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. Sting, meanings built into it. It can refer to which express their own needs and for instance, could be regarded as a cultural products like soapies, video meanings. The only way to resolve typical rock industry figure, a clips, comics, films, and records such theoretical questions is to look somewhat manipulative musician which are consumed by masses of at concrete cases. Pop music, for who made an immense amount of people and, to a greater or lesser instance, is the dominant popular art money in a short time, turned himself extent, enjoyed by them; or it can of our time. Itjs an incredibly into a film star, and began using his refer to what are sometimes thought commercialised, manipulated music own life and his family as a suitable 22 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW

subject for self-promotion. He was music industry over the Australian first is the inability of the the focus of a very rich and very scene. programmers to determine, finally, powerful part of the music business. But the early Australian what will be popularand what won’t. Yet Sting’s bitter-sweet songs often “hillbilly” singers soon began writing To use the pop music industry as an had a quite radical political content, their own songs out of their own example again, reggae, punk rock dealing with everything from experience and with extraordinary and even disco and, more recently, unemployed coalminers in rapidity created their own genre of hip-hop and “House” music became Thatcher’s Britain to the nuclear country music. It dealt with the real popular at grass roots level while the realities of the Cold War, and his concerns of country people and was industry chiefs were trying to sell messages were heightened by the closer in tone and feeling to the more easily packaged stuff; the same video clips which encapsulated his oiginal Appalachian and Western occurred earlier, with Dylan and the songs; here, in the heart of the beast, songstreams of the United States folk whole protest song movement, the w^s a political artist at work culture than to the Nashville music Beatles, the Rolling Stones, in fact, criticising and commenting on the which followed. Slim Dusty’s first rock 'n' roll itself. Of course, the system of which he was a part. recorded song, When the Rain industry and media quickly seize Rock has been going for so long Tumbles Down in July, is virtually a upon and commercialise such now that it has set up its own list of evocative, highly charged bush movements; it is the familiar problem traditions which sometimes run quite images drawn as directly from his of the avant-garde being unable to counter to the music industry and own experience as Banjo Paterson keep ahead of the salesmen. But the its values. Bob Dylan, for instance, had drawn from his. Their stage popular arts never become influenced an entire generation of names still drew on America — Tex completely manageable, as singer-songwriters; Dire Strait’s Morton, Buddy Williams, Slim successive new movements prove. Mark Knopfler, whose songs veer Dusty — but their music was The second phenomenon is the between fierce working class satire Australian. Often they drew on multiplicity of motives and interests, and sentimental indulgence, is Australian folk songs and bush often conflicting, shown by those among them. And Knopfler had an ballads; within a decade they had involved in the mass media. Even impact upon such groups as The created an original bush music which Australian newspapers, radio Style Council, which managed, elicited an enormous response from stations, TV stations, magazines, and incredibly enough, to top the charts country people (it still does) and so on, operate in a pluralistic with songs which are straight marxist developed into a widespread popular situation. Many of their staff or those propaganda while appearing to culture of music, songs, ballads, who write for them are actively conform to (parody?) the rock jokes, travelling shows, radio opposed to the policies of the owners industry’s demands of style and programs and all the rest of it. and use the mass media to promote presentation. The list could be Since then, Australian country counter-ideologies. The media are taken over by the.system; Elvis is the music has itself been steadily monopolistic, but not monolithic. classic, and tragic, example. It is true commercialised; EMI suddenly (And though their owners can help that others are products of the realised that Slim Dusty was selling create popular taste, they are also entertainment industry and are more records than any other local or forced to respond to it; as in the packaged and promoted as such right overseas artist, rock, pop or country; music industry, the controllers are to from the start. In between, however, and country music, like its US a certain extent in the hands of the are infinite variations and counterpart, has become a staple controlled.) Take one media permutations; the mass media is.the music of an urban working class institution, the ABC; despite its site of constant cultural struggle/ which has only residual links with the conservatism, many of its programs fusion/conflict/contradiction; any country. But the tremendous success are opposed to the dominant attempt to impose a theoretical grid of such songs as The Pub With No ideology; the ABC Staff Union, the which does not allow for this is Beer, and of Gordon Kirkpatrick Women’s Broadcasting Co­ operative, and some individual doomed to be simply wrong. (Slim Dusty) himself, show that the tradition still has the power to throw producers have real, if limited, Australian country music, to up popular icons and images and power. take another musical example, shows artists who tap into some stream of just how complex this process can be There are alternatives. Graffiti, the Australian experience and and how American cultural yarns, jokes, bawdy ballads, perform one of the crucial roles of imperialism can be turned by a local children’s rhymes, satirical songs, popular culture; expressing that culture to its own ends. It began as a and so on, can all be seen as which others feel but cannot speak, quite blatant copy of American uncensored expressions of the or sing, or write. country-and-western music in its popular imagination. A great deal of fairly debased and commercial If contemporary popular popular culture, from sport (surfing) post-Nashville forms, and as such culture were simply the manipulative to art (the local rock group) to can be seen as a subservient response and coercive creation of our social lifestyle (criminals, cosmics, to the economic power and cultural controllers, one would have to counterculturalists) to rituals (drugs, domination exercised by the US explain two further phenomena. The skinny dipping, orgies) exists in AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 23

defiance of, or in uneasy tension beginning of this article. (It also one of the reasons we can fee! with, the dominant culture. But demonstrates what a loss Ian optimistic about the evolution in spray-pak graffiti on the factory wall Turner's death is to us all.) Without contemporary society of a popular is not a sufficient answer to the leaping at this point into the high culture which is popularly created massed potency of the media, which culture/popular culture debate, it and expresses the life and aspirations is why the Labor Party’s refusal to seems to me that the distinction of the common people. confront the media monopolies and between the two is no longer as clear Three contemporary examples its softpedalling on alternative media as it used to be, and that the traffic of cultural phenomena confirm this such as FM stations, video centres, between them is usually beneficial. general analysis. And, to make it public broadcasting and public TV is High culture is continually difficult, 1 should begin with one so djisheartening. Labor leaders like reinvigorated by popular culture. which seems to be an absolutely Bob Hawke and, earlier, Neville And the mass media, for all its faults, straightforward case of cultural Wran try to buy off the media chains has made the most highly refined manipulation by the advertising by deregulating them and granting creations of Western elite culture industry. The NSW Tooheys TV ads them Lotto concessions and the like, accessible to a mass audience for the which link beer to well-known but this sort of action simply first time (one million reproductions sporting figures and to the increases the power of the groups of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn, da Australian sporting ethos, have been that are historically opposed to the Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Beethoven's phenomenally successful. The “I feel ALP. Short-term solutions, Fifth Symphony can’t be wrong). like a Tooheys" refrain has seeped long-term defeats. into the consciousness of millions of “Seeing into" culture Here were left intellectuals consumers and has helped make attacking me, and my family, Tooheys, once the underdog in the Before he died, Ian Turner gave NSW beer industry, one of the most a paper to the University of Exeter and my neighbours, in fact popular brands in the nation. titled The Bastards from the Bush: nearly everyone I knew, as Now, undoubtedly one of the Some Comments on Class and mindless victims of consumer reasons this promotion has been so Culture which suggests an alternative capitalism. Zombies successful is that it has hooked onto to the condemnation by some critics an important and pervasive element of popular culture as “diversionary in Australian life, namely the and escapist" and as operating “to emotion people feel when they are create a false consciousness in the involved in or watch some sort of proletariat by means of the values it sporting triumph. It can be an disseminates — that happiness can amazing Mark Ella manoeuvre, or be achieved by individual success an unexpected marathon win, or an within a competitive, class-divided underdog VFL team beating the society, and measured in the material competition leaders, or anything else rewards of the consumer culture". which creates within us all that sense In it Turner argues that the of tension, and excitement, and final mode of production does not directly release which makes almost any and immediately determine culture, sport such a powerful mode of but rather sets the limits within which popular culture, the imagination can operate. From Tooheys has commercialised this, he moves on to a defence of both that emotion for its own purposes. the insights and the “escapes” of the But it’s important to realise that the arts and entertainments, and adds “I power of the advertisement derives believe that the imagination should basically from the authentic sporting stand in an alternative and critical It has been argued that such moment it recreates, rather than relationship to the production creations simply project the values of from the brand-name advertising process and to all existing power the exploitative societies they content of the commercial. The structures”. He even commends the represent, but this is to media artists who create the ad have counter-culture as lying outside and misunderstand the way in which art hooked on to something quite in opposition to the ncrms of the can be a process of “seeing into” and genuine, and though the purposes high culture of both the capitalist and “seeing through” the culture of the towards which the emotion has been communist worlds, and in that sense time, an imaginative mode which can used are trivial that does not mean “popular" be critical of, in opposition to. or the emotion itself has been It’s a very clear and level-headed transcend, the social/political invalidated. exposition of a position which superstructure. To use Turner's In other w ords, in this Turner describes as “libertarian language, art is never wholly and concocted pop cultural form there marxist”, and it escapes the anti­ utterly conditioned by the dominant remains enough of the sign’s original populist bias which I described at the economic mode of the time. That’s power to make it communicate with 24 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW

a considerable degree of integrity; we cultural metaphor for the real. work songs, laments, shouts, hollers, know, in our hearts, that what we are By the time we reach a profound arwhoolies, spirituals and moans seeing on the TV set is only a copy, cultural form like the blues, the which were synthesised in the blues but it is a copy of something which processes of resistance, identification form towards the end of the stirs and moves us, and if the copy is and transformation which 1 have nineteenth century. good enough (art in the age of been talking about become obvious. But lhe blues can also be joyful, mechanical reproduction?) it The blues is not only one of the great a fierce act of affirmation in the face communicates to us nonetheless. poetic forms of the 20th Century: il is of tragedy: as so many blues singers Which is why. when 1 see the an example of the way in which have explained, they sing “to sing the Tooheys commercial, though I am popular genres, if they are good blues away” and those interlocked aware of the insidious nature of the enough, can accrue a formal emotions can be heard in the voice of process at work, I (like many others) significance, a dominant meaning, a every major blues singer from Bessie respond to it. There is a genuine “charge" if you like, which persists Smith to B.B. King. And, as Wilfrid process of recognition and throughout whatever artistic and Mellers has argued in Music In A identification going on. social contexts it finds itself in. Thus New Found Land, in creating the A somewhat similar process the blues, as well as being a classic blues, the black American has occurs with those sentimental, banal created a perfect artistic metaphor pop songs of the 'thirties and ’forties How could we ever have for modern, alienated humanity: which have become "standards" and survived the 'sixties without form the repertoire of singers and Chuck Berry and his gas (It) began as the music of a minority. This easy listening stations all over the minority, having nothing more to lose, world. For most of my life. I’ve stations, juke boxes, could accept its alienation and its despised or ignored those songs schoolyards, teen queens, long isolation for what they were, with a (Cole Porter, Irving Berlin. Oscar distance calls and V8 jalopies? desperate fortitude denied to the Hammerstein) as fake culural members of an ostensibly prosperous society. Vet in so doing this minority products which were mass-produced could imbue its awareness of in Tin Pan Alley just as Fords are dispossession with a universal mass-produced at Broadmeadows. significance, making its melancholy serve For me. rock ’n' roll came as a blast as a symbol of the alienation of modern, of fresh air: as Richard Goldstein urban man. D.H. Lawrence said that asked, how could we ever have humanity today is “like a great uprooted survived the 'sixties without Chuck tree”; and James Joyce made the hero of Berry and his gas stations, juke his modern Odyssey a Jew. The boxes, schoolyards, teen queens, American Negro was literally uprooted long distance calls, V8 jalopies and from his home ... his lexicon of American pop history? The reason that the great mass I In the Australian colony, both of people has responded so j genres were imports, but at least lhe instinctively to the blues in one or second was real. Vicariously, my other of its forms is that they have brothers and I in Rose Bay lived out found in the music of a dispossessed, the black rhythm-and-blues rebellion alienated, ex-slave race the exact against honky middle class culture, expression of their own dispossess­ just as Liverpool musicians did a few ion, alienation and industrial slavery, I years later (Roll Over, Beethoven in form in its own right, has been Yet they, too. seek a way out. And so i thick Merseyside vowels). But a significant part of rhythm-and- in a modern blues such as B.B. King's puzzling about it since, I’ve come to blues, rock 'n* roll, boogie woogie. "That’s Why I Sing the Blues”, which realise that though the lyrics of the jazz, and even contemporary funk. reached the top of the American old pop songs are almost invariably And in each transmogrification it has charts, there is a yearning, and yet an corny and manipulative, their forms manifested much the same qualities optimism, an excitement which we I encapsulate popular feelings and which have characterised the form all respond to. It is our music that he J emotions and, like the Tooheys ads, from the beginning. is singing. hook onto genuine cultural What is absolutely unique to the responses. blues, and what has made so many Loving in vain We know the singer’s emotion is generations of people respond to it so One Christmas holidays, in the fake, but we also know the emotion powerfully, is its synthesis of sorrow surfblown heat of Byron Bay. the she; he is referring to is not, and if we and joy a paradox which would be young son of a friend was playing I can feel our way through the facade almost inexplicable if we were not around on guitar and trying to work we can sometimes discover the aware of its social evolution. The out the chords for Love in Vain. He authentic behind it. At such times the sorrow that characterises the blues is was trying to sing it too. When I fake is transformed into a genuine derived from black slavery and the asked him why. he said it was because AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW 25

it was the most moving love song he’d profit from his art, in typical black revolutionary music of the ever heard; he had just broken up capitalist fashion; yet the same ’seventies, and the alternative musics with the woman he had been living system, without comprehending the (punk, reggae, hip hop, House) of with, after a long relationship. He cultural significance of what it was our time. It’s a good example, I had learnt the song from a Rolling doing, distributed Johnson’s records think, of how capitalism can never Stones album. Let it Bleed, released throughout the United States so that entirely control the effects of its back in 1969: but the Stones, of they became part of the popular operations nor determine completely course, had got it from Robert culture of rural and urban black what happens to the culture it Johnson, the great Mississippi Delta Americans and carried their helps promote; art has a way of blues singer who had recorded it at messages and metaphors to a vastly escaping the machinations of our one of the only two recording wider audience than he would ever merchandisers. sessions he made in 1937, before he have reached in performing live in To return to specifics: my died at the age of 20 — poisoned, the Mississippi. friend’s son and his own mates now story is, by a jealous girlfriend. Not More than thirty years later the write their own songs and play them many country blues singers eversang Rolling Stones, a blues-based British — not for some commercial purpose, and wrote songs with the stark and rock band, included its own version but because it seems a good way to primitive passion of Robert Johnson create music. It certainly is; it’s what who, even on his rare recordings, people have been doing for centuries. seems to be a man possessed; and They write songs out of their own Love in Vain is an extraordinary experience, for their own peers, in an song, based on the traditional 12-bar 'Love in Vain* became an attempt to synthesise that blues but altered by Johnson to almost Shakespearean experience, in exactly the way become an almost Shakespearean outpourings of unrequited Robert Johnson did. If they finally outpouring of unrequited love, and get their rock group off the ground crystallised in a form which is in love they will become much more a part of many ways comparable to the the capitalist system than they are Elizabethan sonnet. The last verse now, but hopefully they will be able goes: of the song on one of its bestselling to make use of it as much as the albums. The Stones, whose name is system makes use of them. In the When that train left the station it had two in itself an act of homage to one of meantime, in Byron Bay, Oz.tralia, a lights on behind Muddy Waters’most powerful blues, young man has been helped to When that train left the station it had two were no doubt as admiring of the understand his own life by a song lights on behind song as everyone else who heard it; recorded 45 years ago in a San The blue one was my baby, and the red their version is quite faithful, in lyrics Antonio hotel room by a black blues one was my mind singer — who was exactly his own When your love's in vain. and tone, to Robert Johnson’s original, through slowed down and age. made slightly more melodramatic. That’s one song, heard by one Johnson probably wrote that By this time the record industry was person, in one place. You could song, in the manner of Delta blues much more consciously and skilfully expand on it a millionfold, with singers, from his own experience; exploitative and the profits much similar built-in complexities. I there is a poetic veracity about it larger; Johnson's song reached suppose that’s where the role of which we find in much great millions instead of thousands. Decca cultural criticism lies. Some of our literature. He would have sung it at extracted its profit; the Stones popular culture is manipulative, dances, in bars, on street corners to extracted theirs; Johnson, who was mass media-ised, capitalised in the his own people before he recorded it, dead, got nothing; but suddenly the interests of a conservative hegemony carrying out the immemorial role of world was given one of the great love Some of it quite consciously criticises the folk bard. If ever there was a songs of our time, a metaphor for all and resists that hegemony. And some uiu.sk' nl the people, by the people, of us who have ever loved in vain, of it struggles to be free of the system, lor the people, this was il. Johnson's and which for my friend’s son acted grappling with the eternal questions life as an intinerant black musician as both affirmation and catharsis. which confront all societies and was. certainly, shaped in part by the In one sense the motives of the civilisations. Most of it is somewhere dominant capitalist system; but commercial system which made this in between those three trig points, a many societies, capitalist and non- possible are irrelevant; the cultural mixture. That doesn’t lead us to easy capitalist, seem to have equivalent effect of its operations, in this case, theoretical answers but it leads us bards, troubadors, and wandering has been the distribution throughout closer to the truth. minstrels. the entire Western world of a music When he recorded his songs for which provides cultural meanings CRAIG McGREGOR is head of the design ARC, Johnson was being used by the and insights for us all. The same school at the Sydney College of (he Arts, and a record company which extracted a happened with Dylan, the Beatles, writer for the Sydney Morning Herald.