It all began with a slight but suggestive sartorial detail. A little thing easy to miss amid the wash of bogus Australian Bicentennial pseudo-events and bogus Australian champagne. It was at the press conference to launch the first advisory report of the Constitutional Commission, where to my eyes one little thing stood out from the usual run of the mill meet the press bun fight. There, wedged in between the bespectacled, grey suited dignitaries, with their tastefully conservative ties perched like floppy kippers between neatly pressed lapels, there sat Mr Peter Garrett in a faded black denim jacket and an open necked shirt. As the report being launched tells us, Garrett is "Lead singer for Midnight Oil; lawyer".1Evidently he was dressed in the style of the former of these two capacities.

It seems to me that the "lawyer" appellation was less important under these circumstances than the "Lead singer". This is what is most curious about the whole show. How is it that "Lead singer for Midnight Oil" has become the sort of qualification one lists at the front of advisory committee reports? How is that the most striking thing about Mr Garrett's curriculum vitae is the discreet non-mention of his most remarkable achievement: the fact that this lead lawyer-singer came within a hair's breadth of winning a seat in national parliament?

Midnight Oil are a rock'n'roll band after all. A popular act, admittedly. Yet if that were the main criteria, why not Michael Hutchence of INXS, Jimmy Barnes or Neil Finn of Crowded House? Or even Australian of the Year, Mr John Farnham himself - surely still a household name in this land. After all, these are the entertainers which the industry itself considers its 'favourite sons' (sic).

Clearly, something else is going on here, The perennial presence of Peter Garrett in the public eye seems to me symptomatic of a whole range of things that can be pin-pointed in the relationship between our popular culture, political culture and the 'culture industries' as they stand at the moment. This essay seeks in part to use Garrett as the thread for a rumination (summary as it is) on how these relationships might work.

The critic has to be careful in territory such as this. Take the opening trope of this essay: The critic as the one who has an eye for the telling detail. The suspicious mind which seizes on the metonymic part that will explain the whole business. But by what right? While the primary interest in what follows is in the 'micro-politics' of certain pop music, it is important also to lend an ear to the politics of the critic's relation to all that. A straightforward critical detachment may turn out to be not quite so straight after all. Particularly if the critics have detached themselves only too well. 'Critical distance', if you can bear the pun, can be taken too far. Hence this essay runs back and forth between the business of music and the business of criticism.

2. Oils Ain't Oils

There is a distinct lack of solid, critical writing about popular music in Australia. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that there is a distinct lack of popular music. A preliminary distinction may help explain this state of affairs.

On the one hand, we have the music industry; on the other, popular music. I define popular music for present purposes as being that which enjoys the devoted, sincere, dedicated and even fanatical support and affection of a distinct and distinctive section of the general public. Which is to say, these people are prepared to buy this music off their own bat without being told to do so. In popular music, some relationship, some necessity links the audience to the music. Demand precedes supply, but those supplying the music, the musicians, have to work damned hard to prove to their audience that they are indeed the genuine article, faithful and true, a suitor who will love, honour and obey.

Once they become firmly wedded to popular music, its audience is usually tenaciously faithful to it - often for decades. This courtship occurs through the dense network of channels and capillaries which form the media landscape of our time: clubs, pubs, parties, jukeboxes, record stores, fanzines. Like any other small business, a rock'n'roll band starts small, investing a little capital, doing solid business, generating good will, word of mouth interest, building up a working stock of material, improving the product. Sooner or later, it will reach the stage where it needs a major injection of liquidity, capital or access to a big distribution network. Particularly if the band wants to break out of a small domestic market and get into big, international ones. This is when the band 'sells out', as it were.

If they are lucky, the band will succeed in negotiating a deal with the big firms in the business which doesn't damage the good will it has with its small family of loyal clients. In other words, a band will use the credibility it has garnered as purveyors of popular music as a bargaining chip to play against the majors in the business, so it can turn credibility into a base for financial success and exposure, and get a reasonable piece of the action as well.

Such is the story of Midnight Oil. The legion of Midnight Oil fans, from teenage tearaways and surfologists, to middle aged suburban public servants, are just such a loyal, faithful audience, and Midnight Oil have tried to keep the faith and keep their independence even though they now have a distribution deal with CBS, the most major of the major corporations in the music industry. 'The Oils', as they are affectionately known, have worked long and hard over the last 10 years to achieve this.

This is something of a contrast to how things work right at the heart of the music industry. The music industry is that branch of the 'culture industry' responsible for pumping out prepackaged music - be it popular in origin or not. Most prepackaged music fails in the marketplace. Some prepackaged music sells by the tonne, though not without the assistance of those branches of the industry who's job it is to promote the product, comb through it for the most bankable 'unit shifter', give it the stamp of approval of the leading style authorities - and flog it for all its worth. Here the major company which is promoting the package has to invest heavily in packaging, promotion and so on, and the band itself will be obliged to sit still for this, to allow itself to be marketed, to be cling wrapped in cellophane, fondled and pawed by the magazine and the TV people. Particularly if the act is lacking in credibility. That is to say, hasn't spent years scraping and saving and gigging and accumulating capital, goodwill and so on out there in the capillaries or tendrils of the information landscape. If it lacks this kind of base, then the act has little bargaining power with the major recording and publishing companies, and will more or less have to do as its told, more like hired hands than a subcontractor.

Prepackaged music may indeed sell, but without for all that becoming popular music. The distinction lies in the fact that the impulse to buy the package comes from above - from the marketeers and style leaders of the 'culture industries'. Supply precedes demand. The aim is to seduce the buyer into picking up what's on offer, giving it a fling or a spin. For the band, everything hinges on getting it right on the first date - its all or nothing. Obviously the major and the band want the public to flirt with it on a regular basis, but for the major this is merely desirable, not essential. The majors know - as the public knows - there is always another act to be had down at the singles bar.

I don't want to give the impression that i'm making a value judgement about the 'lifestyles' of popular music as opposed to prepackaged music. One can't exist without its complement; the monopoly sector of industry can't exist without the competitive sector; monogamy and promiscuity mutually define each other; one meets demands the other can't. The central point, in terms of Midnight Oil and Peter Garrett's style of agit-pop politics, that the impetus in prepackaged music comes from above, and in popular music it comes from below.

What I am trying to suggest is a model of 'culture industries' in Australia which does not reduce the circuit between music and audience to a crude theory of manipulation or simulation.4 Neither could account for the tension and complementarity between popular music and the music industry. These two phenomena co-exist in a dialectical relationship of adjustment, absorbtion and indifference - and daylight robbery. On the one hand; the slick music coming out of the industry which may or may not enjoy success but which can never accrue credibility without a spectacular, tragic and premature death. On the other hand; there is popular music, the music coming in out of the blue, supported by popular taste or burning conviction. Popular music can build up a steady stock of capital. but will rarely make 'the big time' without striking some kind of bargain with the monopoly sector of the business - Faustian or otherwise.

After money. credibility is the second most precious commodity in circulation. As far as the majors are concerned, once you can buy that, the rest is easy. This is why the majors are prepared to deal with acts like Midnight Oil and cede a certain amount of business and artistic autonomy to them. Unlike money, credibility can only be earned the hard way. Credibility is inseparably wedded to the mythology of 'paying yer dues' and is also a system of peer assessment, competition and support. Midnight Oil (touted in their early days as the hardest working band in the country) have earned it - and enjoyed not a little commercial success along the way. Oils ain't oils; there is a complicated politics of credibility and success which traverses the whole of the 'culture industry' and blurs its boundaries.

3. The Power and the Passion.

Within this framework, we can understand the double success of Midnight Oil and Peter Garrett. Midnight Oil are as well if not better known for their extra-musical activities as their art. This is in no small measure due to the activities of Garrett, who is 'frontman' in more ways than one. He achieved national media exposure as the Nuclear Disarmament Party candidate in the 1984 election. Since then, his distinctive high domed pate and bush hat have become familiar icons on television and in the press. The Garrett presence has mounted the soapbox for everything from the Uluru/Ayers Rock hand over ceremonies to the anti-ID card campaign to 'Surfers Against Nuclear Destruction' (SAND) and a symbolic visit to Pine Gap, loud hailer in hand. Not to mention being hypothesized about on 'Hypotheticals'. For an act which consistently refused to appear on 'Countdown' both Garrett and the Oils have achieved remarkably wide media exposure. One is almost tempted to suggest that Garrett's baldness has resulted from wearing too many hats.

Garrett has succeeded as a populist and progressive figure in the public domain precisely because Garrett and Midnight Oil have achieved credible success in producing popular music, supported from below, rather than turning out prepackaged music, promoted from above, Its authenticity is not really an issue. The Oils convey the sign of authenticity according to the conventions of their fans, and that's what counts. There is an organic link between the Oils and their patrons which precedes the machinations of the major powers that be in the industry. Precisely for this reason, Garrett is able to appear in public, wear many hats, give voice to populist causes, vent his spleen in op-eds for the tabloids,6 stand for office, sit on sub-committees, all without appearing ridiculous to the fans of Oils music. This is the precious stuff of credibility - the magic elixir of rock'n'roll power and passion - and politics.

As such Midnight Oil are a practical critique of a lot of what passes for critical practice. A critique from 'within' the so-called culture industries, which is consequently far more credible than critiques which claim the alibi of coming from without. Lets face it, criticism itself is as much inside the beast as music, and the rules of the game, the network economy it is enmeshed in is not so very different. The education industry is just as much a part of the 'culture industry' as the music industry. Yet by failing to include such obvious observations within their criticism, critics of the music business continue to misinterpret what they hear. Here are a few examples of criticism which consistently call the wrong tune.

Cochrane and Plews complain that there is a "great need for radical cultural workers inside the machine" but make no effort to properly analyse, let alone support so central and obvious an example of what can and can't be done as inside the machine as the Oils. One suspects they are happier prescribing what should and shouldn't be done. Since their proscriptions are aimed at rock musicians with acute cases of industrial deafness, they fall on deaf ears and the critics remain pessimistic about the beast of pop culture which has stuffed all and sundry down its ravenous maw.

The more knowledgeable pessimism of Marcus Breen has it that regardless of how 'sound' the songs may be, when they "suffer a transformation and become an extension of the marketing nexus of the dominant cultural and social values, their meaning is changed." Or, no matter how pure your intentions, 'they' will turn it into something evil. Criticism in the paranoid mode, in which ordinary people are assumed to simply consume meaning, rather than participate in its production. A difficult position to sustain without slipping into a patronizing 'holier than thou' tone in order to explain exactly how the critic remains immune to "dominant cultural and social values" which somehow get injected into the mainline consciousness of everyone else.

Michael Birch quite rightly stresses the "ongoing relationship between the nature of cultural products and the technology of production and distribution." He also gives an account of the influence of the 'Birmingham school' on the study of popular culture, and the way that they look at it as "a field of struggle, a battleground of ideology, a field in which dominated groups win space for themselves." So far so good. He also ticks off "scholarly work" which has "taken a phenomenon through which millions have found expression, and has spilled quantities of academic ink to find a definition of popular culture." Which is even better, (though one wonders why its in the past tense). Birch is admitting to the futility of attempting to define pop culture other than nominally and relatively.

Just when things were going so well, Birch seems to succumb to the most tedious error of all: nostalgia. He can't resist an invocation of 'the real sixties', as he experienced it, and expresses a desire to rescue the critic's own times from younger critics who evidently don't understand them at all. This application of selective memory culminates in dark mutterings to the effect that "the 'political role' of popular music seems to have disappeared" and that for Australians "the implications of recent developments are even worse." Sadly, this is a position which could only be sustained by keeping ones ears as firmly closed as one's mind.

The bottom line with all of these critical approaches is pessimism about culture industries other than education and cultural practices other than criticism. They all seem to derive from an excess of exceedingly general arguments of the sort where you take away the number you first thought of and the answer always adds up to an admission of hopelessness.

For example, Birch argues that successive cultural technologies tend to be more and more alienating, and estrange the performer more and more from her or his own work, The example given is video: "the innocent days when a live band were just filmed making their music are gone forever." Innocent days? This is really nothing more than the common sense supposition that 'they don't make hotdogs like they used to'. Notice that the alienating technology of today is compared with... the day before. As if the cultural technologies of the 70s were not alienating to those who first experienced them, relative to what went before. Lets not forget that the Frankfurt school fell out over such 'alienating' technologies as photography, cinema and jazz music. There is nothing historical or dialectical about Birch's view of alienation here. No sense of the capacity of commodity production and the division of labour to both enslave and enliven; liberate and estrange. Too often in Frankfurt influenced cultural studies alienation becomes the original sin which irrevocably adulterates every morsel of (non-academic) cultural sustenance. It becomes the intellectual's alibi for an orientation to a theological beyond - nostalgic past or utopian future.

Returning to Birch, on the subject of Garrett and the Oils we get this:
"The effect of a 'political' band like U2 on Irish politics will always be negligible. The example of Peter Garrett's failure to enter the senate, despite an enormous vote, is a perfect example of the treatment of performers in the world of popular music once they attempt to step outside it. Right wing bad actors can do it, but not people with bald heads. The business is now not just commercialized but industrialized."

Firstly, politics is collapsed into culture. U2's white flag raised against hundreds of years of bloody history, Garrett putting the wind up the Sussex st Labor hacks and debating Bill Hayden live on national tv are not considered for what they are - symbolic action, ethical parables - but lamented for what they are not: instrumental political acts. The second and third sentences are the pessimism of insatiable criticism: hard to please, never satisfied. It would be just as easy to be overjoyed at how rattled the ALP were by Garrett's showing. The last sentence takes off on a new tack, and sees the root of the problem in the evil industrial structure. Yet if we take this metaphor seriously, would we not have to argue that teachers and metal workers and soapie actors and are all equally in hopeless political situations because they work in 'industries'. Perhaps that's why, like musicians, teachers and metal workers and actors sometimes form and join unions. The network economy of power, information and money is still there for all and sundry to struggle in, be they in 'industries' or not. Only when we measure such efforts by some imaginary, utopian standard do they pale, which is a good reason not to conduct criticism on such a basis, lest we all get miserable and depressed. What politics is, criticism should be - the art of the possible.

Truly there is no shortage of pessimism when it comes to pop culture! "The Frankfurt school is alive and well and living in Australia" indeed! Ironically enough, while these critics are busy "pitting themselves against the working class" (as John Docker puts it), Garrett is busy trying to do the opposite. Whether he passes some critics' ideological soundness inquisitions on all issues is not really the issue. The point is that Garrett's is a practical critique of critical practice, as practiced in the academy. Perhaps the soapbox orator has a better understanding of the armchair critic than the armchair critic has of soap on the box!

4. Best of Both Worlds

To return to the main point: i'm arguing that credibility sets popular music apart from prepackaged music, and that the Oils and Garrett are fine exponents of the former. This suggests two things, Firstly, that popular music of this sort is the heir to the tradition of folk music. Perhaps we could say that popular music is the folk music within monopoly capital. Any politics, any culture which is not merely utopian dreaming must take place within the social formation which prevails, and that is no cause for grief.

Secondly, within the particular beast that is our own social formation, the organic links between The Oils and their audience have been the springboard for Garrett to establish quite another kind of organic social relation and credential. To my mind, Garrett represents the figure of the organic intellectual in our time. Not quite the organic intellectual Gramsci spoke of. This is not quite the same conjuncture as fascist Italy in the 20s. The traditional intellectuals, to whom Gramsci contrasted the organic intellectuals, are certainly no longer principally the clergy, although the structure of their moral beliefs today may be rather similar.

Still, i think the analogy holds. Garrett uses his position in a particular set of social relations which are to do with the business of manufacturing music, in order to give voice to his constituency. Garrett sees the constituency with whom and for whom he speaks as being more or less the same as the audience for whom he makes music as part of the collective entity that is Midnight Oil. While Garrett takes care to distinguish these roles in public life, the credibility of both are founded upon the same sort of rapport. It is a simple thing so hard to achieve. There is nothing formal or institutional about this relationship, but from this double position Garrett acts as as a mouthpiece for certain conflicts and negotiations - which is the very stuff of our hegemonic culture.

David Rowe puts the up side of this very nicely:
"Rock and overt politics collide only intermittently, at particular moments when broad social movements meet performers with Brechtian aspirations. Garrett hopes to use his over-18 fans as a block vote and to link them to the heterogeneous clutch of organizations which is anti-nuclear. At the same time, he is playing Pied Piper to the nation's current and emergent youthful constituency. Garrett is ... a spectral repudiation of Hawke's consensus, a metonym for the excluded and the dissident. It is encouraging to feel that ... rock can still provoke dreams of a new synthesis in the slumber of fiscal austerity."

As independent outsiders with their own base of support, both Garrett and the Oils can 'deal' with the business end and the press without being captive or captivated by either. This 'relative autonomy', besides bestowing an aura of credibility, has certain other advantages. It helps give Garrett access to the press and makes him a relatively recognizable 'talking head'. The Oils spent some ten years building up a name and a reputation, so they don't totally need either CBS or the media to put them into circulation. Garrett is quite well known without all that, which not only gives him some leverage vis a vis the publicity machinery of the music business, it also gives him a tiny, tiny bit of leverage with the non-music media. Editors want Garrett because he is already known and hence good copy.

Midnight Oil and their management try to use this to extract some degree of control over their image and message. Interviews are granted selectively, and they may retain the power of veto over a photo session. Needless to say there is very little room to manoeuvre when it comes to dealing with the mainline press, but 'The Office' which runs Midnight Oil's affairs have applied the lessons learned in the music media to the media in general. There is certainly a lot to be learned from their example about messages that "suffer a transformation" (as Breen puts it) in the media process.

Thus, Garrett has two of the things political figures aspire to - constituency and media access - without a political party. His attempt to be part of one, the Nuclear Disarmament Party, was not in the end a success. Garrett's split with the NDP is a complicated affair, but part of the problem may have been that Garrett's methods of work were so much at variance with those of a political party. Garrett worked up out of an organic relation to a grass roots musical culture, into the electronic media. Perhaps his style did not translate very well into the rorting and wrangling of a quite different kind of grass roots organization - the mass social movement. Individualism is both the strength and weakness of Garrett's personal, populist style.

It is no surprise that Garrett is fond of quoting Orwell. Like Orwell, Garrett is popularly credited with a knowledge of politics without being tainted by too close a complicity with it. He retains (for some) the dignity of the committed artist who is both half in and half out of political life for the self same reason: the absolute necessity to retain moral integrity. What we might call the Orwellian dilemma, or the Catalonian tragedy...

Garrett is ideally placed to act as a populist figure: not totally dependant on the culture industry, not answerable to the 'politics industry' either. For a pop populist, the best of both worlds is to work with both but be identified with neither. Garrett uses this double position to advance a vision of a stripe which is uniquely his own. It combines appeals to 'Australian-ness' with elements from the agendas of the social movements of the 70s. (Perhaps Garrett inbibed the spirit of these while studying for that law degree). Some of its elements are: environmentalism, anti-americanism, land rights. At the same time, Garrett nods towards an older tradition of radical nationalism: republicanism, egalitarianism, participatory democracy, the rights and needs of the little people. A fair go for all. Garrett's most interesting contribution to our political culture is in demonstrating that ways in which older values can be aligned with more recent and seemingly different ones, and may be made more palatable to younger generations who may not even be aware of our progressive traditions.

Of particular interest in this respect is the visual iconography. That bald head is such an inspired symbol in this regard. Together with his catatonic dancing and open, outstretched hand, the bald head has always been an integral part of Garrett's stage presence, but off stage it has come to mean rather more. To return to matters of sartorial detail: if hair styles signify anything in this day and age, it is age itself. A haircut, particularly a 'public' one, is always some sort of compromise between what befits ones age, what is fashionable, and how one wore it in one's youth. Garrett sidesteps the whole problem by abolishing it. The gleaming skull bridges the gap between the old left and the new left; the counterculture and post punk marginalism; city and surf subcultures. Certainly, all of the songwriting members of Midnight Oil (principally Jim Moginie, Rob Hirst and Garrett) are of an age which puts them somewhere in between the student radicalism of the late 60s and the punk rebellion of the late 70s, but the eclectic mix of attitude, iconography, ideology and musical styles which characterizes the band's art tries to speak to like minded souls from any and every period of cultural formation.15 Hence the bold bald shine under the follow-spot at centre stage: a sign of open, honest, neutrality, catatonically animated.

The Aussie bush hat is another key icon here. While the bald pate has gathered significance accidentally, the bush hat does have a slightly more calculated air about it. As far as i'm aware its first public exposure was when Garrett launched the NDP campaign. It also appeared in the context of a public event connected with the Constitutional Commission: the re-enactment of the proclamation of Australia as a nation.

The bush hat's connotations are obvious, and therein lies its appeal. More interesting are subsequent attempts to appropriate it. In a daring display of image scavenging Ian 'Molly' Meldrum took to wearing one as host of the ABC's pop TV show Countdown to cover his receding hairline, and made a big show of symbolically giving Bob Hawke one when the latter appeared one night in the guest compare's seat. Thus Garrett, the wearer of many hats, has put one particular hat in circulation which has since been worn on many formerly hatless heads.

At the very last Countdown annual award show, Molly removed the hat to reveal a clean shaven pate, a la Garrett - no doubt mean as a show stopping joke to commemorate the antagonism there has always been between Meldrum and the Oils. The joke was on Meldrum. We all knew at the time that the avuncular Meldrum is going bald, and losing his grip on Australian teen consciousness, but not even Garrett himself knows if Garrett is going bald. The spokesperson for the aspirations of youth, now 33, is reserving the right to grow old but not grey, gracefully. So far the press and the industry have let him, and that in itself seems to me to be a powerful tribute to the Garrett-Oils credibility. Something worth paying homage to - at least this once.

Of course, it would be possible to approach this whole business in a more critical vein. Neither Garrett nor Midnight Oil nor their management are beyond reproach, not all of their judgements along the road have been good ones, as they are themselves aware. Still, i think it is necessary to appreciate that stance for what it is, before denouncing it from that more traditional seat of intellectual judgment - the armchair.

From an unknown source, by McKenzie Wark

(Note: this article has not been approved for reproduction.)