The AMP: Why So Serious?

Yesterday’s Australian Music Prize shortlist announcement says some pretty morbid things about the Australian psyche right now, writes SHAUN PRESCOTT.

[Historical image is withheld pending rights review.]

All manner of outrage follows the announcement of an Australian Music Prize shortlist, and this year is no exception. The usual online to-and-fro between "haters", supporters and those who maintain a supposedly healthy ambivalence is interchangeable year after year. It's the same debate.

Just picture this: every year the judges (of which there are 40 including the editor of this very website) are allotted the grueling task of listening to piles of Australian music. Then they have to make a choice from an arbitrarily formed list which record is best (artists need to pay to be a part of the long list, and normally labels or other reps enter the bands they represent). On the panel you've got everyone from retailers to broadsheet critics to radio presenters to ... Kram, which amounts to a cross section disparate enough that you'd expect some wild cards to pop into the shortlist. Or so you would think.

I'm not really interested in bagging out the nominees: some of them are decent, others are embarrassing. But the results here correlate with three Australian artists that factored into the upper echelons of triple j’s Hottest 100 poll (Gotye, Boy & Bear, Matt Corby), in that both tell us something about Australian taste at the moment. It's pretty easy:

Australians aren't in the mood for fun.

None of these records you'd exactly call "a hoot". The lite playfulness of Gotye and Kimbra's hit single sounds like an office daydream, a quick moment of escapist shut-eye, too brief to permit actual colour, too restrained and coy to offer any real kind of pop salvation. This is the type of whimsy we resort to when we want to imbue drudgery with meaning: the walk to the office or a drive to the Ikea becomes a Mike Leigh film. We listen to Gotye because he is exactly like us - ambiguities are forbidden, the personal is profound, meaning is never lost. Which is actually really lovely and we all need that sometimes, it's just that Gotye approaches colour like a tight-arse skimping for a mortgage he/she'll never pay off: there are no big splashes, no moments of transcendence, but instead a prolonged deftness of touch - a frustrating obsession with aural subtlety, a reluctance to stand out. FUCKING LIVE, man! You're halfway to something beautiful and weird. But maybe that's exactly where you need to be.

Quiet, confiding, ethereal, nostalgic, meditative - there's a bunch of that and not much else. It's pop music as salve for our precious little hearts, which are clearly always breaking. Either that, or capital “S” serious songwriting is what we resort to when the condition of our mass media is so rapidly deteriorating. Or maybe we resort to it because it's a reflection of who we are: a society aloof to its own condition, shielding its ears and la-la-ing while we work harder and harder for houses we'll never afford, in cities increasingly cost prohibitive, under a government that wants to push us away.

“God forbid the demonstrative, the celebratory, the weird, the startling, the fun.”

We don't want sex, drugs, rollercoasters and pools of awesome coloured balls: we want to be held and rocked. We want to listen to Boy & Bear and pretend we're living in an era most of us (Australians) have no direct connection with. Anywhere but here. Or we want the Sunday-morning friendly folk of The Middle East to prep us for the thankless grind most of our lives have or will become. It's clearly a mood that cannot welcome albums by Architecture in Helsinki or Royal Headache. God forbid the demonstrative, the celebratory, the weird, the startling, the fun. Where was Kram during the voting process?

The AMP shortlist is the work of an industry apparently hung up on workmanship and craft over daring and pomp; focused on career arcs, reach, and a tiring sense of worthiness and artistic accomplishment. None of those words are inherently nasty, but at a time when Angus and Julia Stone and Gotye can top a youth broadcaster's end-of-year poll there's something fundamentally morbid going on. It's like our collective imagination has been drained, and any attempt to wrest us from our fug is dismissed as superfluous, stupid, meaningless.

The Seventh Annual AMP Shortlist

Abbe May – Design Desire
Adalita – Adalita
Boy & Bear – Moonfire
Gotye – Making Mirrors
Gurrumul – Rrakala
Jack Ladder and The Dreamlanders – Hurtsville
Kimbra – Vows
The Jezabels – Prisoner
The Middle East – I Want That You Are Always Happy

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Winners of The AMP will be announced at a sit-down industry lunch at the Sydney Opera House on March 8. David Fricke from Rolling Stone US is guest speaker. Details here.