Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands popular music video as an Indigenous knowledge ‘system’

Abstract

“Though many Aboriginal musicians perform for and aim to please a general market, they also often feel that they are singing especially for an Aboriginal audience, and want to express their ideas to that audience in terms and styles that it understands”. Thus wrote music scholar Graeme Smith in a school music resource text published in the early 1990s. With the more recent proliferation of Indigenous music video, the capacity for the expression of such ideas has expanded considerably. Indigenous Australian popular music has been and remains primarily music of struggle—for rights, recognition, reconciliation and restitution. This paper seeks to demonstrate that contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islands popular music video comprises a rich and often complex sign system that encodes valuable social and cultural knowledge, from which all Australians (and others) can beneficially learn. Engaging the theoretical notion of double identification developed by popular music scholars Alistair Pennycook and Tony Mitchell, the paper briefly examines a range of Indigenous music videos released over the past five years by artists including B2M, Eastern Journey, Emma Donovan, Gurrumul, Jimblah, Last Kinection, Tom E. Lewis, Mau Power, Kutcha Edwards, The Medics, Street Warriors, and Frank Yamma. The analytical framework employed concentrates on six knowledge fields: song, dance, language, understandings of country, social vision, and narratives of lived experience.