Popular Culture

It’s Sydney – and Saturday night. The Great Jazz Orgy has begun … a million people are moving, turning, swaying, shuffling to the accompaniment of pianola, gramophone, or jazz band, and are beating out the barbaric time of syncopated melody. (Home magazine, 1923)

Historian Jill Julius Matthews takes us back to Sydney between the 1890s and the late 1920s, when cinema and the phonograph were exciting new imports, their impact on the local culture at once exhilarating and threatening. Matthews examines the way modernity – in the form of popular music, dance and film – was brought to and embraced by Sydneysiders. Her focus is on the ‘mediators’ of the new: entrepreneurs who imported the products and the technique of making them indispensable to people’s lives; the traditionalists who hoped to protect audiences from ‘corruption’ by seductive popular culture; and the government officials who negotiated these voices, seeking to regulate content.

Tara Brabazon’s Ladies Who Lunge: Celebrating Difficult Women is a collection of essays on feminism and popular culture. Addressing a range of subjects – including aerobics, wrestling, Miss Moneypenny, Anita Roddick and the pedagogy of Sylvia Ashton Warner – Brabazon’s material on the whole does justice to her general contention that feminist readings of popular culture need to be fearless and bold. Arguing that feminism requires a (metaphoric) equivalent of the movie Fight Club, Brabazon suggests that feminist critique is at its sharpest when it reads against the grain of mainstream thinking. For the most part, these essays do just that. However, for a book that celebrates the brazenness of feminism, why not include the F word in the title? In fact, the lameness of the title’s pun turns out to be characteristic of a deeper identity crisis. While Brabazon argues for a non-populist feminism, a tough and gritty brave new world of feminist critique, the style and packaging, and sometimes the substance, of her book seem to be trying hard to reach a market that is both ‘young’ and ‘popular’. Not that there is anything intrinsically wrong with this market, but it contradicts Brabazon’s wider project of taking us somewhere other than feminist readings of popular culture that dumb down many of feminism’s most critical insights.