Archive: January 2018

ALAN WEEDON GRAPPLES GLORIOUSLY WITH CHALLENGING CONVENTIONS THAT TRADITIONALLY GOVERN MUSIC JOURNALISM

Publisher and Photographer

Publisher and photographer from down under, Melbournian, Alan Weedon grapples gloriously with challenging conventions that traditionally govern music journalism. He takes a good look at the branding of the artist and their work, as well as the ideologies of masculinity that are ingrained in Australian history and identity. Such endeavours are evidenced by his longform musical journalism publication, Swampland, of which he is Creative Director, and his other various photography projects aimed at queering narratives of male masculinity.

Interview by Sophie Rasheed

STK: So, good sir. Tell us a bit about yourself...

Alan: Well, I’m primarily a publisher and photographer. I did a Journalism degree at RMIT [Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology] fresh outta high school. I started university at 17 and did all manner of things there. At RMIT you’re given a variety of opportunities to experiment, to try out what kind of voice you want to give yourself and what you want to do with your degree. So I did journalism.

Essentially, it was a really formative experience for me because RMIT was my dream degree. I didn’t expect to get into it but I did. That led me down a number of different pathways. I did a bit of community radio for SYN FM, which is a student youth network and then I edited my student paper, Catalyst. The reason I got into photography was because I was doing a lot of street press photography. I was going to gigs every weekend at the Corner and yeah, I just busted my chops writing, interviewing and doing a lot of photography. All of which made me realise that I get a lot of gratification doing this kind of work. So I took as many photography electives as I could in my degree and took it on my own steam to learn. I’m now doing freelance work and curating the photography for the magazine that I published, called Swampland.

STK: Yes, Swampland!

Alan: Yeah! So I’m the Creative Director of Swampland. I curate the photography that goes into the magazine, liaise with designers and head up all socials.

STK: For those who don’t know, can you tell us what it’s all about and what constitutes longform musical journalism?

Alan: Cool, so our elevator pitch for Swampland is that we’re a print only publication that specialises in longform musical journalism photography. Broadly defined, longform is anywhere between 3000 and 6000 words or higher. So the three of us that co-founded it—myself, Kimberly Thompson who’s the Managing Editor, and Kelsey Ethan who’s our Deputy Editor—we obviously love music, Australian music. Though there’s such a dearth of music journalism. The only people who invest in longform music journalism are Rolling Stone—every issue is majority American—and The Saturday Paper, in which music is mainly just in the fold and caters to their core audience: older, very privileged, highly literate people who are more familiar with Nick Cave from back when St Kilda was still cool. Which is fine. For instance, I know with The Saturday Paper—which I read a lot—their head music journalism writer is Day Fawkner, who is the head judge of the Australian Music Prize and who used to be in the Hoodoo Gurus. Anyway, I’m drawing a long bow here. What I’m trying to say here is that we thought there was a space for intelligent, critical longform music journalism, particularly for Australian music. All of the music writers in the major papers had all been made redundant and even then, they’re predominately middle-aged white dudes. When it comes to online contexts, there’s never really anything critical. I don’t think the online news and journalism world have properly figured out how to display longform journalism in the online context. So the reason why we’re print is because that’s our paywall. Literally, you will buy the magazine and that’s how you will access the content. We refuse to put anything online and that’s not because we hate the internet and we’re technophobes! We just want to wait until we find the right website, platform and design to treat the stories we do have correctly.

STK: Just as you give people a voice in your magazine, would you say that this underlying intention translates into your personal photography practice? Perhaps even more so when capturing ephemeral moments otherwise lost, the ones that capture the true essence of someone?

Alan: I haven’t really critically thought about how Swampland influences my photography to be honest. I‘m sure it does. My photography has always been bubbling away in the background. I know that in retrospect I picked up photography because I found it quite hard to be in social situations, particularly around the music world. I’d have a camera around my neck so I’d feel more comfortable going to gigs by myself and just taking photos of musicians and feeling like I had a work thing to do. So it had a liberating element.

STK: How Andy Warhol-esque of you.

Alan: Yeah, in a sense. And then later down the track as my photography developed—as did my voice—I started questioning, “What is my critical dialogue over the body of work I’m producing?” Because that’s my experience and one that although has become easier to talk about over the last 20 years, we’ve never really had a chance to talk about it openly. My photography, for the most part, looks at queering narratives of Australian masculinity. And what I mean by that is that Australia as a whole has a cultural default of the classic ocker male: “Oh yeah, shrimp on the barbie, ah she’ll be right mate,” bullshit. And even in progressive circles, that’s still a thing because it’s something you can have an ironic wink at, right? It just seeps into so much of the public consciousness. And I don’t know if it’s a good or bad thing but I feel that kind of rigid, ocker, straight, policed, Australian masculinity fucks people up in a lot of ways, regardless of how you identify. And that’s what I’m fascinated in looking at with my photography.

STK: The Australian identity is so complex and multifaceted when you unpack it, right?

Alan: Yeah, exactly. Australia has never figured out or refuses to acknowledge the dispossession and the fact that Australia is stolen. Of course, there are some people who acknowledge it but for the most part, it’s a history Australia doesn’t want to acknowledge because it’s bloody brutal.

STK: Yeah, so many of us turn a blind eye completely.

Alan: Exactly. So I’d say one of the pieces I wrote a while back when I was writing for this British longform music journal called The Quietus, was about my friend, Marcus Whale, who used to play in a band called Collarbones. He released his LP—his debut—called Inland Sea. It was looking at early queer narratives of colonial Australia. There was in fact this bushranger called Captain Moonlight and there was even a queer party at the John Curtin Hotel named after him. In the 1850s he was this methodist pastor who went around Victoria, who became very destitute and poor and started stealing just to make ends meet. He was then put in jail and—well, I’m condensing a really long narrative here—but essentially he fell in love with the guy in his cell. Upon their release, they lived together but in the historical records it had only ever been noted that they were ‘mates’ or ‘friends’. What I find most fascinating about this story is that I think it has resonances with how contemporary male Australian bonds are spoken about. ‘Mateship’, I think is a fragile concept. Going back to the Captain Moonlight story—you have the people reflecting on the historical narrative—there’s a really good article in The Monthly about it in which they interviewed one of the historians. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, the lover died and the Captain held him in his arms, crying, kissing him and even possessed a lock of his hair that he wore around his chest for the rest of his life. And he was only alive for another few months after that, as he was executed. So if you go through the writing it’s all this homoerotic stuff, right?

STK: Wow, who knew? But that’s the point I guess!

Alan: Yeah, exactly! And then in his will, he stated that he wanted to be buried next to his partner. Now, that didn’t happen. This was in a town called Gundagai, about eight hours in between Melbourne and Sydney. So the lover got buried there and Captain Moonlight was buried against his wishes in Sydney. Then around about ’97, some Gundagai historical woman wrote to the NSW [New South Wales] government. The result of this being that his body was exhumed and put in the cemetery in Gundagai to fulfil his final death wish. It was the first instance in NSW, even Australian, history that they exhumed the body of a person who wasn’t directly related to them. This just hit so many weird parts of my brain about the origin stories of Australia: how Australian identity is incredibly fragile because we’re not supposed to be here and we have to put up all these things that give us some kind of origin story. With my photography, I’m interested in the idea of how Australian masculine culture is policed. How is it defined? What are the borders? It’s clear when you look at that which defines Australian public life. Look at how much space football takes up in Australia, for instance, or sport in general. It’s our big ...

STK: Our unifying force?

Yes, our unifying force but it’s inherently masculine, right? Even though there’s AFLW [Australian Football League Women’s], every fucking Tom, Dick and Harry is like, “Oh my God, look at women in sport, isn’t this great? Isn’t this cute? Wow, we’re so progressive!” Like, “No you’re not. Fuck off.” As a queer person, I’m fascinated by how there’s no queer narrative in Australian football as a lived experience. I mean, sure there’s the token ‘pride match’ that all the footballers can play in but they’re not allowed to come out.

STK: As in, they can’t or they just don’t or wouldn’t?

Alan: I’m sure that they could but it’d be horrific for them and statistically, we know it’s impossible for the AFL [Australian Football League] to never have had a queer player. So I’m just curious in exploring this repression, this tension in the idea of Australian masculinity trying to keep itself together. Once it’s broken, what happens? I’ve been fascinated by how in the ‘60s when the birth of the Polaroid came along if you were to share an intimate photo with someone you’d probably give it to one or two people, as that was the physical limit. Polaroids ignited an interesting change in how we viewed photography because it was the first time people could take erotic photography without having it mediated by the developer, right? Such an interesting perspective. Whereas now people with Instagram can recreate and share the same sorts of poses and positions that you may share with a lover, but you can broadcast it to thousands of people or however many followers you have, in order to curate a certain brand for yourself. And I think this has a confluence with how particular articulations of the gay male body are represented on Instagram.

STK: A queer friend of mine has expressed his struggle with being instantly attributed with such characteristics due to the sheer fact of his being gay. Do you think such attributions have been perpetuated by applications like Instagram because they’ve been broadcasted on a greater, more open and accessible scale?

Alan: Yeah, perhaps. I’m so fascinated by the narratives that people talked about with the birth of Instagram. When it first came around people were like, “Yes, this is great. It’s going to democratise self-portraiture. People are going to be able to see different body shapes and sizes,” and so on, which is fine and I’m sure that happens. Though what I’m most interested in with how Instagram has developed, is how all the prejudices and social hierarchies and body hierarchies that we have in advertising and print media, have also been reflected in Instagram. Even though it’s this ‘accessible, democratic space’ the people who rise to the top are still white, beefed up dudes. Now, I don’t know if that says more about us—as the advertising world hasn’t necessarily been able to control how Instagram delivers information. If somebody’s just seeing a bunch of hot, white rigs in their feed that’s really interesting to note. For sure.

STK: I’m also really intrigued by what you said about how we’re (even subconsciously) curating a brand for ourselves or pursuing a pre-existing one that we’ve seen on various social media platforms. I really think this is due to how the mediascape is changing.

Alan: That’s something I actually found really insufferable whilst I was working in the journalism industry. I mean, we’re living in a time which is similar to—I imagine—what it was like when the printing press was first invented. We are now living in a context where we are the most visually literate version of the human race that has ever lived, right? Everything is image and screen-based. We read space in a visual way and the sheer amount of information we have to process is unprecedented. So, in terms of the ‘brand’, one of the things some of us were told in journalism—which I thought was fucking bullshit—was to ‘build a brand for yourself!’ It was all aimed at becoming a media personality, rather than being a journalist and they’re so clearly two different things. After doing my journalism degree, I hated Australian media and I still do. It’s fucked most of the time. And I loved watching all of the journalism colleagues I didn’t really get along with, groom themselves to be a TV personality. They had their Twitter account and they didn’t say anything controversial and they had their palatable display photo. So what I find so interesting about cultural journalism in Australia is how it has such a tiny marketplace. The result of this is people who are too afraid to say anything critical, not necessarily to mean ratting on anyone but a critical analysis rather. We just lack decent critical analysis in this country, aside from perhaps Schwartz Media. If you say anything vaguely critical about an artwork, people will say, “Ah, you just don’t like the industry.” Fragile egos.

STK: Do you also see this in music journalism?

Alan: Yeah, well the thing with music journalism is that there’s nothing really critical online, as everything’s done in relation to the press cycle. So new writing is commissioned depending on the press release coming into someone’s email. Everyone wants to plug something, which is fine. The media just runs at this hyperspeed where you have twenty-four-hour rolling deadlines. And the thing with music reviews, in my opinion at least—oh, and I should stress that Swampland doesn’t do any reviews—you just know the journalist has had a week to listen to this music, in between all the other work they have to do and that listening experience is mediated by the cycle they’re in. Though for me, music is something with which my relationship changes all the time. For instance, I won’t have the same relationship with that album I’m listening to now, compared to in a week’s time, three months time or six months time. So a review feels like a rushed thing, as you’re not getting the grand review of someone’s experience. But I also think reviews are necessary in one sense because we need these people to tell us, “Alright, cool, there’s this new Drake album, what are the main points here, what is its musical direction, etc.” It can help frame your own personal analysis and ongoing experience with the music but I’ve come across reviews—more so online—that just shove point-of-views down the reader’s throat.

STK: Yeah, totally.

Alan: When a review lists other fucking music that Drake, for instance, sounds like, you know they’re just jerking off to their own musical knowledge. I could rant for ages. This is like ‘Alan’s rant against journalism hour.’

STK: Going back to our means of access and interpretation of information and digital media, have you witnessed different versions of this process in different cultures through any of your travels?

Alan: No, I’ve planned to travel but I haven’t yet done so on my own volition. I’ve been to the Philippines three times in my life as that’s where my mum’s from but I would like to go overseas. I don’t see myself living in Australia for the rest of my life.

STK: Ah, yes indeed. I get the sense you’re getting a calling from… Berlin?

Alan: A classic Melbournian’s move. Ah, Berlin. Maybe in a short burst. Yeah, I’ve always had notions of going to Glasgow in Scotland, as they’ve got a really great school of arts there. And I also imagine myself going to places like London, Rome, New York, because I want to be in cities that function at such a fucking high level. As much as I love Australia, we’re so affluent and wealthy that we’ve bred a certain kind of complacency in how we do things. For instance, there are so many middle-aged white fuckers in positions of power and I’m like, “How the fuck does this country function?” Hear, hear. Because you know, it’s like that, “Ah she’ll be right mate, don’t tell me what to fucking do, don’t tell me to change this, nah it’s not broke, don’t fix it!” Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in a cage and I’m here like, “Fucking get me out of this mediocrity!” I also just think there are younger kids and people of our generation, who have grown up with the internet and know how to use things more efficiently, who could be doing better things with the industries that Australia has. Though due to this cake layer of privilege and inherited wealth and power structures, it’s just… Ah, it just winds me up sometimes. I see this in publishing as well.

STK: You know, there are people like us who want to get our stuff out into the world, yet how do we do it? How do we do it on a solid platform in a fast-paced, mass-driven publishing structure?

Alan: Yeah, but even looking at newspapers like The Australian, it’s never made a profit in its entire history. It’s only been propped up by being subsidised by money that’s coming in from 20th Century Fox. Whilst financially it didn’t make sense, it was a smart business decision as it bought Murdoch influence. If Swampland had its own version of 20th Century Fox I’m sure we’d be fine!

STK: Ah, who needs money?

ALAN: Yeah, right? Who needs money…

STK: Alan, thanks for your time.

Alan: Yeah, thanks for the chats. I chew people’s ears off, I really do. I just read a lot and listen to a lot of podcasts and then I just bleeeehhhhhh.

STK: Thank you so much for the intellectually stimulating chats.