“Our” Music

Does your country have something you all call “our” music?

Australia does not.

Aboriginal tribes have their own forms of song and rhythm tools and the magical didgeridoo.  White Australia has often borrowed the digeridoo and some successful bands have been of Aboriginal origin and driven by a desire to share an Aboriginal experience of being Australian via their music and performance.

However, White Australia, us later comers who have lived here only two hundred years, after stealing the land the Aboriginal tribes and clans had been custodians of for forty, fifty, sixty THOUSAND years, have not yet created our own music form.

We generally have a lot of live music venues, pubs and the like, so emerging artists of the popular ilk can find places to practice their craft with the immediate feedback of a positive or negative audience.

We borrow other forms of music,  blues, pop, rock and do them really well, but they are not OURS.  We also do a lot of classical music really superbly, but again, not OURS.

Every now and then an artist will come along who writes songs about our experience that makes our cities and our streets sound as cool and important as the songs we love from the UK or the US make their cities sound.   I’m thinking of Paul Kelly or Richard Clapton as examples, or Midnight Oil or Skyhooks or ………..    more and more as I think about it.

As wonderful as these artists are, we still have not created OUR music, there is no form that originated with us.  Not yet.

How about your country?

Do you have a music that you all say is “our music”?

Peace,

Mikel.