The Frightening World of Right-Wing Music
There are always nuts in the margins looking to advance abhorrent political causes by any means necessary, including through music. Back in the day that mean neo-Nazi punk and metal bands who found fans in the White Power end of the spectrum. But the song remains the same today for a new crop of outliers with repugnant ideas. And it’s not just rock and punk anymore. The Guardian takes a look.
Last month, Mark Seymour instructed the anti-Muslim group Reclaim Australia to cease playing the Hunters and Collectors song “Holy Grail” at its rallies.
“We stand together with refugees and asylum seekers the world over,” he wrote. ‘We are opposed to bigotry, race hate and fascism. Reclaim Australia has no place in Australian Society.”
Seymour’s comments followed similar remarks from Jimmy Barnes, Midnight Oil, Shane Howard and John Farnham – interventions that left the Reclaimers, by necessity, musically reliant on their own supporters. Thus, at the Adelaide Reclaim Australia event, anti-Islam protesters were treated to a performance from a hip-hop artist calling himself Aussie Digger.
It was quite something.
Aussie Digger threw down his rhymes on a stage already occupied by a man wearing a pink onesie and another flag-waving fellow dressed as a giant jar of vegemite. “Our Aussie hangover cure is – wait for it,” rapped the Digger. “Egg and bacon sandwiches/I don’t think there’s any chance of changing it/ So believe it mate you can love it or leave it”.
“The low-fi recordings,” wrote New Matilda’s clearly shellshocked Max Chalmer. “The old people in the crowd trying not to look too perplexed. The growing distance between the rapper and his beat.”
White conservative rap is, of course, a reliably woeful genre, both in its Australian and US manifestations.
