Missy Higgins

Here are all the great Aussie protest songs

Music / / 5 minutes of reading

On Tuesday an Australian newspaper of repute published an earnest think-piece asking the question: where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Where oh where – in this, our Age of Unreason – are the new Midnight Oils, Goannas, Redgums and Chisels, the author, Jeff Apter, asks?

“Why do the musos of today … seem more concerned with navel-gazing and their fragile broken hearts than weightier, more universal issues?” he writes. “Why the resistance? It’s not like there’s a shortage of subjects to rail against.”

Indeed there isn’t: asylum seekers, Australia Day, violence against women, Aboriginal deaths in custody, marriage equality. And if you spare a moment to actually listen to the musos of today – particularly women, who don’t rate a mention in the piece, and people of colour – you’ll find each of those subjects feature in some of the best new Australian protest music around.

So, where are all the great Aussie protest songs? Well, a lot of them are on Spotify, where it took us about 10 minutes to make a playlist. Feel free to make your own!

AB Original: January 26 (2016)

A mic drop on the nation. If the mark of a good protest song is to start a conversation, this song applied a set of jumper leads to the question of when we should hold our national day of celebration – and got voted to #16 in Triple J’s Hottest 100, before Triple J decided to change that date too.… Read more..

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Kev Carmody: Pillars Of Society at 30

Music / / 6 minutes of reading

Kev Carmody’s debut album, Pillars Of Society, recorded as a conceptual excoriation of the Australian bicentenary in 1988, is now 30 years old. On release, it was described by critic Bruce Elder as “the best album ever released by an Aboriginal musician and arguably the best protest album ever made in Australia”.

There have been many brilliant records made by Aboriginal musicians since but with the exception of AB Original, none of them has produced such a sustained polemic, and only Archie Roach rivals him for poetic eloquence.

Born in 1946, Carmody grew up on the Darling Downs, west of Brisbane, born to an Aboriginal mother and Irish-Australian father. He is a member of the Stolen Generations, taken along with his brother from his parents when he was 10. Emerging from school illiterate, he now has a PhD in history and is a member of the Aria Hall of Fame.

His first public musical exposure was on the Murri Radio program of Brisbane community broadcaster 4ZZZ. His song Thou Shalt Not Steal, which brought him to national attention, contained the following portrait of black life in Brisbane:

Well Job and me and Jesus, sittin’ underneath that Indooroopilly bridge
Watching that blazin’ sun go down beneath the tall-treed mountain ridge
The land’s our heritage and spirit here, the rightful culture’s black
And we’re sitting here just wonderin’ – when we gonna get that land back?… Read more..

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Kevin “Bloody” Carmody releases archive avalanche

Music, Qld Politics / / 5 minutes of reading

South-east of Stanthorpe, in the granite belt that straddles the border of the apple-growing country of Queensland and New South Wales, there’s a small property, once part of a much larger orchard, with a classically rustic farmhouse and a huge insulated shed where the produce used to be stored.

The shed is now a musical Aladdin’s Cave. Rare gig posters from the 1980s and ’90s festoon the walls. There’s a drum kit set up for occasional gigs in a room that could comfortably fit 200; another in a smaller studio anteroom, and practically everything else inside – from butter knives to oil drums – is an instrument waiting to be played.

This is where Kev Carmody – most famous for his iconic song co-written with Paul Kelly, From Little Things Big Things Grow – recorded his first music in a decade. This is how he describes it: “It’s a good little bloody space. Crikey, better than those bloody sterile bloody huge bloody studios they have in bloody major cities!”

A conversation with Carmody is invariably long and liberally peppered with such vernacular. Born in 1946 to an Aboriginal mother and Irish father, he grew up droving on the Darling Downs, and remained illiterate until finding his way into university in 1978.… Read more..

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Carrie & the Cut Snakes

Music / / 4 minutes of reading

Back in 1990, when Uncle Tupelo released No Depression, the idea of alt-country probably seemed necessary. Garth Brooks’ self-titled album had been released the year before, and country music as a genre seemed to be losing touch with its roots: as the stars of the Grand Ole Opry drifted towards the excesses of arena rock, the signifiers (10-gallon hats, tassels and so on) were getting in the way of the substance.

By giving the genre the same kick in the pants punk gave to rock, the movement has been remarkably successful. It may not have spared us from Shania Twain or Faith Hill, but throughout the 1990s, artists as varied as Lucinda Williams, (early) Wilco, Gillian Welch and Steve Earle have reminded us of country music’s fundamental, deeply earnest mission: small stories of small lives, writ large.

So I’m not sure we especially need alt-country any more, any more than we really need alternative music. Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to the self-titled debut album by Carrie and the Cut Snakes, which I wouldn’t describe as alt-country any more than Carrie Henschell’s heroine, Dolly Parton.

This is, in case you’re wondering, a good thing. Henschell is a 20-something songwriter from Brisbane, whose parents live on a farm on the Darling Downs.… Read more..

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