With all of the offensive tripe tumbling from the maw of Tony Abbott over the years, what gets to me the most is the suggestion of some shadowy “physiological differences” making women inferior candidates for leadership positions or occupations comprising any form of intellectual capital. However, Abbott’s view also demonstrates the problem of articulating contemporary feminism: as in select corners of the globe women’s participation burgeons in the workforce (and I stress we are only at the beginning of a long road to equality; there are plenty of statistics available on current inequities), the problems faced by women move to the less quantifiable realm of attitudinal disadvantage – which is notoriously difficult to scientifically analyse. But it is possible: recent research into our concept of women scientists shows how far we have to come.

So it is important not to shirk conversations of women’s involvement in leadership roles and the obstacles they face, despite difficulties in perceptibility, which may have made it harder to present the case of gender bias.

However, here’s what I have to say: there’s a grander narrative at work here, and in a way a more urgent one, which is a global issue. I’ve turned it over in my head and no matter which way I look at it, women’s involvement in working life seems to be the greatest contributing factor to some of our foremost measures of “progress” per se.

First of all, women’s participation in government is undeniably correlated with a reduction in global violence and warfare, the reasons for which were recently outlined by Steven Pinker in his book “The Better Angels of Our Nature“. It may or may not be directly causal, but a relationship is clearly observable; beyond theorising interminably about causes and effects, it does seem to be a good idea to keep ahead with anything that appears to be working to reduce war worldwide.

But then there’s global population increase also, which is at least partially responsible for our climate change dilemma.

I have good news: women in the workplace are solving this one too. One of the grand narratives of the last century has been the colossal change in lifestyle that comes with mass urbanisation. Humans are now predominantly urban, and as the world is urbanising, the total fertility rate (or the rate of population growth) has also begun to decline. It’s a continuing story in the developing world, where we still find the highest population growth: as people move to cities, they begin to have less offspring. Apparently, access to superior education, labour pooling and its attendant variety of working opportunities and environments, changes everything.

So the education of women and workplace participation in parts of the world lagging in gender equality – as well as those on the vanguard – can be thanked for a great many improvements to the lives not just of women, but everyone. We all gain from this process. Check out even more correlations between women’s rights and human development markers.

Calling for or justifying any kind of exclusion from this process, as has Abbott, woefully protected by other members of his party, is in part a call to slow down mutual human progress toward a more equitable, peaceful and sustainable world for everyone. And this is to say nothing of the sense of purpose and meaning brought to the lives of those women who are simply good at leadership, and experience the flow of working in an occupation they were born to enjoy.

Today I’ll offer that travelogue, then. Having returned from a couple of weeks spent in Hong Kong compels me to write a few lines in wonder at an astonishing metropolis both fast and garish, wild yet condensed, exhausting and energising at the same time. Hong Kong has the second longest life expectancy in the world (after Japan), ranks high on the Human Development Index, has superior corruption perception according to Transparency International and at the same time retains singular economic freedom and is unattached to any Western democracy since the handover in 1997. It’s a confounding place.

It’s also geared toward families, with all generations out on the streets at night – that is, safe. Coming into the city, nestled in the hills, it looks like a science-fiction paperback jacket from the 1960s minus the flying cars and multiple moons hugging the horizon.

But what I find most striking, and what I want to write about, is the lack of cynicism in the people. This is not something so easy to quantify, but coming en route between Australia-London-Scotland, it is evident. When you talk to someone in Hong Kong, the conversation starts from a place of mutual trust; at the same time, Hong Kong is saturated in media and commercial interests which seem less questioned.

I’d like to clarify my doubts here, before I go on. I spoke to a friend employed in Hong Kong as a schoolteacher – she suggests there just isn’t the same emphasis on coaching in critical thinking (although I noted protests before I arrived, some of which had to do with resistance to China’s injection of jingoist doctrine in the school curriculum). My friend, who has also lived in New Zealand and Australia, says almost exclusively when the kids hit their teens, they don’t do traditional outbursts and question authority (teenagerdom as we know it), they just retreat inward. She describes this as difficult to watch.

Another friend whose extended family resides between Australia and Hong Kong describes the way most families – including her own – will not speak openly of familial disputes, preferring instead to pretend they are not happening, suffering in the process. She posits this as a kind of local custom – family enmeshment reigns, but healthy questioning of family bonds does not. Many in her family refuse to speak to one another.

At the same time, the openness and honesty, the lack of ingrained irony and constant questioning I encountered – and have encountered in others I’ve met from Hong Kong – as well as abundant honour- and trust-based social and commercial transactions, all came as such a relief that I began to ask myself some hard questions.

Although I’m pretty much hardwired now to uphold the virtues of critical thinking in education – an irony in itself when you consider how spuriously targeted a value this “critical thinking” is – I had to note that its absence makes for a refreshing point of view. There’s a lot lost in a world where it is necessary to mistrust every message as you receive it, to always start from a critical position with all communiqué.

There’s the problem: it is necessary to do this kind of questioning. The culture of critical thinking didn’t come out of nowhere – I’ve devoted a lot of time here to encouraging readers to consider not so much the values embedded in specific media, but the sociology of the effects of mass media; what is happening to us the more time we spend engaged with mediated reality? One thing we need more than ever are the tools and the minds to question whether or not pretty much every communication we encounter has our best interests in mind, given that the majority of messages we receive are now commercially driven and often harder to detect as commercially driven. Working in PR, I have witnessed with some distress the drive to integrate commercial interests with our most intimate, local and trusted sources.

Naturally, this emphasis on critical thinking has to become habitual and attitudinal in order to work – but as this happens, it increasingly has to spill over into all our interactions, ever the more so when our social interactions are mediated through devices which add adds to them, and all manner of sneaky distortions of our sociality to direct our attention through trusted media. It has become necessary to mistrust everyone, and it shows in the attitudes of successive generations – if Gen Y communicated in a protective nudge-and-wink irony, wait until you see Gen Z and subsequent iGens at work!

For communication to mean something, it needs at least occasional trust. But with good reason, that trust is harder to find.

The relative absence of this familiar attitude may have made Hong Kong refreshing to a traveller like myself, but subsequently Hong Kong is an almost blindingly commercialised city. Every surface seems covered in advertisements of some kind – and considering the amount of buying and selling and intensive consumption of planetary resources happening there, some of it is surely internalised…

How do we do this then? How do we achieve a workable level of trust and not become driven by those with the capital to exploit it?

Of course, this is just one question weighing on my mind. I also regretfully left behind such wonders as the MTR, providing the mobility of which my hometown Sydney can’t possibly see for decades, at least. Why? Because in our version of democracy, we value critical debate 4eva and live in the moment – how long have we been debating long-term public transport plans? How long, despite clear future gains, has no one been willing to pay for it?

Yet another friend elucidated the economics of the transport system: the government built shopping centres above the land under which the MTR was developed. The shopping centres partially fund further transport investment. But then you’ve got more shopping centres, of course…

So I come to wonder, so grandly, whether democracy is only a means to begin separation of powers – once this is achieved, how on earth do we get on with the job of long-term planning? How did Hong Kong plan such a great city, with its tumultuous political past, swapping hands and enduring occupation? After the Japanese left and the war ended, the United Kingdom did put a lot into development of one of their final colonies, at this point with no opium gain in return – perhaps at pains to make amends and rebrand colonial heritage, make it look good. After the unpopular handover, it seems to have kept developing at speed. Hong Kong fans are fond of saying it’s the best of the east and the best of the west combined – I’m inclined to tentatively agree. “Tentatively” – must be that westernised cynical streak in me.

That dialogue died down swiftly as we came to accept our lot – the IT “revolution” (replete with scare quotes) couldn’t be stopped. So we discussed the minutiae of day-by-day developments in digital culture. While we may have missed the point earlier – the many more hours spent in mediated reality seems chiefly in aid of social pursuits, even just organising face meetings – we shouldn’t stop considering the effects of over-mediation. Within a generation, we have adapted to a world where much more of our surroundings are mediated by other people; tailored reality, tamed, commodified, distilled from the complexities of the world around us, subject to the tyranny of consensus and groupthink &c, &c. Plus, there are plenty of timely warnings about the attention-stunting effects of screen time on early brain development.

Now we talk about the me culture. Rising narcissistic personality disorders, encouraged by marketing gurus with their “my” this “i” that. What’s happening, can we blame the technology?

Thomas De Zengotita argues it’s not that simple. A cultural analyst foremost, he’s been arguing that celebrity culture and the media we spend so much of our time engaged with is about us rather than the content itself – and we’ve become obsessed with analysing content as though it meant something. He is not as interested in minutiae or incessant close readings of pop culture: he’s looking at the accumulation. What happens when we have so many screens, so much advertising space, so much targeted content all addressing us? All flattering us by speaking to us all of the time, paying us attention – as all media does. Screens pay us attention, not the other way around.

This has to have changed the way we think about ourselves.

Zengotita is concerned that it’s made self-interested performers out of everyone. But there’s something else at stake here – and it has to do with innovation.

Here’s the deal: the quickest to figure out the parameters of the mediated world in the playground – and replicate it – receives the dubious honour of being the schoolyard trendsetter, head of the “cool group” if you like. So we grow up taking cues from one another as to how to behave, and it is dictated by who learns the language first. We have to learn the pop culture references, accepted quick dialectic exchanges, or die a social death. Perhaps there is no greater torture for an adolescent.

We spend years learning the language of media content, and being driven by those who understand it best – or at least who understand how to replicate it.

Imagine how betrayed you would feel if it turned out all of that learning was smoke and mirrors. We defend to the death the assumptions we’ve grown up with, and that’s how media influence spreads.

It’s also how our cultural references get narrowed. We’ve been told through this flattery that we already know what’s important. We must demonstrate to others that we already know it (preferably implicitly, as if it were so real it were a part of us). Imagine if someone came along and said: you don’t know much beyond a media-distilled vision of the world, here’s a new idea.

What an insult! They’d get laughed down. That’s just not possible.

This is why we are in a culturally dead age – no one’s even trying for a new idea. It’s why we have a number of genres, time periods reduced to a few fashion image-symbols, tropes and stereotypes to select from when we choose to create something new. This is why when someone releases new art into the world, they choose from a list of pre-determined influences – references been and gone, genres long-set, agreed on. Even “experimental music” is a genre now, with its few ideas repeated over and over.

So we’ve got these cultural handles: if we didn’t know about it already we wouldn’t “get it,” and not “getting it” is the death of the social self.

But it gets uglier. Seen youtube? Of course you have. Youtube humour trends are very revealing about what we like to engage with, and so many online phenomena that aren’t just reiterating these pop culture handles are about laughing at those who don’t comprehend them, like ‘Dot Dot Dot.’ Funny, yes, but also flattering – cause where the object of ridicule doesn’t get it we do.

But it also broadens to general knowledge. Consider the rainbow videos: a guy excited about seeing a double rainbow, and worse, a woman obviously suffering from paranoid schizophrenia freaking out about a rainbow in her backyard. They’re funny because the subjects don’t understand basic things that we all should know. The publicly pilloried for not “getting it” have become as famous as public figures creating culture. At least we’re not them.

Why is that important to us? To locate people who don’t get it and laugh at them? Why is this what defines current “counter-culture” as well?

I posit it’s because we’re reaffirming all this learning we’ve done online, on TVs, through ads, through rhetoric disguised as arts and information, in the playground; reaffirming that it’s valuable. And real. We are in the in-group because we understand – they are in the out-group.

Thus our narrowed perspective – we just can’t encounter anything new without it being a threat to the self.

Nor does it help that in the culture of media competition, everyone is reaching for the jugular – the quickest way to grab attention. It’s like once we spent so much psychological analysis discovering the formula for generating interest, that’s all we could do. We simplify to the attention-grab, selling out the potential for deeper meaning in the process. And this is becoming the norm, like a 4/4 dance beat thrumming away until you can’t conceive of another rhythm.

Culture is one thing, but think of what this means for innovation and new ideas in other realms – such as politics. How do we find a place of real ideas exchange, how do we allow public figures to have bold, unrecognisable ideas again without shouting them down with our own self-protected knowledge of what is knowable?

And how will we adapt to this attention-seeking and attention span-lacking, flattered and mediated culture?

Ideas welcome here.

Email media-inquiry@dbcde.gov.au to make your submission, or use NewsStand’s online form at http://www.newsstand.org.au/make-your-submission.

You might consider the following points:

1. Media ownership: do we need to break up New Ltd’s 70% market share and cross-media control, and how? What benefit will this bring?

2. Media regulation: will our media benefit from more independent regulation? Can the ACMA and Australian Press Council be improved to this effect, or do we need new bodies with greater regulatory power and a better understanding of the regulatory problems presented in the changing online media landscape?

3. Workplace relations: it is apparent that the News of the World scandal which sparked this debate has a lot to do with the working culture in Rupert Murdoch’s organisations, as well as other struggling media outlets. In an environment of dwindling staff, pay cuts and increased workplace competition, journalists have to produce more content with less time to do their work, and many are afraid of losing their jobs, adopting unethical practices to get ahead and prove themselves to their employers. This encourages undesirable journalism. Can we regulate the workplace rather than the content to ensure a safer, fairer environment, and thereby achieve a better product overall?

4. Should we have more publicly funded journalism? Should the ABC receive an enhanced budget? Should an independent, peer-reviewed body, like the Australia Council, be set up to incentivise good journalism practise and that which has gone missing in much of the mainstream media: investigative journalism? Can we provide grants and awards for investigative journalism and alternative media outlets which are doing good work with little pay? Is it the government’s role to use public funding to provide essential common benefits to our democracy that the marketplace is failing to provide, such as reliable information and investigative journalism?

Good luck with your submission!

Not long ago I sent the following interview questions to some friends and colleagues who are all in some way engaged with countercultural music-making in Australia. The questions were my way of attempting to understand what was going on in our heads when we thought about the role music has and could have in our lives, as well as how music is evolving and why… or if it has temporarily stopped evolving, and why. What follows are the answers I received from alternative music radio host Angus Cornwell and Sydney singer-songwriter Bud Petal.

Some of the following I find rousing; some of it I emphatically disagree with; all of the responses are interesting. Likewise, the respondents seem at times both buoyed and annoyed by the questions – which I suppose means I’ve done my job, after a fashion. If you’d like a stab at answering these questions, I’d love to hear from you. Email me at wyatt [at] wyattmosswellington.com – if they add to the debate, I will upload them below.

Enjoy!

[Update 9 August 2011: Tony Wellington's answers have been added below, forwarded to me with the fatherly proviso, "here are some responses from an old fart"; see particularly his answer for Q6, articulating one of the most important aspects of contemporary music production and consumption.]

Q1: At some point the abbreviation of “independent”, i.e. “indie”, became marketable as a sound and an aesthetic rather than having anything to do with independent production. Does this bother you at all?

Angus Cornwell: No. Certainly, it has created a lot of confusion amongst people who don’t know better and think the ‘indie sound’ represents more of a claim to the totality of music than it really does; and sometimes industry watchers who should know better conflate ideas of independence from the mainstream musical establishment and originality and resistance and solidarity and counterculture, &c, &c.. As a teenager I was a subscriber to the second category. Then, I would have thought indie music embodied all those confused ideas in my head and thought ‘wow – it sounds good (saccharine) for something that does all that.’ These days maybe I’d think ‘wow, it’s kinda disappointing for something that can do all that.’ But does it bother me? No.

Bud Petal: I’m not sure I’d say it bothers me. I realise that such a phenomenon exists, but as an artist the way my music is manipulated by marketing trends is something over which I have little control. I don’t feel a part of the music industry in the sense of a career musician making his living only from music (mainly because that’s not possible due to the nature of the music industry). I think that from the perspective of a music lover/consumer/buyer of records/etc. (i.e., someone who does not create music), marketing “independent” music and the nature of the music industry is more bothersome because the access to good, creative, unique, independent, etc., music has become very difficult.

The “indie” marketing phenomenon is a marketing scheme –  it bothers me in the same way that watching a Pepsi commercial telling me how to be trendy or whatever bothers me. People who actually know what independent music is won’t be bothered per se because the same has happened to the terms “grunge” and “folk” and “blues” and “disco” and “surrealist” and “dada” and “absurdist” and countless other music and art movements that have been appropriated by the commercial and marketing companies. It just so happens that a significant amount of money available to artists resides in multinational corporations who have interests pertaining to market share and profits (there are interesting exceptions, but even in those cases the money comes from the same source). If artists want money from these companies, they are going to have to abide by the rules set by these companies. I don’t mean this to sound defeatist or fatalistic; artists for at least a couple of centuries have had to deal with the problem of making a living out of their art (I haven’t looked this up properly, but I suspect that the artists who had a steady income paid for by a wealthy philanthropist or by a government body were either in the minority or had similar issues as those artists signed to, say, a major record label these days). There’s a problem with how our culture and society values artists, though I think there is a disconnect between what the general population values and what the government and corporations value (the same happens with any political issue).

Tony Wellington: Back in the late 60s and early 70s there existed a genre widely known as “underground music.” This included anything that wasn’t mainstream, radio-friendly and pushed by the major labels. But the term has now been broken up into subgenres (psychedelia, progressive rock, space rock, etc.) and the useful moniker “underground”, with its connotations of grass-roots revolution, has completely disappeared.

I suspect the same will occur with the term “indie”. Originally it was designed to refer to non-mainstream music artists in the same context as “underground”. But, thanks to modern technology, music is continually heading well beyond the sweaty grasp of the corporate music industry. This is both a good thing (more variety) and a bad thing (lack of quality filtering). But in the end, “indie” will increasingly become meaningless as a useful catch-all. Like “underground” its days are numbered simply because its catch-all usefulness is waning.

Q2: The “indie” phenomenon still lays claim to a kind of authenticity of individual expression – this can mean anything from use of light acoustic or toy instruments, to lo fi recording qualities. Are we mistaken to hear these sounds as being any more authentic than highly “produced” sounds?

AC: Yes. But here’s some food for thought. Let’s play ball with lo-fi for a minute (I don’t care much for toy instruments myself).

Triumvirate reasons why some lo-fi is aesthetically appealing to me (in general, rather than making reference to the particular style of poetry that has grown symbiotically with it):

a) It entails a different set of values to highly produced music. In some ways the overhaul of conventional ‘sounds good’, and the secession from artistic control (an object of hi-fi production?) is liberating, easy. This can be a cheap way out. It can also open the door to new ways of thinking about music and new ways of listening to it. New priorities, new possibilities.

b) Beauty of ambiguity.

c) Hypnotic effects of distortion.

Some people are also interested in the technical side of distortion and the acoustics of this music. I don’t know much about it, but I think that’s a reasonable angle on lo-fi music, too. And we can’t forget that it’s associated with lots of desirable, romantic images in counterculture.

BP: I don’t exactly understand the term “authentic” in this context. If it means these works were created by a human using only their own skills and ingenuity, then everything is “authentic” and the term is meaningless. If it means the work is not derivative, then that’s a different and (probably moot) philosophical discussion because everyone has to start from somewhere. I’m guessing the marketing departments don’t want people to have a clear understanding of the term because it actually has no serious content to it. Countless other examples include: “the king of pop”, “album of the year”, “best song”, “the voice of a generation”, etc.

TW: Getting back to my “underground” reference above, the notion of lo-fi harks back to the prototype metal/garage sounds of, for example, MC5. Back in the 60s it was considered radical and revolutionary to produce an album loaded with distortion and grit – something the major labels would never consider (until they finally realised they could make a buck from it with the arrival of punk). It seems to me that modern lo-fi is seeking the same imprimatur of radicalism. Being non-mainstream in the music business is much easier today. Trying to stand out from the morass of non-mainstream music available is much harder. If your primary purpose is to demonstrate that you wish to break with convention, then listeners need to understand the conventions that are being broken. Trouble is, conventions have become increasingly slippery, and radicalism harder to pin-point. Personally, these days I prefer to listen to people who can wring new life from old conventions rather than those who eschew conventions for the sake of it. But I’m old, and younger people still need to feel they are rebelling against something – even if it’s harder to define what that something is.

On the notion of “authentic”, real authenticity can be generated using conventions no more or less than spurning them.

Q3: Obviously these sounds have roots in a couple of identifiable genres – punk and folk seem to be common reference points. Any reason why these genres appealed more to young musicians looking for influences to inform their own music?

AC: Easy chords to quirkiness of melodic structure ratio? Perhaps a culture within those movements which had certain values in common with the musicians? Punk and folk are both egalitarian at their core. That’s maybe the clearest thing they have in common. With that, inherent acceptance in these traditions of the plurality of ways to enjoy music?

It’s easy to be cynical. There is some good music being made by this new wave of musicians, IMO.

BP: I don’t think anyone can give any clear answers to why certain styles of music or musicians were selected as influences whereas others were not; it’s too complicated and unpredictable. For what it’s worth, I think a lot of it has to do with the values and interests a person has. A person who is a fan of the latest pop star obviously has completely different values and cultural interests to someone who owns the entire back catalogue of an early twentieth century minimalist composer. Some of it has to do with training and leisure time (one may not understand minimalist classical music or have no leisure time to explore the aims of such composers, or one may be baffled by the difference between the number one pop hit on the charts of last year and the previous year).

TW: Folk music has been around as long as humanity. Punk is a modern fad. But both have their roots in the fervent expression of social conditions. Woody Guthrie was lambasted for being a communist (though he never joined any communist organisation) and Johnny Rotten was labelled an anarchist (though he probably had no idea what that really meant politically). There will always be music which seeks to exemplify the heartfelt oppression of certain social groups – even when, in the case of punk, that cohort was disaffected, self-interested western youth whose “oppression” was really just indulgent teenage angst.

Q4: All of this has also meant less emphasis on musicianship and often exclusion of any need for virtuosity, which is looking increasingly old. Do you think the fading emphasis on musicianship is a reaction against something culturally endemic, and if so what is it rebelling against?

AC: It is easy to react to an artifact of the establishment where one is identifiable. The need for virtuosity may be considered as one, and this dialogue has been had at length on many fronts for about fifty years. I would like to think that these days alternative music is tending toward some happy medium where virtuosity is desirable, but it can be acknowledged that it is not entirely necessary in all domains.

In the wave of electronic music that has stormed Sydney in the last eighteen months (Gold Panda, Jamie XX, et al), virtuosity seems to be celebrated. An overconfident young DJ who played a set on Fbi Radio on Friday, 15th July observed that this new music could be seen as an adaptation of the scattered, glitchy, highly technical and… virtuous underground electro of the 1990s, finding a new home for itself in the mainstream.

Musicianship is not dead, people just don’t understand it. It’s like drinking sugar when you’re first starting to drink coffee – you need trainer wheels. Gold Panda, for example, brings the best of the inaccessible and resets it in a tolerable – even enjoyable – format, without compromising its complexity.

There is an increasing complexity and elegance (and new culture of experimentation! Gwen Stefani, I’m looking at you in particular) of the production that lies under mainstream pop of late. Mainstream pop is supposed to appeal to everyone. This borders on conspiracy theorising, but I think that even in popular gangster rap, there is a dog-whistle effect. For a sophisticated audience it has quirks of production, subtexts to read and honestly a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek irony, emotional intelligence and drama. Often there is an interesting, embedded cultural or political statement being made, too. Kids from Mt Druitt will covet the blingin’ lifestyle and the escape from suburbia, and the rest will soar over their heads.

N.B. Orthodox western musicianship’s values, the worship of originality, the beauty in authenticity, the requirement of virtuosity, the appreciation of people attempting something that is difficult: all just values – not universal!

BP: Whose emphasis? The record labels’? If so, I don’t think their emphasis has changed because their structure and aims have not changed. They aim to increase profits, and that has unfortunately meant taking advantage of unknown artists and forcing them into a mould and tying them into a contract. That can’t be so easily done to a virtuoso because they have the upper hand (assuming of course they are not just, say, guitar-playing machines but rather artists who wish to create their own artworks). A talented musician is less likely to be swayed by the major labels’ promises of making them a star, though there are exceptions of course. The record labels’ emphasis is only on increasing profits (to varying degrees of success and ferocity); whatever brings them to that end they will pursue. So I don’t think that the record labels’ emphasis on musicianship is a reaction to anything – the emphasis wasn’t there in the first place (I also think this is true objectively; it would be interesting to see a study on what kind of artists record labels have supported in the past in comparison to now, as I suspect there has been little change in the last few decades at least).

Or maybe you mean the emphasis of the public or music fans? That’s a different question. Maybe it is true that there is less value now placed by our culture in artists. Though I’m sceptical because it seems to me that the roots of such values are intertwined with many other factors. Cultural values can change very drastically within a short period of time, even when the actual practices of artists changes very little in the same time frame. A drastic example is Weimar Germany, which was the peak of European civilisation in the arts and sciences and seen by many as perhaps the period with the highest level of intellectual production in human history, and within less than a decade Germany sunk into the depths of human depravity in the Nazi era. So it’s difficult to say whether an emphasis has faded and whether it’s a reaction to a cultural zeitgeist. It’s too complex. People are affected by many outside factors and it takes constant vigilance to remain close to ideals of cultural values and respect for artists and human rights and a myriad of other values and ethical principles that can be erased without hard work on the part of the population.

TW: Punk was a direct reaction against the requirement for musical ability. Garage likewise. Rap similarly. These genres sought to return music from the grasp of commercialism back into the control of ordinary people.

Unfortunately, thanks to the commercialisation of music during the last century, plus globalisation generally, music critics and music consumers are driven to make comparisons at a world-wide level. Contrived hierarchies are flaunted proffering the supposed best-of – whether it’s a rock guitarist, sousaphone player or scantily clad dance/performance artist (Lady Ga Ga, Kylie Minogue, etc). That’s a pretty daunting set of exemplars by which to judge one’s ability. Musicians are today forced to live up to impossible standards as they are continually compared to the world’s best.

Here’s something to mull over. Before music was recordable, it was a more utilitarian, participatory art. Extended families and friends would gather around (with or without accompaniment) to sing together. As soon as it became marketable through recordings, the simple pleasure of music performing was taken from the hoi polloi. Music suddenly needed an audience (i.e. paying consumers) to justify its existence. I have read that, back in the early 1900s, one in every 3 Australian households had a piano, and many had zithers (which were sold door to door). These instruments weren’t used for money-making, individual expression, or even showing off. They were used for simple communal pleasure.

Today many houses have a guitar. But they are rarely used to bring people together as in the pianos of old. Rather they are strummed by those who tend to fantasise about performing before an audience. Today music doesn’t serve a function unless it has an audience.

Q5: Another element which seems important to many listeners is to hear a unique personality behind the music – which often seems to translate as highly apparent eccentricity, especially an eccentricity which appears genuine. Why do we value locating eccentric art-makers?

AC: See “Brands, Fakes & Authenticity” by David Boyle.

We crave originality in some respects, and there’s nothing more compelling and MORE ACCESSIBLE than authenticity. Maybe it’s our socialisation, maybe it’s some inbuilt biological mechanism that mistrusts contrivance – in the same way some compulsion in our nature prefers symmetry, the appearance of simplicity, etc., we prefer authenticity. It’s easy to understand, it’s easier to get into. It feels safe. And it’s hard to contrive something convincingly.

Music is mostly an escape. Would you prefer to escape into something that is real, beautiful, tried and true, or inhabit some synthetic structure with infirm edges and uncertain hospitality, and maybe a hole in the bottom?

BP: Eccentrics might be valued because they represent to others what human ingenuity is capable of; maybe people find them interesting in the same sense that the Freak Shows and circuses used to be valued; maybe people value eccentrics for their bravery in standing up to the mainstream culture. People search out eccentric art-makers because people are looking for something different – they feel unique, important and smug in the fact that they alone sought out and found these artists that few people know. Though at the end of the day (and especially in the current explosion of new music via online sites) only very few artists will be superstars and known worldwide in the same way The Beatles were in the 1960s. I think the media and tabloids focus on eccentric personalities because there is so little to distinguish between mainstream pop stars signed to major labels. The music-listening public know the differences. They may not care or ignore the facts but they are aware of them. So I guess people seek out eccentric art-makers because they are aware that what they see on the major television music channels is not all there is and that there is better and more important music being created. Though I don’t think people seek out eccentrics as much as they seek out the music they know exists but is not represented in the mainstream tabloids. That’s not eccentricity per se.

TW: We are overrun with music choices. In my teen years, it was easy to make oneself aware of every recording artist available. Today that would be impossible. Spoilt for choice, we live in decadent times. It’s no wonder some music consumers seek a hint of underlying personality – because that’s some guarantee of interpersonal connection between listener and musician. But I agree that, in a world of advertising artifice and contrivance, affectation is often mistaken for individualism.

Q6: What role has the digital revolution played in determining the kind of music countercultural artists are making now? (i.e. ease-of-acquisition of recording equipment, ability to disseminate music online and the subsequent passing of power from music labels to libraries like iTunes)

AC: I don’t think I know the answer.

The digital revolution has opened ample avenues for production and dissemination. Equally, the digital revolution has made people lazy, stupid, complacent, uninquisitive, bored, boring, and more s**thouse than ever before.

It is easy to generate content. It is easy to get heard. It is easy to connect with your audience, if someone else already cultivated one. It’s still just as hard to break up the dirge.

BP: The digital revolution has allowed many people to make music much more easily. It’s a wide spectrum ranging from using a beat machine and looped vocals to a whole band recording an album in their lounge room playing only acoustic instruments. Both were not possible until the last couple of decades or so. The former was not possible at all until electronic music, the latter became much cheaper and thus now allows many more artists to record in high quality and relative ease. Though the question of how the digital revolution has changed the kind of music people create is difficult to answer apart from the obvious truisms that it is cheaper to make music and disseminate it worldwide and that certain kinds of music were impossible to create before the digital revolution. I think more people are making music now than in previous decades, though that’s due not only to the digital revolution but also, among others, due to more leisure time available to people and a reduction in instrument prices (acoustic, electric, and electronic). I wonder if the claims that significantly more music is being made these days than in past decades have more to do with the availability of the music online, rather than actually more music being produced. A lot of music would never have been recorded were it not for the cheap home recording devices now available; so it’s probably more accurate to say that more recorded music is now available.

TW: The digital revolution has resulted in more music being available, as more people have access to recording facilities (in their own homes). This is both a good and bad thing. But its most important impact has been on listening habits. The easier it is to access (i.e. download) music, the less the consumer invests of their time and effort in its consumption. Instead, a sort of off-hand, almost disconsolate listening habit has evolved.

In the analogue era, I would save up my money, make a special trip to the record store, and very carefully choose my purchase – often based on prior research. Then, at home, I would sit down and play the LP from side one through side two, listening intently. In other words, I would give every music purchase my undivided attention. That’s because of the level of effort required to choose, purchase and consume the music.

I don’t see that attitude in today’s music consumer. Instead they are inclined to have lots of music available, but played (often in compressed form) as audio wallpaper to other activities. Today’s younger music consumer rarely devotes significant time to simply listening to the music. Invariably the music fills an audio void whilst they do something else.

Today songs and tracks are downloaded, compiled, played randomly etc. There is no longer the sense that an “album” is a discrete, complete work of art in itself (including LP cover). There is no information about the musicians, instrumentation or recording available. It is no longer easy to follow the careers of studio and supporting musicians, let alone music producers. Music has devolved into a mass consumer item that is disposable and ubiquitous. As a result, its social relevance has significantly diminished.

Of course there are still people who care enough about music to listen attentively and to treat it as the skilled art form that it is. But overall, the decadence of overexposure inevitably leads to contempt, and I sense that attitude creeping into the consumption of music. Thus today many consumers simply assume that all music should be freely available, that musicians don’t automatically deserve payment for their efforts, that the quality of the recording is less significant than its availability, etc. Perhaps, eventually, after years of downloading compressed files from Russian websites, some folk will feel the urge to seek out a genuine hi-fi listening experience – and be prepared to pay for it?

Q7: It appears increasingly difficult to make money off any kind of intellectual property now. Does this disincentive matter at all?

AC: I don’t know. Probably. It’s not easy to be a career musician – to specialise. But it never has been. The landscape is just different now. There’s probably a clearer path to success, but at what price?

American-dream style, today pretty much any competent, intelligent person *could* become a successful mainstream musician. But what sacrifices would they have to make?

There is this interesting problem that affects me as a barista as much as it affects any musician worth their salt: simply, what do you make? Do you give them what they want? Do you give them what you want? Do you give them what’s good for them? Do you educate? Do you insulate? Do you masturbate? Everyone has a different purpose.

Some people just make music for themselves. Some people want to be famous and rule the world cause they have daddy issues or something. No two people are not on fire. But anybody can be on fire. That’s what’s important.

BP: I think the prior questions should be ‘to what extent was it ever possible to make money off intellectual property – and who was making that money?’ Like I mentioned above, I don’t think there is much difference in the financial status of artists in, say, the last 50 years (that statement has to be defended though). The intellectual property of artists seems to be the least valued in our culture but I don’t think it will be a disincentive to many because money is not the reason why artists do what they do. The same goes for any creative pursuit; there’s the classic story of Einstein who was working full time as a bank clerk and in his free time was working on his relativity theory that would revolutionise physics. That of course does not mean that since artists would do what they do anyway, they should not be paid for what they enjoy doing, but it does mean that the difficulty of making money off intellectual property will not be a disincentive. (Though as a side note, this difficulty does not exist in, say, the biotechnology industry, where intellectual property is a multi-billion dollar industry.)

TW: The internet has seen a massive shift in popular attitude regarding intellectual copyright – not just in music, but also film, writing, photography, etc., etc.

Humans will always be driven to be creative, either from some deep inchoate drive (e.g. ancient cave paintings), or, more often today, from a desire to be noticed. We are tribal creatures suddenly thrust into urban conglomerates. The result is attention-deficit, because we are surrounded by strangers rather than familiars. Individualism is one means of coping with the loss of familiarity. It is therefore inevitable that the arts draw people who seek both attention and personal validity. This is the real payment that most artists seek.

It is a genuine shame that artists are now struggling to maintain control of their creative endeavours, and to be paid adequately for them. If artists seek validity, then surely payment and respect are two key means by which they get their fulfillment?

I imagine that, in the future, governments and arts bodies will end up finding further means to assist artists to continue their work – particularly as direct artist-consumer transactions continue to dry up. We have already seen this intervention with the introduction of public/educational lending rights fees to authors, and the more recent introduction of money being paid to visual artists each time their artworks sell at auction. In the end, it is only through a better understanding of the value of arts to society that such measures can be put in place.

As a footnote, it is interesting to sit here in Australia and contemplate the social standing of the arts. Compared with cultures that enjoy long histories of artistic endeavour, we in the New World are incredibly dismissive of the role of artists. In Europe, for example, being an artist is a valued profession, with society at every level appreciative of the importance of the artist’s role. Here an artist is more often viewed as being a skiver. Sportspeople generally enjoy higher social standing than artists. Artists and intellectuals are too often viewed with suspicion in a culture founded in rural colonialism. Still, I’d rather be undervalued and living in the Lucky Country!

Angus Cornwell also offered some final words: In sum, I sometimes wonder whether the payoff would be greater if I were simple. I look at Victor Oatmeal (my mostly imaginary nemesis). I look back at myself (imagine I have a mirror). In my youth I bought the Indie Dream, but I did it wrong, or the dream wasn’t working like in the manual or something and I ran square into its glass walls. I wonder if I could reverse back out and keep flying with more flying skills and experience and buy it back and live simple and be happy. Mr Oatmeal is not happy, but there’s one thing he doesn’t have to worry about. There’s one thing he can believe in.

Nah – I’d rather f**k with the ether.

Obviously we are getting psychological abuse of a handful of desperate individuals, but that can’t be enough for today’s politicians: there must be some sort of gain for them. Let’s look at the process.

So we lock up boat arrivals as per criminals – although in the past couple of years roughly 90-95% of them turn out to be genuine refugees, and even if you are not a genuine refugee, applying for refugee status is not illegal or we would have no refugees, and thus be sending everyone home, many to be executed. We lock these people up for indefinite periods of time – a torture unlike even convicted criminals must endure – in the expensive and ineptly-run jailing service provided by the company we outsource to, Serco. We keep them in these jails where they are treated like criminals under circumstances that would lead most people to suffer mental health problems, are surprised when they exhibit mental health problems, and then respond by threatening to take away even more legal rights – even shooting at them. Controlling this process becomes more expensive. It would be much cheaper to process all boat arrivals in community housing within a few weeks, just as plenty of other countries manage, to everyone’s benefit (Norway is just one example). So what are we paying for?

There’s no reason on earth to give one person different legal rights to another, no matter who they are or where they come from. The only reason to do so would be to appeal to a minority of Australians who like to see ethnic suffering, not because they are sadists, but because it misguidedly makes them feel safe. So are we trading the psychological harm of others and a wad of cash for the false sense of security of a few Australians? Yes. Who benefits from that? A few politicians looking to win them over.

Thus, it seems we are paying the company Serco for a very expensive – expensive in taxpayer costs and human costs – political campaign. It is paid for not by the beneficiaries of this despicable service – mainstream political parties and Serco – but by Australians with their wallets and moreover asylum seekers with their lives and their health.

Ergo, locking up asylum seekers is an expensive political campaign.

1. Wikileaks has greater presence and influence thanks to news audiences’ appetite for martyr heroics. Nothing could have been better for Assange’s branding than an over-the-top sex-by-surprise case, whatever the wobbly plop that is. And he will be defended to the ends of the earth by the majority of media outlets, as Wikileaks is doing their job for them. It’s fundamentally a large part of what investigative journalists used to do, but media outlets don’t have to pay for the information anymore, as well as Wikileaks absorbing associated legal costs for them. It’s just alarming that effective and widespread investigative journalism is now so foreign to us that Julia Gillard and ilk can pretend it may be illegal.

2. I released my album “Gen Y Irony Stole My Heart”!

3. In lieu of good product on the silver screen this year, I rewatched “The Graduate.” It is still excellent.

4. At Cancun’s climate cavalcade, a Climate Fund to assist developing nations’ adaption to the Torrid New World has now been agreed upon.

5. I just found Queenslander Stuart McMillen’s picture blog, Recombinant Records.

6. “Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular. But it is not something that can be demanded from life, and if you are not happy you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.” Robertson Davies

7. The marvellous tome “What Are You Optimistic About?” provides fodder for anyone in search of reasons to be grateful for life in 2010.

8. My house is quite clean at the moment.

9. The Yes Men.

10. My partner Louise. Nuff said.

Alright, I give in to the lulzcats too: an honorary mention goes to Maru, Hero of the Internet. Happy holidays, y’all!

Besides which, it’s true, comparatively to other OECD nations we work longer hours for our pay, and living essentials such as housing (not just home-owning) are expensive when rated against other developed countries we use as a yardstick. But that’s exactly the problem: Australia is a completely different place, so can we be using Europe and the United States as a yardstick?

Although appropriate wealth distribution should concern us all, as it is an indicator not only of stability but also an economic situation more realistically reflecting the consumptive options available to the populace, the current level of conversation skirts a longitudinal study of Australia’s geographical challenges, as we speak about managing our wealth and expectations of that wealth within its borders.

The time has obviously come to remind ourselves that Australia is not a European country. Although we like to think we’ve shaken off the cultural heritage, if not the royal heritage of our colonial ancestors, a brief look at our daily habits will suggest a different story. Take, for example, one of the most palpable symbols of cultural inheritance: cuisine. In Australia, we consume more beef than our country can handle. In fact, to cease eating hoofed animals is probably the single most important consumer choice we can make if we really care about environmental sustainability.

But we defend our right to these activities because they are what we’ve done for generations.

It’s not just what we eat, however – we need to revise our broader expectations of what the country can offer. We still want to maintain a consumer economy like that of Europe or the United States. We want to produce and buy and have as much stuff. When we speak of cost of living, are we defending our right to the norm of, say, buying a new television every year, as does one in four Australian households? By this average, we seem to be doing alright.

We may be doing alright, but we refuse to pay for it – Australia just won’t support the same kind of consumer culture. There is a historical reason Europe fostered the civil societies it did over the past millennia and the United States prospered after colonisation: the geography suited the lifestyle. Meanwhile, Australia’s geography suited the lifestyle employed by its Aboriginal inhabitants. Now we’re forcing the island continent into the wrong shoes.

Besides the obvious – and pressing – Ozzie dilemmas of irregular fresh water supplies and soil salinity, there is also the distance to conquer. As nations become urbanised, they pool labour (including access to education and health services) and naturally become more “wealthy” – that is, they experience an easier quality of life courtesy of proximity to goods and services that rural inhabitants would otherwise need to provide for themselves. It has been a beautiful, instinctive shift in the contemporary human experience – and it works. Urbanization is also responsible for the declining rate of global population growth. But Australia is big, and we have to pay for that.

Infrastructure costs more. If we decide we want a national broadband network, it’s going to cost us more than it would in a smaller country. We may encourage our growing population to move out of the clogged, mismanaged cities to de-crowd them, but the associated costs with supporting rural Australia go unmentioned.

We don’t have the opportunity to farm right next to our major cities, as in a condensed Europe (or dig coal close to cities, either). The costs associated with distance will have to be picked up by all of us together, yet some of the expense will naturally appear on the price tag for the consumer to shoulder.

In the dumbed-down creed of “economic growth” our last few decades have been cursed with, we can forget that economics, at its best, should reflect what is realistically available to us. To a certain extent, the process occurs organically as we independently decide the worth of goods and services, although to work optimally this requires extensive regulation and assistance for those who are subject to Australia’s increasingly fickle weather patterns. These have associated costs too. So does the highly necessary regulation of quality in consumer goods, which in many cases prices Australian produce higher than imported produce.

There is an upside to all this, which is of course that consumer culture doesn’t necessarily make anyone happier. So let’s enjoy this beautiful country we’ve been blessed with sans the pressure to buy more hoardable items this Christmas. The baby boomers ended the age of having anything we wanted. As global population hurtles toward a peak, we’re not going to see all our desires fulfilled again for a good few generations.

Besides, if we’re really upset that we can’t maintain our vision of materialism as life-enrichment, there’s always investment in science and art…