40 Mass Media Moments That Changed Australia

The Tribal Mind - 40 Mass Media Moments That Changed Australia (Registration Required).

David Dale, writing in his SMH column The Tribal Mind and copying a list of "100 mass media moments that changed the world", in British magazine Uncut, has listed the "40 Mass Media Moments That Changed Australia. There are some very predictable media moments there but a couple of omissions that I think are critical in their absence.

First up and most glaring, how can this list contain 'Bandstand' without 'Countdown'?!

I don't even remember Bandstand, being born in 1965, but Countdown was a standard feature of TV in the 70s and 80s. Countdown stands as a monolith over the entire late-1970s, early-1980s national music culture of Australia! Many many bands came through that mill which connected the individual city pub rock scenes with a national audience and introduced many successfull acts to the national stage. E.g. INXS, The Models, The Reels, The Sunnyboys, The Church, to name a few and to avoid the boy-bands like Sherbet so beloved of Molly Meldrum. And even on the world stage; for example the way that Meldrum pushed acts like Abba, Blondie, and Madonna, and although they may have been successful regardless of this exposure, I think that Molly's unashamed fandom of these acts and their ensuing Australian chart success probably ensured their international impact was greater than it would have been.

The other big ommission from this list would have to be the beginning of "Rage" back in 198?. Until this point, Generation-X late-teenagers and early 20-somethings like myself who had outgrown Countdown had no really quality late night TV music to watch at 3am when we came home from the Trade Union Club or wherever we were that night; but Rage not only filled this gap but got rid of the annoying presenter personality cult and played a lot of quality and obscure music to a very willing audience. Rage changed our expectations as to how music TV worked with the excellent mix of new and classic music long before Channel[V] and MTV came along with to fill it up with celebrity-based reality TV and car-makeover shows and derivative pop R&B and neo-"emo"-punk nonsense.

Here's two media moments - this time in radio.

1. The start of 2JJ with Skyhooks' "You just like me cos I'm good in bed", and;
2. The nationalisation of JJJ.

The first event marked the moment of birth of a truly great Sydney institution introducing a lot of really interesting music to Sydney's adventurous radio listeners, and the latter because it was the beginning of the slow death of the very same radio experiment, through which it still suffers a slow and agonising death today. Remember the all-day show/festival "The Works" that they used to put on once a year? What about the "Fuck Tha Police" episode?

As for bands themselves, why include Men at Work in this list and leave off many other worthy contenders? If you were to pick influential Aussie rock let's start at the beginning with Johhny O'Keefe (see also RAGE, which still features to this day as part of it's theme music, Iggy Pop covering JOK's song "Real Wild Child").

Or how about the Easybeats, the success of which bankrolled the songwriting team of Vanda and Young, which enabled them to produce and record such luminary acts as AC/DC. And not to mention the Bee Gees who are one of the biggest selling rock/pop acts of all time? How about The Saints - one of the world's first punk bands to release a single and a highly influential one at that. The punk revolution started a new musical journey that still affects music today. Or INXS which despite their recent embarrassing TV escapades nonetheless were in the 80s one of the biggest rock acts on the planet! Although the really big media event there perhaps is the death of Hutchence.

Anyway, overall David a reasonable effort but it needs more work!

Update: As David Dale kindly indicated below in the comments, the updated list is available online, as are the readership's comments on the original list. Well done David!

Responses[1]

Posted by Autonomous Organisation on 30 August 2005 20:38:59 #