Burying Dig, Exhuming Nostalgia

Having graduated from high school in 1994 I currently find myself on the downhill side of my 30s, and not so coincidentally I also find myself squarely at the centre of the target market of what used to be known as the ABC's Dig Music but will henceforth be referred to as Double J.

1994 was also the year Kurt Cobain died and all this talk about it being the 20th anniversary of his death this year just makes that slide toward 40 seem ever more steep. But this is a feeling I get often, like that time just a few years ago, me and some guys from school were at a party. We were among the older people at this party, the majority were in their early 20s, us approaching mid-30s. Strangely though, our music tastes were aptly catered for: Pavement, Superchunk, Pixies, Sonic Youth, et al. These songs that I had grown up with, were now accompanied by the inane self-congratulatory tones of the 20-somethings, squeaking giddily as if they'd discovered it without a thought for the age of the music or the age of the other people in the room. I wanted to storm over and switch it off and yell 'Nam veteran style, "YOU DON"T KNOW, YOU WEREN'T THERE, MAAAAN!". But out of respect for their ignorance of bands like of My Chemical Romance and Kings of Leon, I decided to just leave them to it. We went home, put Bubble and Scrape on and proclaimed loudly, "They can take our Pavement, they can take our Pixies, BUT THEY'LL NEVER TAKE OUR SEBADOH!" A friend, much more eloquent than I, wrote at the time that she felt her monkey had gone to heaven. And indeed it had.

I’m hopefully less self-righteous and rude these days. I kind of need to be, because for the last six months I've been informed by ads with increasing frequency that Dig Music was "now powered by Triple J". The playlist changed quite dramatically, I was all of a sudden hearing all the bands that I loved in 1994, which I of course still have in my collection. Bands like Pavement, Sebadoh, Sonic Youth, The Pixies, even Mudhoney, were appearing more frequently, I'm sure, than they ever did on Triple J in the actual 90s when they still represented the raw edge of popular rock. We used to call it "indie" then without ever really knowing why or how exactly to define it. Nevertheless, all five of these bands are still producing music in different capacities and qualities and of course Dig has also been playing their new stuff; Sebadoh and ex-Pavement frontman Stephen Malkmus's new band have had feature albums as has Mogwai and Julia Holter who segue nicely into that mix. So much so that I felt a little guilty and uneasy that my taste was being catered for so astutely and consistently.

But I also felt uneasy for other reasons. Sure, I like the new Malkmus, the new Sebadoh isn't terrible either, but I just feel a little bit embarrassed when some of those 90s songs come on, a little bit like somebody has publicly posted some of my bad high school poetry on Facebook. This is partly because the music you like in your teenage years becomes intensely personal for any number of reasons. But it's also because much of it speaks so clearly of that time that it's really hard to just transport them seamlessly into the present. Helen Razer said as much writing about Kurt Cobain's death and the way his music hasn't travelled so well on the long journey from the 90s.

But this isn't really my point. Dig Music has spent the last few months asking us what kind of station we want the new Dig to be, what music do we want it to play, do we want presenters or not, and even what we think of the name. All of our responses from official surveys, social media comments, and the "dig it" buttons with which we could indicate when we liked a song (sadly there was no bury it button), were apparently all compiled into a neat little statement that said we wanted pretty much what they had been giving us for the last six months but that we want a presenter some of the time, and we want it to be called Double J. I have no evidence to back this up but I can be pretty certain not a single Dig listener would have suggested that name, and even though Dig hints at a very strong vote towards the negative in relation to the question of presenters, this has been qualified as just not wanting them "24/7".

One does have to wonder, though, why they needed to go to all of the trouble of surveys and "dig it" buttons if they were just going to change the station into what they had already changed it into. It's no coincidence that an ad playing in the lead up to the change to Double J that ran the tagline "playing the best new music from Australia and overseas, plus the songs and artists that shaped your life", turns out to be the exact conclusion that Dig has reached after analysing all the data from the surveys and social media complaints about the new playlist.

There are only two possible reasons for this outcome. One is that they are genuine when they say that this is indeed the result of the surveys, which is still ridiculous because audiences had been being given a vigorous 90s priming in the months prior. But the second, and more likely, outcome is that they just completely ignored the data, or just pretended to collect it in the first place and were always going to be Triple-J-in-the-nineties regardless of what "we" said. However, I am actually in favour of this second outcome on a strategic level, just not so much with the playlist that has resulted, and I probably wouldn't have bothered with the surveys either. If Dig relied on us, the public, to dictate what they would play the results would be unlistenable. Just like the movie Snakes on Plane (which incorporated pre-release input from fans generated through internet hype, into the final film) is unwatchable, just like the people's choice award winner at art prize exhibitions is always rubbish, and just like the way focus groups put political parties and advertisers further out of touch with people rather than closer.

Pop artist Claes Oldenburg said it best in relation to public art: "The public don't know what they want." And he's right. Even though I filled out one of the surveys, when I think about it deep down, I've got no freaking clue what I want from a radio station. I know nothing about radio, how playlists are created, how to create diversity within a playlist without making the changes between songs too jarring. I like music, so I fancy that I would put together a pretty good playlist, but the only person who would really like all of it would be me.

No, Dig I don't know what I would like you to be. What I want is an expert to use their expertise and guide me, and maybe surprise me. What I don't want is to have assumptions made about me. Probably the only place I can tolerate this kind of autocracy is in the complex world of culture. Not because I believe all our cultural decisions should be made for us but because I have, as a result of working in the arts industry, a large amount of respect for the people that have devoted their careers and education to arranging and organizing cultural products for popular consumption. Many of these people are or have been artists themselves, they are smart people with years of research, learning, successes and failures behind them. I respect that the decisions they make are good ones because they have this knowledge informing them. But more importantly I get a sense from such people and their decisions that they respect their audience enough to make the assumption that they will be open to exploring their curatorial strategies that take risks, rather than adhere to the safe and familiar.

Sure, as a white middle-class male in his late thirties, I pretty much personify the Double J demographic. And I will still call Pavement one of the greatest bands ever to anybody who will listen, but that doesn't mean I actually listen to Pavement that much anymore. My music taste has matured with me, become more diverse, more enthusiastic about electronic music and pop, more interested in originality rather than a particular "sound", more interested in how musicians evolve rather than their ability to stay the same, essentially, just less pretentious than I was in the 90s. And the old Dig wasn't necessarily a radio station that satisfied that particular taste, but it didn't treat me like an idiot either. It appeared unselfconscious and didn’t seem to be trying to please anybody in particular, and for that fact alone, pleased me greatly. However, now it is trying to please me. Me specifically. It’s counting on my 90s penchant for nostalgia, but what it is often overlooked by such simplistic views of that decade is the fact that it was old to begin, it was already a nostalgic time, and had a nostalgic sound. And that is not a sound that is sustainable over time.

I caught a bit of the launch broadcast, the bit where the new lead announcer Myf Warhurst reminisced with Paul Dempsey about the time they shared a house together in the 90s. Dempsey played an old Something For Kate song and when asked why he chose to play that particular song, he said that it was because it sat well with the nostalgic tone of the station. That is, the new nostalgic tone. And it was only at this moment that I figured out that the reason why I was so uncomfortable at that party a few years ago was because of this tone of nostalgia. It wasn't because Gen Y was all of sudden claiming my musical adolescence as their own, they most likely did genuinely like it, they most likely were as blown away by it as I was at their age, which is great, but doesn’t make it relevant. What made me feel so awkward was not the youthful enthusiasm for music that was no longer youthful, it was that the original nostalgic tone of that music was being mistaken for youthfulness and had therefore become something much worse than old, way worse than retro… it was "classic".

The radio classic can’t be defined better than as a form of hollow nostalgia. Nostalgia for its own sake, without any real meaning beyond being nostalgic. Radio creates classics by adding an extra layer of nostalgia to the music simply by broadcasting it. Although the word “classic” will never be used on Double J, that is where the Bryan Adamses will be replaced by the Dinosaur Jrs. But this is not an exchange that can be made without serious collateral damage. As much as Triple J would like to claim it, radio was not where I discovered these bands, and most certainly was not where I looked to discover them. The pre-digital network of mixtapes, album liner notes and Rage guest-programmers yielded more new music to me than radio ever did. The problem now is context, the radio is not the natural home of the majority of the music that is being re-animated by the burgeoning nostalgia market of which Double J is but a symptom, and cafes furnished with mismatched second-hand decor maybe the cause. No major Australian radio station in the 90s could have safely played "Range Life" and "Dirty Boots" within minutes of each other as happened the other day on what was still Dig.

Digital radio might be the new home for the nostalgic yearnings of beer guts in band shirts and nose studded nannas, but for the moment I’m happy for my personal music collection and my radio to remain separate. Some monkeys should just be allowed to stay in heaven.

[And fuck it, I’m listening to Dig - I  mean Double J - as I write and the most annoying prick in Australian music, Ben Lee comes on with "American Television", which is, I’m embarrassed to know, essentially a song about nostalgia for the 90s. You look beautiful in 1994. You sure do. Shame it’s 20 years later.]