Jon Stratton

Capitalism and Romantic ideology in the record business

Given the existing capitalist determinants on the structure of the popular music industry, the record companies, because of their economic importance, not only represent one moment in a system where the music moves from artist to audience, but also generate both the artist, as producer for the industry, and the audience, as consumer for the industrys products — and both as living facets of an ideology best described as Romantic. Romanticism, whilst lived as being in opposition to capitalist concerns founded on rationality and standardisation, in fact supports capitalism by providing both an enabling rationale for invention and a sustaining emphasis on the individual which allows cultural products to be viewed as something other than simply more commodities. The Otherness of culture in capitalist society may be viewed as the manifestation of the necessary but repressed ‘irrational’ qualities which bring into existence and sustain the rational, ordered structure of capitalist practice. In the record business, both the rational aspects of capitalism and the Romanticism of its Other are highlighted by virtue of the highly developed capitalist nature of the culture industry.

Zombie Trouble: Zombie Texts, Bare Life and Displaced People

There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At the same time, members of western countries have become increasingly anxious about displaced peoples: asylum-seekers and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those countries. What displaced people, people without the protection of the state and zombies have in common is that both manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. Moreover, zombies have the qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The genre of the zombie apocalypse centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge for a group of humans. In these texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with displaced people who are ‘threatening’ the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people constructs them as similar to mythical zombies. This article includes analyses of a number of zombie films including Shaun of the Dead, Fido and Undead.

Two Rescues, One History: Everyday Racism in Australia

On the same day, at different ends of Australia, two extraordinary rescues of men from extreme hardship took place. The two miners, both white and of Anglo-Celtic origin, were fêted, appeared on television chat shows and became celebrities so sought after that they had to employ an agent. The three Torres Strait Islanders, members of a grouping identified as ‘indigenous’ in the Australian social order, who had survived 22 days at sea in an open dinghy, were, to all intents and purposes, ignored by the mainstream Australian media. They would appear to have simply gone back to their families and got on with their lives. This article tracks the discursive histories in which each event was embedded to examine how this distinction could happen and how it could be so naturalised that hardly anybody commented on the disparity of treatment. It is this taken-for-granted disparity that I am describing here as everyday racism.

The difference of Perth music: A scene in cultural and historical context

In the present article, I think about the importance of Perths culture as a crucial context in which the popular music of Perth has developed. In the case examined in the present article, Perth music in the 1960s and 1970s can be understood as a scene that evolved in situ. Its localism was certainly not a function of any attempt to market ‘Perth music’. Rather, as we shall see, the Perth music scene as I describe it has arisen in a particular geographic place with specific qualities and, as I will argue, these qualities have had identifiable effects on the music produced in Perth.

Jews, punk and the Holocaust: from the Velvet Underground to the Ramones – the Jewish-American story

Punk is usually thought of as a radical reaction to local circumstances. This article argues that, while this may be the case, punk’s celebration of nihilism should also be understood as an expression of the acknowledgement of the cultural trauma that was, in the late 1970s, becoming known as the Holocaust. This article identifies the disproportionate number of Jews who helped in the development of the American punk phenomenon through the late 1960s and 1970s. However, the effects of the impact of the cultural trauma of the Holocaust were not confined to Jews. The shock that apparently civilised Europeans could engage in genocidal acts against groups of people wholly or partially thought of by most Europeans as European undermined the certainties of post-Enlightenment modernity and contributed fundamentally to the sense of unsettlement of morals and ethics which characterises the experience of postmodernity. Punk marks a critical cultural moment in that transformation. In this article the focus is on punk in the United States. We’re the members of the Master Race We don’t judge you by your face First we check to see what you eat Then we bend down and smell your feet (Adny Shernoff, ‘Master Race Rock’, from The Dictators’ The Dictators Go Girl Crazy! [1975]) It is conventional to distinguish between punk in the United States and punk in England; to suggest, perhaps, that American punk was more nihilistic and English punk more anarchistic. Clinton Heylin writes that: Much – indeed too much, too soon – has been written about the similarities between American and British punk scenes. The differences were considerable. (Heylin 1993, p. xiii)

Uncertain lives: migration, the border and neoliberalism in Australia

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nation-state with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agambens theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism.

Non-citizens in the exclusionary state: Citizenship, mitigated exclusion, and the Cronulla riots

Using the Cronulla Riots as a starting point, this article explores the way in which neoliberal ideology, and the social and economic practices associated with it, have transformed Australia from an inclusive nation-state to one founded on the premise of exclusion. From this foundation, relative inclusion is based on a persons utility to the economic requirements of Australian capitalism. More and more people live outside of Australian citizenship which, previously, marked the limits of the inclusive state. In this new order of relative exclusion, many white Australians, who previously had felt themselves to be entitled members of the Australian state, experience an increasing disenfranchisement. Resorting to nationalism as a way of asserting their membership of the nation-state, the Cronulla riots were a manifestation of the frustrations of many white Australians.

Whiteness, Morality and Christianity in Australia

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between Christianity and claims about Australian culture. In modernity Christianity was reconstructed as fundamentally European and white. This article argues that English middle-class values, which historically have been deeply imbricated with the values expressed by the Church of England, have been taken up in Australia as the foundation of Australian culture. In official multiculturalism non-Anglican Christian denominations have been with ethnics. This includes Catholicism which, in spite of the numbers of Italians, Maltese, and other Catholics now present in Australia, is still associated with the Irish. This article argues that the Howard government was a watershed in the political use of Christianity to claim a hegemonic Australian morality and this has been established in opposition to other religious groups in Australia, most obviously Muslims. At the same time, this Christian morality is implicitly white and the members of other religions are assumed to be non-white.

Punk, Jews, and the Holocaust\-\-The English Story

Punk in England is usually thought of as being related to a critique of stadium rock or to the disillusionment of a generation that saw nothing in the future but drudgery. In this article I argue that punk has more profound connections. Punk in England was driven by two Jewish managers, Malcolm McLaren and Bernie Rhodes, but, more important, punks general politics of nihilism express in a cultural context the shock and trauma of the Holocaust. After almost three decades of near-silence, by the late 1970s the Holocaust was beginning to be named and talked about. The horror of this event on not just Jews but Western society more generally, as the acknowledgment of the genocide began to undermine the historical acceptance of Enlightenment assumptions about progress, science, and the moral righteousness of Western civilization, led to an existential crisis best expressed in punk. Whereas in the United States many punk performers were Jewish, in England the Jewish connections are to be found in the managers and in the lyrics.

Nation Building and Australian Popular Music in the 1970s and 1980s

Australian popular music in the 1970s—I am thinking of a decade that runs pretty much from 1975 to 1985—while being influenced by English and American developments, evolved a particular Australian identity. This music was deeply imbricated in a nation-building project which sought to produce a culturally based national identity for the country, something fostered deliberately by governments in respect of the Australian film industry but which happened more organically in Australian popular music. Nevertheless, symptomatic of this new cultural identitarianism, by the late 1970s and early 1980s there were a number of popular songs from quite different musical genres and artists, celebrating and critiquing Australia. These ranged from the song written to promote Australian nationalism in the first World Series Cricket competition of 1977/1978, ‘Come On Aussie, Come On’, to Peter Allen’s ‘I Still Call Australia Home’, released as a single in 1980 and used in Qantas advertising campaigns in 1997 and 1999, to Men at Work’s ‘(Land) Down Under’ in 1981, which was used as the unofficial anthem for Australia’s 1983 America’s Cup challenge, to Goanna’s criticism of the treatment of indigenous Australians in their 1982 single, ‘Solid Rock’. Then there was also much of the corpus of Midnight Oil from their third album onwards. Place Without a Postcard, released in 1981, included both ‘If Ned Kelly Was King’, about the mining industry and the treatment of Aborigines, and ‘Lucky Country’, the title of which echoes a similar irony to Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country (1964), which, in a manner similar to Bruce Springsteen in the United States, championed working-class relief from the unthinking monotony of work and suburbia in the exhilaration of driving. This article focuses on two of the three strands of popular music which developed in Australia during the 1970s and considers how they relate to the nation-building