S.L.A.M rally: a response.

When the SLAM Rally came to an end, it was hard not to feel warm and fuzzy inside. A tad It’s a Wonderful Life. While I didn’t see people handing out hundred dollar bills to the homeless or bolting from the protest to head straight to the soup kitchens, the general opinion directly after the protest was that this rally summed up all that was valuable in society - community spirit, political agency and good ole gosh darned passion - and also tapped into a previously often-opinionated but relatively diffuse and un-mobilized group, that of the ‘Melbourne independent music community’ (and I gladly quote here). There was a lot of backslapping, beer drinking, live-music-watching and manifestos that night. Wow, that was fucking amazing. We really showed the bastards. It almost felt like a victory.

But protests tend to do that. They stir up raw emotion, a physical response (whether it’s hand-claps or a therapeutic fist shake), and a sense of solidarity. It’s hard, particularly when enjoying one of those rare moments in this fine city - a real protest – to maintain a critical distance. As the crowd makes its way along Swanston and up Bourke, you feel a potent mix of wonderment, anger and excitement wash over you. Why stop to think? However, while we can drink up and celebrate our successes, it’s also important to look at just what happened, and it’s a positive sign that so soon after, people are offering genuine critiques of the rally.

Considering I’m responding to contemporary’s post, I might as well reprint his friend’s initial six-point list of what was supposedly wrong with the protest.

1... The people loudly retching and complaining during the short free-jazz piece that was performed, EVEN THOUGH several of the speeches had just taken great care to praise the diversity of Melbourne's music scene.

2... Every part of every speech where people were prodded to BOOOO. I mean Christ ~ we're adults, legitimately protesting; not 6-year-olds at a skeezy pantomime....

3... The Socialist Alternative douchebags trying to co-opt the rally, sullying the power of the number in attendance and diluting the unity of the message.

4... The backward-focus of most of the speechmakers. There were definitely some exceptions (Pikelet, Tim Rogers), but it seemed like most of the speakers were more focused on talking about some amazing gig they saw in 1976 than talking about Melbourne music's *future* -- which is what is at stake.

5... The inflated estimates of how many people were there. It was a big fucken turnout, but there is *no* *way* that there were 20,000 people there. (And they're the more conservative guesses ~~ Amanda Palmer claimed upwards of 70,000.)

6... The low-sitting shame and disappointment that comes with knowing that this rally will almost certainly succeed ... (I'll be astonished if we don't see a direct effect of this in liquor license policy in the next 6 months) ... while the just-as-big rallies for climate justice have led to absolutely nothing. Why can this succeed where the far-more-crucial one was doomed to fail?

Straight off the bat, I’m going to broadly agree with contemporary on points 3 and 5, and qualify point 2.

Firstly, I’d contest that booing is somehow ‘infantile’ or ‘stupid’. Protests are visceral politics (literally the body politic), and it’s amazing when a section of the citizenry is so worked up by an issue that they literally yell and scream at the seat of power. Rational argument is for coffee shops, letters to the editor and conversation. A protest is a breaking point. Protest is also a performance. A group of citizens standing in front of Parliament is a rare physical confrontation within the democratic system. A potentially threatening physical act directed towards the physical icons of power. It’s a performative act anyway, so we might as well live the pantomime. If we were all simply going to stand there and politely clap after each speech, we might as well have sat on the couch, drank tea and watched the ABC.

Socialist Alternative do just ‘come with the territory’, simple as that. Their appearance (yet again!) at any protest vaguely related to their goals of revolutionary socialism (or is it socialized revolution? I can’t keep up these days) is not news, and shouldn’t really be used in terms of a critique of the SLAM rally as a whole. A similar argument goes for the outlandish protest numbers (for what it’s worth, my guess for all the jellybeans in the jar, is 15,000).

The wider critique that contemporary offered though, which echoed the initial problems outlined in points one and four of the list, provided a more compelling argument:

it was the proponents of this bloated rock myth - the Boomers and the Xers collectively known as "Melbourne's rock royalty" (a phrase that couldn't be more apt) - that mostly held sway in the speeches, and who set the tone for the rally, as some kind of repairing of this great big rock establishment in Melbourne.

While the majority of artists, the ‘rock royalty’ if you will, were skewed towards the older side of things, I’m not necessarily sure that this was such a major problem. Personally, I didn’t hear much call for the re-instatement of a once great rock utopia and in fact, the better speeches warned against wishing for exactly that. Paul Kelly, didn’t lionize particular venues and claim that if the Tote or the Dan O’Connell would just re-open, all would be right again with Melbourne, but quite modestly noted that venues would always close, but it was important that the culture was maintained. Furthermore, the discussion on stage about country pubs, small, forgotten bluegrass gigs and bouzouki playing in Prahran, showed that the discussion wasn’t about dragging Melbourne back to some imagined time in the 70s or 80s, when from St. Kilda to Fitzroy, music spilled out from pubs onto the street, and the city danced away the night, or about protecting ‘Boomer’ gigs in the inner-city, but actually highlighted just how many disparate venues would be affected.

It was clear that Evelyn Morris gave the best speech - a clear account of the current state of play - and that the rally would have suffered greatly without her presence. Her lack of hubris and clear discomfort at speaking to a mass of people (as opposed to Ms. Bowditch’s empty ‘OMG look at me, I’m wearing SUNGLASSES’ speech), really spoke to what the rally was about. Desperately normal people, wanting to be Paul Kelly or Missy Higgins, but quite happy playing to sixty people at Yah-Yah’s on a Wednesday night. One of her closing lines, “We’re strong enough as a community to overcome anything,” was one of the most powerful of the day. Yet she too delved into nostalgia, talking about giving up her stadium rock dreams at the age of sixteen, and her surprisingly quick entrance into the music community. I didn’t see any real problem that most speeches spoke from personal experience and memory to make a point, I’ve got no doubt that I would have done the same. Which wasn’t such a bad thing anyway, because in the end the rally was about maintaining, and developing a culture, a specific culture with its own history and its own needs.

And I think that’s where I diverge in regards to the Rock vs. DJ argument. While I accept that there were a lot of childish low blows, and elitist stereotyping in regards to ‘dance music’ and ‘DJs’, particularly as that community are just as passionate about music as we all are (making a clear break between decent dance clubs and beer barns here), I think the overall distinction had to be made. Because as an emotional Jon Perring explained at the end of the rally, live music is a very different animal. No club in their right mind would keep hiring DJ’s and keep the doors open if only thirty punters rocked up across the night. They’d shut up shop. In comparison, live music has unique difficulties in regards to liquor licensing act, mainly because some pockets of the industry run on passion and love, and are happy to keep a good blues band playing on a Sunday afternoon for a smattering of locals. The lack of distinction in Government policy has impacted the live music community heavily, and it would have been counter-productive to spread the protest to the entertainment industry as a whole. With no negativity intended, S.L.A.M did need to position itself as a unique entity from the rest of the late-night traders, as they’re working from different angles and aiming for different goals.

I didn’t leave the protest ambivalent, and I’m glad to say that after reflecting on what happened I’m still happy with the framing of the rally. The protest was in effect institutionalized from the beginning and framed as such, as a clear call for the elected Government to do something, and I don’t see a real problem with booing politicians, effectively telling them they’ve fucked up, and then asking them to fix it. And while I commend the Liberals for their stunning display of tactical politics, apart from a vague 'Liberals love live music', they haven’t really laid out a productive plan. Boos were probably warranted.

And finally, I don’t see why we should wish for a Sydney or Perth situation, and while those scenes churn out some amazing bands, I wouldn’t sacrifice quantity for quality. It goes down to the whole democratic vibe of Evelyn's speech. Sure there’s a lot of complacent bands in this town, but there’s also small cliques of hyper-aware, innovative kids doing weird things with casio keyboards and amplified guitars. The youth are always confused, angry and loud. We don’t need to create abject conditions to force what will always come naturally to creative people. All we need to do is offer them the Thornbury backyards and cafes, the Fitzroy open mics and the Missing Link walls and allow all the awkward Led Zepplin lovin’ drummers, good and bad, step up on stage.

And let’s all respect the free jazz, huh kids?