Every musical form is clearly used and abused by market strategists… For example, every pair of jeans sold in the West is not only associated with practical clothing, but also with an image of the rock’n’roll lifestyle. When we buy jeans we become “characters” from a large catalogue of differentiated character types. When we buy our jeans we are buying our way into the image of the individualistic, de/generate, low life, high living rock’n’roll subculture

Marcus Breen (1984) [my emphasis]

In 1989, I wrote an article entitled “Rock’n’roll De/Generation”. It was perhaps an accurate fit for the social revolution (or putsch) then taking place in Australia. Scholarly fashion variously named this era: economic rationalism, neoliberalism — even authoritarianism. With its payload of deunionised and privatised welfare becoming a gentrified neocolonialisation in extremis, the existing Australian economy suffered broadsides of abstract empiricism (“economimesis”), male hysteria (“security state”), and grand theory (“technological polis”): in effect, de/generation. De[vil]/generation or generation of illusion reinterprets, not scientific exploded “race” theory, but Jean Baudrillard’s Evil Demon of Images.

These no-brainer measures had decentred effects on the DNA of culture, including popular music, such as rock’n’roll and its mix and match cutups with R&B, Disco and Hip Hop. Loss of jobs, due to public downsizing, amassed a now between-engagements, indisposed sector, or “under-class.”

This differed from the hyped working-class of 1970s Punk subculture, or over-educated middle-class of 1960s Hippy counterculture. Ironically, such conversions also led to successes, like a new academic subject of “Cultural Studies,” with its North/South, Australian Southern Theory imprint.

In the 1800s, WC Wentworth’s poem, “A New Britannia“ was ridiculed by pre-federation colonial parliamentarians, as the ravings of a “Bunyip” Aristocrat–bunyip is an Aboriginal word for “swamp monster.” The 1960s DC Comics creature Swamp Thing, fictional victim of [devil/diabolic: shared etymology with “dance”] “de/generated” science-gone-too-far experiments, was popularised in the 1980s mainstream Hollywood movie franchise, and a succession of “answer songs” by Australian and overseas rock’n’roll bands, e.g., The Birthday Party, Grid, Scientists, Tch Tch Tch, GoBetweens, Slaughtermen–Warumpi Band, Coloured Stone, No Fixed Address, Yotu Yindi–the Cramps, New Order, Soft Boys, Meteors, Screamin’ Blue Messiahs, Gun Club, and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins).

In this article, the reprivatisation science experiment of de/generation (invisible hand of the market, precarity, minoritarian race fetish) is acknowledged as the (dis)integrating context for shifts in the centre of gravity of global trade, or as orthodox social theory would have it, “the imperial chain.”

Although, in the long-term, this tendency indicates a decline for the Western hegemony, I argue that Australian culture, and notably her cultural-capital Melbourne, were positively placed in the 1980s, to take advantage of such events. That situation resulted in a thriving, globally acclaimed popular and pop culture peak. However, it was followed by a serialisation — where the gains of these robust achievements seem to have been lost on the post-nuclear-attack, hacked netizen audience.

The music taken here as most iconic of deeply-felt, if mindlessly forgotten FM Alternative Chart success, is the Birthday Party’s Junkyard–a sort of semiotic seismic prelude to now. The best radio channels to Swamp were EEEK! or The Skull Cave (3RRR), in a beeline to Junkyard (3PBS) today.

Swamp, the overexposed genre

According to Paul Virilio, in his celebrated 1982 cult article “The Overexposed City”, “deurbanisation” is the effect of growing technologisation — events in economic and social relations that sociologists, such as Alain Touraine, proactively dubbed “The Post-Industrial Society”. Like a reconstituted fruit-juice of de-realised digitisation, the altered perception anticipated by Futurism artists, supposedly came true with a vengeance in the media-mediated “infosphere,” as “precarity“ theorist Franco Berardi formulated it. Precarity is a particularly poignant term for Australia — the still colonial outpost, without independence — where a stark condition of client state reliance on Dangerous Allies, Britain and then the US, was a reality since the settlement/invasion of Empire.

To overestimate most Australians’ colonial situation as subaltern “white trash” — where restrictive migration was based on an inferiority complex (according to Alfred Deakin), and recent selective migration by fear of invasion (“Populate or Perish”), is not possible. Recent changes to economic policy, rather than reintegration into the “liberalised” international community, have involved an extensive deregulation, privatisation, and divestment of industrial protections, necessitating the creation of millions of jobless workers. Such de/generation horrors arrived with compliments from the Swamp (not “Bodgie”) Hawke Government, and his overzealous Howard regime successors.

Before posing overdue questions as to how this anti-social(ist) male-hysteria induced a change of heart, we should examine the data grounding any thesis that the Swamp genre was an outcome.

In an unsovereign land, where the pursuit of luckiness compensates for less enabled happiness, the Swamp genre of popular music was perhaps the main accommodation to these new, if unnecessarily harsh circumstances. In other words, in the 1980s a horrible time was had by all. Yet the assorted Australian talent for making the best of a bad thing, gave us the most important and characteristic popular music genre, locals have (n)ever known. What kind of event was this? As influential intellectual Paul Taylor declared, in his prognostic manifesto on “The Art of White Aborigines [sic],” its “detonation has left a trail of corroborating fragments after a now long-gone event.” In America, the annual Austin Texas music festival and Nu Country subgenre flourish to this day.

Swamp recombined a Country and Blues gumbo in a rock’n’roll setting (check-out any issue of Rhythms magazine, or Nu Country on community television). From the same era, in the United Kingdom, as a kind of last-hurrah from the contemporary unrivalled, world-standard rock-press, New Musical Express, Sounds, and Melody Maker hailed 1980s Australian music, in the personnel of Triffids, Laughing Clowns, and Go-Betweens, as “the greatest rock’n’roll in the world.” Lastly, growing up in Melbourne, the Birthday Party, albeit under the reenchantment of their own myth-making, are among the most essential all-round artists and musicians this country has produced. The solo works by Rowland S. Howard, Mick Harvey, Barry Adamson, et cetera, are a force to be reckoned with, also doing film, novels, documentaries and poetry like Nick Cave and Warren Ellis.

It also might be witnessed that the spectacular international breakthroughs made by mainstream bands, related in entrepreneurial Craig Mathieson’s The Sell In (as opposed to “sell out”) of 2000, such as INXS, AC/DC or Kylie Minogue (collaborating with both Michael Hutchence and Nick Cave), were aided by Swamp artistry. It can even be added that increases in federal government funding and resources to support Australian music, in the 1994 publication of Creative Nation by the Keating Government (PM Paul Keating was a band manager in the 1960s) — documented by Marcus Breen in his meticulously researched, Rock Dogs (written in 1999 after “music biz” bureaucratisation), were thanks to efforts of Melbourne’s Swamp “mafia.” Lastly, the rock’n’roll “community” chronicled in Clinton Walker’s Stranded of 1996 — celebrating the tyranny-of-distance from overseas and tyranny of proximity to Western culture, for musicians lighting-out in variously imagined directions, is exclusively comprised of the times of Swamp rock participants. This triad of informative readings remains the best intro to those uncannily familiar soundscapes.

Draining the swamp

It is also of relevance to account for the fact that, according to the exhaustive official Australian TV history, Long Way to the Top, Swamp did not take place! On the backstory rebound, representing shifts in industrial might from Western powers, the 10-year Schumpeterian business -cycle in Australia of the 1980s, was a necessary interim rest-stop for the  irrepressible journey of popular music from West to East. 1950s rock’n’roll, located in race-culture capital Memphis, migrated transcontinentally to counter-culture San Francisco by the 1960s. All too short-lived in its “peace and love” noble failure, it soon relocated to New York and London subculture by 1977.

Interestingly, major artists taking part in this experience found their thrills and spills in Germany, at various stages of careers: especially mid-Elvis, early Beatles, later Bowie — and the imploding Birthday Party too, at the end of an era in 1980s underculture. Nowadays, bookended not only by neo-1960s laidback Haight Ashbury-style revival spikes, like Drone, Shoegazer and Doom, in the West — but also, the in-vogue consumer enthusiasm of K-Pop, slick commercial anime power of J-Pop, and productive indie outbursts of C-Pop, this centre has emphatically shifted to the East.

To think that the, albeit Alternative Chart success of Junkyard, by an overweening bunch of jumped-up private school kids, warned-you-in-advance of the horror fuelled political economy dancing-on-the-grave to come — or, let’s be frank, corrupted greed-is-good Swamp nightmare — is a refreshing and aesthetically rewarding, if not prophetic thought. The next step or proposal should be, not so much to modify the readings of this “scene” (Will Straw), “tribalism” (Jean Baudrillard), or “subculture” (Dick Hebdige), but to put as much distance as possible between such experiences, and the anti-intellectualism of authoritarian centralist Rage TV, petit-nationalism of Triple J radio, and chemical nostalgia of Rave Party festivals, passing for “In.” In fact, such far-out events already take place in the style, form and content of Pop Asia. Eat-your-heart-out Ku Klux Frankenstein — yet another family chainsaw model, Creedence Clearwater Revivalesque Melbourne Swamp band — performing their de/generated answer song “Poor Sadie,” to the John Farnham classic, “Sadie the Cleaning Lady.”

Yet, if not for interim temporary popular music rock’n’roll capital, Melbourne (soon to be the most populous town in the country), Australians might still be seen as a race-from-the-burning-building. And, if not for its global vegetal Swamp genre, relocators to Naarm like the Hoodoo Gurus, Surrealists, Triffids, Exploding White Mice, Riptides, and every other everglades wayfarer, might now be trampled under-foot by the EuroMIX2 video game, etc. Here was where the Swamp era definitively avoided a rock’n’roll lost weekender! On these grounds — just for fun — and to those ends, I dug out my first drafted rave-review below — on that very fait accompli:¹

The Birthday Party’s Junkyard

This is the third and perhaps the final instalment — Nick Cave has been quoted as saying the group may disband after the release of this album — to be added to the Birthday Party canon. They return with a hack hack vengeance, kicking against the pricks and rehabilitating garbage in the name of an irrepressible desire to extend the ductile permutations of the word (world) NO, in that compelling vein, beckoning the hapless listener/victim into the false scents of insecurity. Having descended into the hellion’s playpit and enthused at the fetor of uninhibited lunacy, we are collared, once again, by the grim lineaments of the unspoken, unspeakable: a dishevelled avatar of the Birthday Party’s UNCONSCIOUS — it percolates the guitars and drums, squaring  off in an embattled flurry and attempting to milk the last drops of aural angst from a slightly defused intensity, before the entire musical scaffolding caves in. On the vocal level the mythical images are hawked up with a tip of the iceberg assurance, leaving the impression that with just a little more coaxing and cajoling, they will be delivered over en masse for our religious consumption.

With this cultish ascesis, the band take on a semblance of SALVATION. An accolade typical enough in rock’n’roll, usually awarded however momentarily, to a sound reflecting the current climate with immediacy or appreciably modifying our frame of reference. A condign punishment for these hubristic hierophants!

The sound texture dips and rises over splashings of Americana (Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s sleeve art clicks in this respect), often spilling into the depths of pure Detroit, reminiscent of Radio Birdman in there more mannered moments. “Dim Locator” bristles with the intriguing revelation: “There are some certain people who shouldn’t start fires” — perhaps the meaning lies in playing the ingroup off against the stipulated outgroup, the more sinister connotation being: “Some people should stay in their place.” Trashy sentiments indeed! Then there’s the opening cut “She’s Hit”: ostensibly about masculine violence, but with a description cum prescription flavour, e.g., “All the girls across the world are hit, ev’ry little bit,” partly redeemed by the truism “The headshrinker is a quack,” obviously on account of his coiffure, “Anyone who’d wear their hair like that.”

Despite certain shortcomings, generally, Junkyard’s ubiquitous air of exuberance serves to demonstrate and consolidate The Birthday Party’s sneaky MANA, attesting to their importance as harbingers of new musical values. What is striking about this LP though, is that the band seem to have stumbled upon a stylistic minefield, where the dangers include: falling prey to complacency or looking to their bedraggled laurels for inspiration. To negotiate this bomb(ast) stretch unscathed, without drilling their wheels into the sands of repetition could require a fresh tack, pis aller for anti-artists since time…was subverted.

Swamped!

Whether or not the review registered an example or cross-section of audio impressions in the, until now, unarticulated “political unconscious” genre of the moment, it did appear to stand the test of team-self-deprecation we might tentatively categorise as, “Australian”. And just like novelty answer song(s) “Swamp Thing,” recurring in various formats, contexts and subgenres (from Psychobilly to Disco), likewise de/generation was echoed at the time in diverse settings.

We could even argue that global popularity of the Australian blockbuster (monster) saga Crocodile Dundee was facilitated by Melbourne based music of Poison Ivy’s Swampy lover (in addition to his own film franchise, TV series, comics, cartoons, and flattering imitation, etc.). In the case of “de/generation” (sans slash), apart from the local TV comedy troupe, and various pop song(s) in their own right — by The Screaming Jets, and X, etc —it is also the term applied in literary methods to describe a failure to obey “the rules of genre,” thus imagining a new one. So, the 1980s out-there in-joke might be: if you’re too-straight to de/generate, and too-hip to vegetate, take heart in your fate, and STAY SICK! (a la The Cramps’ trés chic matrimonial Ivy & Lux).

For The Political Unconscious of Frederic Jameson, by the 1980s, “genre criticism” was a “thoroughly discredited … theory and practice.” Considering the soon-to-be advent of another pop-culture genre, in a little known town of Olympia, Washington (I also attempt to document elsewhere in Overland–and now re-popularised as Barbie the film) it may be appropriate to offer Jameson the last word.

With the elimination of the institutionalised social status for the cultural producer and the opening of the work of art itself to commodification, the older generic specifications are  transformed into a brand-name system against which any authentic artistic expression must necessarily struggle.
The Political Unconscious (1981)

Note

1. Excerpted from ‘little magazines’ (with ‘CAPITAL LETTERS’) — referred to by the sadly missed best Melbourne music fan/critic, Vicki Reilly, in her study of rock’n’roll journalism, “The Canonisation of Junk.”