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