A Popular Passion

18 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW A POPULAR PASSION From Fats Waller to Slim Dusty, popular entertainment has made the world go round. The left has tended to view it with a jaundiced eye — sometimes celebrating it, more often damning it. Craig McGregor doesn't think either response is enough. Here he looks at what makes rocking around the clock tick. hen I first began writing lives we led. It was the time of the exposed), the really surprising thing about popular culture, great Alf controversy (Alf equals is the diversity, and richness, and W instead of just living it, I ocker), and Admass, and the imagination which people manage to was mainly concerned to defend it Suburban Desert, and Barry bring to I heir lives despite the system. against the attacks of elitists, Humphries' ultra-right caricatures of Most lives, looked at close up, traditionalists and cultural all who lived there, and intellectual reveal profound and eternal authoritarians — and, to my despair at the Ugly Average Aussie. I meanings. These are expressed in a surprise, some of the heaviest mean, that was me. million subtle and unsubtle ways: in criticism came from the left. love, work, families, sport, pop It seemed like a betrayal, and, to songs, parties, gardens, barbecues, 1 mean, here 1 was, this likely lad a certain extent, it still does. The left pubs, races, weekends in the bush, with impeccable lower-middle-class stands for the rights, dignity, history, Friday night at the club, Anzac Day, origins from Haberfield, where red creativity, culture, ideals and infinite demos, strikes, jokes, yarns, Sundays brick bungs stared eyeless at each (and yet untested) possibilities of the in the car, births, fucks and death ... other across the canal that emptied common people, or it stands for the entire galaxy of relationships, into Iron Cove, and listening to nothing. But I have come to events and rituals we have come to Bessie Smith, Bunk Johnson, Jelly understand the emotion behind Ian call popular culture. Roll Morton, Muddy Waters. Turner's and Allan Ashbolt’s Lightnin’ Hopkins, Leadbelly, Fats condemnation of how modern This is a wide definition Domino, Chuck Berry, Little capitalism manipulates and distorts of popular culture, of course; but it Richard, Elvis, the Beatles, Miles the great mass of people who is, I think, the most sensible (and, Davis, Cannonball Adderley and comprise it, and why those on the lately, the most widely accepted) John Coltrane (is there a Great left, as they grow older, become meaning of the term. It has both T.S. Tradition there?), surfing amid the weary and even cynical about almost Eliot and Antonio Gramsci on its bluebottles and inflated condoms at everything which occurs within the side, so it can't be bad. It includes Bondi, drinking beer with my mates system. Nothing, it sometimes seems, rituals, activities, the "way of life” of at the Golden Sheaf, playing footie, short of revolution, will ever change a particular people in a particular going to dances, chundering out the it. culture, and where these (popular) door of my FJ Holden, working and This confronts the left with a activities shade off into (popular) writing and getting married and dilemma, because in condemning the arts, these are included too. Finally, having kids, seeing my Mum and system and what it does to people, it includes the products of the mass brothers on Saturday and my Dad critics are almost forced to condemn media: radio, TV, films, newspapers, when I got up the coast to Forster on the lives led by the great majority of cartoons, comics, pop music — what holidays, and here were lan Turner people in Western capitalist is called, often in derogatory terms, and Allan Ashbolt and other left countries such as Australia. “mass culture". One way out of the intellectuals attacking me, and my Whereas, as I think 1 know from leftist dilemma, of course, is to try to family, and my neighbours, in lact having lived most of my life in make a clear distinction between nearly everyone I knew, as mindless Australia (as well as some of it in “mass culture", which can safely be victims of consumer capitalism. England and the United States, regarded as the corrupt and Zombies. They didn't like our music, where the workings of the power manipulative fare purveyed by or our houses, or (apparently) the structure are much more nakedly advertising agencies and media Photos: Sydney Morning Herald. AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 21 owners, and “popular culture” which to be more “authentic" cultural which fits precisely the marxist refers to the culture that people forms, such as sport, folk music, schema described earlier. create for themselves and harks back hobbies, dancing, trade unions, But it has to be remembered that to peasant and folk meanings of the the rituals and celebrations which are rock, which is still at the core of term. created by people for themselves. contemporary pop music, was taken I don’t want to disregard the fact The contrast is between people as up by young people and became that there are two identifiable and passive consumers and people as popular against the weight of the important processes at work here: active creators, but the truth is that entire music industry, the mass one in which people act, and one in all people play both roles, often media and the ruling culture. Like which people are acted upon. But all simultaneously. jazz before it, it is an exhilarating our lives, of course, are a fusion of This isn't just having it both example of a genuinely popular art acting and being acted upon, and this ways, it’s a recognition of the (created by and for the people) applies to our culture as well; we both complexity of the cultural field. In forcing its way through to a position create it and have it created for us. Australia, especially, the mass media of major importance in our culture And it seems to me that, these days, are crucial instruments by which the — and, like film, transforming itself the two processes are so interfused ruling elite maintains what Gramsci into high art. By the time we reach that we simply have to recognise that called its cultural (and therefore the songs of Bob Dylan, and freedom Coke ads and kids' parodies of them, political) hegemony and manipulates marches, and Black power, and cricket on the beach and Packer’s the consent of the mass of people to a Woodstock, and the anti-Vietnam televised circus, ocker’s party and brutally unjust society. In this I agree war movement, and sexual liberation Don’s party, the local pub rockers with the general thesis advanced by movements such as women’s and the latest megabuck creation of such critics of the media as liberation and gay liberation, LA’s rock industry, are all part of the Humphrey McQueen: you don't together with the entire concept of a culture of our time. have to write for newspapers for very counter-culture, and the art, This conception tends to please long before you realise how they not ceremony and iconography of them neither the structuralists nor the only censor what people can know all, it's clear that popular culture post-structuralists, because it seems but also define the very parameters of (expressed in these forms) comprises to move between Gramscian whatever political debate can take one of the most heartening hegemonic analysis and what we place. phenomena of our time. might term a more pluralist, To narrow the argument again: As the late Alex Carey once “postmodern” approach. But it rhythm-and-blues, and then rock *n‘ recognises that, in the real world, said, ain’t much use having a two- roll, like jazz thirty years before this is the way it is. As Stuart Hall party state if you've got a one-party them, dragged the mass media, argues (in his essay “Notes on press. Even where the mass media is protesting, along behind them. Ian Deconstructing The Popular’”), at not overtly political, its effects are Turner, who I remember used to the heart of popular culture is a political; as Elsaesser says of the defend jazz as a genuinely popular process of struggle, of contestation cinema, it forms “an extensive and no art of real merit while denigrating between the attempt to impose a doubt complex institution of rock ‘n‘ roll as a worthless cultural system upon working people socialisation and social control, i.e. commercial plot, finally changed his and the resistance to it. an apparatus which manipulates mind. Years before, Francis Newton consciousness, generated and In the study of popular culture, we (Eric Hobsbawm) had defined the maintained by concrete economic should always start here: with a double- way in which all commercial music stake in popular culture, the double interests". Marcuse argued that even depends for its vitality upon regular movement of containment and where popular movements seem to infusions of non-commercial resistance, which is always inevitably be in clear opposition to the (popular) musics; even in inside it... Popular culture is neither, in a dominant (bourgeois) culture a internationalised, mediaised, “pure” sense, the popular traditions of “repressive tolerance” is at work twentieth-century mass art, the resistance ... nor is it the forms which are which acts to subsume such energy comes from the people. superimposed on and over them. It is the opposition within the system. ground on which the transformations are worked. But this dominance is never Pop marxists complete, and people employ a The careers of some contemp The word “popular”, in myriad of strategies to resist it and to orary rock “superstars” illuminate contemporary use, has both these create cultural and subcultural forms the way these processes work.

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