and those buffoons with astroboy haircuts speak far too articulately to be anything except salesmen (and women, although there was a conspicuous absence I thought of capitalist women, mostly business-as-usual psychopathic men like kyle sandinmypants or whatever his name is). there was the gendered height thing the whole night, too. such poor planning, what was with that?

knoxville was funny as the clownery, tho, i’ll give them that. he just didn’t give a shit.

the industry side of things was quite funny, with the forced insertion (like a kind of reverse enema) of industry ‘celebrities’ such as the ugly, ugly, ugly radio hosts into proceedings, while the only people/groups of that part of the industry that were celebrated by the actual award winning artists were the independent records, ABC, and triple j. it is a great example of the functioning of the spectacle to forcefully produce certain visibilities within its closed architecture while these other elements sort spill over in a nervous, sweaty-palmed gushing of excitement under the force of attention.

You could see the true artists, if I can be so naive, because they spoke to their own jaggard rhythms.

I missed it as my flatmate refuses to watch anything except on abc and sbs. Though I managed to get him to make an exception for Rome and The Sopranos.

Indeed, there’s been too much complaining from people schooled in reading the ideologies of ’80s pop culture, and not enough figuring out what the fuck is actually going on right now. Much more so with hip-hop than rock, I’d say. But at the same time, I’m still fascinated by a more expansive concept of “virtualised” ’80s Australian pop culture politics that somehow established chains of meaning that weren’t necessarily “ideological”, even if they involved Midnight Oil at certain points. There’s also the signifying chains of ’80s British pop, which integrated occasional leftist flag-waving into a more general culture of utopianism. I haven’t read much British cultural studies, but I get the impression that its emphasis on the microscopic resistances of subculturality would tend to miss that weird relationship between programmatic politics, a public concept of the defining political horizon, and the politics of style. Or maybe I’m retrospectively reading too much into the ’80s. I’m not trying to argue for a revival of “’80s ideological” pop, by any means, but to reread it in less literal terms.

Meanwhile: ah, the ARIAs. Last century I found myself in Silverchair’s hotel room at an ARIAs after-after party, with Daniel Johns standing silently in the corner, looking for everything like David Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth. He was a barrel of laughs.