Brag#725

A BEHIND-THE-SCENES LOOK AT A HORROR FILM 15 YEARS IN THE MAKING

WIN COPIES OF JUST DANCE 2018

HOW THE REPLACEMENTS SOLD OUT (AND SAVED THEIR SOULS) ALSO INSIDE:

SHONEN KNIFE, FOO FIGHTERS, ALI BARTER, TWO STEPS ON THE WATER AND MORE!

GEORGE CLINTON ALSO INSIDE: T H E C R O W N P R IWO N C E O FW A T EF U N KE!!

SHONEN KNIF E, F OO F O S T E P S O N T H E WAT FE FO FII G H T E R S , A L I B A R T E R , T W R AND MORE

in this issue what you’ll find inside…

6-7

4-5

Back To Business

6-7

George Clinton is one of the most important funk acts in the genre’s history.

“The new lineup of The Replacements were that most dangerous thing: a band with something to prove.” (14-16)

8

Shonen Knife

17-20 Live snaps

9

Foo Fighters

10

Ali Barter

11

Metz

21-23 Farrah Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended is a weirdo work of art

12

AJJ

13

Two Steps On The Water

14-16 The Replacements’ Pleased To Meet Me is one of the finest records of the last three decades

“It goes like this: first they adore you; then they ignore you; then they rip you off. Or that’s how it’s meant to go, anyway.” (6-7)

8

24

Greg McLean

25

The Nether

26

Bojack Horseman

27

Kuso

26

28-29 Total Propaganda, Shattered, Out & About 30

Album reviews

31

Off The Record

33-34 Gig picks 34

Giveaways

28-29

the frontline with Nathan Jolly and Brandon John ISSUE 724: Wednesday September 20, 2017

The Hummingbirds PRINT & DIGITAL EDITOR: Joseph Earp joseph.earp@seventhstreet.media NEWS DIRECTOR: Nathan Jolly STAFF WRITER: Joseph Earp NEWS: Nathan Jolly, Tyler Jenke, Brandon John ART DIRECTOR: Sarah Bryant PHOTOGRAPHER: Ashley Mar ADVERTISING: Josh Burrows - 0411 025 674 josh.burrows@seventhstreet.media PUBLISHER: Seventh Street Media CEO, SEVENTH STREET MEDIA: Luke Girgis - luke.girgis@seventhstreet. media MANAGING EDITOR: Poppy Reid poppy.reid@seventhstreet.media THE GODFATHER: BnJ GIG GUIDE COORDINATOR: Anna Wilson gigguide@seventhstreet.media REGULAR CONTRIBUTORS: Arca Bayburt, Lars Brandle, Tanja Brinks Toubro, Alex Chetverikov, Max Jacobson, Emily Gibb, Emily Meller, Adam Norris, Holly Pereira, Daniel Prior, Natalie Rogers, Erin Rooney, Anna Rose, Spencer Scott, Natalie Salvo, Aaron Streatfeild, Augustus Welby, Zanda Wilson, David James Young Please send mail NOT ACCOUNTS direct to this NEW address Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 EDITORIAL POLICY: The views and opinions expressed in this publication are not necessarily those of the publisher, editors or staff of the BRAG. ACCOUNTS RECEIVABLE: Carrie Huang - accounts@seventhstreet.vc (02) 9713 9269 Level 2, 9-13 Bibby St, Chiswick NSW 2046 DEADLINES: Editorial: Friday 12pm (no extensions) Ad bookings: Friday 5pm (no extensions) Finished art: No later than 2pm Monday Ad cancellations: Friday 4pm Deadlines are strictly adhered to.

Published by Seventh Street Media Pty Ltd All content copyrighted to Seventh Street Media 2017 DISTRIBUTION: Wanna get the BRAG? Email george@seventhstreet.vc PRINTED BY SPOTPRESS: spotpress.com.au 24 – 26 Lilian Fowler Place, Marrickville NSW 2204 follow us:

like us:

@TheBrag

THE BRAG

thebrag.com

VALE SIMON Many in the Australian music scene were shocked and saddened when Simon Holmes from brilliant Sydney band the Hummingbirds passed away recently. To celebrate his memory, a number of the country’s finest musicians are banding together and will perform at the Factory Theatre on Sunday December 3. Ratcat head a great lineup, which also features Custard, Smudge, Ups & Downs, Jodi and Trish from The Clouds, Alannah Russack from The Hummingbirds, Peter Fenton, Jamie Hutchings and many more.

All proceeds from the shows will be donated to Simon’s family.

since the rapper has been down under – not since 2015, when he made his way around the country with the help of ole mate 2Chainz. This tour has been a long time teased too: we’ve had days now of our friends over at Universal Music Australia teasing us with snaps of the rapper perched upon the Sydney Opera House like some kind of adorable, adjustable Ken Doll, and rumours of Aussie shows have been swirling since all the way back in January. But now the dates have finally been confirmed: Drake will be hitting up the Qudos Bank Arena on Tuesday November 7 and Wednesday November 8. Tickets are on sale now, and you can be sure that they will go like proverbial hotcakes, so make sure ya don’t miss out.

MICROCHIP-TUNE Prepare yourself to hear some adorable shit. Firstly, there is a time of year referred to as “kitten season” in animal care circles, which begins in spring, peaks around late

Grouplove

FRICK ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW If you are a fan of the late-’80s cult film Heathers, which assembled perhaps the most underrated cast in cinematic history – Winona Ryder, Shannen Doherty and Christian Slater, for a start – then you’ll probably be excited to see how the dark teenage drama will translate to the stage. If you’re not a fan, what is your damage? Yes, Heathers: The Musical is coming to the Factory Theatre, courtesy of Kore Productions, with the run kicking off on Thursday November 16 and running through until Monday November 25. The shows start at 7pm each night, and there isn’t really that much else to say about them – you’re either completely sold by now, or baffled by why this story is in your warm little hands. Oh, worth point out though that the play will be quite dark, as this ominous disclaimer attests: “All firearms within the production are used under direction and supervision of a licensed theatrical armourer.” You’ve been warned.

IT CAN ONLY MEAN ONE THING… Perennial sad boy and ‘Hotline Bling’ mastermind Drake, he of Degrassi fame, is finally heading our way. It’s been a long time

BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN Back for its fifth year in action, the absolute treat of a festival Mountain Sounds has got some very exciting news, announcing LA indie rock champs Grouplove as the first band on the 2018 lineup, and the news of an extra day of music, art and various other boutique festy fun.

Running from Friday February 16 to Sunday February 18, 2018, the festival will once again take place at the picturesque Mount Penang Parklands in Kariong on NSW’s Central Coast, smack band between Sydney and Newcastle, the perfect place to camp for a few nights (with hot showers). A new addition will be the Mountain Village, with local markets, silent discos, food and drink, hair and makeup helpers. It’s all looking like the biggest year so far for the festival, which has sold out the last three years off the back of some brilliant lineups.

What more could you possibly want?

Cosmic Psychos

A BUNCH OF PSYCHOS Cosmic Psychos are one of the very best band in this country’s history – and don’t just take our word for it. Over the years, they have received acclaim from icons as varied as Eddie Vedder and L7’s Donita Sparks, and have spent some four decades releasing excellent album after excellent album. Now, off the back of their new single ‘Better In The Shed’ they’re heading out on tour.

They’ll be hitting newly resuscitated venue The Landsdowne on Friday November 3, bringing the excellentlymonikered Amyl And The Sniffers along with them. It’ll be an evening of hard drinking, heavy moshing and excellent tunage, so make sure you make a note of the date in your diary and then circle it, won’tcha?

November or early December, and drops away in autumn. Basically, this is when the weather warms up and creatures remember sex is fun, and while this is natural and beautiful and vital and gross, it does also result in floods of un-mothered kittens being stranded and abandoned, like a sad Disney movie without any charm or singalongs, and it’s the animal shelters and rescue groups across the nation that have to deal with this adorable mess. Oh. That wasn’t so adorable after all. Seriously though, thousands of kittens will come into shelters over the next few weeks, and it’s mainly because owners aren’t desexing their cats. As a way of publicising this issue, RSPCA NSW have launched “an album of cat ballads to give cats a voice around three pillars of responsible cat ownership: desexing, microchipping and protection.” I could argue that five songs is more of an EP than an album, or I could just tell you that you should head to thebrag.com to find out more about the project, named Cat Ballads: Music To Improve The Lives Of Cats. There are spoofs of Adele and Miley, and the cat-titude levels are, frankly, quite high. Get on it.

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 3

Back To Business Music Industry News powered by The Industry Observer

THE CHANCE THE RAPPER LAWSUIT THAT COULD DESTROY THE HIP HOP INDUSTRY

a tradition album. Lil Wayne in particular has turned the mixtape into its own legitimate artform, with a lot of his most acclaimed work coming in this form.

Childish Gambino released a series of

mixtapes named I Am Just A Rapper in which he spat verses over Pitchforkfriendly indie songs of the era by artists such as Grizzly Bear, Sleigh Bells, and Animal Collective; songs which would

Written by Nathan Jolly Unauthorised sampling in hip hop has been a legal minefi eld since the early ’90s, when the genre began to build into a commercial force, and artists whose works were being manipulated and reconstituted started to feel cheated.

It was, initially, more of a legal issue in the UK’s dance music scene. The KLF (then named The JAMs) were one of the first high-profi le acts to feel the legal force of this crackdown when they were ordered to destroy unsold copies of their sample-heavy album 1987 (What the Fuck Is Going On?) after ABBA fi led a copyright claim.

Later, an unsuccessful lawsuit attempted to stifl e a 1989 song by hip hop group 2 Live Crew, which leaned heavily on Roy Orbison’s ‘Oh, Pretty Woman’. The court ruled it was a parody, and therefore protected by fair use, and that any commercial success was not a result of the Big O’s reputation, as the two songs were aimed at vastly different markets.

Furthermore, two songs released in 1990 broadened the appeal of hip hop almost overnight: MC Hammer’s ‘You Can’t Touch This’ and Vanilla Ice’s ‘Ice Ice Baby’. Both were based around prominent samples, and both artists settled lawsuits out of court by crediting the original artists: Rick James, whose ‘Super Freak’ is the basis of ‘U Can’t Touch This’, and ‘Under Pressure’, written by David Bowie and Queen, and from which the bassline was nabbed by Vanilla Ice for his frozen treat of a tune.

A landmark ruling in a 1992 case saw Biz Markie’s album I Need A Haircut withdrawn from sale after it was deemed to “willfully infringe” upon Gilbert O’Sullivan’s maudlin-as-fuck ‘Alone Again (Naturally)’. This spooked record labels, who made sure their artists were upfront about their sampling ways, and legally cleared them before commercially releasing a record. It both changed (and solidifi ed) the hip hop industry.

Now, note the use of the word ‘commercially’ in the above paragraph.

Samples need only be cleared if the music they are used in is to be sold – which makes sense. Musicians are usually more than happy to clear samples too, as doing so can prove a lucrative form of passive income, especially if the single is a massive hit.

A large part of hip hop, however, involves releasing music for free – in the form of mixtapes. Named due to their inception as physical cassette tapes, a mixtape usually involves an up-and-coming rapper showcasing their dexterity and lyricism over a series of established beats, often taken wholesale from already-familiar hip hop songs.

Mixtapes are promotional items for a rapper hoping to build an audience or get signed, and – due to the copyrighted beats – given away for free. They have also become a way for rappers to release music quickly, and without the pressure, commercial expectations, or the build of

Chance The Rapper

have been prohibitively expensive to clear for commercial release.

Mixtapes are also dumping grounds for completed songs slated for albums but removed at the 11th hour due to issues with clearing samples. ‘Control’ by Big Sean was intended as the centrepiece of his second studio album, and is often cited as containing Kendrick Lamar’s best verse, yet it was relegated to a free mixtape after Big Sean’s label couldn’t legally clear the sample it was built upon.

Enter jazz musician, composer, and — most crucially, it may turn out — lawyer Abdul Wali Muhammad. He has fi led a lawsuit against Chance The Rapper for sampling his song ‘Bridge Through Time’ on Chance’s debut mixtape 10 Day (which he recorded during a tenday suspension from school, in what must sit as one of the best examples that conventional schooling just doesn’t work). The track in question is ‘Windows’, and while Chance the Rapper has never denied he sampled the song, the idea of seeking permission doesn’t (yet) legally apply to mixtapes and most likely wouldn’t occur to a teenager well-versed in mixtape culture.

The entire six-page lawsuit can be checked out online if you’re a fan of intense boredom, but basically Mohammed is claiming that, although Chance didn’t directly profi t from the mixtape as it was — and continues to be — available to be downloaded for free, he has “received profi ts from the marketing, promotion and sale of merchandise, performances, tickets to concerts and other performances as a result of” the sample. Basically, he is saying this mixtape launched Chance the Rapper’s career, and he wouldn’t be wrong.

If Muhammad’s case is successful, it will set a frightening precedent. As noted above, every modern hip hop artist from Kendrick Lamar to Nicki Minaj to Kanye West to your mate from school has released one or more of these mixtapes containing uncleared samples. As it is an artform adopted at the beginning of an artist’s career – and therefore almost always directly related to their first fl ush of success – any composer who has been sampled in any popular rapper’s mixtape could rightfully claim the same thing as Mohammed. Again, they wouldn’t be wrong, either.

As the ‘Blurred Lines’ lawsuit has shown us, all it takes is one ruling to dramatically shift the legal landscape – now artists like Mark Ronson, Ed Sheeran, and Taylor Swift are pre-emptively crediting songwriters whose work bears little more than a passing resemblance to their own in fear of later litigation. Ronson is in the middle of yet another of these suits as I type.

If this case results in a loss for Chance the Rapper, we will see all the vultures come out of the trees (do vultures live in trees?) and swoop on years-old songs given away for free. It will be a bloodbath, and could result in the removal of countless pieces of valuable art from the internet, as fearful artists erase any trace of their now-illegal work. There will be a lot of rappers losing money they earned from legitimate and legal album sales due to earlier demos that they didn’t make a dime off.

It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be fair. xxx

4 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

thebrag.com

Tropical Fuck Storm

GET ON SOME GRANTS Some of Australian music’s best and brightest have received some highlysought after funding, with the Australia Council for the Arts announcing recipients of their latest round of grants. The funding will support 221 projects delivered by 147 individual artists, 25 groups and 49 small-tomedium arts organisations, including acts such as Jen Cloher, Alex Lahey,

Luke Yeoward, LUCIANBLOMKAMP, Seekae, and Gareth Liddard of The Drones’ new project, Tropical Fuck Storm. A number of big-name festivals and events have also secured funding, including Face The Music, Rudely Interrupted’s concert for the international day of persons with disabilities, Felix Reibl’s Spinifex Gum project, and a national tour from Ecca Vandal.

SAFE HAVENS Sydney’s live music scene is currently weathering one of the most catastrophic storms in its history. Since the lockout laws were introduced to the NSW Parliament on January 31, 2014, thousands have become unemployed, venues have closed their doors and the city’s culture has been threatened. City of Sydney hopes to change that. At the beginning of this month, the local government authority introduced a new funding program for music venues, offering $450,000 in grants. Revamping the current live music and performance grants program, the new initiative offers funding for live music venues to make improvements like sound muffling or buying sound equipment, and to allow them to offer safer spaces and boost their programming. The grants will also allow businesses across the city to stay open later and to increase the diversity of their night-time activities like cultural and food events, retail promotions and live music programming. The first round of applications is now open, with the City offering up to $30,000 matched funding per recipient, meaning recipients must match the City’s funding with their own cash contribution.

Lyor Cohen

STREAM ON, LOVER Lyor Cohen, the veteran US label exec, entrepreneur and now global head of music at YouTube, is not only a huge fan of Australian music, he’s willing to give it an almighty push on his company’s platforms. Just last week, Tina Arena used the platform of her keynote speech at Bigsound to call for a public, voluntary commitment from commercial broadcasters to program 50 per cent local content, with TV and streaming playlists falling in line. Cohen, one of the most powerful players in the global music community, is a supporter of the move. “I love Australia. I think it’s critical we have diversity of Anglo-repertoire; it can’t just simply come from America and England,” he told the audience on

thebrag.com

Tuesday at the Ritz-Carlton Ballroom. “I think that Australia has a heartbeat and a core of their society that is musical and some of our greatest bands and artists have come from Australia. And I want to do anything I can to support local repertoire being successful. That’s really important for YouTube to continue its growth and its success is to support local emerging talent.” There are no such licensing requirements for streaming services, though the BRAG understands reps from key rights bodies met at Bigsound to talk through the issues with a goal to presenting a united front. Cohen admits he’d rather the carrot approach than a policy maker’s stick. “I’d rather be proactive than be forced,” he said on establishing a lofty goal for local content.

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 5

COVER STORY

THE GODFATHER OF FUNK Joseph Earp examines the legacy of funk experimenter and legend George Clinton, an alltime great who remains oft-imitated but never topped

By The Time You Hear The Next Pop… “The only other person I’ve seen do it like that before is Prince.” – GEORGE CLINTON ON KENDRICK LAMAR, PIGEONS AND PLANES

H

is is one of the very first voices you hear on To Pimp A Butterfl y, Kendrick Lamar’s 2015, era-defi ning record. It’s deep, rich; the kind of voice that you might imagine emanating from god himself, or at the very least some glitz-spangled prophet, standing tall on a mountainside and booming out his message of peace. And what a message; the kind of mind-expanding sentiment with the power to melt down the unbelievers and emboss the faithful in gold.

“Yeah, lookin’ down, it’s quite a drop,” he intones on ‘Wesley’s Theory’, a rich blend of hip hop, funk and soul stylings. “Look both ways before you cross my mind.”

His name is George Clinton, but the voice that barks its way through the mess of samples and freestyled asides doesn’t really feel like it belongs to a named force, or even to a human being. It feels like the voice of the universe itself. It feels like years of American history given life, and melody; like an entire culture has finally had enough, jumped up onto their desks and sung as one.

All you need to do is get yourself down to the record store, fork out a small fortune on Clinton records, and spend the next few months entombed in your room, drinking in music so vital and all-encompassing you could dedicate the rest of your days to it.

“The Clinton output has always been confusing, in terms of the divide between bands.

Theoretically, Funkadelic immerse themselves in fuzzed guitar freak-outs, while Parliament tilt towards the dancefloor, but much [of the music] released as Funkadelic could easily be Parliament material.” – MARTIN LONGLEY, THE GUARDIAN It goes like this: first they adore you; then they ignore you; then they rip you off. Or that’s how it’s meant to go, anyway.

Take the case of Clinton, the mastermind behind funk-soul outfits Parliament-Funkadelic and the recently formed Woke, and you realise that some lucky bastards can skip the middle step altogether, spending their whole career fluctuating between the states of adulation and inspiration and kicking off the careers of countless contemporary artists just by existing.

Not that Clinton himself was born into a musical void. The first record he put out under the Parliament name, Osmium, drew on the psych explosion pioneered by the Yardbirds and Yes, and combined it with the weirdo, cosmic jazz of pioneers like Sun Ra and Miles Davis, creating something at once danceable and yet slightly deranged as a result.

Osmium wasn’t the first of its kind – far from it. It was a record that sought to pay homage to Clinton’s forefathers, and the heavy debt that it owes to Ra in particular makes it feel like a love letter written from one anxious young artist to the performers who have inspired him.

And yeah, sure, you can hear in those early records – first drafts like Up For The Down Stroke, and even 1975’s Chocolate City – the sound of a musician finding their feet; testing the limits of their talents the way that a child gently flexes their voice when learning a new word.

But those were just the band’s starting points, the blocks on which Clinton stood, prone, waiting for the crack of the pistol that announced the race was on. From there, he never made the same record twice; never even tackled the same genre twice. His is the kind of imagination that can take the barest hint of what has been done before and use it to construct something entirely new, building spaceships out of dinosaur bones.

That, after all, seems to be the only way to be able to describe a record like The Cinderella Theory, Clinton’s 1989 mess of disco freakouts, Public Enemy features, and tenor sax work, or The Clones Of Dr. Funkenstein, a collaboration with ex-James Brown collaborator Fred Wesley that might be the only album in history that could justifiably be called a “funk-freak-folk-goth-hip-hop-horrorshow” hybrid.

And that, after all, seems to be the way to describe Clinton’s new status as the de facto godfather for contemporary music’s dyed-in-the-wool weirdos. Although his legacy has been adopted and reshaped by those who would consider

themselves more straight laced, traditional funk purists – the likes of Benjamin Booker, Leon Bridges and even a crossdisciplinarian like Lamar – those really carrying the Clinton flag are acid freaks and jazz geeks.

Thundercat, the fur-wearing bass giant whose Drunk was one of last year’s very best records, considers Clinton the source from which his own blend of jazz and gin-addled pop emanates, while Flying Lotus signed Clinton to his Brainfreeder label, and has helped produce a number of the man’s recent singles.

As a result, while the rest of funk and soul’s originators – even artists as vicious as Brown, and arch commentator Sly Stone – have slowly settled into the pages of history books, Clinton has yet to be canonised. He has never, not once, neutered his sound, or embarked on legacy tours, or made the mistakes that might have otherwise besmirched his Rorschach test of a discography. George Clinton has, in short, never been anything less than a prophet.

The Future “Funkadelic have been inviting people up on stage to twerk and tweak and tweet for the last 20 years. Ain’t nothing new.” – GEORGE CLINTON, THE GUARDIAN

Articles like this – articles about legacies, and the great weight of a genre’s past – usually get written around the time that an artist is settling into retirement, or when their very greatest achievements are behind them. After all, such pieces have something of the eulogy about them; their reflexive nature implies, however subtly, that an artist’s finest albums are done.

But fuck those implications. This is not that kind of article, largely because the job of closing the coffin lid on George Clinton should be left to an undertaker, and even then, caution should be exercised.

I mean, how can you suggest that Clinton is done when one short year ago, he and Thundercat and Shabazz Palaces and Flying Lotus released ‘The Lavishments Of Light Looking’, a thumping, heavy metal and funk indebted mess of hooks and snarled threats that sounds like nothing that Clinton has ever released before?

Nah. George Clinton’s story isn’t over. He’s still causing a stir in interviews, and he’s still releasing his multi-coloured musical experiments into the world, churning out tracks at a speed that continues to dazzle artists even half his age.

And sometimes, listening to his music, you get the sense maybe he’ll still be doing it when we’re all dead: that he’ll be the last man on earth, playing funk-folk riffs for the pleasure of radiated cockroaches.

Where: Max Watt’s When: Thursday September 28

“The story of George Clinton is the story of soul itself.”

6 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:08:17

thebrag.com

george Clinton photo by Jenny Risher Photography

After all, the story of George Clinton is the story of soul music. You don’t need to lose yourself in textbooks or Wikipedia articles to understand where the genre came from, or how it has evolved from the traditional, fiery brand of sexed-up sonic seduction doled out by James Brown and his crew to the weirdo hybrid of funk and rock pumped out by innovators like Flying Lotus and Thundercat.

Embraced By Oddballs

“[Clinton’s] is the kind of imagination that can take the barest hint of what has been done before and use it to construct something entirely new, building spaceships out of dinosaur bones.”

thebrag.com

“It goes like this: first they adore you; then they ignore you; then they rip you off.

Or that’s how it’s meant to go, anyway.”

BRAG :: 721 :: 26:07:17 :: 7

FEATURE

Shonen Knife: Fun Times Punk pop act Shonen Knife tell Anna Rose they like to take life one adventure at a time

S

honen Knife are one of a kind.

The three-piece band, famous for their pop punk, Ramones-indebted tunes, have spent the last 40 odd years amassing fans and blowing off roofs, and, as the cliché goes, show few signs of slowing down now. Everyone has paid homage to the influential group, from Kurt Cobain (he told Melody Maker that he had “turned into a nine-year-old girl at a Beatles concert” while watching the band play in LA) to the beloved, sorelymissed English DJ John Peel.

Now the group are heading back to Australia for the first time since 2015 with songs from last year’s Adventure in tow and some great bands ready to support them. It’ll be local firebrands Glitoris who will support them on the Sydney leg of the tour, and Shonen Knife’s lead singer and founding member Naoko Yamano couldn’t be more excited.

In fact, she couldn’t be more excited full stop. In spite of Yamano’s broken English, you can pretty much hear her smiling face radiate down the phone line, and everything she has to say about the pending tour oozes with delight and love for her fans. She is, in that way, the prototypical indie musician – a performer who doesn’t take to the stage in order to get her face plastered on the front of magazines, or to earn herself a million bucks, but because she loves it; because she loves the people that she plays for.

=“I’m so excited,” she says. “The first purpose of our tour is, I will get to meet with Shonen Knife fans – we love to share happy times with them. I [have] only been to Australia three times so far – the next time is the fourth time. I think Australian fans are always very friendly and so cheerful.”

Over their tenure as a band, Shonen Knife have perfected a formula that involves mixing pop melodies with a punk attitude, and they’re like some unholy cross between an entire top ten’s worth of catchy, radio-friendly tunes and the anarchistic, no-nonsense outlook of a band like Black Flag. And yet despite the toe-tapping joy hidden in the centre of every one of their songs, they’ve remained relatively underground and never enjoyed mainstream success.

For her part, Yamano admits that of course, more mainstream success wouldn’t go unwelcome. “Actually, I, of course, want to be on the mainstream radio and touring with our private jet,” she giggles. “Yet I don’t know why, but we are a very DIY band. We play our instruments and we make songs by ourselves … We have even always made our costumes by ourselves – actually our bassist Atsuko makes our costumes.”

But even if Shonen Knife haven’t enjoyed the recognition afforded to so many mainstream bands, they sure as hell have had a raft of incredible opportunities. They’ve played to adoring crowds at London’s All Tomorrow’s Parties festival, Austin’s Fun Fun Fun Fest, Fuji Rock in Japan, and Lollapalooza – not to mention opening for Nirvana on more than one occasion.

“I always enjoying playing at big festivals.

It is so exciting for me and our band; when we play shows we always play happily.”

“Of course I am so proud of playing at big festivals and touring with Nirvana – I always enjoying playing at big festivals.

It is so exciting for me and our band; when we play shows we always play happily.”

Adventure every day!” she cries. “Every day of my life is adventure!”

Discussion soon turns toward more current endeavours, namely 2016’s Adventure. “I like this album Adventure very much,” Yamano says. “It was released last year and we toured the UK and around America, Canada and Japan.

The album is inspired by some ’60s and ’70s classic rock, especially hard rock.

Part of treating every day like an adventure means not micro-managing your future, something Yamano strenuously tries to avoid. So as a result, she’s not sure when the band will next take to the studio. “[I’m] not decided yet because I’m very lazy and I usually start to write songs only when I book studio time. I don’t make music [frequently]; I am too busy having fun! I have to book recording studio and if I’m in the studio I can start writing songs.”

“Our previous album [2014’s] Overdrive was inspired by pop music, and our previous album [2012’s] Pop Tune is inspired by ’70s classic rock too. But for the new album, Adventure I think we were all more improved – we got better and better, I think.”

And write songs Shonen Knife do. With a whopping 16 studio albums under their belt and a 36-year stint of extensive global touring, Shonen Knife are a legendary act with a glittering future; not to mention one with assuredly more music to come.

Certainly, Adventure is one of the most comprehensive and satisfying record of the band’s recent career. Given upbeat and encouraging songs like ‘Jump Into The New World’, not to mention joyous numbers like ‘Rock‘N’Roll T-Shirt’, you might assume Shonen Knife have written about a specific series of adventures that influenced writing of the album.

But Yamano happily says otherwise.

The album’s title doesn’t refer to a single event as much as it refers to a kind of life philosophy. “No, no, no, no!

Before Yamano brightly says her farewells, she touches upon that exciting future she envisions for the band. It’s all one day at a time for the performer – her life is one big adventure after another – but if there’s one thing she’s certain she wants for her group, it’s that private jet.

“I’d really love it,” she laughs.

Where: Oxford Art Factory When: Wednesday September 27 With: Glitoris

“I [have] only been to Australia three times so far – the next time is the fourth time. I think Australian fans are always very friendly and so cheerful.”

8 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

thebrag.com

FEATURE

Foo Fighters: Everything’s Golden Chris Shiflett, lead guitarist of the Foo Fighters, tells Natalie Rogers he is living the dream

Y

ou could forgive Chris Shiflett for being a bit of dick. After all, he’s been the guitarist for rock titans Foo Fighters since 1999, and the day he chats to the BRAG is a mere two sleeps before the release of his band’s ninth studio album, Concrete And Gold. And that’s not even to mention the swathes of Grammy and Kerrang! awards he and his bandmates have under their belts, or the 490,000 copies they sold of their last album, Sonic Highways.

But underneath all that swagger, the band are still vulnerable to their fair share of nerves. “Whenever we’re getting ready to put a record out we always have that moment of, ‘Oh God I hope people like this!’,’’ laughs Shiflett.

“Because you never know until it’s out there how it’s going to be received. But we all really love this album and can’t wait for everyone to hear it.”

In conversation, Shiflett is warm, friendly and a bit of a joker, and he speaks with a degree of ease. Not that that’s surprising: the man has spent the best part of his 46 years immersed in music, and he began playing the guitar before he was even in high school, joining his first band before he learned to drive. “I feel incredibly lucky to be in a band that has the draw and the reach that the Foo Fighters have,” he says.

“It’s amazing that we get to travel the world and do everything we do.”

xxx

These days in his downtime, Shiflett keeps himself busy by working on new

music for his country-inspired project, Chris Shiflett and the Dead Peasants, and interviewing up-and-coming artists and veteran musicians for his podcast, Walking The Floor, on which he recently interviewed Australian music great Paul Kelly. “How amazing is Paul Kelly – I love him,” he says.

Nonetheless, Shiflett says his podcast is more of a hobby – a way for him to reach out to musicians he knows and loves – than a study in how to write the perfect Foo Fighters song. “I like talking to different songwriters about how they write, but it’s more interesting than helpful because I don’t think anybody can really teach anybody else how to do that. Even the best songwriters in the world don’t really understand how they do it. There’s a trial and error, a lot of fumbling around and then something clicks and you’re like, ‘Oh there it is!’

It was last year, just as Shiflett was ready to head into the studio with the Dead Peasants, when he got a call from the ever gung ho Grohl asking him if he was ready to come practice the songs that would eventually form the backbone of Concrete And Gold. “I remember somewhere around the beginning of last summer, Dave sent out a text or an email to all of us saying he had some new ideas, but I had actually booked some time to go off to Nashville to make a record, so I was like, ‘Woah! I don’t know,’ you know what I mean?

“The Foo Fighters were cranking up again before I even got started making

my own record – but then everyone was kind of busy with summer and I wound up going to Nashville for a month.

Then pretty much the day I got back, I went in to our studio to grab something and Dave was in there working on something else, and he mentioned that he had a project that he was going to work on in the fall, but that he had some new song ideas. Then a week later he called a band meeting to say the other thing didn’t end up happening, so we should start rehearsing tomorrow. So that was how that went: bam! And we’re back at it.”

Concrete And Gold is everything you’d expect from the accomplished hard rock stalwarts, and the decision to bring in the Grammy Award winning ‘Producer of the Year’ Greg Kurstin (Sia, The Shins, Lily Allen) has evidently paid off in droves.

“When we started to record the album in December we had a bunch of song ideas,” Shiflett says. “Some of them were more fleshed out than others of course, but those evolved a lot when we added Kurstin into the mix: he really took it to a different place.

“I would just sit there and pick his brain all day long about music stuff and never be bored,” he continues. “I think he had fun too. He doesn’t normally work with big, loud rock bands so he got to explore that side of himself as well, and we benefited hugely from it. Although he’s known as a pop producer, he’s got a lot of rock‘n’roll, punk rock, and new

“I like talking to different songwriters about how they write, but it’s more interesting than helpful because I don’t think anybody can really teach anybody else how to do that.” wave in his past and in his quiver. I’d work with Greg again any time.”

But Shiflett isn’t ready to rush into album number ten, or keen even to speed onto the next Dead Peasants project. He is happy just to reminisce about the good times; to cast his mind back to when he very first picked up a guitar, what feels now like a lifetime ago. “I feel incredibly lucky to be able to have done this for so long – it far exceeds our wildest dreams that any of us ever had as a kid.”

Where: ANZ Stadium When: Saturday January 27, 2018 And: Concrete And Gold out now through Sony Music Australia

“Whenever we’re getting ready to put a record out we always have that moment of, ‘Oh God I hope people like this!’” thebrag.com

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 9

FEATURE

Ali Barter: Like A Boss

Now the dust has settled following the release of her album A Suitable Girl, Ali Barter tells Natalie Rogers how music is set to save the world

T

riple j Unearthed winner Ali Barter is a hard presence to ignore. Her debut album A Suitable Girl was a critical and commercial success, and in recent years she has become an in-demand artist, touring nationally at sold-out venues and festivals.

But despite all that, Barter prefers to spend her free time focusing on the women who have forged their own path in the music industry, posting a kind of informal history of female-centric rock’n’roll on her Facebook page as part of a project she calls The History Grrls. “Every week people comment and really get involved in whoever I do a post about,” she smiles. “I love it when people send in suggestions, and I believe these are topics readers really wanna talk about.”

Indeed, Barter’s so dedicated to paying homage to the game-changing women of the past that she’s still posting regularly, despite being in the middle of the One Foot In national tour. “New Zealander Kane Strang is supporting me for the Sydney gig at the Oxford Art Factory – he’s a wonderful artist,” Barter says, before adding that fellow Unearthed alumni Moaning Lisa will also appear in Sydney. “We’ve chosen some really great bands to open the shows. It’s going to be a real mix.”

If the chance to hear Barter’s ‘Girlie Bits’ and ‘Run You Down’ up close and personal isn’t enough of a draw card, you’ll also have the opportunity at the shows to get your hands on a one-of-a-kind tea towel designed by Lily Gloria, a Western Australian artist who has also worked with Barter on her A Suitable Girl zine.

Sold exclusively at her headline show, all proceeds from the tea towel sales will go to Gift Box Organic, an Australian initiative headed up by Saskia Hampele. “I get a bit of a bee in my bonnet when it comes to things like paying GST on tampons,’’ Barter says by way of explanation.

By becoming a subscriber to Gift Box, your membership fee will go directly

to providing free tampons to homeless and vulnerable women across Australia.

Simply put, for every box you buy, Gift Box Organic donates a box, making the charitable organisation one of those rare not-for-profits that actually produces practical, observable good in the world.

“These items are non-negotiable for most women every month, so when Gift Box approached me, I was like, ‘Yes, I love it.’

It’s exactly the kind of thing we should all support.”

While Barter takes philanthropy in her stride as she heads around the country, you can also catch her at The Small Ballroom in Newcastle, and at this year’s Yours and Owls Festival in Wollongong at the end of the month. “It’s funny because my husband, Oscar Dawson from Holy Holy, is playing there the day after us. I would like to hang around but we have to go play a show,’’ she says.

“Also, one of my all-time favourite bands, At The Drive-In, are on that day as well, so I’ll have to miss them. It’s so annoying, but I’ll just have to get him [Dawson] to make a video on his phone for me. Oh well. I’m sure I’ll see them somewhere else, and I’ve seen Holy Holy a million times before, so it’s no big deal,” Barter laughs.

Barter and Dawson married last year after first working together on her second EP Community in 2014. “My husband and I love all the same music and although he helps me in the songwriting process, I often write without him,” she explains.

“I’m constantly writing songs, but A Suitable Girl took about 18 months. I put out three EPs and an album in five years, and I’m working on my second album now and it

“The songs need to stand up without all the stuff that you hear on a studio recording: that’s everything to me.”

10 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

“I get a bit of a bee in my bonnet when it comes to things like paying GST on tampons.” really is a labour of love. But the more I record music, the less time I wanna take doing it. The more time I take doing it, the less it sounds like me or like what I want.

It’s like, the more time I have to tinker and fix and change, the less I like the end result.”

As a result, her plan for her eagerly-awaited sophomore release is to get the thing pumped out as fast as she possibly can.

She doesn’t want to linger; she wants the album to be the purest possible expression of her inner life. ‘’For my next record I wanna have it written by December and I wanna record it in two weeks and go straight to mixing.

“I am very hands-on and I very much want it to be me, and it’s really important that I can play those songs without a band and without production. The songs need to stand up without all the stuff that you hear on a studio recording: that’s everything to me. But we demo everything together and [Dawson] produces it. It’s very much my vision and he knows that now. I think the first couple of times we worked together it was a battle of the egos, but now he knows I’m the boss.”

What: Yours And Owls When: Saturday September 30 – Sunday October 1 Where: Stuart Park, Wollongong With: At The Drive-In, A.B. Original, AJJ, Dune Rats and more And: Barter plays the Oxford Art Factory on Thursday September 28

thebrag.com

Ali Barter photo by Hannah Markoff

“It’s really important to recognise that there is inequality, and that we need to be more balanced when we talk about our musical history.”

From Carole King to Kylie Minogue, to inequality and double standards within the industry, nothing is off limits for Barter – an op-ed she wrote on discrimination was even retweeted by Yoko Ono. “It’s really important to recognise that there is inequality, and that we need to be more balanced when we talk about our musical history. I also just really enjoy researching a different woman every week – it’s great to be able to listen to their incredible music.”

FEATURE

“All we knew going into making this record was that we had no interest in making the same thing again. We were in a really good headspace.”

Metz: No Justice, No Peace Canada’s loudest (and friendliest) band talk to David James Young about their blistering new LP

A

t the time of writing, II – the imaginatively-titled second album from Ottowa’s Metz – has been out for two years, four months and eight days. It’s well and truly an artefact of the past. Its tour cycle is complete. It’s history. Even so, one still gets this lingering feeling that somehow, somewhere, perhaps in a basement in the south-east of Canada, there’s a guitar still feeding back and droning against an amp from a session for that record.

Metz photo by xxx

Such was II’s power. Not only did it score Metz a Polaris Prize nomination, it also boosted their international profi le and cemented them as one of the most menacing, ferocious rock bands currently stomping on pedals.

After fi nishing the touring commitments for that album, it was time for Metz to

“A lot of what we were doing on this record was new for us. At the heart of it, you can still tell that it’s the same band; but it’s the sound of us really stretching out.” thebrag.com

start again – and, as The Smiths so helpfully pointed out all those years ago, barbarism really does begin at home.

“I was posted up at home, just doing a lot of writing and demoing in my spare bedroom,” says Alex Edkins, the band’s lead vocalist, lyricist and guitarist. “We all went our separate ways at the end of touring the last record and had some time to ourselves, so by the time we reconvened we were all really excited to start banging it out again. We were ready to try out anything – there was a lot of workshopping to see how things would fi t with the three of us. All we knew going into making this record was that we had no interest in making the same thing again. We were in a really good headspace.”

The end result is Strange Peace, Metz’s third LP. While still holding onto the structural and sonic elements that ostensibly comprise the band’s DNA, it’s worth pointing out that fans shouldn’t go in expecting, ahem, II part II. As Edkins points out, Strange Peace is an album grounded in the trio’s desire to develop something stronger, smarter and sharper.

“It went in a lot of different directions for us,” he says of writing the record. “It wasn’t something we openly discussed, but any time that things would take a really different turn in terms of the songs we were working on inevitably turned out to be the ones we were the

most excited about. A lot of what we were doing on this record was new for us. At the heart of it, you can still tell that it’s the same band; but it’s the sound of us really stretching out.

“More and more, I’m starting to realise what it is that music means to me,” he continues. “I honestly think, in a lot of ways, it’s medicine. It’s a way to work out the heavy shit. This is no different for this record, although I don’t think that I really understood that until it was done. I can hear myself working things out in my head when I listen back to the record. I can see it all unfurling as it was all documented.”

Strange Peace was recorded at Electrical Audio studios in Chicago.

If the name isn’t immediately familiar, perhaps that of its owner – and Strange Peace’s engineer – might be: Steve Albini, the legendary guitarist and recording engineer behind albums

by Nirvana, the Pixies and literally thousands more. According to Edkins, enlisting the veteran Albini to work with them was as simple as putting two and two together. “We were in LA, and I was listening to a lot of Scout Niblett’s records,” he explains. “I really got into her stuff. When we were driving to the airport awhile later, this Mclusky song came on the radio. We immediately thought, ‘Well, fuck – there’s the drum sound that we’ve been picturing for these new songs.’ It happened to be Steve who was behind both. We decided to reach out to see if he was

interested in making the record with us, and within a day we’d had it confirmed.”

Having worked on countless records that were influential on Metz itself, Albini quickly set to work on Strange Peace, and had the band recording the songs live, something they had never done on previous releases. “We hadn’t even considered it before we started working with Steve,” says Edkins. “It’s just the way that he works – he’s all about capturing the essence of the band.” Edkins goes on to praise Albini’s hands-off approach, saying that it was having the band in its element that brought out the best on either side of the mixing desk. “He drove us to be so efficient,” says Edkins.

“That’s the only thing when it comes to Steve: you have to know your songs, you have to get them together and you’ve gotta come in and play them.

That’s that. He knows his gear and his room so well that it’s really, really easy to get going. Within our first few hours of being there, we had actually done takes of songs that ended up on the album itself. We’d never had any kind of experience where it came together that quickly. At first, it was kind of intimidating; but Steve really made us feel welcome. Whatever reputation he may have as some sort of hardass, we didn’t see it. He was affable, hilarious and super-dedicated to what we wanted to accomplish.”

What: Strange Peace out Friday September 22 through Inertia

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 11

FEATURE

AJJ: Going Biblical David James Young shoots the shit with AJJ’s Sean Bonnette, and learns the man is equally enamoured by both The Young Pope and The Wiggles

“O

h, you mean our last album?

The album we put out last year? The album named The Bible 2? ... Yeah, we came up with the name first.”

Sean Bonnette – lead vocalist, chief songwriter, guitarist and one of two founding members of AJJ – has just been asked a stupid question, prompting a stupid answer. The query pertained to The Bible 2, the 2016 album from the band and their first to feature their shortened new name, chosen after they abandoned the somewhat controversial Andrew Jackson Jihad.

In a chicken and egg-like situation, it was put to Bonnette whether the name was picked due to the lyrical themes of the new record – religion, church, desperation, parables, etc – or if the name was already on top of some pile of potential monikers before any of that had even come up. Normally, this wouldn’t seem like all that outrageous of a question, but come on: the album’s called The Bible 2, for fuck’s sake.

“We were actually considering naming our previous album The Bible 2,” says Bonnette. “Eventually though, we went with Christmas Island. We’re kind of glad we waited, because we really got to throw a whopper down when we announced this album. I can see how people connected the title to the lyrics, though – I guess that Catholic belief system is intrinsically linked to everything

I do with this band. Religious imagery – angels and shit – is my favourite stuff to work with aesthetically for this band.”

As for his own religious background, Bonnette sees it as a trajectory of sorts.

“I was raised Catholic, but not in a deeply spiritual sense,” he says.

“I was raised Catholic enough to see how kind of weird it all is. I’m still sort of down with it – I like Catholic charities a lot. They do a lot of good work. I’m pretty into the new Pope, too. I like The Young Pope too, but I haven’t finished it yet.” This, naturally, sparks Bonnette to jokingly make up a spin-off of the series for himself: “It ends in Australia, actually.

They’re gonna film the whole next season there. There’s an episode called G’day Melbourne.”

Before Bonnette and company return to Australia for their first-ever headlining tour, AJJ is doing an extensive American tour in duo mode to celebrate the tenyear anniversary of their second album, People Who Can Eat People Are The Luckiest People In The World. A cult classic of the folk-punk movement, the album boasts songs that still feature in the band’s setlist to this day, and is widely regarded as one of their defining moments. “I think that was our first good record,” Bonnette laughs. “Our first decent one, at least.

“I think that record was where I found my voice. I wasn’t just trying to make people laugh – I was trying to get some

stuff out of writing music for myself.

There are some songs on that record we’ve always played – songs like ‘Brave As A Noun’, ‘People II’ and ‘Bad Bad Things’ get a pretty decent run. Some of the weirder, faster songs haven’t been played for a while. We’ve been practising, though, and it’s sounding really good.” Disappointingly, however, the band will not be able to play any anniversary shows on their Australian tour. “Just because Ben [Gallaty, bass] won’t have a double bass over here,” Bonnette explains.

“That’s kind of the way that we’re able to make this whole thing work. By having Ben just play electric bass when we travel and tour internationally, it helps us to not lose too much money. Renting an upright bass can be really expensive – especially if you need it for an entire tour.

If you’re flying with one, you basically have to buy another plane seat just to get it checked in as baggage. At least travelling with a normal bass is a little easier for us.”

AJJ are well known to Australian punk audiences thanks to their 2015 tour with The Smith Street Band and fellow American act The Sidekicks. Amusingly enough, that tour coincided with the release of Mad Max: Fury Road, and thus the band would routinely take to “chroming” each other using a spray normally designed for decorating cakes.

“I forgot about the chroming!” cackles Bonnette when reminded of the nightly

12 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

tour tradition, which culminated with Steve from The Sidekicks having it performed on him onstage. “That was incredible.”

More recently, however, the band have become known to an audience very different from their own. The act’s most successful music video to date, an OK GO parody recorded for the song ‘Goodbye Oh Goodbye’, saw the four members of the band in yellow, red, blue and purple t-shirts respectively.

A picture of them from the video was then reposted on Instagram by noted fans of said colour scheme, The Wiggles, who added: “We like your style!” Having fielded endless comparisons to the group ever since the video came out, AJJ were completely surprised by this wiggly correspondence.

“I was delighted,” says Bonnette. “I don’t know too much of The Wiggles, but I respect them a whole lot. I can see what they’re doing is really great, and I can see why people love them. Of the two bands to feature four people and use that exact colour scheme, theirs is the best. I hope we get to meet them while we’re in the country.”

Where: The Metro When: Friday September 29 thebrag.com

xxx photo by xxx

“I don’t know too much of The Wiggles, but I respect them a whole lot.”

“Religious imagery – angels and shit – is my favourite stuff to work with aesthetically for this band.”

“Whether we consciously realized it or not, we ended up writing music that centered on an emotional experience over an intellectual one, or one rooted in a specific genre or style.”

FEATURE

Two Steps On The Water: Fighting Back The Fear Allison Gallagher speaks to June Jones of Two Steps On The Water and discovers a musician committed to shattering labels.

“I

t’s not a passive album,” says Two Steps On The Water’s June Jones of the band’s forthcoming LP Sword Songs. That’s something of an understatement, given the record is replete with songs that galvanise one to survive in an often hostile environment: “If you’re feeling terrifi ed / It can help to feel a little terrifying”, sings Jones on opener ‘Camoufl age’.

Written throughout 2016, during and immediately after recording full-length debut God Forbid Anyone Look Me In The Eye, the Melbourne band’s second album continues to highlight their propensity for visceral, gut-punch songwriting that is at once deeply comforting and utterly devastating.

Two Steps On The Water photo by Naomi Beveridge

Across Sword Songs’ nine tracks, the record spans a breathtaking textural and dynamic range – seamlessly

“Emotions have always been designated as for women and sissies and wimps – intellectuals have always been framed as masculine.” thebrag.com

shifting between sparse intimacy and huge, swelling soundscapes fi lled out with powerful vocal harmonies, organs and string sections. “We naturally tend to work in both extremes of very soft and very intense,” explains Jones.

“We’re pretty drawn to that dynamic between opposite sorts of feelings.”

Altogether, Sword Songs feels fuller and more realised a record than the band have ever released. The vast majority of the album was recorded with Melbourne producer Geoffrey O’Connor at Irene’s Warehouse in East Brunswick, along with sessions at other Melbourne studios Head Gap and Phaedra.

Recording was spread out over a period of eight months, a considered process in contrast to the three it took to record God Forbid. “There was a lot of revising and redrafting, among other things going on in our lives. A lot of the time we’ll rearrange the song a few times until we find what seems to work best. We were a little bit more perfectionist than we’ve been in the past, which I think was good”.

That attention to detail shines throughout each track, with performances that are polished while retaining the band’s trademark vitality. Soaring strings performed by members of MSO provide the backdrop for some of the album’s most compelling moments.

While it’d be easy to categorise Two Steps On The Water as “folk punk”, given their skew towards lively refrains and traditional instrumentation, it’s a label they typically reject. It’s something of a loaded term, as Jones explains, given its historical context and explicit political nature – “we’re a little more subtle in our politics.” Instead, the band opts to describe themselves as “emotion punk”, a self-aware reflection of their tendency to prioritise the emotional connection at the heart of their recorded output.

“I’d say I have a particularly tumultuous relationship with my emotions,” says Jones. “But I found that once I started writing and focusing on them, I started writing good songs – ones that didn’t sound like they were trying to be anything else. Whether we consciously realised it or not, we ended up writing music that centered on an emotional experience over an intellectual one, or one rooted in a specific genre or style”.

That emotional experience anchors much of the album; Jones’ lyrics are tender yet frank meditations on trauma, strength and trans identity. As its title suggests, it’s difficult not to see a narrative of fighting back form throughout the album.

What does it look like for those things to manifest throughout the course of someone’s everyday life? What sort of resilience does it take to persist in a culture that consistently demonises mental illness, trans people, and sensitivity? On Sword Songs, Jones articulates unapologetically honest responses – if not necessarily answers – to these questions, complemented by a voice that oscillates between fragile whispers and full-throated howls.

“I feel like the album is a lot of different takes on a similar experience. Some are resilient and proud and brave, and some are totally defeated and desolate.

Others are just bitter, like, ‘Maybe I’m not thriving, but fuck you anyway’.” The anger that comes through on tracks like ‘Venom’ feels as vital as pleas for compassion on ‘Hold Me’.

Jones recognises the power and connection that can come from actively prioritising emotion over technicality in songwriting – an action that has often been devalued in comparison to “serious” music (read: music traditionally made by men.) “Emotions have always been designated as for women and

“We naturally tend to work in both extremes of very soft and very intense. We’re pretty drawn to that dynamic between opposite sorts of feelings.” sissies and wimps – intellectuals have always been framed as masculine.

It applies to politics as well – to be political in this abstract way that’s not about experience, and is more about a perception of the world, has always been a historically masculine thing. But emotional music is what gets kids through things like fucked up experiences in high school.”

It’s not hard to imagine a young queer or trans kid stumbling upon Two Steps On The Water and feeling recognized and understood. At their root, getting people through fucked up experiences feels like the band’s driving force. As anyone who has seen them perform live will attest, there is something truly beautiful about a room full of people sharing and contributing to the warmth and energy that Two Steps On The Water project into whatever space they occupy. Last year’s God Forbid highlight ‘YoYo’ assured listeners “If the world don’t love you / then the world is wrong” – the rallying cry of a band that invites people in, offers empathy, and finds a way to fight through the darkness.

What: Sword Songs out Friday September 29 independently

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 13

FEATURE

A Bunch Of Good For Nothing Sell-Outs:

30 Years Of The Replacements’ Pleased To Meet Me

By Joseph Earp

“The new lineup of The Replacements were that most dangerous thing: a band with something to prove.”

14 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

“ T

here have been better bands, louder bands, and drunker bands, but there has never been a better, drunker, louder band than The Replacements, and the second two qualifiers wouldn’t matter one whit without the first.” – Ari Surdoval, Torn and Frayed: The Story of the Replacements’ 1987 Classic Pleased to Meet Me

After all, it’s not easy for a music scene to survive a big-time bust like that, and Memphis’ commercial industry largely didn’t: recording studios were few and far between. That’s not to say there weren’t good bands about – Memphis musicians like Eddie Hinton and Tommy Tate were just starting to cut their teeth in the ’80s, and the scene was on the up.

But such stars were hard to find, and mostly played low-end spaces like Huey’s, a burger bar.

Memphis in the late ’80s was a shithole. You look at photos now and it’s like one big cement smear; all busted out neon lights, and stained, wind-blasted billboards. Once a hub of culture, music and sports, the city had been rocked by a series of large scale business closures, most notably the implosion of Stax Records in the mid ’70s. The famous funk and soul label had barely been able to survive the death of its biggest star, Otis Redding, killed in a plane crash, and had been driven to insolvency by the excessive spending of its new owner Al Bell, leaving a gaping hole in Memphis’ cultural life.

It wasn’t the safest place to make your way around after dark; the food was cheap and grease-laden; and the closest thing you could get to a cultural experience was to buy a jug of Gallo wine – a California brand more akin to literal piss and vinegar than the Semillon you could get up the coast – and get so drunk you passed out in a gutter. Which people did, often after they’d been kicked out of clubs with names like Bad Bob’s and Buck and Tiny.

It was through Memphis’ crowded, soot-stained streets that Paul Westerberg cut one evening thebrag.com

▲

FEATURE

“David Fricke of Rolling Stone had once described Westerberg as “a former janitor with a lightbulb nose and tubercular singing voice”. That was maybe generous.”

Bob Stinson and his younger brother Tommy, the bassist. They had a frontman, but Westerberg got them to fire him, and quickly took the reins of the act then called Dogbreath, eventually transforming them into a scrappy young punk and rock’n’roll act affectionately known as The ‘Mats.

But by ’87, as Westerberg made his way through Memphis to Ardent studios, the band wasn’t exactly scrappy anymore – they’d signed to a major label, Sire, and had released Tim, regarded by many critics as their magnum opus. Nor were they the same band that they had been all those years before, practising in the Stinson’s basement; they’d kicked out Bob. He was “the most wasted guy in a very wasted group”, as writer Ari Surdoval puts it, and they’d grown tired of his habit of getting so shitfaced he couldn’t even stand straight, let alone play.

Which means that summer in Memphis, the new lineup of The Replacements were that most dangerous thing: a band with something to prove.

They had to prove to the departed Bob that they could get on fine without him; to the critical establishment at large that they could follow up a record like Tim; and to the public at large that the machine known as The ‘Mats wasn’t set to selfcombust. Not yet, anyway.

To achieve all that, the band knew they had to get away from the limelight – to retreat from expectations, and work out who the fuck The Replacements even were now Bobby was gone.

Hence Memphis, the shithole of all shitholes, and hence the record that they would spend that summer piecing together, a loud, ecstatic masterpiece called Pleased To Meet Me that might just be the one of the finest American albums of the last half century.

F

or a long time after The ‘Mats used it to record Pleased To Meet Me, there was a little stain on the roof of one of Ardent’s recording booths; the group’s parting gift to the space. Circular and dark, it went unnoticed by most, but not Ardent’s owner, John Fry. After all, Fry knew what it was. Fry knew that it was puke.

He was also a heavy drinker. He had spent some ten years honing his skills when it came to boozing, and by the mid-‘80s he’d start on a bottle of wine at noon and wouldn’t stop till he lost consciousness in the evening. The alcohol only exacerbated the pleurisy he spent months battling; you’d hear his cough long before he walked into a room. thebrag.com

Which is all a way of saying Paul Westerberg was one of those guys who was lucky to have music. The son of a Cadillac salesman, Westerberg was a whip smart teenager, but an abrasive one, and he spent his whole life railing against authority. Punk wasn’t just the kind of music he played; it was his guiding ethos, and he was famous for clawing his way to whatever he wanted.

For example, his band, The Replacements – he’d practically bullied his way into becoming their frontman. Walking home one day after work, he had heard a group of musicians playing Yes covers in their basement, and had been convinced that they were musical geniuses.

“What got to me was the sheer volume and the wild thunder,” he later told Bob Mehr, the author of Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements. “That was the major attraction: the balls of a band to play that goddamn loud.”

The “band” was drummer Chris Mars, guitarist

It wasn’t even the wildest thing that Westerberg did during those recording sessions. He’d get into trouble at local bars, then return to Arendt to

▲

in 1987. The 28-year-old was one of the fi nest singer-songwriters in the country, but you’d never know it from looking at him: stragglehaired and frequently clad in his trademark fl annel shirts, he looked like the kind of guy who spends his day getting told to move on by the cops and drinking too much; probably because he was. David Fricke of Rolling Stone had once described him as “a former janitor with a lightbulb nose and tubercular singing voice”. That was maybe generous – Westerberg was the dark shape you crossed the road to avoid.

“I’m not complaining, Jim,” Fry had said to Ardent’s production engineer, Jim Dickinson. “But I’m just curious: how did they get the vomit on the ceiling?”

It was Westerberg’s puke, of course; he’d taken too vigorous a swig while downing a jug of Gallo wine, had vomited a little back into his hands, and then had hurled the chuck into the air.

“[Westerberg] took too vigorous a swig while downing a jug of Gallo wine, vomited a little back into his hands, and then hurled the chuck into the air.”

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 15

FEATURE ▲

“Westerberg had always been afraid of his softer side; always felt ashamed of how much he loved the quiet balladry of Alex Chilton and Big Star.”

record for ten day spurts before he hit creative walls and had to recoup for a little bit. Buzzing on a Chinese liquid speed called Rocket Fuel, he’d be fucked up on beer by the afternoon, and would stomp around Arendt’s basement, the so-called Dungeon. There he’d perfect the material – hone down strange, lopsided songs like ‘I.O.U.’ and ‘Alex Chilton’, his paean to the Big Star singer of the same name.

If Westerberg was nervous about the expectations on him and his band, he didn’t act like it. As was his wont, he’d make up lyrics on the spot, occasionally reading off scraps of paper and napkins he’d pull out of his pockets while up at the mic. Even the record’s swing and jazz elements were last minute additions: the saxophone part on the fizzy, bassinflected ‘Nightclub Jitters’ was provided by Edward Kirby, a local star who Dickinson had recruited very late in the game.

And about Dickinson, actually. Westerberg had been predictably abrasive when first meeting the producer. Dickinson had rocked up while the band were eating breakfast, and they had been, again, predictably, pretty drunk. “I was dressed the way I usually dress, and Tommy said, ‘Look Paul, he’s got a flannel shirt. He’s just like us,’ Dickinson would later tell Surdoval. “And Paul said, ‘I don’t care what his shirt is. He’s not like us.’”

But over the course of recording, Westerberg had warmed up to the young one-time session musician and man about town. Westerberg’d often be like that, actually: initially vicious and cruel, and then increasingly chatty. He could even be friendly, in his way – generous and loyal. The only person he’d ever liked from the very get go was Tommy Stinson, who Mehr notes was the closest thing Paul ever had to a love of his life, but he did end up trusting Dickinson all the same.

16 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

The band didn’t talk much about the record they were assembling, or even their future, though it was clear they all wished Bob was there. “I could feel everyone else missing Bob,” engineer John Hampton told Surdoval. “A kind of insecurity, a kind of ‘What do we do?’ An aura in the room is the best way to say it. They were all going nuts, but they were trying to be serious, trying to grow up at the same time.” Dickinson even suggested they call the record Where’s Bob? No-one thought the joke was very funny.

But the absence of Stinson wasn’t just a creative dearth, or a source of the band’s collective anxiety. It helped free Westerberg up a little too.

See, he had always been afraid of his softer side; always felt ashamed of how much he loved the quiet balladry of Alex Chilton and Big Star, and how comfortable he felt with an acoustic guitar in his hands.

Whether accurately or not, Westerberg felt Bob was the one who would most object when he’d bring stripped down acoustic songs about alcoholism, and love, and death to the band. So sometimes, in the past, he’d written songs and not played them for the group; had kept them all for himself. Now, with Bob gone, Westerberg didn’t have to feel so ashamed.

Well. He didn’t have to, but he did. ‘Skyway’, the gentlest song on Pleased To Meet Me was recorded by Westerberg and Westerberg alone.

He stole into Ardent early one morning before anyone else had arrived and played the tune by his lonesome, sitting close to the mic and with his eyes closed. Even with Bob Stinson gone, Paul Westerberg sometimes struggled a little with sounding like himself.

I

n terms of their immediate goals, Pleased To Meet Me couldn’t have been any more of a success for The ‘Mats. It was heralded immediately as a triumph, praised by writers as diverse as Robert Christgau and David Fricke, and later hit third place in the Village Voice’s influential Pazz and Jop critics poll.

And even though the band were a mess – still alcohol sodden and dysfunctional – they managed to take the record out on the road for perhaps the best tour of their career. They played like the legends they had slowly become, and even their onstage flubs and fights became tangled up in the mythology of the perennially fucked up game-changers.

They had done everything that they wanted to do.

They had proved to the world that they could skirt the very limits of respectability and cohesion without ever falling apart, and that, Bob Stinson be damned, the loss of one member wouldn’t have to result in the end of the band.

Of course, experience that kind of success and the only way for you to go is downhill. Within four short years the band would finally combust. Bob Stinson would die four years after that, succumbing to the alcoholism that had ravaged his life and got him kicked out of the band that had made him famous.

And the legendarily iron-livered Westerberg would be forced into sobriety, unable to keep up with the side effects of his boozing.

But none of that changes what they did. Right when they seemed most ready to fail – to disintegrate into their composite parts – they produced one of the greatest examples of American punk rock ingenuity ever laid to tape. And sure, maybe that’s not a fucking fairy tale. But with The ‘Mats, you don’t get fairy tales.

You get stories that end like this: with life, just briefly, going okay. ■

thebrag.com

afi 09:08:17 :: Big Top Luna Park :: 1 Olympic Dr Millers Point 9033 7600

What we’ve been out to see this week. See full galleries at thebrag.com/snaps

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 17

thebrag.com

s n a p s

18 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

03:08:17 :: Sutherland Car Park :: Corner of Flora and Merton streets

sounds of the suburbs

01:08:17 :: Oxford Art Factory :: 38-46 Oxford St, Darlinghurst 9332 3711

amy shark

What we’ve been out to see this fortnight. See full galleries at thebrag.com/snaps

s n a p s

sounds of the suburbs 03:08:17 :: Sutherland Car Park :: Corner of Flora and Merton streets

thebrag.com

03:08:17 :: Sutherland Car Park :: Corner of Flora and Merton streets

sounds of the suburbs

thebrag.com

08:08:17 :: Hordern Pavillion :: i Driver Ave Moore Park 9921 5333

02:08:17 :: Enmore Theatre :: 118-132 Enmore Rd Newtown 9550 3666

gang of youths

the preatures

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 19

20 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

10:08:17 :: Sydney

marriage equality rally

What we’ve been out to see this week. See full galleries at thebrag.com/snaps

s n a p s

thebrag.com

FEATURE

Farrah Abraham’s

My Teenage Dream Ended

Is The Purest Expression Of American Pop Ever Recorded

BY JOSEPH EARP

Abraham And The Sublime le mate and ground-breaking 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant is famous for a number of things: his mindwarping yet teeth-grindingly dull theses; his bizarre bedtime habits; and for being one of a litany of obscure thinkers that your art school boyfriend kept name-dropping at parties after one too many craft beers.

Yet above all else, Kant is perhaps most famous for developing the concept of the sublime, that complex emotion that gets stirred up in us when we are faced with sights of incredible magnitude, devastation or scale. You know the feeling – it’s that weird mix of heart-in-throat fear and unfettered amazement; the eerie joy we got from watching a wire-walker, for example, or while staring slack-jawed at a video of a tidal wave.

But Kant didn’t just work to demarcate the sublime; he sought to understand it. And ultimately, for Kant, the feeling of the sublime is so dizzyingly addictive largely because it provides a way for humans to marvel at our own powers of reason. We can gaze at a Turner painting of a ship being tossed about in a storm and be at once terrified of the unfathomable whims of nature, and yet also strangely comforted that our rational, logical minds have the capacity to render destructive forces; that the might and majesty of nature can be transformed into oily brushtrokes that we can gaze upon while wasting a few spare hours in an art gallery.

So yeah, the sublime is an admission of our own mortality for Kant, but it’s also an appreciation of the fact we can do things that no other mortal animal can; that we can render, and understand, and process, and think.

Which is all a way of saying that when I listen to one time reality TV star Farrah Abraham’s debut pop album My Teenage Dream Ended, released alongside a tie-in novel of the same name, the feeling that comes over me is not the waves of nausea and disgust that racked so many other music critics, or the complete apathy exhibited by the American public at large. When I listen to one time reality TV star Farrah Abraham’s debut pop album My Teenage Dream Ended, I am filled at once with feelings that I can only describe as sublime.

Left: Immanuel Kant

“When I listen to one time reality TV star Farrah Abraham’s debut pop album My Teenage Dream Ended, I am filled at once with feelings that I can only describe as sublime.”

▲ thebrag.com

BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 21

“The record is a means to an end; an attempt to gain success by releasing an album about success, not to mention a desperate plea for attention auto-tuned to the point of pitched perfection.”

“I Can Only Put So Much In A Song” Critics like to talk endlessly about the albums that have defined prior generations – those pivot points on which musical history turns.

But really, whenever they start disseminating the ineffable power of Patti Smith’s Horses, or The Who’s Tommy, it doesn’t take long to realise that what they’re really talking about is market value.

See, for so many American critics, a defining

album is one that: A) sells extraordinarily well, and B) fits their narrow, often obligatory definitions of “great”. That, after all, is why you can’t move but for bumping into thinkpieces about the enduring impact of Nevermind, or even The Velvet Underground And Nico, which only became a worthy contender for the moniker of “timeless” after it had recuperated from its initially poor sales and became the record to buy for mopey teenagers the world over.

It would be illogical for many of these critics to consider that a genuinely timeless, genuinely revolutionary record might be one that sells poorly, or barely sells at all. But why? It is just as easy to trace the anxieties and pressures of a generation in a record that has all the commercial impact of a fart in a bath tub as it is in a record that propels its creator into superstardom. In fact, in some ways, it is easier to see such fault lines in a stranger, more indelicate record; in those albums that try and fail to ape the confines of pop culture, and reveal something more honest along the way.

Which leads us, again, to one time reality TV star Farrah Abraham’s debut pop album My Teenage Dream Ended. Because My Teenage Dream Ended is not as much a pop album as it is a parody of one. It is the skeleton of 60 years of pop experimentation and chart sales onto which a loose, baggy skin has been hung; a blueprint for success that has been shakily traced over in crayon.

▲

Of course that’s partly because, for Abraham, the album was more a career stepping stone than the product of years of artistic desire – one more bullet point ticked off in an itemised checklist of the hallmarks of American success.

Which, in turn, fits Abraham’s career as a whole: her life in the public eye has been one long string Above: JMW Turner’s Snow Storm-Steam Boat Off A Harbour’s Mouth Top: Farrah Abraham and her daughter Sophia at the VMAs 22 :: BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17

thebrag.com

FEATURE

tuned to the point of pitched perfection. For Abraham, the record wasn’t some way of satisfying some years long creative itch, or about communicating her soul to the world, or any of those trite reasons that artists dole out for making their art when they are pressed on an album’s publicity tour. My Teenage Dream Ended was reverse engineered. It was as conniving and as calculated as a presidential campaign run.

And in its bare-faced honesty – in its sheer, uncomplicated grasping – it has a genius all of its own.

The Sound Of Her Voice Farrah Abraham can’t really sing in the typical way that we use that word, so for much of My Teenage Dream Ended, she doesn’t. The album opens with a snatch of spoken word, her voice buried under layers of autotune, and it ends with one too, as Abraham spits out a line she has seemingly lost the energy to sing.

Not that everything inbetween those two bookends is significantly more melodic.

Abraham’s voice is a cross between a helium squeak and the sound adolescents think grownups make when having sex, and it fluctuates between the perverse and the pained through Teenage Dream. That’s partly, one assumes, because Abraham is singularly lacking in confidence as a singer: there are times on the record, most pertinently the song ‘On My Own’, when one could swear they heard the cocking of the gun pointed at Abraham’s head.

Of course, the irony of the record – not to mention Abraham’s career – is that she is the one holding the gun. Abraham is the archetypal self-made woman, except she is yet to be made. She is all ambition and no pay-off; a pure serving of the slobbering desire that underpins everything Americans really talk about when they talk about success. She is going at it alone; fighting the grim odds laid out in songs like ‘Unplanned Parenthood’ and ‘Caught In The Act’ with nothing but her own sense of resolve to help her.

For the record, that’s Teenage Dream’s other defining characteristic; an aching, seemingly insurmountable sense of isolation. All those echoey, reverb-heavy vocal effects plastered over Abraham’s voice make her sound trapped in the least metaphorical way that word can be used, as though she is singing from the confines of a safe in which she has locked herself for all eternity. “We’re fighting, we’re fighting now,” she sings on ‘Liar Liar’, her voice a million miles away.

She could be the very last person on the earth.

Top: Abraham’s My Teenage Dream Ended Above: The Velvet Underground & Nico

of carefully carbon copied career turning points, slowly worked through with an efficiency that is both admirable and faintly distressing.

She did the reality TV stint; then she sold the merch; then she released the sex tape; then she dropped the album. She is American pop culture’s Jay Gatsby, always holding parties and spending money and chasing, always chasing, the green light that glimmers on a shore she forever finds herself on the opposite side of.

Indeed, that selfsame longing is the key to My Teenage Dream Ended. The record is a means to an end; an attempt to gain success by releasing an album about success, not to mention a desperate plea for attention autothebrag.com

And in some of the bitchier lyrics, she claims that she is. Abraham has had a number of publicised spats in the media, many of them with her mother, and these are referenced with a wearied sense of predictability across Teenage Dream. Abraham has been abandoned, she assures us, and the only way she can reclaim any sense of identity is by being cruel about those who have done her wrong, adding a thin layer of vengeance over the record’s polished, plastic sheen.

The instrumentation is about as warm. Songs turn on thin, wasted ‘drops’ – moments where the writhing mass of electro parts find some sense of communion and all build to the same instant of catharsis. It’s house music as produced by someone who has spent a lifetime reading about house music without never once having heard it; club bangers reduced to an intellectual exercise, or a game.

Which makes it sound maybe like Teenage Dream is “bad”, or the kind of record that can only be enjoyed ironically. But that is most stridently not the case.

Like other anti-art oddities such as Tommy Wiseau’s The Room or The Shaggs’ Philosophy Of The World, Teenage Dream shatters such binary modes of looking at art.

“It is just as easy to trace the anxieties and pressures of a generation in a record that has all the commercial impact of a fart in a bath tub as it is in a record that propels its creator into superstardom.”

Teenage Dream is not terrible, although there are many people who had that first, instinctual reaction to it. Nor is it a masterpiece, although certainly amongst contrarians there was the impulse to call it that too.

Instead, it is this kind of miscreant combination of both of those things – an at times cringeworthy, at times inspired piece of art that feels flung out of space, or dug up from deep beneath the surface of the earth.

“Finally Getting Up From Rock Bottom” Because Teenage Dream is an insular, selfcontained record – a serpent eating its own tail – the record’s success is meant to be its own happy ending. The concluding track, ‘Finally Getting Up From Rock Bottom’, is Abraham’s acknowledgement of personal potential; a song about the great strength she has exhibited while crawling out of the self-made controversy she generated with her James Deen co-starring sex tape, not to mention the great success of the self-made album the listener has just spent a little under half an hour making their way through.

Of course, that the album was not a success, and was generally chided by the critical establishment, only reinforces much of what the album is really about – which is sadness, and isolation, and the unashamed aping of achievement. That last, spat out line (“dig yourself out!”) is a carefully planned victorious, hot-blooded rallying cry that is not victorious, nor hot-blooded, nor even really a cry.

It is an acknowledgement of a triumph that does not exist; decades of late capitalistic greed and ethical quandaries reduced to a cliché half-sung by a reality TV star.

Which is the perfect way for the album to end, really. Abraham has learnt from other pop stars that you end your record with self-congratulation, so that’s what she does, and that she has nothing really concrete to congratulate herself for seems to be far, far from the point.

And in that way as in so many others, Teenage Dream is an American pop album stripped off the true meaning of that word “pop” – a pop album that is not popular, and instead is the endpoint of that great, hulking, ominous thing we call the American success story.

That is why Teenage Dream is the true defining record of our generation – the true expression of what decades of late capitalism, and VH1 Behind The Music segments, and the myth of American economic and ideological superiority have been leading up to. It is Jay-Z’s The Blueprint without the hustle; Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho without the self-awareness.

It is the creaking, endlessly whirring machine that drives all American culture and politics laid bare, revealed in the work of a young, middle-class American playing success the way her young daughter plays dress-ups. And that is why it is a work of the sublime in the purest sense – a gilded, chintz-draped monolith in the face of which one can do nothing but sit, slack-jawed agape, and marvel. ■ BRAG :: 722 :: 09:08:17 :: 23

arts in focus

FEATURE

“That’s the exciting part of the industry: all it takes is an amazing idea.”

Greg McLean: Sheer Survival [FILM] Briony Kidd talks to the twisted mind behind Wolf Creek about the two new films he has hitting Aussie cinemas this year

I

t’s been 12 years since Greg McLean first unleashed Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor onto unsuspecting audiences, forging his reputation as one of Australia’s foremost genre filmmakers in the process. Or filmmakers period, I should say.

As our interview begins, talk turns first to Tobe Hooper, the filmmaker responsible for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre who had sadly died the day before. McLean notes that although Hooper’s films are revered by fans of the genre, in some ways his reputation is restricted to a “horror ghetto”. “[Actually] people who love film, I find, love all kinds of films,” McLean

says. “There’s so many films and great filmmakers and interesting voices out there, so you’d be bonkers not to explore everything and be inspired by everything.”

McLean has a busy few months ahead of him. He will soon find himself in the unusual position of having two films released in Australian cinemas in consecutive months: audiences will be able to catch his ultra-violent-yet-fun The Belko Experiment later this month and then psychological thriller Jungle in October.

The latter tells the story of Israelborn Yossi Ghinsberg, a young man who goes adventuring into the Amazonian rainforest, and is

“[Distributors] do tend to basically keep trying to push the same thing, which is why we’re living in a world of endless remakes and sequels and corporate decision-making. But at the end of the day I think the only thing that people respond to is good stories.” based on Ghinsberg’s recollection of events, written soon after they happened in 1981. Starring Daniel Radcliffe as Yossi, a go-getter who learns a lot about himself the hard way, the film also features Australian actors Joel Jackson and Alex Russell as fellow backpacking adventurers (they’re Swiss and American in the story.)

(or boy) who makes it out, broken and heartsick, but alive.

The trio head for Bolivia, where Yossi is persuaded by a charismatic Austrian (Thomas Kretchmann) to journey into uncharted territory: the ‘real jungle’. Needless to say, it doesn’t turn out to be the smartest move.

“I thought [Yossi’s story] had some interesting themes about what people are capable of in terms of using imagination to help them survive horrible situations ... It’s a pretty potent metaphor for the way that people survive adversity in small ways in their lives; in using stories as an escape, in using music, in using art, as a way to get out of whatever shitty situation you happen to find yourself in.”

“I was actually trying to get as far away from Wolf Creek as I possibly could by telling a story about someone trying to survive and succeeding, as opposed to someone trying to kill people and succeeding,” McLean says.

Clearly he is a filmmaker attracted to extremes, whatever the genre.

Jungle and The Belko Experiment are tonally worlds apart, yet both are precise, almost forensic examinations of the survival instinct.

Like Battle Royale before it, Belko sets up a brutal dog-eat-dog scenario in which office workers discover that they will be executed by a Big Brother-type figure unless they murder a specified number of their colleagues first. Although McLean continues to depict humanity in a less-than-flattering light, there are redemptive elements to his work too, and his films frequently feature some kind of saving grace, such as a “final girl” 24 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

Jungle, for example, focuses not only on the physical dimension of Ghinsberg’s journey but on what McLean calls a “mystical aspect”, shown in the story through Yossi’s hallucinations while he’s alone and suffering.

But McLean says it was the relationships in the source material that first attracted him to the project, meaning it was essential for him to cast the supporting roles well, particularly Kevin, the backpacker who ends up spending the most time with Yossi when the group is eventually split in two. McLean says he was impressed by Joel Jackson’s star turn in Peter Allen: Not the Boy Next Door and by his evident enthusiasm and commitment to his craft. But he acknowledges there was a degree of luck involved in shaping the onscreen dynamic between the cast.

“We weren’t able to audition them together because they were all over the world…. [but] it really helped that there was an essence of each of the real people in each of the actors

that we cast. That helped make the story clear and helped make the relationships very believable.”

I take the opportunity to ask McLean a few broader questions about being a filmmaker right now in Australia. As distribution models continue to evolve at lighting speed, he’s in prime position to see the way ahead. Working across both film and television, locally and internationally and at various budget levels, he’s at the vanguard as the Australian film industry struggles to maintain its identity while finding more commercially lucrative ways of operating globally.

“There’s certainly a myth that Australians don’t want to see genre,” he says. “I think that’s an illusion; it’s not true. [Distributors] do tend to basically keep trying to push the same thing, which is why we’re living in a world of endless remakes and sequels and corporate decisionmaking that’s not particularly inspired. But at the end of the day I think the only thing that people respond to is good stories.

“That’s the exciting part of the industry: all it takes is an amazing idea… That’s really what keeps the industry alive and rejuvenated: outsiders from the bottom coming up with something cool and making it for themselves.”

What: Jungle playing as part of Jewish International Film Festival Where: Event Cinemas Bondi Junction When: Saturday September 23 And: The Belko Experiment in cinemas Thursday September 21 thebrag.com

arts in focus

The Nether: Taming The Infinite [THEATRE] Justin Martin, the director of the Seymour Centre’s new production of The Nether, tells Adam Norris how he managed to stay true to a thorny script

A

FEATURE

s titles go, The Nether is a particularly fitting one.

There’s something vaguely unsettling built into that second word, and the place it has come to describe – a liminal world of menace and uncertainty – keenly reflects the themes of the Olivier Award-winning work, a dark masterpiece penned by American playwright Jennifer Haley.

The play, celebrated by critics upon its debut in March 2013, is a “sci-fi crime drama”, which is a rare combination of words indeed. But there’s no reason for it to be. Although such oddball genre hybrids are rare, they also happen to be timely, what with the hellfire dystopia that we find ourselves mired in the middle of.

Our worst collective nightmares have all come true, and stories about the suppression of personal freedoms, the surveillance power of the state and the vicious nature of capitalistic expansion aren’t just far-flung fantasies; they are based, horrifyingly, very much in the contemporary.

Indeed, The Nether is especially on point at present, thanks in no small part to Australia’s own reassessment of meta-data laws and the nature of personal liberties in a digital age. We might feel like the internet is making us safer, more connected, and more politically conscious than we have ever been before, but that progress is coming at a price – one that sees us sacrificing our freedoms, and our identities. And although we like to point our fingers at America as the ultimate manifestation of late capitalism’s flaws, we Australians aren’t much less ethically or intellectually compromised.

Not that any of that means The Nether was an easy work to bring to life, mind you, as the play’s director Justin Martin now knows all too well. “It’s a tricky play to pull off, partially because my interest is in how to plug it into a conversation that’s happening in Australia at the moment,” the rising theatrical star explains. “I think on some level, like all good plays, it’s raising questions that we all ultimately have to answer, and will have to answer very soon. How do we find a legal framework for the internet, and for the notion of a virtual landscape?

And at the same time, how do we govern and police that?

“That’s why it’s so interesting here now, two years after the meta-data laws have been passed, and now they’re being renewed. Back then they originally said that metadata would only be used to stop terrorism and the like, but might now potentially be used in civil cases. That notion of, if something isn’t real in terms of it being digital or virtual, how do we find a framework within which to exist in that world? Because we spend so much time in it these days. I think it’s important now, but it’s going to be more important tomorrow.”

Thematically, The Nether seems to fit into that genre of ethicallyambiguous narratives that are the

“How do we find a legal framework for the internet, and for the notion of a virtual landscape? And at the same time, how do we govern and police that?”

bread and butter of television’s Black Mirror. In the near future, the internet has become the Nether, a universe of connected virtual realms. In such a world, where (as Hassan-i Sabbah once proposed) nothing is true and everything is permitted, how is illegality reconciled with reality?

Given the play touches on serious crimes – not to mention grave ethical transgressions – it will undoubtedly prove a sombre and controversial night out at the theatre; though playing for shocks is far from its purpose.

“I think there are three aspects of the show. There’s the ethical element, there’s the crime thriller, which gives it its drive, and at the core of it there’s this love story, which was the same with [Martin’s earlier production] Let The Right One In. If you care for those people, then in a way, the fear around them and what might happen to them becomes very palpable and very complicated.

“I think this play does that in a very clever and very moving way. It’s not horror … but there’s certainly tension, and that’s

“It’s not horror … but there’s certainly tension, and that’s because it hits at things that are happening in the country right now. These are issues that affect us all, and we have to think about them.” thebrag.com

because it hits at things that are happening in the country right now. These are issues that affect us all, and we have to think about them. One of the big ones is, there are cameras in most computers, and anyone can have access to them, and that’s a terrifying idea.”

The challenges of instilling tension within an audience notwithstanding, The Nether is guaranteed to have its audiences discussing the ethical implications of its premise long after the curtain has closed – and this is what Martin finds most important.

“With this, there’s a certain question of how do we be Australian within this changing world where the internet is becoming something we not only use, but rely on. How do we exist

within that? And that excites me.

It’s something we’re going to have to wrestle with.

“I think the internet … it’s the promise of allowing us to fulfil certain dreams, of making things easy. But it’s also a tricky place.

A lot of warfare happens there now, and it feels like the future questions of who we are and how we exist are going to involve that virtual world. Jennifer Haley, who wrote the play, is one of the few playwrights exploring that, and Charlie Brooker who made Black Mirror is one of the few TV writers exploring that. There’s really no legal precedence for the internet.

We’re making up the rules as we go.”

What: The Nether Where: Seymour Centre When: From now until Saturday October 7 BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 25

arts reviews

“Bojack is the human desire for selfpreservation made physical; a character reduced to its most basic, fundamental properties. Bojack is a survivor, but not in the way that we usually mean that word.”

■ TV

Why would anyone watch a show like Bojack Horseman?

By Joseph Earp

W

hen it first premiered back in 2014, there didn’t seem to be much that made Bojack Horseman special. Sure, it boasted an impressive voice cast, led by Will Arnett as Bojack, the show’s titular washed-up horse, but it appeared to be one more adult animated comedy in a sea of adult animated comedies; a sitcom in all but name that, especially in its early episodes, cartwheeled between satirical jabs levelled at our celebrity obsessed media landscape and surrealist, multicoloured non-sequiturs.

Critics got their knives out, with Erik Adams of the AV

Club proving particularly vicious. “It spoofs the emptiness of celebrity, but does so without any novelty or true insight,” the writer savaged. He wasn’t alone either. The big question surrounding the first half of the debut season was not even whether Bojack was good; it was, “Why would anyone watch a show like Bojack Horseman?”

But critics – and audiences, for that matter – were jumping the gun. Those early episodes were not the meat of the show, nor even a fair indication of where it would end up. They were set-ups, not for a joke, but for a kind of anti-joke; the kind of devastating punchline that Bojack’s

writers have spent three years honing.

Because Bojack is not really a story about celebrity, although, in its newly-released fourth season, it certainly saves a lot of vitriol for politicians who run campaigns as though they are vying for the Miss America crown.

Nor is it really a show about artistry – its central band of outsiders might feature a writer, an actor, a talent rep and a businessman, but Bojack is less about their creative pursuits and more about the ways in which they fuck them up.

No. At its heart, Bojack is a show about trauma; more specifically, the ways in

which we inherit trauma, and find ourselves, often to our growing horror, transforming from victims to oppressors. It is a show about the ways in which violence can linger – the ways in which torment can echo throughout the years, manifesting itself over and over again in a range of different, insidious ways. And it is a show about waking up and discovering that you have slowly transformed into your parents; that you have become a cog in a machine of multi-generational pain.

That’s what sets Bojack as a character apart, particularly in the show’s fourth season, which he spends much of while offscreen, lurking beneath the surface like a tumour pressing against the back of an eye. The annals of TV’s history might be stuffed with pricks, but Bojack is a different kind of monster. He is not a Don Draper-type, a booze-sodden chameleon desperate to reinvent himself whenever he gets the chance. Nor is he a Stringer Bell, a cool, calm and collected sociopath, his heart one hardened, time-wearied callous. And he is certainly not a Tony Soprano, that ethically ambiguous titan with a set of values that remain steel cut and shining despite the murk he finds himself surrounded by.

After all, those characters

26 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

are, at heart, creatures of principle. Draper might be a womanising jerk, but he is a consistent womanising jerk; as regular in his indiscretion as a stopwatch.

And both Bell and Soprano are only likeable because they are unwavering – like good captains, they follow the ship all the way down, and never once retreat from their ideals, no matter the demons that means they must face.

Bojack, again, is something else. Bojack is the human desire for self-preservation made physical; a character reduced to its most basic, fundamental properties.

Bojack is a survivor, but not in the way that we usually mean that word.

He has not so much learnt from trauma as he has been forever claimed by it; whether dealing with the vicious figure of his mother in season four’s ‘Thoughts And Prayers’ and ‘Stupid Piece Of Shit’, or attempting to find himself in ‘The Old Sugarman Place’ he cannot escape the legacy of the past.

Nor does he even particularly want to.

Whereas in the first few seasons Bojack’s unrepentant assholery was largely played for laughs – he was a character willing to destroy his friend Todd’s life for no other reason than petty jealousy, and a desire not to be left alone – by season four, it has become pathological.

Bojack is no longer just unashamed of pissing on his subordinates, and tearing apart his loved ones; he is unable to conceive of behaviour that does not somehow inflict hurt. He has moved beyond the level of your petty jerk, and has become something else entirely – the legacy of familial pain writ large.

If that sounds like a bummer, that’s because it sometimes is. The fourth season of Bojack Horseman might feature zombies, and a guest spot from Matthew Broderick, and heavy dashes of the kind of Jacques Tati-esque fuckery that the show has become well-known for. But it is, at its heart, one of the most convincing portrayals of survivor’s guilt yet put to screen; the story of a character who has been quietly consumed by his past, and by his trauma, and has given himself over to both as one would a lover.

Why would anyone watch a show like Bojack Horseman? Because it’s a show that reminds us, for horses as for humans, that pain begets pain; that although we may be through with the past, the past is not yet through with us.

The complete fourth season of Bojack Horseman is available via Netfl ix now.

thebrag.com

arts reviews ■ Film

Kuso is a deep well of depravity, but there’s rage at its heart

By David Molloy

S

tories of mass walkouts from Sundance screenings are a dime a dozen these days, but they are any counter-cultural creative’s calling card. And if shock is currency, then producing prodigy Steven Ellison (AKA Flying Lotus) is gunning to be Scrooge McDuck, diving headlong, gleefully, into a bottomless pit of obscenity with his debut feature Kuso.

Let’s try and wring a coherent narrative out of this one. In the wake of a catastrophic earthquake, the few surviving residents of Los Angeles are infected by a plague of boils.

In four distinct stories, these diseased mutants experience the depths of depravity as they navigate a new world of horrors.

Two quotes spring to mind when trying to rationalise the experience of Kuso. The first is from Philip Ridley’s surrealist nightmare play The Pitchfork Disney. “It’s survival of the sickest,” says Cosmo Disney, a dazzling enfant terrible who makes a living eating live cockroaches for bewildered audiences. Given he espouses the values of “our daily dose of disgust”, he’d be quite at home in the world of Kuso.

The second is from Deadpool: “You look like an avocado had sex with an older, more disgusting avocado. Not gently; like, it was hatefucking.

There was something wrong with the relationship and that was the only catharsis they could find without violence.”

If hatefucking led to the creation of Kuso, the participants may have been the respective founders of Dadaism and Funnyjunk.

“It’s an aesthetic wonderland, perturbing as it is; the highest quality trash around.”

Directing under the moniker “steve”, Ellison collaborated with digital sicko David Firth (best known as the father of Salad Fingers) to birth this 90-minute monstrosity, a film that would have John Waters reaching for a bucket.

It’s little wonder that the credits reference transgressive champions like Eric Andre and Elijah Wood, or that Tim Heidecker makes an appearance (as a naked rapist, no less). But steve’s creation also bears the marks of David Cronenberg, William S. Burroughs, Tetsuo: Iron Man, Aphex Twin, Peter Jackson and David Lynch, even going so far as to directly visually reference Twin Peaks’ Black Lodge. It is pastiche writ large, snipped from newspapers and cemented with pus.

It’s also possible that steve would detest the listing of his sources – “To be compared is to be impaired,” Busdriver repeats adamantly in the film’s closing poem, itself concealed behind the credits.

So yeah, it’s gross. Very, very gross. But beneath the panoply of fart sounds and squishy effluvia, there’s something of value. And to

parse it – to get even a shred of meaning from it – you have to dive deep into the muck.

A woman buried underground tries to find and eat her baby, carving away at the concrete between them with her teeth. And another woman hides her pregnancy from both her multi-dimensional housemates and her dateraping stalker, later meeting a rapper terrified of breasts who seeks the medical attention of a ‘doctor’ with a giant insect in his anus.

So there’s that.

“I think it’s exploitative and sexist, though artful,” says Kazo, a furry rainbow muppet with a TV for a face voiced

by Hannibal Buress, his eyes trained on a video of genital mutilation. Qualitative statements aside, it’s hard to argue with the film’s selfassessment. It’s an aesthetic wonderland, perturbing as it is; the highest quality trash around.

It’s hard not to focus on the depravity of it all – the sickly fluoro Adult Swim aesthetic,

the wounds and orifices, the autocannibalism, insects, incest, remotes hidden in vaginas, the bleeding dicks, the ceaseless torrents of vomit and cum and poo. But beneath the giggling puerility of Kuso is something else – a rage so fierce it vibrates and shakes all above it, like the inciting earthquake.

In one passing vignette, a game-show contestant is offered a choice between resuscitating a dead, filthy child or drinking a jug of spit. Ellison offers us a rare moment of respite by cutting to static, but the choice speaks for itself – anyone who’s performed CPR could tell you the two acts are synonymous. Saving the child involves acknowledging that the corporeal world is filth, and you have to suck it up to survive.

Transgressive humour makes the repulsion more palatable.

There’s twisted gags aplenty, like the Cosmo-esque salesman who demands of a potential client, “You ever beat a n***a with a n***a? I mean, pick his best friend up and

“It’s gross. Very, very gross. But beneath the panoply of fart sounds and squishy effluvia, there’s something of value.” use his ass as a battering ram?”

The language is another key – in an interview with The Guardian, Ellison declared, “You have just never seen black characters like this in film – ever. Ever!” (It’s true: name one other film in which a person of colour is fellated by a talking neck boil. I’ll wait.) This level of transgression, arriving in this historical context, from this artist, cannot avoid being political. And if Busdriver’s impassioned cries of “futility reigns” don’t sell the message, the conversation that B (Bethany Schmitt, credited as The Buttress), Kazo and Masu (Donnell Rawlings) have around the glowing snuff film on their TV set must:

“I fucking hate this movie.”

“Eat ass, n***a, this is art.”

“This is garbage. Art is garbage.”

And as for those walkouts at Sundance, it’s worth nothing that even though FlyLo has talked down the more elaborate reports of the screening, there’s no such thing as bad press for counter-culture.

Cosmo Disney puts it best: “Tell someone there’s a photograph of a car crash in the newspaper and what’s the first thing they do? Buy the fucking newspaper.”

Kuso played as the closing fi lm at the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

“This is a profoundly malignant film: the bastard child of a thousand memes, and a seething, writhing mass of slime.”

thebrag.com

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 27

Book Club ■ Book

Helen Razer’s Total Propaganda will make a dirty Commie out of you

By Joseph Earp

M

illennials might not have a viable entry into the housing market, stable job prospects or much hope of living in a world unaffected by the worst of climate change, but there is one thing that we’re more than sorted for, thank you very much, and that’s advice doled out by boomers.

Publications as once vital as the Sydney Morning Herald have spent the last few years slowly transforming into soapboxes accessible only to those with a major in world politics, a crippling mid-life crisis and a tweed jacket with dinky leather patches sewed onto the elbows, and younger Australians can’t move but for bumping into headlines screaming about how they’ve ruined one obscure industry after the other. Boomers have a stranglehold on media outlets in this country – and they’re using them to lecture us.

What: Total Propaganda out now through Allen and Unwin

To that end, there are some who might be understandably wary of a book like Helen Razer’s recently released Total Propaganda, a

230-something page long diatribe designed to teach the philosophy of Marx to “the angry and the young”.

After all, in the hands of a lesser author, the work could have easily been boring at best and actively insulting at worst; one more opportunity for millennials to get their ears chewed off by slobbering geriatrics ever ready, in Razer’s own words, to “write their shit about how young people aren’t buying homes because they’re too busy stuffing themselves with brunch and Tinder cock.”

But there is a lot separating Razer from the stale farts and muckrackers stinking up our overcrowded media industry. For a start, she’s funny – and not funny in the way that we tend to use that word while talking about radio personalities and celebrity authors in this country (i.e. to mean “about as funny as a multi-car pile-up”), but genuinely, actually funny.

Like some unholy combination of Jonathan Swift and Lenny Bruce, Razer has the ability to cut through the deluge

of literary allusions and cocktail party fart-sniffing that has somehow become the standard for comedy around these parts, and there are moments in Total Propaganda that are laugh out loud hysterical, amongst them a bold, twoparagraph-long rant in which Razer turns her powers of deconstruction onto Gwyneth Paltrow and her vaginal steam cleans.

So no, Propaganda is no bone-dry lecture, nor boring dinner table chinwag; it’s a shitstorm of cuss words, vicious insults and multiple synonyms for the word “fuck.” Eminent Marxist philosopher Slavoj Zizek is described as a “mutant brat”; 45th president of the United States Donald Trump as a “broken toilet”; and even Marx, a thinker for whom Razer has considerable respect, is a “bugger” and a mind fucker.

Nor is Total Propaganda a distilled semester at a second-rate university, or one of those agonising textbooks you were forced to pore over in high school that tried to

make maths cool or science “radical!” Razer doesn’t tell as much as she shows, and her book is peppered with references to contemporary politics that never feel strained or hamfisted.

We are, after all, living in distinctly shitty times; trapped on one side by a frothing, rabid bunch of radicalised neo-Nazis high on energy drinks and their nightly furry porn binges and on the other by a bunch of pantsuit-clad centrists with all the political acumen and morality one would normally find at a car salesman convention.

Razer knows this all too well. Although she saves considerable ire for “morbid symptom” and all-around tool Trump, her (admittedly not limitless) faith rests in socialists like Sanders and the UK’s Jeremy Corbyn rather than Clinton, who, although “not the devil”, is one more capitalist shill in a world full of capitalist shills.

Razer even takes on now beloved Barack Obama, who she points out deported more “illegal” aliens than any other president in US history.

“Like some unholy combination of Jonathan Swift and Lenny Bruce, Razer has the ability to cut through the deluge of literary allusions and cocktail party fart-sniffing that has somehow become the standard for comedy around these parts.”

■ Book

Shattered makes the case that the one person hampering the Clinton campaign was Hillary herself

By Hannah Willis

These pages, like everything else Clinton has said and done since she ceded victory to Donald Trump in November last year, make it clear that the one-time Secretary of State is keen to blame everyone but herself for her performance, and they speak to an arrogance and a duplicity that devastated her presidential bid in the first place. They are the words of someone obstinately refusing to face up to reality; the whimpered

insults of a politician who has spent her career doing everything in her power to buck the assessment the public has made of her. The world might have changed since Trump took to power, but Hillary Clinton has not.

For those acquainted with the recently released Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign, a new work by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, the vitriol contained

“The world might have changed since Trump took to power, but Hillary Clinton has not.”

28 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

within Clinton’s literary facelift would have been anything but a surprise.

After all, if there is one thing that Shattered makes blindingly clear, it’s that Clinton has always been eager to dole out blame; that her aim since 2008, when she emphatically lost the democratic primaries to Barack Obama, has been to devastate her rivals, lock in the support of the wealthy and the powerful, and, perhaps most importantly of all, punish anything she considers “disloyalty”.

So no, nothing in Shattered is necessarily surprising for those of us who have always assumed that Clinton, a relentless career politician who backed the Iraq war, opposed samesex marriage, took fossil fuel money, and supported the devastating anti-drug policies of her husband Bill, was a bad egg. What is surprising, however, is the breadth of the Clinton campaign’s dysfunction, revealed to Parnes and Allen via interviews with anonymous, bitter staffers.

thebrag.com

Hillary Clinton photo courtesy Asia Society/Flickr

What: Shattered is out now through Crown Publishing

A

few weeks ago, pages were leaked from Hillary Clinton’s ghostwritten burn book, What Happened. On the basis of those excerpts alone, it became clear the failed candidate’s blatant attempt to salvage some of her besmirched credibility and mount the campaign for an inevitable 2020 election bid was going to be nasty.

Like, really nasty. She made Trump out to be a gross, mouth-breathing pervert, but more controversially, she painted Vermont state senator Bernie Sanders as a renegade who opened the door for sexist criticism, and ran for no other reason than to disrupt the democratic party.

arts reviews

out & about

“Younger Australians can’t move but for bumping into headlines screaming about how they’ve ruined one obscure industry after the other.”

And even Trump, despite getting one verbal lashing after another, is not really the villain of Total Propaganda. That is entirely the point of Razer’s precise takedowns, and her use of swathes of statistical data that indicate capitalism makes us unhappy, unfulfilled and even

psychologically traumatised: there is no one single author of the horror novel we find ourselves shuffling through every single day. There is no Big Brother; there is no man behind the curtain.

Capitalism is something that we do to ourselves; something that we actively choose, each and every single day.

“Propaganda is no bone-dry lecture, nor boring dinner table chinwag; it’s a shitstorm of cuss words, vicious insults and multiple synonyms for the word ‘fuck.’”

Which is depressing as fuck, right? But Total Propaganda is no suicide note for the western world, or terminal cancer diagnosis. Like Sanders and Corbyn, Razer has faith – not that the world will be saved by petroleum price-fattened boomers, but by the young, and the alienated, and the pissed-off. It is those who have been broken by an inhumane system that Total Propaganda is really for, and that is what makes it a valuable read for apolitical adolescents and battlehardened media junkies alike: it’s not a lecture as much as it is a love letter, albeit one stuffed with references to genocide and class war.

Ever since Trump’s election, arts critics the world over have become obsessed with the phrase “a book/fi lm/album for our times” – as though political outrage and a desire for change have only just come back into fashion. Total Propaganda is not a book for our times. At its swollen, blood-gorged heart Total Propaganda is a book for all times – a hoarsened, desperate battle cry for change. ■

“Nothing in Shattered is necessarily surprising for those of us who have always assumed that Clinton, a relentless career politician who backed the Iraq war and opposed same-sex marriage, was a bad egg.”

Edith Windsor photo by Rex Block/Flickr

From the very opening chapter of their excellent book, as Clinton speeds towards Roosevelt Island in a motorcade, the authors make it clear that of all the questions Hillary preprepared answers to, “Why should you be president?” was not amongst them.

And as Clinton grows more and more despondent throughout her campaign, thrown by Sanders’ surprising success and the fallout from the growing FBI investigation into her emails, the sense that the Clinton train had no conductor only becomes more pronounced.

Worse still, Parnes and Allen make clear, was the cut-throat atmosphere within what they call “Clintonland”. Campaign advisors were frequently walled off from Hillary, forced to go through her right-hand woman Huma Abedin rather than speak to her directly, and even senior aides often only encountered the presidential candidate when she called through to admonish them. In one particularly memorable scene, Clinton’s campaign managers huddle around a mobile phone and listen in as the woman herself chews them out, speaking with all the clipped put-

thebrag.com

downs of a substitute teacher reining in a particularly naughty class.

Clinton spends as much of Shattered admonishing as she does campaigning. She lectures aides about not going hard enough against Sanders; about failing to properly suppress stories concerning her email scandals; about not giving her speeches the personal, emotive punch they so clearly lacked.

As Allen and Parnes note, “Hillary should have been angry with herself … but she instead turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign.”

It is lacerating stuff – while Bill is painted as a sexist, ruddy-faced walking media snafu who frequently butts heads with Hillary’s top advisor Robby Mook, the presidential candidate herself is an arrogant, disingenuous robot who spends much of the campaign trying and failing

to come across as a real, flesh-and-blood human being. Her aides celebrate when she manages to nail comforting a child on camera, but these moments of victory prove few and far between.

Not that Parnes and Allen are necessarily Sanders supporters, or that they luxuriate in the same kind of gleeful satisfaction that has defined Trump’s response to the Clinton defeat. And for that reason, Shattered is a tragedy rather than a smear.

The subtext is not, “it’s good Clinton lost, given how poorly she ran her campaign”, it’s, “god help us all.”

Indeed, hanging over the book like the bloody end that Macbeth meets, or the violence awaiting Hamlet, is the threat of Trump himself, and the untold destruction he has done since inheriting the presidency. There should be no pleasure gained from Clinton’s folly, Parnes and Allen seem to suggest.

After all, that Clinton lost an unlosable election, and thus guaranteed the most powerful nuclear arsenal in the world fell into the hands of a madman, should fill us with nothing but heartache, and an emotion indistinguishable from honest-to-god grief. ■

Queer(ish) matters with Arca Bayburt

On The Death of Edith Windsor

A

lthough many had hoped that the High Court would ultimately rule that the plebiscite was unlawful, thereby burying it so deep it could never crawl out of its grave again, it turns out that it’s not unlawful. And so it goes.

Edith Windsor died on Tuesday September 12, 2017 at the age of 88. She was well known as one of the most honest and heroic of all same-sex marriage pioneers and activists. In 1957, she received her master’s in mathematics and went to work for IBM, where she ended up holding the highest level technical position in the company, senior systems programmer.

Windsor met her partner, Thea Spyer, in 1963.

IBM did not allow Windsor to name her partner as her insurance beneficiary. But Windsor, being the tough-as-nails person she was, wasn’t one to roll over and do nothing about her rights and the rights of other queers. I don’t have the space in his column to list her endless achievements, but she is well worth reading about.

In terms of her wins for marriage equality, Windsor’s historic Supreme Court speech is one we should all revisit in the wake of our own battles here in Australia about what it means to deny dignity to queer people by excluding them from institutions like marriage – with the poor justification provided for that exclusion always boiling down to a glorified version of the wail, “There are no gays allowed in our very special club!”

“EDITH WINDSOR DIED ON TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 12, 2017 AT THE AGE OF 88. SHE WAS WELL KNOWN AS ONE OF THE MOST HONEST AND HEROIC OF ALL SAME-SEX MARRIAGE PIONEERS.” what’s on…

This month it’s all about the Queer Screen Film Festival. Here are a couple of films showing at Event Cinemas George Street which you should definitely add to your watch list: On Thursday September 21, Sisterhood is playing at 6:30pm. This beautiful film focuses on a young woman named Cici as she returns from Taiwan

“IN TERMS OF HER WINS FOR MARRIAGE EQUALITY, WINDSOR’S HISTORIC SUPREME COURT SPEECH IS ONE WE SHOULD ALL REVISIT IN THE WAKE OF OUR OWN BATTLES HERE IN AUSTRALIA.” Windsor’s partner died in 2009 and Windsor was devastated to discover that she owed $363,000 in federal estate taxes, all because her marriage to Spyer was not considered valid in the United States. It is this gross injustice that took Windsor to the Supreme Court, and eventually led to her winning her case against the United States over the Defence of Marriage Act in 2013.

A few short months after that win, the Supreme Court nullified the Defence of Marriage Act, setting an unbelievable precedent that would pave the way for marriage equality in the US. Something that Windsor said bears repeating here: “Like countless other same-sex couples, we engaged in a constant struggle to balance our love for one another and our desire to live openly and with dignity, on the one hand, with our fear of disapproval and discrimination from others on the other.”

She had to live a double life, because there was no other way for her to live. It’s only because of people like her and her partner that we enjoy a level of freedom and openness that has historically been denied to so many.

Windsor accomplished so much for women in STEM fields, the queer community and, y’know, humanity in general. Edith Windsor is a name to remember, and her incredible story and sheer gall throughout her life is something to be admired.

to Macau to mourn a lost friend, Ling, and reconnects with a past she has long sought to leave behind.

On Friday September 22, Tom Of Finland is playing at 6:30pm.

Boasting shots of leather, denim, and elastic all straining with swollen musclemen, the film is based on the doings of real life gay icon Tom Laaksonen, and offers intriguing insights into the man

himself, not to mention his loves, his family and his inspirations.

On Sunday September 24, The Death And Life Of Marsha P. Johnson is playing at 3:30pm (presented with Trans Sydney Pride).

This film is a heartbreaking examination of Marsha Johnson’s life and untimely death in 1992, so if you’re unfamiliar with her story, then consider this one required viewing.

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 29

Sounds Like…

NEW ALBUM AND SINGLE RELE A SES WITH JOSEPH E ARP

Spring is here, which is nice, but it might be easier to appreciate if the unseasonably hot non-winter we just breezed through wasn’t so indicative of the damage we have done to our rapidly warming planet. Oh, and maybe we’d all be a little more relaxed if we didn’t live in daily fear that we’re on the verge of being obliterated in a nuclear hellfire unleashed by a brace of emotionally maladjusted, sweaty-browed megalomaniacs, or if we could all wake up one morning without having to read a news report about another gathering of fucking neo-Nazis.

At least that general sense of morbidity is being shared by musicians. The last two weeks in music have been dominated by the unrelentingly dour, with the award for the biggest grumblers going to The National.

The band’s new record, Sleep Well Beast, out now, has been championed by some critics as their magnum opus, but for those of us who were never on the Matt Berninger train to begin with, goddamn if it doesn’t feel like a slog to get through. There’s only so many six-minute songs about heartbreak that one can take in a single sitting after all, and, as usual, the band’s non-existent sense of pacing means the whole affair feels rather like having one’s teeth pulled by an apprentice dentist (sans anaesthetic.)

Elsewhere, Ariel Pink, heir apparent to oddball pioneer R Stevie Moore and general creative loose unit, has finally followed up his masterpiece Pom Pom with Dedicated To Bobby Jameson, 12 tracks of jangled folk and sun-warped, Beach Boys-indebted pop, out now. Pink couldn’t make a dour record if he tried, but Dedicated does have a distinct, if vaguely depraved, sense of mourning to

it. It’s an album for life’s losers, and songs like ‘Time To Meet Your God’ and ‘Feels Like Heaven’ are more heartfelt than even Pink’s dedicated fanbase might be expecting.

Another weirdo swapping out irony for heartache is Alex Cameron, whose Forced Witness, out now, more than builds on the promise of his debut Jumping The Shark. A piss and vinegar stained masterpiece, Forced Witness is one long bad joke, packed with songs about Nigerian scammers, eczema ridden dogs, and sexed up, selfie-hungry perverts. It’s depressing stuff, fitting with our fortnight’s theme, but Cameron’s sense of humour stops it from becoming an exercise in nihilism.

Even LCD Soundsystem, the most reliably energetic band in indie rock, have succumbed to their darker impulses. Their new record, American Dream, out now, is

the bleakest, meanest album they’ve ever released – for better and for worse. ‘How Do You Sleep?’, a genuine highlight, is a funeral dirge stripped down to its basest components, but album closer ‘Black Screen’, a Bowie eulogy that runs for 12 long minutes, errs too far on the side of the overindulgent.

But who needs mopey yanks when Australia is currently quite so jam-packed with talent? Compare the weepy nonsense of Berninger with something like Two Steps On The Water’s Sword Songs, out Friday September 29, and it is clear who really just dropped their magnum opus.

“Forced Witness is one long bad joke, packed with songs about Nigerian scammers, eczema ridden dogs, and sexed up, selfie-hungry perverts.”

30 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

thebrag.com

albums

brag beats

Off The Record DANCE AND ELECTRONICA WITH ALEX CHET VERIKOV

Musicians need to speak out – now more than ever

I “Sword Songs is not about anything other than life itself, and it’s not for anyone but the people who will take every last one of its melodies into their hearts; the people who need it.”

Two Steps On The Water photo by Naomi Lee Beveridge / Protesters in LA photo Flickr/Neon Tommy

After all, just as Steps’ God Forbid Anyone Look Me In The Eye proved to be the most exciting, innovative record of 2016, so too is Sword Songs already making its way to the head of the pack this year, standing out as one of the most heartfelt and hardened albums dropped in the last seven months.

Sure, it’s all those things critics like to moan on about – it’s emotional, and it’s compelling, and it’s honest – but more than anything else, it feels like an album that resists academic jabbering. It’s not about anything other than life itself, and it’s not for anyone but the people who will take every last one of its melodies into their hearts; the people who need it.

Similarly impressive is Paper Thin’s Living With. Being Without, out now.

What with its wormy melodies, and layered, rapidly unravelling guitar work, the four track EP owes a debt to bands like American Football and Mineral, but Paper Thin is no nostalgia project, nor glorified cover band. Rather, they are a group of astute, clear-eyed songwriters, and songs like ‘When You Call’ succeed not because of the subtle musical debts they pay, but because of their great emotional power.

One would do well to watch what the band do next.

Album Of The Fortnight: Ariel Pink’s Dedicated To Bobby Jameson is more than worth your time, as is Alex Cameron’s new joint, but the real masterpiece is Two Steps On The Water’s Sword Songs.

Get on it.

thebrag.com

won’t lie: I do so love it when a musician jumps up and makes a public comment about a social issue, particularly if they do it unprompted.

Sometimes, it’s the balanced, thought-provoking aspect of an informed response that I am so drawn to. Think of people like Brian Eno, Kirk Degiorgio, Bill Brewster, Frank Broughton, and Kathleen Hanna – think of the things that they have said when they’ve gotten their backs up about something, or when the machinations of conservative-leaning politicians has left them with no option but to retaliate, and wage a kind of verbal war.

“MUSIC HAS POWER; A TREMENDOUS, UNDENIABLE EMOTIONAL GRAVITAS. SIMPLY PUT, IT’S A VEHICLE FOR CHANGE.”

More often, however, what makes the press is a little aimless splash that ruffles only a few feathers in the process. (I’m referring off-hand to The Chainsmokers and their recent comments about taking a dog to China. I’m against people eating dogs and the Yulin Dog Festival, but come on lads: we need to respect that there are cultural sensitivities and differences at work.)

Protesters in LA

I don’t love the ignorance, of course, or the knee-jerk response that often comes as part and parcel of it. Nor do I necessarily feel that many musicians are equipped to make these public comments. But their input gives us perspective on how specific groups in society are affected by socio-political issues.

Concerning a topic I wrote about back in June (gendered representation in electronic music), I received plenty of thoughtful responses from Australian producers and DJs that were applicable well beyond the more narrow focus of the article. Sydney’s oft-quoted lockout laws have also been appropriately considered by a whole range of groups and individuals.

Elsewhere on the newcomers front (kinda) is Tropical Fuck Storm’s ‘Chameleon Paint’. A supergroup made up of members of The Drones, High Tension and Harmony, Tropical Fuck Storm combine the whomping electro work and good old fashioned punk fuckery of The Drones’ last record, Feelin’ Kinda Free. The new single is lacerating stuff, a riposte to the unending bullshit of social media feeds and selfies that’s about as subtle and considered as a brick half to the jaw. Tropical Fuck Storm are already one of the most exciting Australian acts around, and ‘Chameleon Paint’ is already one of the songs of the goddamn year. It’s almost good enough to make you forget we’re a few weeks away from getting annihilated by a swollen orange fascist with his stumpy little fingers on the nuclear button.

Almost.

Dud Of The Fortnight: The National’s new record is red-wine ruddied nonsense.

A big ole meh.

I love such public comments because they remind me, and us, that musicians do have a public voice. They have a tangible platform and a medium to express themselves (provided we call them out when they make throwaway generalisations or judgments.)

That, I think, is the key to the sway of musicians. They might not always feel like they have the power to influence society – they might feel, sometimes, like little more than entertainers. But the impact they can have is not to be ignored.

When we think of the word “protest”, for example, we imagine an organised mass of people; placards, slogans, a collection of viewpoints united under a kind of ideological umbrella. But an idle comment in an interview can be a form of protest too.

“MUSICIANS MIGHT NOT ALWAYS FEEL LIKE THEY HAVE THE POWER TO INFLUENCE SOCIETY – THEY MIGHT FEEL, SOMETIMES, LIKE LITTLE MORE THAN ENTERTAINERS. BUT THE IMPACT THEY CAN HAVE IS NOT TO BE IGNORED.”

And yet why is it that more and more musicians are backing away from the controversial issues?

The EDM scene, for example, is being dominated by bloated personas that reek of egos gone mad, rather than artists ready to imbue their extensive reach with a meaningful message. The internet has given us the largest network of ideas the world has ever known, and yet we find ourselves in a society in which we’re being pulled further apart, and alienated.

What I’m getting at is the act of creating tension and friction; what UK producer Jam City described in an interview as “dissonance”. What we need now is a popular form of dissonance; a disruption of frequency. Music has power; a tremendous, undeniable emotional gravitas. Simply put, it’s a vehicle for change. We shouldn’t forget that.

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 31

g g guide gig g

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

WEDNESDAY S E P TE M BER 2 7

PICK OF THE THE ISSUE Shonen Knife

For our full gig and club listings, head to thebrag. com/gigguide.

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 20 Cath And Him Liverpool Catholic Club, Liverpool West. 6pm. Free.

Reality Dreaming The Bald Faced Stag, Parramatta.

6:30pm. Free.

Strange Days + Liquid Time + Los Pintar + Luke Spook Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $8.

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 21 The Button Collective The Temperance Society, Summer Hill. 7:30pm. Free.

Hemingway Hotel Steyne, Manly. 7pm. Free.

London Grammar Hordern Pavilion, Sydney. 8pm. $89.90.

Louis Baker Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $15.

Timothy Bowen Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $19.90.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 22 Cloud Control Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $40.10.

The Gadflys The Gasoline Pony, Marrickville. 7pm. $20.

Meg Mac Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $50.

Oxford Art Factory, Sydney

Shonen Knife 8pm. $39.90.

Startling The Fearful: A Night Of Tool – feat: Third Eye Factory Theatre, Marrickville. 8pm. $25.

UV Boi Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $23.30.

Vanishing Shapes Town Hall Hotel,

32 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

thebrag.com

g g guide g

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

Newtown. 10pm.

Free.

Hotel, Baulkham Hills. 3pm. Free.

Sydney. 8pm. $64.45.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 23

Bombay Flight Night – feat: Bobby Singh, Sandy Evans, The Sirens, Tony Gorman Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $20.

THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 28

Phantom MkV Bridge Hotel, Rozelle. 3:30pm. $10.

The Grouches The Temperance Society, Summer Hill. 7:30pm. Free.

Rockin Mustangs Penrith RSL, Penrith. 2pm. Free.

Mac Miller Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $89.90.

Frances Madden The Basement, Sydney. 7:30pm. $30.

Make Them Suffer Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $28.90.

Manalion Oxford Art Factory Gallery, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $11.60.

Pond Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 7:30pm. $50.

Rackett The Chippo Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $14.30.

The Soul Movers Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $12.

Tina Arena ICC Sydney Theatre, Darling Harbour. 7:30pm. $121.50.

SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 24 Blake Tailor Bull And Bush

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 26 Angus And Julia Stone Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 8pm. $89.90.

Swollen Members Oxford Art Factory, Darlinghurst. 8pm. $54.20.

WEDNESDAY SEPTEMBER 27 Shonen Knife Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $39.90.

The Vamps Hordern Pavilion,

Pond

Fiona Boyes Band Leadbelly, Newtown. 7pm. $17.85.

Matt “Lightening” Ross Lazybones Lounge, Marrickville. 8pm. $15.

Whoa Mule The Gasoline Pony, Marrickville.

7pm. $7.

FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 29 AJJ Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $30.

At The Drive-In Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park. 8pm. $97.

Pond Enmore Theatre, Newtown. Saturday September 23. 7:30pm. $50.

This year, intergalactic mind-melting unit Pond released probably the best record of their career, The Weather. They’ve always been a tight, impossibly talented live act, so you can bet their Sydney show will be special indeed.

Pond photo by Matt Sav / At The Drive-In photo by Ashley Mar

Ali Barter

At The Drive-In

Ali Barter Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. Thursday September 28.

8pm. $28.90.

Between her acclaimed Fairgrounds set, her signing to Inertia, and the release of her excellent A Suitable Girl, Ali Barter has made a pretty good run of it as of late. You can catch the ascendant star at the OAF.

thebrag.com

At The Drive-In Hordern Pavilion, Moore Park. Friday September 29. 8pm. $97.

With their album Interalia, Texan hardcore legends At The Drive-In proved to the world that they didn’t spend their 17 years of hiatus twiddling their thumbs – their new material is as thrilling and vicious as their classics.

BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17 :: 33

g g guide gig g

free stuff

send your listings to : gigguide@seventhstreet.media

head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

Peter Hook

Peter Hook And The Light Metro Theatre, Sydney. Monday October 2. 8pm. $69.90.

Unknown Pleasures and Closer, legendary records favoured by lost and lonely teenagers the world over, are set to be dusted off and reshaped by Peter Hook and his band this October, as the legendary artist returns to our shores once more.

Even As We Speak Red Rattler, Marrickville. 7pm. $12.

Mi Sex Stag And Hunter, Newcastle. 7pm. $44.

Viral Eyes Botany View Hotel, Newtown. 7pm.

Free.

Wafia Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $34.40.

Wharves Waywards Newtown. 9pm.

Free.

SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 30 Cash Live – feat: Daniel Thompson, Stuie French, Artie Taylor and more Leadbelly, Newtown. 6pm. $35.20.

Dan Sultan Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $56.20.

Get Rocked The Bunker, Coogee. 8pm.

Free.

Haken Factory Theatre,

Marrickville. 8pm. $60.

Kid Kenobi Manly Wharf Hotel, Manly. 6pm.

Free.

Les Butcherettes Landsdowne Hotel, Chippendale. 8pm. $36.50.

Los Romeos Oxidados The Gasoline Pony, Marrickville.

3pm. Free.

Sorority Noise + Oslow Oxford Art Factory, Sydney. 8pm. $42.90.

SUNDAY OCTOBER 1

City Recital Hall, Sydney. 7:30pm. $76.80.

Dune Rats Big Top Sydney, Milsons Point.

6pm. $51.

Peter Hook And The Light Metro Theatre, Sydney. 8pm. $69.90.

Rita B The Gasoline Pony, Marrickville.

6pm. $7.

MONDAY OCTOBER 2 Aled Jones

TUESDAY OCTOBER 3 Old Crow Medicine Show Enmore Theatre, Newtown. 7:30pm. $99.

Have a gig or club listing to get in The BRAG? You can now submit your gig and club listings, head to thebrag.com/gig-guide.

JUST DANCE Who actually likes going out to clubs? They’re sweaty, crowded and the music sucks.

Moreover, why spend all that time and energy bumping around a dark room with a bunch of gross lurchers trying to hit on you when you could just as easily stay in the comfort of your own home and bop along to Just Dance 2018? The newest instalment of the insanely popular video game franchise boasts a bevy of new songs guaranteed to get you shaking your thang in the privacy of your own living room.

Excitingly, we here at the BRAG have two copies of the game to give away. To enter, head over to thebrag.com/freeshit.

free stuff head to: thebrag.com/freeshit

WHAT RHYMES WITH CARS AND GIRLS

Sounds good, right? Fans of the iconic album will need no further impetus to get along, but if you’d like to try your luck, we have a few double-passes to the opening night (Wednesday October 11) to give away. To enter, head over to thebrag.com/ freeshit.

34 :: BRAG :: 725 :: 20:09:17

thebrag.com

What Rhymes with Cars and Girls photo by Jeff Busby

Melbourne Theatre Company have been touring their critically-acclaimed musical What Rhymes With Cars And Girls, based on Tim Rogers’ debut solo album, since 2015. The production is finally making its way to Sydney, playing at Parramatta’s Riverside Theatre from Wednesday October 11 to Saturday October 14. We’re pretty excited, too!

Described in the press release as “an intimate musical gem”, the all-singing, not-much-dancing extravaganza was written by Aidan Fenessy, and is set to feature Rogers himself.

TICKETS NOW ON SALE

W I N N E R

9

TO N Y

A W A R D S® I N C L U D I N G

B E ST

M U S I C A L

SO F**KING

“

GOOD THE DAILY SHOW

FROM 28 FEBRUARY 2018

SYDNEY LYRIC THEATRE BOOKOFMORMONMUSICAL.COM.AU

“

IT MAKES ME ANGRY.