It's a little counter-intuitive to think that a lot of a country's most important ambassadors have nothing to with politics. A lot of the people who create the patchwork image of a country aren't elected and their not really accountable to anyone.

A lot of a country's most important ambassadors are its musicians, sports stars, writers and artists.

Thank God for Australia that we have 'Empire of the Sun'.

Here is a duo of Nick Littlemore (retired from the band) and Luke Steele making clever and catchy pop songs with a highly visual and energetic experience as a background. 

And here they were in Mexico City last night playing to a few thousand fans who jumped up and down wildly, singing along to every song written by a boy from Perth. 

Makes you proud to be Australian and hope that the Kangaroo isn't the only thing the world knows about us.  . . read more

A couple of weeks ago, guest Hoyden Orlando asked why Triple J’s first draft of a “potted history of music” failed to showcase significant numbers of women. (The history has since been edited.)

The “Hottest 100 Of All Time” has since aired, and audiences have been shocked to find that only two songs in the top 100 – two! – were sung by women. Only six female-fronted songs made it into the second batch of 100, so it wasn’t as though the men just edged women out in the final vote – women are just overwhelmingly absent. This sort of discrepancy doesn’t happen by accident; we can quibble about the locus of the problem till we’re blue in the face, but it’s a clear sign of entrenched, largely-invisible sexism in action. Quibbling about the locus is pointless because the locus is everywhere. This is the Matrix.

TripleJ afternoon talkback show Hack today called for a bit of feedback on the testostofest finale. It was great to hear people phoning in making intelligent and feminist observations – women and men both.

A couple of folks stood out as particularly unhelpful, of course, too. One bloke phoned in talking about how women just can’t sing with the same emotion as men can, which was an eyeroll moment. And JJJ presenter Zan Rowe was flailingly defensive, taking the “It’s not us, it’s you!” approach and saying over and over and over again that it was “democratic” and not Triple J’s fault, instead of engaging with the issue in a substantive way or taking responsibility for a plan of action.

The show can be downloaded (it will be up for a week) at the Hack site.

Originally posted at Hoyden About Town.