David Nichols

The new Meanjin, edited by Sophie Cunningham, is exciting to behold. With its varied font, though, it runs the risk of being like Federation Square: striking to look at but difficult to negotiate. The small, faint font made this issue taxing to read. Perhaps younger readers, targeted by some of the content (such as the serialisation of a graphic history), will have less difficulty.

1980: a red-haired girl in my Year Ten art class at John Gardiner High School asked me if I knew there was a radio station that only played ‘that new wave music’. She said it with a measure of contempt in her voice – for me and for it. But I was tempted, and soon became part of 3RRR’s small, staunch audience. A quarter of a century on comes Mark Phillips’s lively, if listy (though no more than Ken Inglis’s ABC histories) narrative of this Melbourne institution’s first thirty years.

Levin’s God is a two-part epic. The first half is a take on the Australian rock scene of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Singer-guitarist Levin Hoffman, on the strength of what people say are ‘great songs’, rapidly takes his band the Barking Dogs to the top of the charts. Levin – believe it or not – finds that success is hollow and that not even his devoted Indian-Australian girlfriend, Shelley, or his long-time friend-cum-manager, Lawrence, can rescue him from his indefinable angst. The second half of the book sees Levin in Thailand, where, lying low at a monastery after witnessing a horrific murder, he becomes a devotee of meditation.

As Roger Hart, Roger Wells was the male lead in the group Little Heroes (not to be confused with their contemporaries, Little Murders), a Melbourne band that spent the first half of the 1980s making interesting rock records. They had a top ten hit, ‘One Perfect Day’, in 1982, which complemented the ‘new wave’ without alienating fans of more established music. Wells now works as a counsellor and has written a book on meditation, so one assumes that Levin’s God is built on a skeleton of experience, though much of the experience seems casually remembered. Tellingly, it is the travail of meditation and Levin’s struggle to purge his own desire and pain through meditative enlightenment that are most credible.

It is impossible to look cool studying youth culture. Researchers can’t help being uncool, whether they’re explaining every little term to their readers, as if to a High Court judge, or shoehorning the ‘in’ lingo into their otherwise conventional academic texts. However advanced their self-awareness strategies or their desire to avoid seeming preachy, nothing can stop them coming off like T-shirted versions of the social surveyors of a century ago. Instead of the slums or Samoa, it’s some kind of sweaty, fertile, animalistic netherworld of tribal signs and tracksuit brand logos.