

It is perhaps contemporary music which features the most curious tales of arbitrariness, confusion and exclusion when it comes to the formal sanctioning of artists from Australia and New Zealand. As David Cunningham emphasizes, scholarly assessments of modern music have long been split between

a still largely conventional musicology, whose received procedures are patently ill-equipped to deal with a vast range of recent musical production, and a cultural theory which is generally content to reduce it to little more than a background noise for the formation of subcultural identity. (2004, 17)

Thus while musicology, ethnomusicology and cultural studies have approached the analysis of so-called popular music in a restricted way and from angles incompatible (at least, explicitly) with aesthetic appraisal, it for the most part has been left to the non-scholarly critics, of whom there are many, to fill this evaluative void and construct a pantheon of rock music.³ Not surprisingly this official discourse, as with film and literature, has been developed almost exclusively amongst ‘experts’ aligned with what Philip Hayward terms music’s ‘North Atlantic axis’ (Hayward 1998, 1).

As these narratives of eminence commenced in earnest in the mid-1960s and predominantly encompass music made since that time, they are of special interest in terms of comparing the reception of contemporary Antipodean sounds alongside that of more renowned recordings from the global North. Today, the canonical debate on rock music is more or less closed: the register of masterpieces is steeped in nostalgia, focusing on the formative 1960s and 1970s (plus, to a lesser extent, minor transformations in the 1980s and 1990s) (Biron 2011; Schmutz 2005; Strong 2010). In the digital age the field has become too crowded and too dispersed to preserve any real meaning, while thanks to the internet the expert rock critic increasingly is seen as obsolete (Mattson 2015).

Here we venture to consider a range of Australian rock artists from the latter 1980s in the context of practices of critical assessment that have prevailed since that time. In doing so, we will reflect on how their work was originally evaluated in the global North, then assess how they have (or, more likely, have not) featured in dialogues around greatness over the decades since. We will look at the reception of seven bands, six from Australia and one from New Zealand: the Go-Betweens; Midnight Oil; the Triffids; Not Drowning, Waving; the Church; Died Pretty; and the Chills. Each was feted by local critics at the time; each (apart from Midnight Oil) evolved out of the interwoven post-punk/independent/alternative scenes that dominated non-mainstream rock music of the period (culminating in the breakthrough success of Nirvana’s Nevermind album in 1991).⁴ The artists selected provide a broad range of examples which have engendered varying levels of critical interest in America and Great Britain. But they also have been chosen because they are considered by the present authors to be aesthetically worthy. As Bannister (2006) notes, too often a mystical objectivity attaches itself to scholarly work on the creative arts, when it ought to be admitted that analysis almost always gravitates towards artists and works the commentators themselves find admirable.⁵

Our exploration of the critical reception of these bands will focus on the following texts: Robert Christgau’s Christgau’s record guide: The ‘80s (1994); Rolling Stone’s third and fourth edition album guides (1992; 2004); Mojo magazine’s Mojo collection (2003); Robert Dimery’s 1001 albums you must hear before you die (2005); Pitchfork’s best albums of the 1980s features (2002; 2018); and James E. Perone’s The Album (2012). Importantly, the artists we assess demonstrate a variety of levels of contemporaneous consideration by Christgau and Rolling Stone – this will allow evidence of the (predominantly US) reception at the time to be supplemented by an indication as to how these albums and artists have fared in the international critical spotlight since.⁶

Christgau’s record guide: the ‘80s

Robert Christgau began writing about popular music in 1967 and continues to this day. His signature format is the LP-oriented ‘capsule review’ of which he has published some 15,000, chiefly in New York’s Village Voice between 1969 and 2006. While Christgau has written many longer essays on music his forte is the brief analysis where, usually in less than 200 words, he perfected what Meaghan Morris 1988 thought almost impossible in short-form journalistic prose: to engage in ‘nuance, qualification [and] the civilized right to contradict oneself’ (121). Christgau is egotistical enough to have bestowed upon himself the title ‘Dean of rock criticism’, his reviews featuring academic-style grades arranged, as the back cover of his 1970s guide puts it, from ‘A+ for the indisputedly excellent down to E- for the interestingly dire’; yet he readily concedes his distinctive position as a left-leaning ‘white male born into the Queens lower-middle class’ (1984, 19). He is supremely confident – some would say arrogant (Mattson 2015) – about his own authority and insight, claiming that if a reader likes many of the albums he hates then they ‘have nothing in common, intelligence included’ (1984, 5); yet he has been at the vanguard of championing female and other marginalized performers on the basis of aesthetic achievement (for instance, in the 1970s few if any other critics deemed Bonnie Raitt and Donna Summer more epochal than Pink Floyd or Paul McCartney). Often a polarizing figure – Dettmar (2015) calls Christgau ‘a mass of contradictions, by turns generous and strangely insecure’ – there is little doubt that he is one of the most important writers on popular (and ‘semi-popular’) music of the past fifty years.⁷

The one Australian act Christgau latched on to in the 1980s and stayed with through to the end was Brisbane’s Go-Betweens. It is worth reproducing in full his capsule review of their breakthrough 1986 album Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express:

The lyrics, which set oblique but never opaque romantic vicissitudes against a diffidently implied existential world-historic, aren’t the secret of their lyricism, and why should they be? These Aussies make music, with Robert Forster’s intensely sincere vocals and Grant McLennan’s assertive but never pushy hooks pinning down the melodies. Granting all reservations about the form itself and with apologies to skilful romantics from REM to XTC, there are no popsters writing stronger personal love songs. I doubt there are any page poets envisioning more plangently, either. A- (1994, 167)

Christgau’s customary esotericism is on show here; he presupposes an erudite audience and allows that his perspective on the music in question depends to some extent on social context. Still, whereas most would happily settle for the near-excellence that his A-minus grade implies, there is an underlying tentativeness less likely to pervade his evaluation of the Clash, or Prince, or other favoured Anglo-American acts of the era (as suggested by his setting of the music of southern hemisphere outsiders alongside that of REM and XTC as orthodox heirs to the 1980s alt-rock throne). Christgau’s original review of the Go-Betweens’ follow-up record Tallulah (1987), published in Creem magazine, further exposed his distance from the Australian scene: referring to twin singer-songwriters Forster and McLennan, he admitted that he still didn’t know one from the other.⁸ Nonetheless, his admiration for the group never waned. He reviewed them affectionately through to their final album Oceans Apart (2005) and was one of the few commentators to champion drummer Lindy Morrison’s role in the band’s musical evolution. His 2000 Village Voice essay ‘A long short story’ and 2006 obituary on McLennan, each reproduced in Is it still good to ya? (2018), are to our knowledge his only long-form writing on Australian music.

Conversely, Christgau was indifferent to Midnight Oil and the Church. His review of the former’s Diesel and Dust (1987), released to much acclaim in the US, perceptively captures their aesthetic limitations when he terms Peter Garrett’s vocal style ‘hectoring.’ Christgau’s grasp of Garrett’s radical stance – he refers to him a ‘crank politician’ – does not impinge on his view that Garrett’s voice ‘remains irritating even as you start singing along in spite of yourself’ (1994, 274). Rather, what Christgau finds tolerable about Diesel and Dust – which receives a B+ rating – is its ‘hooks’, and attribute he defines as ‘something that makes you remember a song, often inserted to just that end’ (1994, 509).

While in the 1980s Christgau was crucial to introducing sub-Saharan African music in particular to American readers, he was always quick to acknowledge his distance from the source: for example, despite engaging more than any Western critic with the South African township music known as mbaqanga, he admitted that his knowledge of the scene and its communal setting was sketchy. However, despite his access to a group like Midnight Oil likewise being limited by his distance from the provincial context of their work, this is never articulated. He did not review their transformational 1985 EP Species Deceases, and reveals no awareness of their generic distinctiveness (a pub-rock outfit with a deeply-held social conscience) or growing engagement with environmental and Indigenous issues (as epitomized by their 1986 outback tour with Koori group Warumpi Band).⁹

Elsewhere, Christgau flatly rejects the Church’s breakthrough 1988 album Starfish (rated B). While he notes the record’s ‘pretty textures’ and (that term again) ‘expert hooksmanship’, he sees it all as better done in the past: any listener, he writes, who ‘gets off on its lulling rhythms and obscure lyrics has his or hers stuck in the ‘60s and up his or her ass, respectively’ (1994, 91).¹⁰ With respect to those lyrics, Christgau appears to demand the kind of literary sensibility archetypal to serious rock music, an attribute often pitted against such nebulous negative characteristics as ‘inauthenticity’ or ‘unoriginality’ (McLeod 2001, 55).¹¹ Yet Church songwriter Steve Kilbey has said that the words to hit single ‘Under the Milky Way’ were ‘an abstract canvas [written] within three minutes’ (Israel 2014), while some might consider the poetry of Starfish tracks like ‘Destination’ intriguingly ethereal (‘In the space between our houses/some bones have been discovered’).

The Chills are the only other group of the period and from the region that come close, in Christgau’s view, to matching the Go-Betweens. New Zealand is widely recognized for producing a percentage of memorable alt-rock music well out of proportion to its tiny population, mainly by way of the Clean, the Chills, the Bats, Look Blue Go Purple and others linked to the Flying Nun label (Mitchell and Shuker 1998). The Chills’ 1987 album Brave Words, which, for Christgau, features ‘more tunes than the early Go-Betweens,’ was given an A-minus rating, laying the ground for an even more complimentary appraisal of their 1990 release Submarine Bells.

Otherwise, the remaining artists under consideration here – the Triffids, Not Drowning, Waving and Died Pretty – never received sustained attention from Christgau. The Triffids made a bigger splash in the UK, where a 1985 New Musical Express cover feature declared it ‘The year of the Triffids’.¹² Not Drowning, Waving, a group that McFarlane (1999, 456) shrewdly identifies as descending in-part from Brian Eno’s momentous Another Green World album of 1975 (A+ rated by Christgau), were critically acclaimed in Australia for albums like Cold and the Crackle (1987), though like Midnight Oil they were criticized by some for their collaborations with Indigenous cultures.¹³ And in the late 1980s Died Pretty released two albums – Free Dirt (1986) and Lost (1988) – that gained little traction overseas, along with a single – ‘Everybody Moves’ (1989) – which saw Australian writer Shane Danielson claim: ‘Died Pretty is god – end of petition’.¹⁴

Of these three only Died Pretty were ever even mentioned by Christgau. His 1980s guide includes an appendix, titled ‘New wave’, listing the names of 200 artists ‘too minor to merit the space it would take to describe them’ (1994, 461). Died Pretty were relegated to this category, along with fellow Australia/New Zealand acts the Saints, Ed Kuepper, Tall Dwarfs, Crime and the City Solution, Lime Spiders, the Verlaines, Hunters and Collectors and Icehouse.

Rolling Stone record guides (1992 and 2004)

Though like Christgau a distinctly American phenomenon, Rolling Stone magazine did begin publishing an Australian edition in the 1980s, and was thus, along with local titles like Juke, RAM and (in New Zealand) Rip it Up, part of a thriving rock music culture in the region. Under consideration here, however, are the compendiums, published in (1992) (third edition) and (2004) (fourth edition), that are Rolling Stones’s self-proclaimed essential reference works of modern music (The rear cover of the (1992) book calls it the ‘ultimate consumer guide’.).

Published in the wake of the 1980s boom in Australian underground music, the assessments provided in the (1992) Rolling Stone guide reveal some interesting quirks. In this edition, the cult of the Go-Betweens seems confirmed, with Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express receiving the first of only two five-star reviews Rolling Stone ever afforded to a release from Australia or New Zealand.¹⁵ Tallulah, which for Christgau remains the best album to emanate from Australia, receives four stars, while their (then) swansong 16 Lovers Lane (1988) rates 4-and-a-half stars. Reviewer J. D. Considine rather condescendingly argues that what ‘separates this Australian combo from its competition is that the Go-Betweens eventually managed to play almost as well as they wrote’ (1992, 284).

At this time Midnight Oil were likewise judged by Rolling Stone as an international-standard group: Diesel and Dust gets a four-and-a-half star review, with Considine, who of the book’s seven contributors seems the authority on Antipodean music, praising the record as ‘blessed with some of the most compelling political pop since [Dylan’s] Highway 61 Revisited’ (1992, 474). Elsewhere, the Church and the Chills, redolent of a certain level of US success, and in the latter case conceivably as a consequence of Christgau’s championing, are included in the (1992) guide but in a perfunctory manner (though Considine rates the Church as a band to watch into the 1990s). As with Christgau, the Triffids, Died Pretty and Not Drowning, Waving are deemed unworthy of inclusion.

By the time that the (2004) edition came around, though, we see a clear tapering off in what minimal interest there was in these 1980s Australian bands. The exception is Midnight Oil who continue, this time through senior contributor David Fricke, to be feted as ‘the antinuclear, pro-environmental conscience of Australian rock,’ with ‘the worldwide commercial triumph’ of Diesel and Dust (still four-and-a half stars) the prime example of this (2004, 540–541). The Go-Betweens fell out of favour between 1992 and 2004, with Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express demoted to an obscurity: in his stingy three-star review contributor Douglas Wolk laments Forster ‘inexplicably [trying] to reinvent himself as a highbrow sex symbol’ and claims that McLennan ‘just gets weird’ (2004, 334). By 2004, the highest rated Go-Betweens record (four stars only) is the post-break-up compilation Bellavista Terrace.¹⁶

The Church and the Chills are no longer deemed significant enough to demand an entry in the 2004 guide, and the Triffids, Died Pretty and Not Drowning, Waving again are overlooked.¹⁷

The Mojo collection, 1001 albums you must hear before you die and Pitchfork

Mojo magazine’s 800-page The Mojo collection (2003) and Robert Dimery’s 950-page 1001 albums you must hear before you die (2005) are worth considering in tandem: they are of similar length, came out around the same time and both emanated from Great Britain. Moreover, they mirror each other closely as regards the involvement of Antipodean artists. Of the seven under scrutiny here, in the Mojo volume only the Go-Betweens hold on precariously to canonical relevance via the inclusion of their 1988 major label release 16 Lovers Lane. Dimery’s book mentions the same Go-Betweens album as well as the Triffids’ Calenture (1987), also a major label debut, though each only merits the briefest half-page entry.¹⁸

Beyond these, there is minimal ‘Australian’ involvement by way of expatriate success stories the Bee Gees, AC/DC, Crowded House, Nick Cave and the Vines, each of whom feature in both texts. This alone suggests a very distinct understanding on the part of recent tastemakers from the global North as to what constitutes vital pop-rock music from this region (though 1001 albums you must hear before you die includes the 1978 Saints album Eternally Yours as well). Interestingly, in both volumes the entries on these acts tend to minimalise, or else expunge entirely, any reference to their Down Under roots, and needless to say neither collection refers to any music from New Zealand.

Pitchfork’s evolving best albums of the 1980s lists show an interesting move over time towards at least some reconsideration of the significance of the Antipodean music of the era, this from a publication launched in 1995 that (along with other online journals like PopMatters and The Quietus) has looked to challenge the historical authority of Rolling Stone et al. Initially, Pitchfork’s November 2002 ‘Top 100 Albums of the 1980s’ list incorporated not a single artist or musician from south of the equator (unless one concedes the Zulu backing musicians on Paul Simon’s Graceland). A 2018 update, doubled in size to ‘The 200 Best Albums of the 1980s’, at last found room for a record from New Zealand: the Clean’s Compilation, at no. 151, credited by reviewer Jesse Jarnow as ‘finding devotees in [‘90s US alt-rock groups] Pavement and Yo La Tengo, and inspiring a major indie vogue for all things New Zealand’. Albums by AC/DC, INXS and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds too came to be numbered amongst the best 200 of that decade, though the latter’s From Her to Eternity was the only one rated in Pitchfork’s top 100 (at no. 63).

James E. Perone’s the album

Curated by a Professor in Music at the University of Mount Union, Ohio and containing contributions from a number of other music theory scholars, The Album: A guide to pop music’s most provocative, influential and important creations (2012) is a four volume publication that constitutes a rare overt engagement by the academic set in constructing modern music’s list of greats. It contains in-depth references to 163 albums released between 1963 and 2010, plus an appendix with briefer entries on a further 101 ‘provocative, influential and important’ records. As well as implicating scholarly critics in the evaluative domain, the publication implies that its assessments are of an intrinsically higher level than those of journalistic critics: the back cover asserts ‘a depth of analysis that goes beyond that in other books about essential albums’. One thing, nonetheless, is certain: this type of reference text only exacerbates the problem of modern music as a phenomenon almost entirely framed from the perspective of the global North, with little recognition of sounds simultaneously emanating from Africa, South America, Asia or Oceania.

Such an example renders questionable Von Appen and Doehring’s idea that the academy is somehow working to destabilize a rock music orthodoxy that others (namely, journalists and fans) supposedly came up with (2006, 34). It is more accurate to observe that scholarly analysis has perpetuated the dominant canon both explicitly, as in the above instances, and tacitly, with the academic study of popular music having overwhelmingly involved critics from the global North pontificating on the (mostly white, male, mainstream and retrospective) popular music of the UK and the US (Biron 2011; Hayward 1998). For the most part this has left music scholars in places like Australia and New Zealand to operate, like the musical subcultures around them, in virtual isolation. (See the forum in the January 2007 volume of Perfect Beat: the pacific journal of research into contemporary music and popular culture, for more on Antipodean critics responding to the traditional north-south divide in scholarly popular music studies.)

Conclusion

Von Appen and Doehring write that ‘any canon should be examined and critically questioned as it implies latent claims to power and authority’ (2006, 34). In the context of the recent history of rock music, the ideological dimensions of canon formation and associated criticism play out not just through an inherent denigration of works from other genres and eras (Hamer 2019; Von Appen and Doehring 2006). There is, as we have tried to demonstrate here, also a persistent ignorance of music and musicians from outside of the prevailing North Atlantic axis. This circumstance is reflected in an academic popular music studies discipline which in part stems from the broader cultural studies movement, one that itself generated a hegemony (initially British, later American) that acquired ‘its effectivity from a self-presentation as universal’ (Stratton and Ien 1996, 363). Taken together, the self-referential Anglo-American purview of most journalistic and scholarly analysis of rock music and associated genres has reduced the Antipodean subcultures to a bit-part role – that is, they have remained ensconced within their inherent local inflections – leaving the many important artists and recordings from Oceania as phantoms roaming the fringes of the global-historical meta-narrative.

It should be acknowledged that the rock music scenes in Australia and New Zealand circa the 1980s were, like their US and UK counterparts, embedded in an internal power structure wherein the contributions of female artists were downplayed if not excluded altogether, and Indigenous musicians were an ‘isolated and unrecognized minority going against the grain in their own country’ (Mitchell 1996, 176). Notwithstanding, in a international context musicians of that period from Australia and New Zealand such as the seven groups we have profiled here – most of whom were already destined to be marginal in the sense of what Mitchell calls an ‘established mainstream musical lineage’ (205) – are three decades on either pigeon-holed as of minimal historical relevance or else forgotten.

The Australian and New Zealand rock scenes developed a history apart from the standard lineage described by Christgau, who argues that ‘whenever it was in the mid-sixties, the Beatles crystalised rock culture [and] whenever it was in the late seventies, the Sex Pistols shattered it (1982, vi). Indeed, as some conclude that culturally ‘Australia had its ‘60s in the ‘70s’ (Homan 2017, 436) it is reasonable to propose that as regards challenging the classic rock hegemony (and with due deference to the likes of The Saints and Radio Birdman) our 1970s happened in the 1980s. This may be of particular significance regarding the various artists from the Antipodes we have revisited here, as in the global North it is widely assumed that the 1980s was a barren period in rock history (Reynolds 2005, xi). In the words of Anthony DeCurtis, ‘by the mid-1980s, rock and roll was well on its way to becoming terminally safe’ (1992, 5), while subsequent critical assessment has allowed only a small handful of British artists from that decade – like the Smiths, the Stone Roses and U2 – to broach the upper reaches of the rock canon (Von Appen and Doehring 2006).

Of course, the 1980s could only be categorized as ‘terminally safe’ from the viewpoint of those embedded in nostalgic, mainstream notions of rock music – the various narratives arising out of what Jon Stratton refers to as the ‘subaltern counter-flow of popular music’ (Stratton 2007, 147) are now accessible to all. As both Christgau’s and Pitchfork’s takes on the 1980s suggest, even within that milieu there were substantial breakthroughs being made by new artists who would go on to stand the test of time (Prince, Minutemen, My Bloody Valentine, Public Enemy, Laurie Anderson and others), while in the same decade Christgau went even further by applauding a range of stylistic trailblazers who in addition were geographic outsiders (such as King Sunny Adé, Gilberto Gil, Franco Luambo, the Chills and the Go-Betweens).¹⁹

In the digital age, the old excuses for excluding music from the global South from canonical debates no longer wash. In a section of The Lucky Country titled ‘Provincial Australia’, Donald Horne cites poet W. H. Auden’s haughty depiction of the ‘dominions’ as places which have ‘produced no art’ (1964, 106). Though himself not ascribing to such a view, Horne argued at the time that Australia ‘has remained a province of Britain [and is] now also a province of the U.S.A.’ (106). Over half a century later it might be argued that if Australia and New Zealand have become far less provincial in terms of cultural production, the art, literature, film and music of both nations continues – in the minds of most international critics, at least to the extent that they even consider it – to be taken as inherently less significant than that which streams out of North America and Northern Europe. Media discourses and associated patterns of consumption and evaluation are inescapably linked to notions of power, most obviously as regards the huge disparity between a domineering global North and a historically subjugated global South (Iqani 2016). As we have shown here, the best the Antipodes has to offer often has been treated with disdain by the critical behemoths of the North Atlantic axis, the single Australian text that has consistently been afford canonical status – AC/DC’s Back in Black – achieving global popularity and critical acceptance by dint of its overarching trait of not sounding Australian (Stratton 2007, 2).

Meanwhile, it remains difficult to find any reference whatsoever to the music of Australia or New Zealand in the literature on music originating from the UK or the US. Take the example of five of the most renowned texts on modern music published since 2000: Alex Ross’s The rest is noise (2007), Ben Ratliff’s Every song ever (2016), Kelefa Sanneh’s Major labels (2021), Greil Marcus’s The history of rock ‘n’ roll in ten songs (2014) and Simon Reynold’s Rip it up and start again (2005). Across 2,000-plus collective pages – written by five males, one from the UK and four from the US, working near the crossroads of journalism and academia – there are but two substantive references to music from Australia or New Zealand: a brief paragraph in Ross citing the composer Peter Sculthorpe, plus a half-page by Reynolds on Nick Cave’s Birthday Party.²⁰

In the introduction to his book, Marcus, without question one of the finest music writers of the rock era, evokes multiple alternatives to the official history of what he still terms rock ‘n’ roll music, speaking of ‘rediscoveries of a certain spirit [that constitute] a step out of time’ (Marcus 2014, 11), and of largely-forgotten recordings and ‘the faint marks they left on the charts or someone’s memory’ and how they ‘might count for more than any master narrative that excludes them’ (16). In this sense, it surely now is admissible to judge Warumpi Band’s ‘Blackfella/Whitefella’ (1985) as historically significant as the Zodiacs ‘Stay’ (1960) in terms of music that is strikingly inventive and speaks ‘a whole new language’ (Marcus 2014, 17). It is perfectly rational to argue that Not Drowning, Waving’s Cold and the Crackle is as beautifully constructed a record as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (which topped Rolling Stones’s (2004) poll), just as it is wholly reasonable to suggest that The Indestructible Beat of Soweto is as socially and aesthetically significant as Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (rated no. 1 in Rolling Stone’s updated 2020 poll). It is valid to claim that in the 1980s the Go-Betweens assembled a catalogue of recordings superior to that of the Smiths or U2; that Flying Nun produced as much high-quality music as any US or UK-based record label; that Perth band the Scientists were as vital to the incipient grunge movement as Brisbane’s Saints were to the outbreak of punk ten years earlier.

To continue to challenge the dominant (and domineering) canonical narratives coming out of the global North, and to continue to give music from Australian and New Zealand its proper place in official accounts of rock music history, it is crucial that ‘outsider’ perspectives are foregrounded and that music’s disruptive subaltern counter-flows are brought to the attention of international audiences and critics alike.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. In the US, Wake in Fright and Evil Angels became Outback and A Cry in the Dark, respectively.

2. Bloom confessed to returning to his favourite works by Shakespeare, Swift, Dickens, Twain, etc. on multiple occasions, is some cases annually.

3. Rock is the generic term associated with ‘authenticity’ and canonical narratives in contemporary music, with its history coalescing for the most part around recordings, especially long-playing albums, as the crucial texts of the form (Griffiths 2019).

4. Apart from Midnight Oil, most of these artists would be considered marginal; even more obscure yet critically lauded acts like Laughing Clowns, Chris Knox, Severed Heads, Dead C and the Scientists, all of whom released noteworthy records in the period, have been bypassed due to the fact that contemporaneous critical appraisal beyond Australia and New Zealand was close to non-existent, certainly amongst the publications we are analysing here.

5. See Bannister (2006, x) on a critic’s ‘personal investment and [their] aspiring to an objectivity that is actually part of the problem’. Though our selection of artists here might be seen by some as an attempt to elicit an alternative canon, the goal is to begin to address the limits of hegemonic music criticism.

6. Rolling Stone and Christgau are especially germane to this argument as both have been crucial to the development of the rock music canon.

7. Christgau defines semi-popular music as ‘music that is popular in form but not fact – self-consciously arty music that plays off popular or formerly popular usages but isn’t (supposedly) designed to sell’ (1994, 512).

8. In the 1980s book this was revised, based on his updated knowledge of the band, to read: ‘I still have trouble telling them apart’ (1994, 167).

9. As far as we are aware, Christgau’s only ever critique of Aboriginal/Torres Strait Island music was his 1992 dismissal, with no explanatory review attached, of Yothu Yindi’s Tribal Voice as a ‘bomb’; it is also of note that referring to what he says is the best album of the twenty-first century so far, MIA’s Kala (2007), he fails to name Indigenous Australian hip-hop group Wilcannia Mob as providing the key sample on the track ‘Mango Pickle Down River’ (instead making reference to ‘preteens’, ‘didgeridoo’ and ‘subteen Aboriginal rappers’ [see MIA’s entry at https://robertchristgau.com/]). As far as Midnight Oil’s association with Warumpi Band is concerned, opposing views can be found in the chapters by Castles, 1992 (mostly disparaging) and Steggels (most affirmative) in Philip Hayward’s From pop to punk to postmodernism.

10. Christgau’s problem with the Church’s ‘obscure lyrics’ is curious to say the least. In the introduction to the 1970s guide he notes that for him music comes first, and he admits to being ‘a big fan of nonsense syllables’ and ‘the sincerely dumb stuff’ (1982, 18).

11. As Catherine Strong further argues, unlike rock, music with a pop sensibility ‘is generally seen as disposable and lacking true “artistry”’ (2014, 426), thus less likely to be deemed of enduring value by those who set the standards of taste. Christgau often seems to require that musicians conform to the required traits of their presumed genre, as when in his negative review of Australian group the Saints’ 1978 album Eternally Yours he writes: ‘If those horns are somebody’s idea of a joke I am not amused’ (1982, 341).

12. In the end that year turned out to be 1986, when the Triffids released Born Sandy Devotional, an album now seen as one of Australia’s finest, and In the Pines, a Down Under counterpart to Bob Dylan and the Bands’ famed ‘basement’ recordings, produced in a remote woolshed in Western Australia.

13. In a comprehensive book-length analysis of the band, Hayward assesses Not Drowning, Waving’s engagement with Papua New Guinean musicians as undertaken with ‘a high degree of cultural sensitivity’ (1998, 6). Yet this ground-breaking group remain prophets with negligible honour even in their own country: for instance, of the six Australian bands examined here they are the only one not to feature in O’Donnell, Creswell and Mathieson’s The 100 best Australian albums (2010).

14. 1989 review, possibly from Juice (source and exact date unknown). As the liner notes to the 2013 re-issue of the Lost album confirm, in the 1980s Died Pretty were better received by fans and critics on the European continent, especially in Italy.

15. In the 1992 edition, five-star reviews are defined as: ‘Classic: albums in this category are essential listening for anyone interested in the artist under discussion or the style of music that artist’s work represents’. The only other 5-star review we are aware of came in the 2004 guide, afforded to heavy metal crossover act AC/DC’s Back in Black album (though that band’s long-term expatriate status, plus the fact that its core members were born in the UK, makes them tenuously Australian at best).

16. In a further offence to Australian culture on the part of the US, in the mid-1990s several Go-Betweens albums, many never previously available in the US, were released there in remastered versions sullied by insipid non-original cover art.

17. Giving further context to Rolling Stone’s ongoing exclusion of music from Australia and New Zealand from its canonical dialogue, the magazine’s much trumpeted ‘500 Greatest albums of all time’ lists of 2003 and 2019 include no artist from either country, other than AC/DC (Highway to Hell and Back in Black in 2003, Back in Black only in 2019).

18. The reviews in 1001 Albums you must hear before you die are of double-page (for those records of greatest historical impact), single page or half-page length. AC/DC’s Back in Black is the only ‘Australian’ record to warrant a double-page spread.

19. Even though the ‘terminally safe’ narrative could not be applied to the ‘indie rock’ subculture of the 1980s, international adulation at the time – many of the Australian and New Zealand musicians discussed here were lauded in publications such as Forced Exposure and Creem in the US and Melody Maker and NME in the UK − rarely translated into subsequent recognition in mainstream historical dialogues.

20. In the introduction to his book, Reynolds adds the following qualification vis-à-vis Australia: ‘For reasons of sanity and space, I have regretfully decided not to grapple with European post-punk or Australia’s fascinating but deep underground scene’ (2005, xi). The remark serves as both a backhanded compliment and further evidence of the way authors from the global North can comfortably place the rest of the world somewhere beyond the perimeters of official history. Further to this, one of the reviewers for the present article rightly drew attention to Bloomsbury’s long-running ‘33 and 1/3’ series – short books by a single author on a significant rock album – and its recent extension to include, among others, a sub-collection specific to the Oceania region. Nonetheless, the very fact that the publisher found it necessary to develop a separate branch of the series distinctive to this region in our view only substantiates our argument as to Australia and New Zealand’s exclusion from the primary canonical narrative of the global North.