Constructing an avant-garde
Australian popular music and the experience of pleasure
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i1.49Keywords:
avant-garde, popular music, Australia, Alternative RockAbstract
The purpose of this article is to discuss the possibility of a culturally based aesthetics of reception that helps to make sense of the ways that the three different strands of popular music that developed in Australia in the late 1970s were experienced. The particular focus of the article is on that strand known as Alternative Rock. Alternative Rock, the musical form that came out of Australia's cosmopolitan inner cities, was seen by its practitioners, and many critics, as being the avant-garde of Australian popular music. Indeed, as a musical form it represented the attempt by its practitioners to develop music that could be taken seriously as art. Roland Barthes had earlier elaborated an aesthetics of pleasure that, for him, legitimated a certain form of literature as avant-garde. In this article I show how similar understandings of pleasure permeate the ways that Australian Alternative Rock was, and indeed is, thought about. One crucial aspect of this, which applies to similar music considered to be avant-garde elsewhere, has been the debate over the distinction between what is considered music and what noise. I argue that this distinction relates to ideas of pleasure and that both are a function of cultural determinations.
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Barthes, R. 1974. S/Z. New York: Noonday Press.
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Calinescu, M. 1977. Faces of Modernity: Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Clifford, J. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Literature, Ethnography and Art. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press.
Dawson, J. 2005. Rock Around The Clock: The Record That Started the Rock Revolution! San Francisco, CA: Backbeat Books.
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—‘The Stooges: Biography’. Allmusic Guide. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p= amg&sql=11:by1m96oodepc~T1 (accessed March 2, 2007).
Fennessy, K. ‘The Scientists: Biography’. Allmusic Guide. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg. dll?p=amg&sql=11:6q2tk6rx9krk~T1 (accessed March 2, 2007).
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Gilbert, J., and E. Pearson. 1999. Discographies: Dance Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound. London: Routledge.
Grosz, E. 1990. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. London: Routledge.
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Johnson, V. 1990. Radio Birdman. St. Kilda, Vic.: Sheldon Booth.
Kolker, R. P. 1983. The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lerner, W. ‘The Boys Next Door: Biography’. Allmusic Guide. http://www.allmusic.com/cg/ amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:4fu67ue070jj~T1 (accessed March 2, 2007).
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Ruhlmann, W., and G. Prato. ‘Blue Oyster Cult: Biography’. Allmusic Guide. http://www. allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:e2jx7i4jg71r~T1 (accessed March 2, 2007).
Salmon, K. ‘Kim Salmon Talks about the Scientists, the Surrealists and the Rest of his Amazing Career’. Noise for Heroes. http://www.nkvdrecords.com/kimsalmon.htm.
Stratton, J. 2004. ‘Pub Rock and the Ballad Tradition in Australian Popular Music’. Perfect Beat: The Pacific Journal for Research into Contemporary Music and Popular Culture 6/4: 28–54.
Tangari, J. 2005. ‘The Stooges: The Stooges/Fun House’. Pitchfork. August 18. http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/article/record_review/22357/The_Stooges_The_Stooges_Fun_ House (accessed March 2, 2007).
Torgovnick, M. 1990. Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Turner, G. 1992. ‘Australian Popular Music and its Contexts’. In From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism: Popular Music and Australian Culture from the 1960s to the 1990s, ed Philip Hayward, 11–24. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Walker, C. 1996. Stranded: The Secret History of Australian Independent Music 1977–1991. Sydney: Pan Macmillan.
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Žižek, S. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.
Published
2007-04-01
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
Stratton, J. (2007). Constructing an avant-garde: Australian popular music and the experience of pleasure. Popular Music History, 2(1), 49-75. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v2i1.49
