An Anthology Of Australian Albums

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

Melbourne, 1971: radical counterculture, hippies, opposition to the Vietnam War and consumerism. The birth of Oz blues rock. Influenced by American blues after Robert Johnson, parallel to developments with Paul Butterfield, the Bluesbreakers and Canned Heat, Chain's music also developed in distinct ways, taking on a style later referred to as Oz blues, or Oz indigo. The emergence of prog rock and the consolidation of blues rock globally made for interesting times. Rock shifted beyond the basics, in the direction of new musical forms and prefigurative politics. In this moment, Chain, four regional white boys with jazz cred and blues licks, recorded the classic Oz blues single Black and Blue and its bedrock LP, Toward the Blues. 50 years later, it remains a monument in Australian rock history. Based on interviews with guitarist and singer Phil Manning, scholarly research and memoirs, this book tells the story of the album's creation and its cultural impact on the Melbourne music scene in a time of significant social change, seeking to capture the magic of that moment.

At a time when the traditional media have been reshaped by digital technologies and audiences have fragmented, people are using mediated forms of communication to manage all aspects of their daily lives as well as for news and entertainment. The Media and Communications in Australia offers a systematic introduction to this dynamic field. Fully updated and expanded, this fifth edition outlines the key media industries – from print, sound and television to film, gaming and public relations – and explains how communications technologies have changed the ways in which they now operate. It offers an overview of the key approaches to the field, including a consideration of Indigenous communication, and features a ‘hot topics’ section with contributions on issues including diversity, misinformation, algorithms, COVID-19, web series and national security. With chapters from Australia’s leading researchers and teachers in the field, The Media and Communications in Australia remains the most comprehensive and reliable introduction to media and communications from an Australian perspective. It is an ideal student text and a key resource for teachers, lecturers, media practitioners and anyone interested in understanding these influential industries.

The success of the Hip-Hop album The Calling (2003) by the Hilltop Hoods was a major event on the timeline of Hip-Hop in Australia. It launched a formerly 'underground' scene into the spotlight, radically transforming the group members' lives and creating new opportunities for other Hip-Hop artists. This book analyses the impact of the album by drawing on original interviews with fifteen Hip-Hop practitioners from across Australia, including artists who contributed to the album. These primary interviews are interwoven with material from media sources and close readings of song lyrics and album imagery. An exploration of the early histories of Hip-Hop in Australia with a focus on the formation of Obese Records and the Hilltop Hoods' biography gives way to analysis of specific tracks from the album and the Hoods' prowess as live performers. The book uses The Calling as a lens to examine the beliefs and practices of Hip-Hop enthusiasts in Australia, including changes since the album was released. Published in 2023 to coincide with the album's twenty-year anniversary, the book is an engaging evaluation of a musical release that was so significant that people now use it explain two distinct periods in Australian Hip-Hop (pre or post The Calling).

Once conduits to new music, frequently bypassing the corporate music industry in ways now done more easily via the Internet, record stores championed the most local of economic enterprises, allowing social mobility to well up from them in unexpected ways. Record stores speak volumes about our relationship to shopping, capitalism, and art. This book takes a comprehensive look at what individual record stores meant to individual people, but also what they meant to communities, to musical genres, and to society in general. What was their role in shaping social practices, aesthetic tastes, and even, loosely put, ideologies? From women-owned and independent record stores, to Reggae record shops in London, to Rough Trade in Paris, this book takes on a global and interdisciplinary approach to evaluating record stores. It collects stories and memories, and facts about a variety of local stores that not only re-centers the record store as a marketplace of ideas, but also explore and celebrate a neglected personal history of many lives.

How did Melbourne earn its place as one of the world's 'music cities'? Beginning with the arrival of rock 'n' roll in the 1950s, this book explores the development of different sectors of Melbourne's popular music ecosystem in parallel with broader population, urban planning and media industry changes in the city. The authors draw on interviews with Melbourne musicians, venue owners and policy-makers, documenting their ambitions and experiences across different periods, with accompanying spotlights on the gendered, multicultural and indigenous contexts of playing and recording in Melbourne. Focusing on pop and rock, this is the first book to provide an extensive historical lens of popular music within an urban cultural economy that in turn investigates the contemporary nature and challenges of urban music activities and policy.

The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham's bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, 'You're the Voice,' has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia's unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.