Q&A: Protest Singers in Australia

Just caught up on last nights Q & A which is on ABC TV1 in Australia on Monday nights. Two of the panelists were Billy Bragg and Peter Garrett (former lead singer of Midnight Oil and current Minister for Education). At 11:38 seconds into the show Michelle Slater from Macclesfield, VIC asked via video:

There appears to be a lack of young political singer-song writers in the Australian music scene. Music, especially folk music, is the voice of the people and provides an avenue for dissent. While we can name current musos like John Butler providing that voice, where are the young Gen Y protest singers? And why aren't they out there?

Here's some of the answer/discussion:

PETER GARRETT: Well, I think they probably are. I'm not sure that Michelle's had a chance to catch up with them. Earth Boy, The Herd. I mean I can think of people who writing songs now and I don’t get as much of a chance to listen...

TONY JONES: So hip-hop is where it's at these days, is that what you're saying?

PETER GARRETT: No, hip-hop and is a great, powerful, musical verbal form and quite a lot of hip-hop has got a political edge to it, both local and overseas. And I mean, you know, you can go to listen to somebody who's busking and you will hear them, they might be playing a Billy Bragg song. They might be putting a point of view about a particular issue. So I'm not sure that it’s not there. They may not be on the charts. You may not be able to easily access through mainstream media but I think, if you go looking, you'll find them.

TONY JONES: Billy Bragg?

BILLY BRAGG: Well, I think something has changed undoubtedly. When I was 19 years old and wanted to make my voice heard, I really only had one medium open to me. Working class background, we're talking in the late 1970s. Really the only choice I had if I wanted to speak to my peers, if I wanted to speak to my parent's generation, was to pick up a guitar, learn to play, do gigs and make records. Now, if you have an opinion, you have the internet, you have the opportunity to blog, you can make a short film about something you feel passionate about, put it on YouTube. You go and Facebook...

BILLY BRAGG: The point is that everybody now can engage in the debate and I think that’s very positive and I do think young people are engaging in the debate but it's tough to learn to play guitar. Not everybody can stand up and sing in front of an audience so I can understand why people put, you know, their time into the social media. But let me tell you this: nobody ever wrote a tweet that could make you cry. Nobody ever toured Australia reading out their Facebook comments. If you want to see the world - if you want to see the world and get paid for it learn an instrument, get out there, step up, let's hear your voices. There’s always going to be and audience for (indistinct)...

JULIA BAIRD: I think it would be great if you had a Q&A competition and had someone play at the end that had the best song. I think it's an indictment on us that we don't actually know enough, as Peter is saying and maybe it's kind of a niche music thing. Maybe we're not spending enough time listening to Triple J but, yeah, when I was listening to Billy's album during the week and the great album you did with Wilco about Woody Guthrie and I spent a lot of time thinking about what it meant to have that kind of music during the dust bowl and a time of great dispossession and it went on to the time of the Great Depression and there was someone saying you have a dignity and this is your land and you have because it's your land you have the right to ask policy makers that it be recognised as your land and at that time, of course, a lot of people in the banking industry had made a lot of risks with other people's money. And people were grappling with it. So I think it's hugely important...

AMANDA VANSTONE: Music in the civil rights movement over that time in the United States was very, very powerful. In fact I think even the ABC might have done a documentary on this matter and I watched - whoever made it, I don't know - but it's a very interesting piece of work showing the role that music played in getting in touch with what people really felt and sharing that message...

BILLY BRAGG: And that’s the crucial thing. I mean the real definition of success in the music industry or in any industry really is if you can do the thing you always wanted to do and get paid to do. Everything else is cherry on the cake. The hardest leap you ever make as a musician is where you give up that job you really can't stand and you finally manage to start to make a living. If you can do that, if you can achieve that, and that is becoming harder because of the change in the music industry because of recording music, the bottom's dropped out of recorded music. The industry helping young artists to make that leap is difficult. It's not so difficult for older-ites like myself and Peter, who have got a large audience back home but young artists are finding it tough. Fortunately though the live music scene is thriving because we have it's a bit of a cliché but it is true. You can experience a download but you can't download an experience. Going to a gig and having that wonderful experience of being in an audience.

PETER GARRETT: Nothing will ever beat, I don't think, being in front of people, whether you're in the audience or on stage. But just to go back to that earlier question, I think there is some really powerful political music that Australian musicians have created over time. I think a lot of it has been driven by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander musician and other musicians who have been sympathetic and identified with the kind of issues that are important for them. If you listen to any person making music from an Aboriginal community, you're going to hear songs about land, you’re going to hear songs about country and I think there's many acts, too many to mention. They're not well known necessarily. I mean some like Yothu Yindi are quite well known.

TONY JONES: Well, Archie Roach will be on this program next week.

PETER GARRETT: And Archie Roach. Fantastic, yeah. So I think it's there but we haven't had a folk tradition that's become mainstream that's reflected, say, things like the Depression, what we went through during the war periods or economic hardship and we probably haven't had hardship generally as a country on the sort of scale that perhaps they had during the period of the dust bowl when (indistinct)...

JULIA BAIRD: You know, a lot of people in Australia listened to Bruce Springsteen. It wasn't really until I went to a series of his concerts in the States and, you know, in New Jersey...

JULIA BAIRD: But, no, I got it when I went to the giant stadium where he’d done his first ever gig and it was going to be knocked down the next day. It was his last concert there and it was the middle of the recession. Young, old, people of kind of all kinds of descriptions, crying, hugging each other, jumping up and down whatever he sang. You know, Jersey Girls and so on and that defiance, that: bring on your wrecking ball. And he was a man who is still singing about the Iraq war, he’s still singing Woody Guthrie songs and I got how resonant that was and I think we import some of that music without, you know, necessarily understanding a lot of that context.


More Information
ABC, Folk Music, Five Years & Funding (22 October 2012) < http://www.abc.net.au/tv/qanda/txt/s3610729.htm >  at 23 October 2012

Luke Vassella - The word is out

Here is another anti coal seam gas mining song from Luke Vassella, a local to Northern NSW and a regular performer at CSG rallys that have been happening lately in the region. I wrote about the issue back in June this year. I've been playing him a lot on my radio show - you can find all his CSG songs on my Music With A message blog here, hope you like this one:

CSIRO: Air Guitar T Shirt

A few years back I heard about the CSIRO developing an Air Guitar T-Shirt. The fabric of the shirt has fine conductive fibers woven into it allowing arm movements to be detected and fed back to a computer through a wireless receiver. Tonight I have been searching the web to find out if the product ever made it to market... so far I havent been able to find it. Please let me know if you know where I can get one! There is also a tambourine t-shirt.

Check out the YouTube video demonstration of the guitar t-shirt:



Further Information
CSIRO Solve, TEXTILES: Shirts Fashioned for Rockin’ Science (November 2006) < http://www.solve.csiro.au/1106/article3.htm >  at 18 October 2012

The Sydney Morning Herald, Hi tech T-shirt really rocks (13 November 2012) < http://www.smh.com.au/news/technology/air-guitar-down-to-a-t-shirt/2006/11/13/1163266457568.html > at 18 October 2012

New Book: The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright

I just read a post on the Associantion of Internet Researchers mailing list about a new book that looks interesting:

The Digital Rights Movement: The Role of Technology in Subverting Digital Copyright 

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12996 

by Hector Postigo 

The movement against restrictive digital copyright protection arose largely in response to the excesses of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. In The Digital Rights Movement, Hector Postigo shows that what began as an assertion of consumer rights to digital content has become something broader: a movement concerned not just with consumers and gadgets but with cultural ownership. Increasingly stringent laws and technological measures are more than incoveniences; they lock up access to our “cultural commons.” 

Postigo describes the legislative history of the DMCA and how policy “blind spots” produced a law at odds with existing and emerging consumer practices. Yet the DMCA established a political and legal rationale brought to bear on digital media, the Internet, and other new technologies. 

Drawing on social movement theory and science and technology studies, Postigo presents case studies of resistance to increased control over digital media, describing a host of tactics that range from hacking to lobbying. Postigo discusses the movement’s new, user-centered conception of “fair use” that seeks to legitimize noncommercial personal and creative uses such as copying legitimately purchased content and remixing music and video tracks. He introduces the concept of technological resistance--when hackers and users design and deploy technologies that allows access to digital content despite technological protection mechanisms--as the flip side to the technological enforcement represented by digital copy protection and a crucial tactic for the movement.

I would be particularly interested to read about social movement theory and the concept of technological resistance... this book has been added to my wish list - if you happen to get a copy feel free to leave a comment on what you thought of it.

Australian Digital Alliance

I have never really taken much notice of the Australian Digital Alliance, for some reason I thought they were just another Record Label/Movie Studio lobby group with vested interests. Turns out I might have been wrong.

I have been reading articles recently about two new reports they have released in which they indicate that wider exceptions to Copyright Law in Australia, along with stronger safe harbour provisions, would actually increase the Australian economy by $600 million. They write:

Australia needs a more flexible and technology neutral copyright regime to meet the digital reality of the 21st century and the evolving needs of society. Currently Australia's outdated copyright laws condemn online services such as web hosts, search engines and social media to a less conducive innovation and investment environment than in comparable countries, and restricts uptake of innovative online activities.

In the snap-shot of the reports, they suggest that there are three things holding Australia back;
1. The risks and costs associated with legal challenges
2. The impacts of these risks on investments
3. Potential impacts on innovation.

With respect to the later of these in particular, they write:

With inadequate and inflexible copyright ‘exceptions’ and with safe harbour protections extending only to carriage providers there is substantially more risk to online services in Australia than in comparable countries. The economic contribution possible under a more flexible regime is shown by the success of companies such as Apple, Facebook and YouTube. However in Australia, as the Lateral Economics reports demonstrate, these businesses are exposed to greater risk of liability for copyright violations. This means that Australia is not a natural home for innovation and it reduces our ability to compete globally.

I highly recommend taking a look at these reports and reading the reasons why Australia needs Copyright Law reform - indeed it is fascinating to consider the wealth that can be derived from exceptions to infringement.

While you are there, I also suggest you take a look at the website of the Australian Digital Alliance. It turns out it was started by former Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia, Sir Anthony Mason, in 1998. It was great to read their Positions on Key Copyright Issues. They have formal positions on:

1. Orphan works - for fair and reasonable use, a wide definition, an exception not a licensing mechanism
2. TPP - against secret negotiations outside WIPO and the WTO and for transparency and participation
3. TPMs - for exceptions to allow for fair dealing/fair use
4. Safe Harbours - support amending the law to protect all online services providers including universities, libraries, schools and cultural institutions, as well as IT companies
5. Fair Use - support a broad doctrine as per that in the USA
6. Contract Law - support a change to the law to ensure copyright exceptions are preserved
7. SCCR exceptions - for education, archives and libraries, visually impaired enshrined in treaties
8. Neutral language and consumer copying - support technologically neutral language in the Copyright Act and broad time shifting exceptions, particularly for cloud computing and services such as Optus "TV Now"
9. Unauthorised file sharing - do not support unauthorised file sharing but nor do they support policies that result in the disconnection of a users internet access or holding intermediaries liable. 

It is without a doubt enlightening and very refreshing to see an organisation in this country that is specificially dedicated to reform of Copyright Law that also has strong policy positions. I agree with all of these except the last one - as you know I am in support of voluntary collective licensing for file sharing. However all of these policy positions are well reasoned and supportive of innovation, creativity and freedom of speech. I for one have signed up to their mailing list and I recommend you do to. Great Scott!

Further Reading
Australian Digital Alliance, Potential $600m annual economic boost from copyright reform (September 2012) < http://digital.org.au/content/LateralEconomicsReports > at 11 October 2012

Australian Digital Alliance, Snapshot - Lateral Economics Copyright Research (September 2012) < http://digital.org.au/sites/digital.org.au/files/ADA%20-%20Snapshot%20-%20Lateral%20Economics%20Copyright%20Research%20%28Sept%202012%29.pdf >  at 11 October 2012

EFF Deeplinks, New Study Affirms Less Copyright Restrictions Benefit the Economy, Amid Renewed Calls for SOPA 2.0 (21 September 2012) < https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/09/copyright-and-campaign-misinformation-new-study-affirms-less-copyright > at 11 October 2012