Triple J and Alternative Music
My most recent substantive post was actually about the Eurovision Song Contest, but most commenters picked up on the throw-away introduction about Triple J and my (perhaps ill-considered) implication that Blink-182 does not belong in the pantheon of indie and alternative acts for which Triple J used to known.
Like other things I have written here, I think the whole definition of “indie” or “alternative” is problematic. Like tofu, because these terms have no real meaning of their own, they pick up the taste of what is around them. That and the fact that terms like “indie cred” have valorised the concept to the point that everyone wants to be alternative, which makes as much sense as everyone being “above average”.
Probably about 10 years ago I went to a “battle of the bands” type of competition with a friend, and one of the bands had identified themselves as “alternative” and claimed Nirvana as their main influence. This was long after Nevermind and Nivana were well and truly mainstream by that stage. I remember scoffing self-righteously, but I might have been overly harsh, because what is happening is a bit of convenient terminological confusion. Wikipedia describes Alternative Rock (in the USA; “indie” in Britain) as a specific genre of popular music deriving from post-punk and including such movements as grunge and Brit-pop. In this sense, as a stylistic but also temporal genre, it is easy to cite bands such as Sonic Youth, Soundgarden, or the Violent Femmes, but also bands that went on to mainstream success, like Nirvana, R.E.M., or even The Cure.
But “alternative” and “indie” also carry that authenticity-based connotation that opposes them to “mainstream” and “commercial”, and I would argue that that is what most of us think of when we see the term “alternative”. Like Wendy I think I can see a pretty abrupt shift in Triple J programming about six to eight years ago, coinciding—I would guess—with a change in the listening demographic. It is hard to qualify, but I have heard people complaining about the station becoming “more commercial”, and the featuring of a Madonna album was a particular low point, considering it was going to get played to death on every commercial station in the country.
I remember Peter Garrett saying at a Midnight Oil gig in the mid-1980s that in the early days the only radio station in Brisbane that would play their music was community/subscriber station Triple Zed. That was about the time the Oils were becoming “classic rock” staples on commercial FM. Like I say in my thesis, authenticity is about the people who had always been into (insert prestigious band/performer/genre).
So I’m not sure it makes a lot of sense talking about whether Triple J, or any other radio station for that matter, is “alternative”, because it is the listener that wants the cred, and we will read into a situation what we need to create that moment of authenticity.
Now, what’s the chance of a Blink-182 song making it into this year’s long-awaited “Hottest 100 of all Time”?
Your Comments
Matthew Smith writes:
I’ll vote for them. What’s my age again?
Posted: 11 02 2009 - 15:50 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
I thought that as the current holder of the Ian Curtis/Kurt Cobain Memorial Hottest 100 Perpetual Trophy, you would have known who you are obliged to vote for…
Posted: 11 02 2009 - 15:55 | Permanent link to this comment
Sam writes:
While Blink 182 will probably get one or two of their greatest hits in the 80s somewhere, this will be because the now vastly out numbered people who voted for them back in the late 90s will still be clinging to them.
With the change in demographic we can expect to see lots of newer songs, but I wonder how many older listeners will vote and tune in just to hear the Hottest 100 of All Time?
Also, if we fail to get Love Will Tear Us Apart back into the top 10, I’m going to hang myself from a block of melting ice.
Posted: 11 02 2009 - 17:26 | Permanent link to this comment
ben writes:
I pretty much stopped listening to Triple J while I was working at Juice magazine in the late ’90s — partly because there was no need (sharing an office with music reviewers kinda obviates the need for radio), but also because it was giving me the shits. I guess their audiences had similar demographics, but I’d been kinda suspicious for some time of the way Triple J’s audience in particular was becoming a kind of standardised market. YOUTH CULTURE! (And because Triple J and Juice were kinda similar, I didn’t want to listen to that shit at home — it reminded me of work!)
I wasn’t really listening 6-8 years ago, but for me the troubling shift pretty much happened long before this, when the station was consolidating itself nationally. It enshrined a particular take on authenticity and credibility that involved glorification of certain touchstones/genres/etc, rather than a having a critical method.
The last straw for me was in 2003, when they ran an appalling advertising campaign called “The Enemy of Average”, in which a caricature of a “stupid female pop star” was physically assaulted by a Triple J microphone during a press conference, if I remember correctly. (I’m not sure if the “alternative” alternative — some macho but equally market-centric take on rock — was explicitly identified, but it didn’t need to be.) For me, this signified the opposite of the intended message: this fucking radio station has no credibility whatsoever. Sure, as someone who’s worked in marketing, I know that the people doing the real work at the station have nothing to do with their advertising campaigns, and I knew people there who were still doing worthwhile work. But nevertheless, after that incident I would have rather died than spend a minute listening to a station that could be positioned in such a manner.
I think it’s the job of a national youth radio station to be subversive in the way it contextualises the music it plays, rather than being “anti-pop” or “non-mainstream”. Wake me up when something like this happens.
Posted: 12 02 2009 - 22:51 | Permanent link to this comment
glen writes:
Hey JOhn I’ve just been googling for Triple J demographics for a blog post I am writing, do you have any stats?
Posted: 14 07 2009 - 00:11 | Permanent link to this comment
John writes:
Hi Glen. No, I’m afraid not. I assume you’ve seen this post by Mel Campbell? It talks about the gender mix of the staff, but not mauch about the demographic.
Posted: 14 07 2009 - 09:09 | Permanent link to this comment