the pronouns we, us and our got a workout in class this week. and pronouns are fond of flexing their muscles in public, but it would seem they don’t take too kindly to questions about the nature of the way they flex. the flexing has enough tension in it already without those uncomfortable questions. what i mean to say is that the when someone says our music or we are more like this and less like that, the pronoun our and we functions in an inclusive and exclusive way. it imagines a border between that which is in our grouping and that which is not. the pronoun works to create such a imagined grouping so the rest of the sentence can appear to be saying something which has a basis. the pronoun is quite sneaky in that regard, in how significant what it does is in relation to how seemingly innocuous and common it is.

in this case the imagined grouping the we refers to is australia, in other words, the imagined community of a nation. this is the term coined by benedict anderson in his book by that name, where he delineates an actual community from an imagined community because it – the imagined community – is not (and cannot be) based on quotidian face-to-face interaction between its members. instead, members hold in their minds a mental image of their affinity.

it was this line of questioning which led me to point out that the music being played and discussed in class was also just a bunch or organised sounds. a parallel way to make this point is to say that the words we and our are also just shapes, in this case, black shapes against a white background. the point here is a fundamental one: there is a thing (a sound, a shape) and then there is what it represents. or to construct the sentence in the negative: the representation is not the thing itself. i’m not necessarily saying this to blow apart the grounds of the discussion about authentic australian music or any other discussion about authenticity, but rather, the issues of imagination and representation help us best engage with the complexity and contested nature of the we and the us. and it is contested: there were three songs played in class, each with very different ideas (that is, representations) of australia, yet no one was willing to say definitively that one was the authentic representation of australia, and if someone was willing, someone else would have disagreed. the we never sees i to i.

paul gilroy’s reading had this sense of complexity and contestation surrounding the issue of authenticity. we engaged with some of this in class through the presentations, but the biggest problem with our discourse was that the issue of race was almost entirely absent. now it might seem on the surface that the issues of “black music” and its relationship to slavery, post-slavery, racism and social inequity are american issues and hence have not all that much to do with us. such a surface appearance is utterly wrong, in at least two senses. firstly, the history of imperialism and racism is a history that includes us. secondly, it’s often argued that we are no longer as racist as we were in the past (the we here is colonial whites) – which may or may not be true – and therefore we can move on from talking about race and colour all the time. whilst moving on from race as a category of human organisation is a good idea (see gilroy), such an idea (especially when argued by white people) has potential for historical blindness, that is, the language of race is something we brought with us. ‘blackness’ was a category imposed upon aboriginal people as part of a white supremacist ideology that saw them as inferior savages to be civilised or killed. that violent history and its negative identification of ‘blackness’ stills sets the stage for indigenous people in the present and the ongoing atrocities committed against them (the latest being the destruction of land rights in the N.T.) by us.

what does this have to do with music and popular culture? well, everything. one of the things you get from the paul gilroy reading, in a general sense, is the complete interrelationship between musical aesthetics and a lived social reality. this was what amiri baraka was saying in the documentary we are the blues: the market wants to exploit the aesthetics of the blues for consumption as entertainment, but want none of the reality of the history of the suffering that produced it. and that history of suffering has a distinct colour. to have really engaged with the colour in our local situation we would have done well to listen to jimmy little over slim dusty, the warumpi band over cold chisel and wire mc over the hilltop hoods.

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links:

there’s a couple of amiri baraka’s poems recorded as part of the dial-a-poem project run by the american poet john giorno in the 70’s. baraka’s poems are the 12th and 19th tracks, downloadable as mp3’s.