Blood Rising – Footy Fever in a Foreign Land
It all came down to one pack of desperate, exhausted men and an oval-shaped ball. When Leo Barry caught the football and the final siren rung out across the Melbourne Cricket Ground this past Saturday, the Australian Embassy in Washington DC roared its approval. Oversized plastic swans were bandied about, as diplomats, expats and their American tag-alongs made like they’d just won the Olympics. The Sydney Swans had defeated my beloved West Coast Eagles by a slender four points in the sacred ceremony that is the Aussie Rules Grand Final, leaving the small minority of West Australian barrackers in the house to wander home with dragging steps.
We had reached the Australian embassy, an ungainly, monochrome example of modernist architecture turned impotent, closely before the match kicked off; I, five-year landed explorer of this mid-Atlantic jungle and Juliette, month-old Melbournian exchange student. Neither of us absolute footy die-hards (a rarity in our Motherland), we had gone more for the ritual of it all, the spectacle and the heart-ache of scenes that were drenched in the sauces of our antipodean home, quietly nestled a tidy 20 hours plane time away. And besides, the Eagles were playing! Some of my fondest Ocker memories include innocent weekend afternoons, watching blue and gold gladiators like “Can’t-kick-for-shit” Peter Sumich (whose parent’s lettuce farm sales were boosted by the number of goals their son kicked the previous week) and greyhound-built wingman Peter Matera steer us to national supremacy in 1992, at age 8.
I had expected a small, perhaps even sedate, bundle of embassy employees and widely drawn nationals working temporary positions “up at corporate.” What I got was a rousing army of roughly one hundred, some even came fitted in their chosen team’s apparel. And there was tea to boot. For such a crowd, the embassy had upped the authenticity ante far beyond wheeling out a big television screen and a satellite link. That tremendous trio who go by the names Sausage Roll, Meat Pie and Pastie were there in all their flaky, chunky splendor, greeted, less surprisingly, by their well-oiled partners, Victoria Bitter and Bundaberg Rum. My stomach greeted both parties with aplomb. That night, 1601 Massachusetts Avenue had been resettled by a new, ravenous foreigner previously known only for feats of crocodile-heavy daring do and shrimped out barbies. And they had some serious business to attend to.
When we arrived, Dame Edna—a cross-dressing comedic personality whose presence on Australian TV has been consistent for several decades—was banging out a number in purple wig, truly a fitting welcome into Australiana. For Juliette, the airship pans across the MCG were a much more familiar spectacle, she’s been attendee of numerous football matches at the home ground of the sport over the years. For me, it was more of a second breath of the cleanest, more refreshing coastal wind I’ve thus far inhaled, a chance to revisit home almost exactly one month after departing Sydney on my too-short summer visit. Suddenly, I could visualize myself in a pub in Subiaco or in the living room at Bigs, Choc and Asher’s place, screaming, shaking, and refilling stubby holders. Or having a kick around out by Lake Monger, working on my wonky drop-punt with Perth’s gorgeous river skyline in the distance. This schizophrenic jumping around we label “cosmopolitanism” loses all meaning at such moments, when my generally straitjacketed yearning to move back home slinks back to the surface. “Even the Vodafone billboards make me homesick,” I told Juliette.
In their upper-thigh length shorts and spikes, with steely calves and Rambo-toned arms, the Aussie Rules footballer epitomizes the Romanesque model of Australian masculinity. Having lived in two of the world’s most sport-mad nations, I’ve reached the conclusion that no sport is more holistically physically challenging than Aussie Rules. Speed, raw strength, agility, endurance, cunning and occasionally a mean right hook are all essential tools in this game, where 18-player sides charge back and forth for 90 minutes across a large, oval-shaped field. Like all games, the purpose is misleadingly straightforward: one scores by kicking the rugby-shaped ball through two posts. But as Spike Lee once remarked, “thrown in the defense, and it’s a whole different story.”
Defense, while not generally considered the most exhilarating aspect of any game, was the dominant theme of this particular one. Vice-like tackles (where a player literally bear hugs an opponent, often leaping upon him as if to strangle or fornicate) and punishing spoils (where the defender emphatically punches the ball away as if it were his wife’s adulterous lover) offered all the answers to promising attacks again and again, leaving little work for the scorekeepers. By the end of the first half, the Eagles had scored a miserable two goals, in a sport where four times that amount is more common. One old friend in Perth sounded quite convinced of our inevitable triumph in this year’s season, and I smiled at the string of expletives he would no doubt be bellowing that very moment.
However, though the man-dressed-as-a-lady had sung, the fat one certainly had not. In a deliberate, steady ebb, the Eagles clawed their way back from having the Swans double their score in the first half, and at one point I sniffed victory.
“I just want a close game,” Juliette had told me earlier, and at the time I had whole-heartedly agreed.
But slowly and surely, my cheering became a little less well humored and a little more tribal. When I stood up and fist-pumped my approval at each hard-earned goal, when I bemoaned the umpires’ obviously one-sided calls and when I began to hide my face in my hands as the momentum began its final Sydney-side shift, the novelty of watching a footy match in the heart of Washington began to fade. This was a battle for the ages, and ethnic nationalism be damned, for that last half an hour I bled blue and gold. Between three and three thirty AM my time, five and five thirty PM theirs, Captain Ben Cousins and his Eagle troops had become the Anzacs in Gallipoli, the anti-Fascist forces in Civil War Spain, courageous guerilla rebels in the heart of some ignoble enemy’s fortress.
Western Australia is a resilient, isolated little chunk of the earth, and that afternoon, its two million odd inhabitants had their hearts resting delicately somewhere between their beanies and their television screens. Whereas Melbourne has countless (well, maybe 10) national teams, we have only two, and one of them—the Fremantle Dockers—doesn’t really count. And where the East Coast has more people, better coffee, the luxury of more than one actual city and countless other bourgeois airs, we in the West have only the Eagles. Since I can remember, Hungry Jacks (Burger King, randomly renamed for a nation of hungry Jacks, it appears) has been marketing it’s kids meal with the Eagle celebrity of the moment, and car rear windows have worn the classic, uncomplicated logo from time immemorial (1987, to be exact). So when that dreaded final siren sounded, as the screams of the triumphant rung out around me, I laid my head in my hands, heart pounding, throat hoarse. The boys from the west had gone down, and with them, at least for the time being, the hopes and dreams of nearly everyone in the state. And, incredibly, at the opposite end of the world, I was experiencing the exact same exhilarating pain.
Before long, we stepped out of our bizarre, antipodean outer-dimensional plane and back into the muggy DC night. I churned out hypothetical what-ifs and game analysis into an indifferent American air; again, Juliette became my confidante, just as I had been hers whilst discussing another mutual love, cricket, strolling through Adams Morgan earlier in the evening. Drew Banfield’s missed goal, the day I played footy in the Czech Republic with some Australian backpackers and tomato sauce as opposed to ketchup all faded against a mental backdrop of returning collegiate obligations. But oh, how good it did feel simply to lose.
Monday, September 26, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
Might I Add
-What I wish I could have told M.I.A. at the show, instead of just kissing her and knocking her over-
Maya Arulpragasam has had much virtual ink spilled over her in recent months. For the uninitiated, this Sri-Lankan-born rapper/beat producer/graphic and film artist has been rapidly adopted as the darling princess of the indie and underground hip-hop scenes. Her debut album, “Arular,” is a heart-grippingly raw, complex mixture of dancehall-inflected world beats mixed with M.I.A.’s sing-songy, surprisingly dark wordplay. I absolutely adore it.
In an illuminating interview with Pitchfork*, she discusses her motivations in transitioning from visual media to making music:
“I went to hip-hop and they were going on about something and it was like, "Dude, shut up about the Rams already!" So I went to indie and they were going on about wanting to slit their wrists and I'd be like, "Aww, how could you? Why don't you just make yourself useful?" You go to any other genre, and there's shit going on. You go to world music-- not that I did-- and there's nothing going on there: There's six billion people and they're all pissed off, yet they can't pick up the fucking stick and bang out a few tunes?”
Now if she were in a Presidential debate for powerful musicians, running on a Reform-the-Left ticket, that casual statement would have secured my vote in a second. M.I.A., as many have noted, personifies the zeitgeist of the mid-decade point in post-Millennial pop art. The indie-dance-garage scene (Franz Ferdinand, et. al) has become increasingly revisionist and retroactive, adding coy, minute updates to a movement that in a contemporary context leans only toward classicist nostalgia, hardly the sort of compelling direction that its major progenitors—post-punk and new-wave—offered in their original incarnation. Hip hop continues to drift its way through the bipolar paradigm of socially-conscious glitz (see Kweli with Kanye); the comparatively youthful genre is creatively well-ahead of contemporary rock, but is being stretched far within its sonic potential. This leaves us at M.I.A., who is indeed, musically and culturally, “pushing things forward,” to quote Mike Skinner.
I’m not going to write another metanalysis of her eclectic influences, which range across a multi-continental palate of Brazilian baile funk to Baltimore club go-go and a dozen sounds in-between, or break down the PLO references and taboo motifs of her lyrics (the album is highly autobiographical, offering insight into the modern refugee plight and sex trafficking). Rather, I only wish to celebrate the great value of M.I.A.’s voice and music to the current state of art, society and politics, a value which only seems to grow with the increasing costs of the global War on Terrorism and the increasing consolidation of Western media and thinking at large.
Maya exemplifies the hodge-podge cosmopolitanism of our time. Her singer, Cherry, was raised in Saint Catherine. Her romantic interest, DJ Diplo, is a White American who (in tandem with Hollertronix) mixes obscure, international sounds together like golden twine. Maya herself is London-born. She was raised in war-ravaged Sri-Lanka then transplanted to London at age 10; thus she has experienced the teething troubles of cultural bridging: firstly, the cold (discriminatory) shoulder of the (in her case) Anglo-Saxon establishment, her immediate reactionary options toward it (assimilation and rejection) and eventually, a Hegelian/DJ-esque dialectical synthesis of contradiction, irony and empowerment. Now it’s that final, newly-adjusted stage which is of particular note. Throughout the immigrant-receiving North, a fresh-faced, well-heeled party of first-generation immigrants is providing the impetus for a paradigmatic, multi-faceted shift the world has not seen since the height of colonialism.
Sure, most Nigerian and Indian university students are studying computer science and are more interested in a high entry-level income than ragga beatcore. And there is a very natural but ultimately non-productive drive toward ethnically-centred isolationism amongst some Arab and Turkish enclaves in Paris, amongst others. But there is a fledgling crop of creative-minded artists within our ranks (I count myself as a dual immigrant, spanning both Australia and the United States), a small, globe-spanning group who are at the heart of a new musical direction.
These artists are emotionally-abundant and identity-fragmented, drawing on the untapped inspiration of the migrant experience. And though the developing world is still flooded with Top-40 radio, devoid of region-specific message or utility, the tide is starting to reverse. Popular music was born through the Blues and Gospel, both rooted in the pain of African-America. Its most successful permutation, Rock and Pop, pull their pedigree from the sexuality and nervous energy of the White middle-class. Hip Hop was a different case; beginning with both block parties (DJing) and angsty ciphers (MCing) in its earliest form, its original voice was uniquely Black and culturally subversive. M.I.A. and the Sub-continental Reformation take these characteristics, add the vitality and emancipated power of the global “Other” (Coloured, as opposed to Black) to an already broad-based artform and repackages it in LP-sized pieces for its inevitable commercial audience: suburban, predominantly-White youth.
The audience at M.I.A.’s show was as diverse as I had imagined. There were hijab-adorned young women in the front row, fey indie boys, outnumbered hip hop heads, a lot of the college downloader caste and that most trying of concert inhabitants, gangs of homoerotic high school girls. Being first in line, I found it anthropologically satisfying seeing who rocked up and in what order. My five instantly-befriended diehards who had the privilege of a pre-show chat with Maya and Cherry during sound-check included an Indian and African-American couple, young political professionals and gap yearees. Such cultural eclecticism was all the more profound, however, when peering backward across the crowd during the opening stanza of personal highlight, “10 Dollar,” where hundreds of screaming “Oh-oh-oh-oh, Hey-Hey” refrains echoed throughout the sweaty, near-riotous venue. That the joyful chaos was being led onstage by two diminutive immigrants in short shorts and high-tops made the experience that much sweeter. Rule Britannia? Maybe for my father’s generation. Last night, a more applicable phrase would have been “Rule Tamil.”
But ultimately, like all great art, M.I.A.’s musical soul packs more punch than the actual event or the three-minute single. For every Galang-led car commercial, there’s a 13-year-old in Melbourne googling the word “Tamil Tiger” after class. A legion of young coloured girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a brown-skinned Asian on MTV instead of endless carbon-copy Kylies. A generation of fellow culture-hopping 20-somethings who hold the catharsis of childhood discrimination and assimilatory afterthoughts about our cousins back home in Malaysia clutched against our hearts. Countless young women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa contracting monogamous HIV from polygamous partners whose deaths may not be in vain. Because, M.I.A., future “Queen of pop music” or whatever hype-laced headline you want to call her, is not really all that futuristic. Our world as a whole has been consistently raping and oppressing young coloured people for a handful of centuries at the very least by this point.
As Maya herself says: “I'm chipping away! You ready for something new, hurry up.” Well keep chipping, M.I.A., knowing how many of us are behind you.
A raw, sexy, angry, cataclysmically beautiful voice is being unleashed upon an unsuspecting mass audience. And she is shouting into a microphone, over and over again, with a chorus of hundreds of passionate converts surrounding her:
“Pull up the People! Pull up the Poor!”
------------------- *http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/m/mia-05/
Maya Arulpragasam has had much virtual ink spilled over her in recent months. For the uninitiated, this Sri-Lankan-born rapper/beat producer/graphic and film artist has been rapidly adopted as the darling princess of the indie and underground hip-hop scenes. Her debut album, “Arular,” is a heart-grippingly raw, complex mixture of dancehall-inflected world beats mixed with M.I.A.’s sing-songy, surprisingly dark wordplay. I absolutely adore it.
In an illuminating interview with Pitchfork*, she discusses her motivations in transitioning from visual media to making music:
“I went to hip-hop and they were going on about something and it was like, "Dude, shut up about the Rams already!" So I went to indie and they were going on about wanting to slit their wrists and I'd be like, "Aww, how could you? Why don't you just make yourself useful?" You go to any other genre, and there's shit going on. You go to world music-- not that I did-- and there's nothing going on there: There's six billion people and they're all pissed off, yet they can't pick up the fucking stick and bang out a few tunes?”
Now if she were in a Presidential debate for powerful musicians, running on a Reform-the-Left ticket, that casual statement would have secured my vote in a second. M.I.A., as many have noted, personifies the zeitgeist of the mid-decade point in post-Millennial pop art. The indie-dance-garage scene (Franz Ferdinand, et. al) has become increasingly revisionist and retroactive, adding coy, minute updates to a movement that in a contemporary context leans only toward classicist nostalgia, hardly the sort of compelling direction that its major progenitors—post-punk and new-wave—offered in their original incarnation. Hip hop continues to drift its way through the bipolar paradigm of socially-conscious glitz (see Kweli with Kanye); the comparatively youthful genre is creatively well-ahead of contemporary rock, but is being stretched far within its sonic potential. This leaves us at M.I.A., who is indeed, musically and culturally, “pushing things forward,” to quote Mike Skinner.
I’m not going to write another metanalysis of her eclectic influences, which range across a multi-continental palate of Brazilian baile funk to Baltimore club go-go and a dozen sounds in-between, or break down the PLO references and taboo motifs of her lyrics (the album is highly autobiographical, offering insight into the modern refugee plight and sex trafficking). Rather, I only wish to celebrate the great value of M.I.A.’s voice and music to the current state of art, society and politics, a value which only seems to grow with the increasing costs of the global War on Terrorism and the increasing consolidation of Western media and thinking at large.
Maya exemplifies the hodge-podge cosmopolitanism of our time. Her singer, Cherry, was raised in Saint Catherine. Her romantic interest, DJ Diplo, is a White American who (in tandem with Hollertronix) mixes obscure, international sounds together like golden twine. Maya herself is London-born. She was raised in war-ravaged Sri-Lanka then transplanted to London at age 10; thus she has experienced the teething troubles of cultural bridging: firstly, the cold (discriminatory) shoulder of the (in her case) Anglo-Saxon establishment, her immediate reactionary options toward it (assimilation and rejection) and eventually, a Hegelian/DJ-esque dialectical synthesis of contradiction, irony and empowerment. Now it’s that final, newly-adjusted stage which is of particular note. Throughout the immigrant-receiving North, a fresh-faced, well-heeled party of first-generation immigrants is providing the impetus for a paradigmatic, multi-faceted shift the world has not seen since the height of colonialism.
Sure, most Nigerian and Indian university students are studying computer science and are more interested in a high entry-level income than ragga beatcore. And there is a very natural but ultimately non-productive drive toward ethnically-centred isolationism amongst some Arab and Turkish enclaves in Paris, amongst others. But there is a fledgling crop of creative-minded artists within our ranks (I count myself as a dual immigrant, spanning both Australia and the United States), a small, globe-spanning group who are at the heart of a new musical direction.
These artists are emotionally-abundant and identity-fragmented, drawing on the untapped inspiration of the migrant experience. And though the developing world is still flooded with Top-40 radio, devoid of region-specific message or utility, the tide is starting to reverse. Popular music was born through the Blues and Gospel, both rooted in the pain of African-America. Its most successful permutation, Rock and Pop, pull their pedigree from the sexuality and nervous energy of the White middle-class. Hip Hop was a different case; beginning with both block parties (DJing) and angsty ciphers (MCing) in its earliest form, its original voice was uniquely Black and culturally subversive. M.I.A. and the Sub-continental Reformation take these characteristics, add the vitality and emancipated power of the global “Other” (Coloured, as opposed to Black) to an already broad-based artform and repackages it in LP-sized pieces for its inevitable commercial audience: suburban, predominantly-White youth.
The audience at M.I.A.’s show was as diverse as I had imagined. There were hijab-adorned young women in the front row, fey indie boys, outnumbered hip hop heads, a lot of the college downloader caste and that most trying of concert inhabitants, gangs of homoerotic high school girls. Being first in line, I found it anthropologically satisfying seeing who rocked up and in what order. My five instantly-befriended diehards who had the privilege of a pre-show chat with Maya and Cherry during sound-check included an Indian and African-American couple, young political professionals and gap yearees. Such cultural eclecticism was all the more profound, however, when peering backward across the crowd during the opening stanza of personal highlight, “10 Dollar,” where hundreds of screaming “Oh-oh-oh-oh, Hey-Hey” refrains echoed throughout the sweaty, near-riotous venue. That the joyful chaos was being led onstage by two diminutive immigrants in short shorts and high-tops made the experience that much sweeter. Rule Britannia? Maybe for my father’s generation. Last night, a more applicable phrase would have been “Rule Tamil.”
But ultimately, like all great art, M.I.A.’s musical soul packs more punch than the actual event or the three-minute single. For every Galang-led car commercial, there’s a 13-year-old in Melbourne googling the word “Tamil Tiger” after class. A legion of young coloured girls whose eyes light up at the sight of a brown-skinned Asian on MTV instead of endless carbon-copy Kylies. A generation of fellow culture-hopping 20-somethings who hold the catharsis of childhood discrimination and assimilatory afterthoughts about our cousins back home in Malaysia clutched against our hearts. Countless young women throughout Sub-Saharan Africa contracting monogamous HIV from polygamous partners whose deaths may not be in vain. Because, M.I.A., future “Queen of pop music” or whatever hype-laced headline you want to call her, is not really all that futuristic. Our world as a whole has been consistently raping and oppressing young coloured people for a handful of centuries at the very least by this point.
As Maya herself says: “I'm chipping away! You ready for something new, hurry up.” Well keep chipping, M.I.A., knowing how many of us are behind you.
A raw, sexy, angry, cataclysmically beautiful voice is being unleashed upon an unsuspecting mass audience. And she is shouting into a microphone, over and over again, with a chorus of hundreds of passionate converts surrounding her:
“Pull up the People! Pull up the Poor!”
------------------- *http://www.pitchforkmedia.com/interviews/m/mia-05/
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
