For an instant the fact that German pianist and composer Ursel Schlicht has quite a nice bum impinged on my awareness. A discussion of Schlicht’s appearance in Sydney, minus bum reference, appears elsewhere. I would never have dreamed of mentioning this end of her—nor would I have remembered it if the semiotic richness of beam ends had not been impressed upon me by a recent feminist postmodernist article claiming that Australia has been refashioned in the shape of Kylie Minogue’s bum.
This strictly pro forma cultural studies essay annoyed a few people, as it was meant to do, and I was wearily annoyed myself. It recurs—sometimes in the form of a peaen to ultra high stilleto heels, in which erotic drama is found in the very danger to your ligaments and tendons the hideous contraptions pose. It is meant to annoy older feminists who have not moved with the times, but it has within it an empowering message of the most fatuous kind. Something like it will always surface, just as, at another extreme, there will always be someone like the crocodile man who trembles his legs, semaphoring wildly and uttering ‘Crikey!’ before diving on a nearby saurian. The familiar claim is this: once Kylie had waved the new face or cheeks of Australia at the world, those mangy koalas, tattered waratahs and blokey croc humpers through which we had projected our quaint identity to the patronising nations were quickly discarded.
It recurs in circling dance with the crikey revival. Incidentally, although it still appeared in Bluey and Curley (along with strewth and strike me pink) ‘crikey’ seemed part of a fading world in the 1940s when I was a boy. Never imagine that you have said goodbye to any of these ghastly phenomena. The passion play in which you sacrifice your lungs on the fiery altar of cigarettes might make its reappearance. Mel Gibson could be writing the script right now. Bound feet? I go too far into hyerbolic space here. Or do I?
Believe me, it all has a great deal to do with the cultural experience provided by Ursel Schlicht and her Australian colleagues at the Side On. For, if Kylie’s bum has ‘unshackled us from the land’, from emblematic flora and fauna, it has certainly not conferred the right—or given ‘permission’ (a big word in this area)—to enjoy Ursel Schlicht’s ensemble without feeling like an elitist or obscurantist. We have now jumped beyond the specific terms of the Kylie’s bum article into the wider ethos of which it is certainly a part. If you do cultural studies you will learn that underwear is profoundly important when promoted by an icon (St Jerome for instance), that pop stars who cleverly position themselves in the market are laudable and that clever positioning of commercial products outside the pop industry is capitalist exploitaton; that someone’s trademark bum is to be celebrated or even to die for while an ordinary commercial trademark is to be hissed. A celebrity may even have a ‘trademark passion for his country’, so bravely commodified has the game become. In the new Australia a mighty wave of pop celebrity gossip columnary has risen from the waiting rooms of the nation, to break all over the arts and entertainment pages of our papers, sweeping everything else into the margins.
Kylie is hip. How cool is Kylie? She speaks exclusively in industry cliches in the accent of an English actress, slipping nasally at whiles. Perfect. And boy, there is plenty there to engage the intellectual. One of them did not have to strain too hard before coming up with this: Kylie is no threat to other women, because she is small. Sure (‘Reg, stop oggling that Kylie Minogle!’ ‘Ah, she’s very small, dear. You’ve got four inches on her.’ ‘Oh, that’s all right then.’). Now we’ve all come up with the fatuous, and this writer’s effort was a gallant one, since it followed on no less than two long pieces about Kylie, one of which concluded with this brave challenge: ‘What’s not to like?’ Well, where is what to sooooo begin not? Already. She has a ‘tightly controlled sense of style’, it was explained after her objection to the Madame Tussaud waxwork presenting her on all fours with her short dress pulled back from her trademark bum.
Style indeed was all that separated this from the deployment of her bum in some of her videos. I was a young man once. As a once-young man I can assure you that the invitation in either case is specific. And as a Christian once told me, ‘Erotica is just high class pornography.’ I have no general objection to either, but let’s not hypnotise ourselves with this ‘tightly controlled sense of style’ business. Style as morality. Indeed. Britney’s star is fading, and this week the gurus don’t like her style of strip tease so they gloat. They are so over her. They are over the singer who has lent her trademark tits etc to the Pepsi Cola trademark. How confused are her trademark semiotics? How cool is she now not, already? They will gloat when Kylie declines, don’t worry. Or gets fat or anorexic. The bad Kylie jokes will be revived.
I write this in weariness rather than anger. What do I care? I am pretty much retired. But isn’t there a basic misunderstanding of popular culture rampant among the pop culture gurus? Is popular culture – which I grew up with and still attend to, alertly one day, idly the next, like almost every person I have ever met – really so linear in its progression and so narrowly confined by pop guru tastes?
Let us make one point about the Kylie’s arse article before dropping it forever. We are told that Kylie and a couple of other other underwear endorsers have made us sexy to ourselves and the world, sweeping aside the other representations of Australianness mentioned above, highlighting our feminine side, freeing us from the blokiness of our paragons hitherto. But, to put it in some perspective, Kylie and her trademark bum and trademark underpants were world famous before the crocodile hunter revived ‘crikey’, which then became his trademark ‘crikey’ of course. Long before either of them there was Olivia Newton John, a sexy girl who starred with John Travolta in a big American movie (and was identified in it as an Australian) before, not after, Paul Hogan made Crocodile Dundee. Before Dundee she made the Let’s Get Physical video in which she pretended that body builders were making her hot or vice versa.
I don’t know if male sex symbols count, or Tasmanians for that matter, but Errol Flynn was a big Hollywood star long before Skippy. Blokey? A swashbuckler, certainly. A dashing handsome chap, a charmer, a seducer, but not really blokey. His career was in part contemporaneous with professional blokey ocker Chips Rafferty’s. One did not cancel the other out. Oddly, Flynn was much better known overseas than Rafferty. Part of Peter Finch’s career was also concurrent. For godsake, Nicole Kidman stood naked on the London stage, and I am told she was briefly nude in the movie Eyes Wide Shut. All the semiotic signals pulsing from her exquisite parts did not stop the rise of the crocodile jumper.
We have been represented internationally by Peter Allen (not blokey, I have it reliably), by Dame Joan Sutherland (a bit blokey perhaps, but she had an awfully high voice), Ian Thorpe (for a while thought to be gay) – all of these more or less in the same era as Shane Warne, Dennis Lillie and admittedly quite a few other blokes, followed recently by Russell Crowe (blokey – ignore the vicious rumours). Long before them, one of our best known figures internationally was Dame Nellie Melba. Also Robert Helpmann. Even such heroes as Snowy Baker, Lawrence Hargaves, Sir Charles Kingsford Smith, Douglas Mawson, Sir Macfarlane Burnett, Sir Gustav Nossal, Sir Sidney Nolan, Charles McKerras, Percy Grainger and others fail, in my memory, to fit comfortably in the blokey box. And since the piping in of The Bum Of Kylie, the cultural mix is pretty much as before. I don’t buy the great woman theory of history. Jump for a moment to America. Madonna has not really cruelled the pitch for Mel Gibson, Arnie, Bruce Willis, etc. Maybe she has helped their careers.
Perhaps it is less remarkable that a young nation like Australia, built by convicts and hard-bitten settlers, has produced some blokey heroes than it is that we have sent such a diversity of talent out into the world.
One serious point about the crocodile man. I watched for a few minutes while someone interviewed him, and he said that you can get a caffe latte anywhere in the world, but our koalas and platypusses are unique and so is my trademark crikey, so that is what we should be pushing. This limited ‘either/or’ choice is no different to that offered us by the mad mullahs of pop culture. Forsake all other passons or die, infidels! Their victory will never be complete. Nor do they want it to be. There will always be some small group of unbelievers who are interested in something else, or whose tastes in popular culture itself do not coincide with theirs. They will always be riding high on jihad.
For the record, I like ‘The Footy Show’—I like Fatty Vautin, Sterlo and company much more than the croc man. They can be very funny, and part of their humour stems from an awareness that the way they speak is as silly as talking posh. You don’t have to do either. And to be plug ugly, as they sort of are and sort of pretend to be, is no more nor less ludicrous than being a sex symbol. For the record I like the way Kylie sings ’...you’re all that I think about..’ She hits the beat in exactly the right place, as if she’s punching herself in the chest. Through the rest of the song she sounds very ordinary and beyond that I don’t have a great deal of interest. You might. I confer ‘permission’. It doesn’t really matter. Let me leave the last word to one of my sisters and her husband who live in rural Victoria. ‘God, what’s Kylie done to her lips?’ ‘She looks like an Abo.’ Cultural studies might straighten them out, but I doubt it.