Organisers of the Aussie rock festival at Homebush will confiscate any flag or bandana bearing the national symbol at the gate.
Labelling Sydney a hot bed of racism, producers of the Sydney Showground event said it will be the only city in the nationwide event to be subject to the draconian action.
Promoters have already moved the event from the traditional Australia Day gig to a day earlier to avoid nationalistic overtones.
Spooked by last year s event, which came only weeks after the Cronulla riots, organisers will outlaw flags being brandished as a gang colour .
BDO organiser, Ken West, now says it was never their intention to ban the flag at BDO Sydney - merely, to encourage concert-goers to [voluntarily] leave their flags at home. Anyway it s not an Australia Day event.
Contrary to the reports in the media, it was never our intention to disrespect the symbolism of the Australian or any other flag.
Unfortunately the media reports yesterday were not quoted accurately and we must thank the participating media for wasting everybody s time, including Prime Minister John Howard, Premier Morris Iemma, NSW RSL President Don Rowe, Keysar Trad (a confidant of the Mufti Sheik Taj el-Dene Elhilaly) and Burt Lane of the Australian National Flag Association.
Ken needs a halfway decent media advisor, desperately
When rock concert organisers start behaving like the Bizarro World RSL of the 1960s you know that something has gone seriously screwy with Australian popular culture.
The sheer bone-headed political illiteracy of this ban is breathtaking. Has he forgotten or has he never learned that to attempt to ban something is the most effective means known to man of encouraging it?
No rock band with any integrity or understanding of the traditions of rock should want to play a gig that features exclusivist cultural nationalism.
It s the antithesis of rock. Rock happened when white kids embraced black music. In other words the children of the dominant culture embraced the culture of pariahs.
There were a few stories about unrestrained nationalism at the BDO last year. One report was a guy asking people to kiss the flag and then thumping anyone who refused. But that is anecdotal so the usual caveats apply.
But judging from the media reports it does seem a bit of a beat up. What I find a little disturbing is the jingoism inherent in the responses by our elected leaders. We can do better than a my country right or wrong type of patriotism.
And for Katz, who said,
Sydney rock musicians would do well to embrace Middle Eastern music.
Or we could get Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones out for a reunion tour. What I find a little disturbing is the jingoism inherent in the responses by our elected leaders.
We can do better than a “my country right or wrong” type of patriotism.
Absolutely! Take the following comment from Andrew Robb:
If [the BDO organisers] have got a security problem, they need to deal with that, not with the flag.
The flag is a symbol of unity,
To compare the flag to a gang colour I think is just outrageous, and totally unacceptable.
Way to miss the point! Way to miss the point!
I don t think he really missed the point at all, Cap n this is just shameless opportunistic spin, taking a punt on how dumb we all are, as pollies (on both sides, alas) are all too wont to do. Not that there s not plenty of evidence, unfortunately.
Aren t you supposed to be outside?
Katz: Rock happened when white kids embraced black music. In other words the children of the dominant culture embraced the culture of pariahs Sydney rock musicians would do well to embrace Middle Eastern music.
Oh, goodness gracious.
If anyone would like to fry an egg on my head for free, do it right now, while the steam is still shooting out of my ears.
Rock happened when white AMERICAN kids, with a long and specific cultural history, embraced black AMERICAN music, which had an equally long, specific, and *shared* cultural history. Which is to say, this whole thing went down not in an abstract zone, but in a real place, with a specific socio-cultural history which was not like the histories of other peoples and other places.
And the so-called black music was not entirely black as it happened, but had a massive infusion of Celtic modes, English ballad-structure, and native-white mountain music mixed in. Interesting to note that rock n roll did not arise in Africa (which has a large black population, so I m told) nor in Brazil, with its large black slave population that was mysteriously lacking in Scots-Irish white trash. If I recall correctly, the banjo is an African instrument, but its main practitioners are those dreadful rednecks like Earl Scruggs.
Tells you a bit of something about all that cultural back-and-forth.
English kids in the 50s upped the ante when they started listening to what they thought was black music postwar, coming as it did from the wealthy hegemonic titan across the Atlantic. What happened next was a form of beautiful cultural misunderstanding that had enormous payouts, something Harold Bloom would just friggin love.
Even the phrase Rock n roll was a low-down southern black slang expression for, well, fuckin . All this stuff is mixed up six ways to Sunday, and that s just fine. But my point in it all is the long and organic historical-cultural nature of the mixture.
I reckon you could drink a freshly-harvested Cognac wine before it was properly distilled and aged in oak, but from what I understand about the process, my guess is that you would puke if you did.
Which brings me to this jewel: Sydney rock musicians would do well to embrace Middle Eastern music.
Well, on strictly musical and aesthetic terms, whatever works well is groovy, and if they do, then good for them.
But the argument seems to draw on a false parallel with the history of white/black musics in a distant foreign country with an elaborate, long, and precise history of same. Nothing could be less true of an Australian relationship with Middle Eastern music, the music of a very, very, very, very foreign culture, only recently arrived in Australia in any meaningful numbers, and with practically zero cultural, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or ethnological claims to anything recognizable in Australian culture as commonly understood, or any worthy place in the building or creation of same.
Unless Katz would like to argue that all non-white cultures have stuff in common, simply by virtue of their shared quality of being, well, not white.
That line of thought will certainly be entertaining. Ah, j_p_z, my skillet-headed interlocutor, I ll see your Oh, goodness gracious and raise it a dearie me .
Thanks for the cultural intermix sermon.
I chose the word happened deliberately and in the clear understanding that it doesn t mean exists . I ll let you nut out the difference. If you need help, just ask.
(It so happens I agree with your explanation for rocks existence .)
Well, on strictly musical and aesthetic terms, whatever works well is groovy, and if they do, then good for them.
Well, that s mighty tolerant of you, j_p_z.
But then this doozy!
But the argument seems to draw on a false parallel with the history of white/black musics in a distant foreign country with an elaborate, long, and precise history of same. Nothing could be less true of an Australian relationship with Middle Eastern music, the music of a very, very, very, very foreign culture, only recently arrived in Australia in any meaningful numbers, and with practically zero cultural, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or ethnological claims to anything recognizable in ‘Australian culture’ as commonly understood, or any worthy place in the building or creation of same.
It so happens I m listening right now to Sir George Martin s Beatles remix Love . And what do I hear? Enormous overtones, undertones and interlacings of Indian music.
Now let s apply your straitjacket to this music.
In the 1960s for the British India was (let us see now) a distant foreign country with an elaborate, long, and precise history of same and the music of a very, very, very, very foreign culture, only recently arrived in Britain and with practically zero cultural, historical, linguistic, religious, and/or ethnological claims to anything recognizable in British culture as commonly understood .
Now, in the cool light of reason, the above interpolation shows just how silly your argument is, doesn t it?
So j_p_z, thank you for informing me that after listening to the Beatles (or for that matter the Moody Blues, or the Incredible String Band, or King Crimson or countless others for all these years, I haven t actually been listening to rock and roll with any musical integrity.
Unless Katz would like to argue that all non-white cultures have stuff in common, simply by virtue of their shared quality of being, well, not white. That line of thought will certainly be entertaining.
But no thanks.
(BTW, I like my head-fried eggs over-easy.) With Christ our head and cornerstone,
Can guide our path aright.
Our lives, a sacrifice of love, reflect our Master s care.
With faces turned to heaven above, Advance Australia fair.
In joyful strains then let us sing, Advance Australia fair.
From the always reliable Wikipaedia.
No doubt the sight in heaven that we are facing is not Christ returning in the clouds, but the Southern Cross, which God placed in the southern hemispheric sky as a symbol of Australia s Christian destiny. Sure, they were 2nd class citizens in law, but culturally their acceptance was well and truly on the table pre-rock n’ roll.
Gee, makes you wonder why Martin Luther King went to all that trouble in the 1960s.
Yes, white elites had embraced certain aspects of black culture by the 1920s. But that was a very small table.
Geraldine Baker, for example, could make a much better living in France than she could in the US.
Pioneers of 1950s white rock, like Buddy Holly in Lubbock, Texas (an awful long way from the Cotton Club) were reviled for exposing their teenage neighbours to nigger music . This is a funny development when on another thread the issue of illiberal leftists or libertarians are being mulled over.
All BDO goers should be able to wear what they want and remove it when they want.
Re the Clem Barstow link -The purists complaining that singlet adorned ,thong wearers and yobs are attending should stay at home and keep their headsets firmly on . Probably with the shades drawn.
How many rock musicians have you actually met ? Integrity , sense of history ??
- Nah ,its about the drugs and the sex. Katz yeah, okay. Some of what you re saying (Beatles, India, huh?
) sails straight past my very limited and extremely unoriginal point and lands over in the neighbors yard, but that doesn t matter, since the rest of what you say is good sense. But then I don t think my argument was silly so much as it was cranky. (I ll let you nut out the difference.
If you need help, ask!) 
anthony I ve found zero most practical. Well done! Funny, as I was writing that, I thought somebody could very handily pick this phrase up and thwack me over the head with it.
Let s see if anybody does . Not only did you pull it off, but in the fewest possible number of words. Pretty neat trick.
I think the three of us should drive around in a van, solving mysteries. Think of the arguments! Think of the lousy ratings!
OK, you were being cranky, and I was a tad immoderate. Truce?
Mmm.
Van, eh?
Are we talking VW Kombi (Microbus), airbrushed a la Janis Joplin s Porsche? He actually said that.
I can understand why the ALP voted him leader. That s so pithy, I reckon it could become a catchy phrase. Please read the .
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