I’ve been unplugged from Twitter – not like a formal thing, just, I find the idea of reading it makes me unhelpfully angry – and my brief breaches of the surface have shewn to me a repeated festival of people being red, mad and on the internet. I have looked at creatives huffing noisomely that their work is underloved because of the mass media, I have seen a man sneering that the Pope’s no expert on being Catholic – literally – and a person whose primary claim to fame is being able to write short, funny jokes most of the time implode and post I think, Garfield pornography.
I wonder about that, and I wonder about this.
I could treat my adult life as unpacking the TISM songs I listened to as a young man, the first steps out into the pop landscape. TISM are an Australian band who used the structure of the then-reasonably new techno-electronica pop music style, a fairly mid-range clearly Australian voice affect and the bleakest fucking nonstandard media perspective I’d ever fucking heard. Oh, yes, I know, alt kiddies, you’ve heard better and there’s no doubt even more obtuse, but TISM were it for me. TISM were the pop singers who sang about shitty things in pop songs – not the maudlin ‘oh fame sucks’ way, but sang about the sheer disposability of their media. They sang about the way stardom and success are expected younger and younger. They sang about the awkward disconnect of Adults trying to Connect With The Youth and in so doing completely fail to grasp why they were considered boring fucking turds, and they did all this without falling into a language space that guarded what they were talking about. They spoke and wrote and sang as Australian men singing and talking about the problems they saw at the time.
They have, by dint of merely being cynical in the 1990s, proven prophetic.
They sang about adulthood where adolescent proved completely irrelevant. They sang about the meaninglessness of life. They sang about the cult of celebrity death, about the blatant racism in Australian domestic policy, about self-justification, about classism and the cancerous abuse structure of reality TV.
And not once did they make themselves ‘a band about issue X.’ Theirs wasn’t Midnight Oil’s chest-thumping earnestness. Sure, cynicism is easy, relatively speaking, but these guys made it hard work. They did these absurd, dadaist stage shows that still featured four-chord pop songs explicitly because they thought pop songs were harder to do than other ‘conventional’ postmodern media devices. Sixteen hours of slow playing bells is fine mate, but try to make a point in four minutes with a chorus and you’ll actually be showing some wit.
They sang about how as a creative person, your audience and you are connected.