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 tells the story from the point of view of 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 when their job was done. The songs are available in high-quality mp3 format with lyrics and artwork free-of-charge, from the New Waver website or BandCamp.
Money for Lugging
Dire Straits' early-80s hit expressed an imagined blue-collar worker 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 record sales, the rise of file-sharing and the democratization of music-making, there is no longer anything like an insatiable demand for recorded music product - or any cultural product, now that most university graduates join a large pool of semi-employed white-collar workers, desperately churning out texts for which there is no audience. As tradesmen have become rarer, demand for them has increased, leading to the phenemonon of the 'cashed up bogan' who runs a business, owns an expensive car and invests in real estate. There is little money in pop music today, and a typical practitioner gets by on the dirty work that others prefer not to do, such as dish-washing, retail and phone-sales. This was always true for aspiring stars starting out - now it is true of most 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-FM 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 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 or Led Zeppelin (or John Cage) we'll be successful like they were.
My Memory-Stick Weighs a Ton
The basic idea comes from Alan Liu's 'The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information'. He places cultural products like literature and music alongside workplace documents, creating a category of 'things built with computers', which we paraphrase here 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 and data not analyzed. There is such an over-supply of culture that in polite company it is considered a duty 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 who'd seen how the inner city once looked would be shocked at the change. There are stories of families as late as the 70s who, desperate to get out of Fitzroy, sold their terrace-houses for a fraction of what they cost now. Now that gentrification is dotted all over the globe, we understand it and how it gets started. Artists form part of the initial engine, and are courted by land-owners and governments: "come rent our suburb, work hard to improve our land values, after which we will move you on". 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. Some artists have figured out why local government is suddenly temporarily friendly to them: see for example this manifesto from Hamburg.
Philosphers Zone
This is from a doco comparing modern rock musicians to 19th century Romantics.
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 more interesting. We used to do this song live - the joke was how many of the words could be kept from the original love song, changing only 'honey' to 'coffee'. For this version we changed a few more, and added samples from a softdrink ad and a bean grinder.
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 define ourselves by what we consume, and we know we're doing the world a favour by evangelizing some piece of media or another.
Paying the Bills
Most of us wind up here eventually - all that varies is the path we take and the age at which we arrive. Zoologists will not get this song because we mucked up the science - we should have said 'worker bee', but without checking, went with the usual meaning of 'drone'. The drones in a real bee hive are more like celebrities than drudges - they do no work and live only to eat and mate.
The Cars That Ate Melbourne
After art and commerce 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 the shopping strips. 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. The song ends in a chorus of triumph.
So there you have it - another album which will be forgotten in a week as a hundred new products clamour for attention. Our creativity helped make Melbourne slightly more marvellous, for which we will pay more rent.
|