a thumping bass for a loving race?

Today I had the choice of (a) slaving away on an animated commercial, or (b) going to the Good Vibrations festival with a backstage pass. I chose the latter, and I can't thank Spider enough for the pass. Spider plays in Lee Scratch Perry's band, and to be honest, Perry wasn't really firing on all cylinders today -- while still great fun, it couldn't compare with the phenomenal astro-dub that he, Spider and Mad Professor were pumping out last year in Sydney, which was simultaneously heavy and stratospheric. A great line, though: "There are no white people allowed 'ere today. You are all black because all your shadows are black."

Backstage, Spider introduced me to {gasp} Jazzie B and Daddae from Soul II Soul, whose set had been far more frenetic and garagey than I'd expected. I remember that Jazzie B got plenty of flak in the day for his one-dimensional attempts at "authentic" jah love shtick, but fuck it, Soul II Soul were my introduction to shiny, uncomplicated soul-pop that wasn't mired in melisma, and they still rock. We might have lost count of the increasingly samey albums, but and at least they didn't disappear up their own arses, unlike the trip-hop sneer of sophistication. Note: Daddae's vinyl case still has Derek Yates' original Funky Dred design! And they played Michael Jackson's "PYT"! My favourite! Unfortunately my batteries ran out quickly, so this was my only reasonable shot of the day:

Asian Dub Foundation were far more engaging this time. Now they had an audience that could dance, and the somewhat po-faced La Haine live soundtrack experience was banished from memory. Continuing Jazzie B's Michael Jackson theme, they even played a version of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough"! Heavy! Afterwards, we had an interesting chat with the ADF's John Pandit, who mused about the lure of religious fundamentalism for non-Anglo young people in the face of repression, and how such traps need to be escaped via practical internationalism. By actually doing things internationally. As Owen Wilson would say: disengaged leftist ideologues, listen to your friend John Pandit -- he's a cool guy.

A seam of utter disgust: our man MC Wire was around backstage as a guest, and he was constantly harassed by security at every step of the way, for basically being Aboriginal. Security guards were everywhere, so it was interesting to see the same thing happen over and over again: they'd come up to Wire and basically make it plain that it wasn't okay that he existed, that he was intrinsically a security threat, a wild animal to be controlled, an intruder. And amongst all the blackness backstage -- all day, every act in our festival tent, from Blackalicious to Gangstarr, was black -- it was instructive to see how Aboriginality was specifically animalised. It's okay to be black if you're a cool overseas performer, but if you're a black Australian, forget it. At one point I was walking outside with Wire and Maya Jupiter (whose new haircut is hott!) when these guards come up and pointedly ask Maya and myself, "Is he with you?", as if he were an unleashed dog.

This panic-based typology of race reminds me of school. I grew up with a lot of loudly racist boys from the country who were insistent on the subhumanity of Aboriginal people. And it wasn't a simply "black" thing, either, at least in the sense of a liberal analysis of racism, which puts everything down to "ignorance" and a preoccupation with the "superficiality" of skin colour. To these boys I knew, Aboriginal people didn't really have a categorisable colour. Meanwhile, "real" black people from overseas -- say, from Papua New Guinea -- were acceptable and even cool, a "proper" identity that could be reckoned with. I think the danger with Aboriginality was that it could be anywhere, and most worryingly, it might be too close to home; I knew so many country boys who didn't look particularly Anglo/Celtic, and given the fallout of a government policy that attempted to "breed out the natives" by stealing Aboriginal children from their families, this kind of panic is no wonder, really. Maybe this specific situation of uncertainty is reflected metaphorically in the more general figures of Aboriginality and blackness in an Australian context. And today, perhaps Lee Perry's statement that "all your shadows are black" cut deeper than expected.