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One of the common responses to the coronavirus pandemic and the lockdowns that have been a feature of almost all countries has been the making of what have come to be called parodies. These are songs with new lyrics set to the tunes of established and well-known popular songs. The new lyrics describe life during the pandemic, the experience of isolation during lockdown, the importance of wearing masks and washing hands, the importance of social distancing when one is out. The pandemic parodies are a comment, sometimes jocular sometimes more anguished, on the new normal. They are posted on social media sites, mostly YouTube but also other sites such as TikTok, and invite comments from their audience about everything from the quality of the recording to the accuracy of the lyrics in reflecting people’s lives during this time. Some of these parodies are by semi-professional singers, others by amateurs. Most of the parodists are white males and most of the songs parodied are from the 1970s and 1980s, part of the cultural capital of Generation X. This article argues that calling these songs parodies invites misunderstanding. They function more like the ballads of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when new lyrics would be written to be sung to well-known tunes. Often these lyrics would be commentaries on significant public or political events. This article argues that the pandemic parodies function similarly only now rather than the new lyrics being sold in the streets by hawkers, the songs are available on the web. At a time when the popular music industry is undergoing a fundamental transformation as a consequence of the impact of new technologies such as streaming, these pandemic parodies suggest another transformation in the production and consumption of popular music. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

KISS was a hard rock group, one of the most successful during the second half of the 1970s and early 1980s. The group’s two founding members, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley, were both Jewish. Indeed, both were the sons of Holocaust survivors. This article examines the impact of Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness on KISS as a rock group and on its success. One of the most obvious impacts was the drive to succeed which Simmons and Stanley shared. Simmons writes about wanting power, Stanley that he wanted respect. As children of survivors they wanted safety. During much of the 1970s, the Holocaust was not yet publicly acknowledged. However, its trauma is evident in, for example, the stage characters that Simmons and Stanley adopted. First, and most obviously, the disguise which hid their Jewishness but, at the same time, Simmons’s creation of the Demon and Stanley’s Starchild both in different ways acting out their inherited Holocaust trauma. This article addresses the many ways that Simmons’s and Stanley’s Jewishness, as filtered through the inherited trauma of the Holocaust, impacted on the image and music of KISS. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Panic buying of toilet rolls in Australia began in early March 2020. This was related to the realisation that the novel coronavirus was spreading across the country. To the general population the impact of the virus was unknown. Gradually the federal government started closing the country’s borders. The panic buying of toilet rolls was not unique to Australia. It happened across all societies that used toilet paper rather than water to clean after defecation and urination. However, research suggests that the panic buying was most extreme in Australia. This article argues that the panic buying was closely linked to everyday notions of Western civilisation. Pedestal toilets and toilet paper are key aspects of civilisation and the fear of the loss of toilet paper is connected to anxiety about social breakdown, the loss of civilisation. This is the fear manifested in the perceived threat posed by the virus. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article examines nightclubbing in Perth in the 1980s. The specific focus is on the ways ethnicity and race related to which nightclub people went to, and the kinds of music played in the nightclubs. The article is based on interviews. The article focuses on three specific clubs, Hannibal’s, where the Italo-Australians and other southern Europeans went, Palladium, where Italo-Australians mixed with white Australians, and Jules, where Anglo-Indians and Anglo-Burmese, who self-identified as black, would go. The clubs for Australians, white Australians, were Pinocchio’s and Gobbles. Official multiculturalism was established during the 1980s and helped legitimise the cultural diversity found in Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules. Likewise, the gradual termination of the White Australia policy enabled the presence of people identified by many Australians as non-white, who thought of themselves as black and identified with African Americans and their music. When the American navy ships docked in Fremantle, the African-American sailors went to Jules. In 1990 Hannibal’s, Palladium and Jules all closed. It was the end of an era. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There are a surprising number of songs that reference Perth, Western Australia, written by artists who do not live there and who might have visited, usually on tour, or have never been there at all. In this article I examine the reasons for this, suggesting that Perth is a city that has become very mythic. This mythic investment is a consequence of Perth being in the west of Australia- California has some of the same mythic qualities in the United States-being (almost) on the coast, and on the coast of the ocean not a sea, and being constructed as isolated. This article examines the impact of these mythic tropes through a reading of various song lyrics where Perth is either in the title or in the lyrics, or both. These include songs by Gordon Lightfoot, Beirut, Bon Iver and Pavement, among others. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article examines the relationship between Christianity and claims about Australian culture. In modernity Christianity was reconstructed as fundamentally European and white. This article argues that English middle-class values, which historically have been deeply imbricated with the values expressed by the Church of England, have been taken up in Australia as the foundation of Australian culture. In official multiculturalism non-Anglican Christian denominations have been with ethnics. This includes Catholicism which, in spite of the numbers of Italians, Maltese, and other Catholics now present in Australia, is still associated with the Irish. This article argues that the Howard government was a watershed in the political use of Christianity to claim a hegemonic Australian morality and this has been established in opposition to other religious groups in Australia, most obviously Muslims. At the same time, this Christian morality is implicitly white and the members of other religions are assumed to be non-white. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In the final article, Jon Stratton explores trends in the charts history in Australia, specifically those in Adelaide and Perth, with a view towards presenting an understanding of the influence of English migrant populations in both centres. Broad links between employment, class and musical taste are drawn, and the very nature of these means it can be difficult to be categorical as to their ultimate veracity. In this sense the article might well be seen as provocative, and we hope it inspires further enquiry with a more ethnographic approach to methodology. This kind of research is difficult without the existence of detailed chart compilations such as those by Ryan (2003, 2007) which are used as the basis for Stratton’s analysis. With a great deal of contemporary industry statistics tied up in proprietary networks to protect commercial advantage, will such studies actually be harder in the future? Does the plethora of unfiltered information in which we wade today provide evidence for an urgent need of modern chart and consumption summaries? Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The Sapphires was the most popular Australian film of 2012. Loosely based on history, the film tells the story of four Indigenous young women, three of whom move in 1968 from a country reserve to Melbourne, who are transformed from singing hymns and country and western to becoming a soul group in the mould of the Supremes and who then tour Vietnam during the war entertaining the American troops. This article analyses the reasons for the popularity of the film. I argue that beyond the feelgood drama, including a romantic comedy subplot, the film minimizes the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians during the 1950s and 1960s, elides the 20 years era of self-determination and suggests a positive continuity between the period of assimilation and paternalism and the John Howard Liberal-dominated government's neoliberal ideology of personal responsibility. To this end, the film also plays down the racism of the assimilationist period and, through the character of Kay, implies that the policy of taking children away from their families (the Stolen Generations) had positive results. The film denies the young women's agency by introducing the character of the Irish Dave Lovelace as the creator and manager of the Sapphires. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article argues that there is an elective affinity between the Jewish worldview and sampling. Sampling has a history much longer than its use in hip hop. Here, though, I am concerned with Jewish artists who have used sampling since the 1980s such as Steinski, the Beastie Boys, Edan and SoCalled. These artists have worked within the generic form of hip hop but have created texts that are quite distinct from texts created by African Americans. My list here is by no means definitive but is a function of the artists that I use for illustrative purposes. I suggest that the Jewish worldview, founded on ideas of catastrophe and exile, and of the bringing back together of fragments to form a new cultural whole, has a synergy with sampling which utilises fragments in the service of creating a new text. These reference points are different from the assumptions that underpin African-American uses of hip hop. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There is limited scholarship about Paul Fenech’s television comedy series and films. What there is tends to focus on Pizza (2000–2007) and place it, and its spin-off film, Fat Pizza (2003), within what has been called the wogsploitation cycle that includes most prominently The Wog Boy (2000). In this article I discuss two of Fenech’s television series, Pizza and Housos (2011–2013), in the context of representations of the underclass. I argue that the discourse of the underclass has evolved as the Other of neoliberalism in a similar way that the dangerous class, what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, was constructed as the Other of industrial capitalism. The characters in Pizza, with their pitiful below-minimum-wage earnings, exist on the borderline of the underclass, while the characters in Housos are immersed in the underclass existence. The film Housos v Authority (2012) is a populist exploration of Australian underclass life. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Judge Dread (Alex Hughes) had nine top forty hits in the early 1970s. All were banned by the BBC. Almost all the music press ignored him. Hughes was white and working class; his most significant idea was to combine naughty remakes of nursery rhymes with ska and rock steady backing rhythms. Judge Dread's singles were a big hit with skinheads. By the mid-1970s, when the skinhead subculture had died out, Dread was releasing rude parodies of songs such as 'Je t'aime... moi non plus' and 'Y Viva Espana'. This article argues that Hughes' work was founded in music-hall genres but also was influenced by the Jamaican rudeness tradition. Hughes can be understood as both a music-hall traditionalist and a postcolonial hybrid. His recordings helped to familiarise Britons with Jamaican music. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article discusses the whiteness of Christianity in Australia and the ways that Islam has been constructed as Other. Its starting point is the phrase used by a protestor at a Reclaim Australia event: ‘Jesus not Islam’. The article begins with a historical contextualization showing how Christianity became white in Europe from around the early seventeenth century. It then discusses how Islam came to be produced as a fundamental threat to Christianity, the moral order articulated through it, and the civilization built on it. The article argues that recognizing this is a necessary foundation for understanding why Islam has been singled out in Australia and the ways that the ‘Australian Muslim’ has been constructed. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This essay is about the hugely successful sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. The programme is centred on an ensemble cast of five main characters, the central two of whom, Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter, share an apartment, who are highly intelligent and work at California Institute of Technology, and a woman, Penny, whose family name is never revealed, who lives across the hall from Sheldon and Leonard. In this essay, I argue that through the behaviour of the characters, the show reproduces many of the key ideological assumptions of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a socio-economic theory of social life which privileges competition above all affective social bonds. I argue that Sheldon’s lack of empathy, which has led many viewers to assume he has Asperger’s Syndrome, is also a key characteristic of success in the neoliberal order. I go on to explore the complexity of family relations in neoliberalism and compare these to the familial structures in The Big Bang Theory. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article is about the very popular American sitcom The Big Bang Theory. It is focused on the ways that the economic assumptions of neoliberalism are made clear in the programme and how much of this process is linked to the character of Sheldon. I argue that Sheldon is a version of the literary trope of the fool. In this case, a person who is lacking in social skills and who therefore speaks the “truth” of his understanding of social situations. It is this understanding which, I argue is neoliberal. I am not arguing that The Big Bang Theory promotes neoliberalism. Rather, I am suggesting that, most probably unintentionally, the show lays out many of the key premises of neoliberalism, such as the importance of contracts, and enables audiences to consider these while laughing at the show. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In the present article, I think about the importance of Perth's culture as a crucial context in which the popular music of Perth has developed. In the case examined in the present article, Perth music in the 1960s and 1970s can be understood as a scene that evolved in situ. Its localism was certainly not a function of any attempt to market 'Perth music'. Rather, as we shall see, the Perth music scene as I describe it has arisen in a particular geographic place with specific qualities and, as I will argue, these qualities have had identifiable effects on the music produced in Perth. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper examines the genre of tracks centred around the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s which include aural representations of female sexual pleasure. The two most important tracks, and the ones on which this paper focuses, are Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg ‘Je t'aime … moi non plus’ and Donna Summer ‘Love To Love You Baby’. The paper argues that this new audibility of female sexual pleasure related to the transformation in the understanding of female orgasm associated with Alfred Kinsey and with William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the American sexologists who radically changed Western understandings of sexual behaviour in the 1950s and 1960s. More broadly, the paper argues for a link between the so-called sexual revolution of the late 1960s and 1970s and the popularity of tracks in which sounds identified as female sexual pleasure were upfront in the musical mix.

'Police On My Back' was written in England by Eddy Grant and recorded by his group, The Equals, in 1967. Since then it has been covered by a number of artists. In this article I am concerned with the original and four covers. Over the 40 years between the Equals' version of the song and the final version with which I am concerned, the meaning of the lyrics has changed from being an expression of Jamaican rude boy culture to being a song that expresses the oppression of migrants from British and European colonies living in the metropoles of the colonisers. This article tracks the changes in musical and lyrical expression in the song against the increasingly oppressive circumstances of those migrants and their descendents. These are the circumstances that contributed to the British riots of 1981 and of 2011, and the French riots of 1981 and the many subsequent riots climaxing in those of 2005. 'Police On My Back' has always been hybrid. Grant's version placed rude boy lyrics with a British beat group sound. Later, as the lyrics came to reflect the circumstances of the migrants, so the musical backing came to include a variety of musical forms, many of which expressed the heritages of the performers and asserted the legitimacy of those heritages in a multicultural context. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

In common with many other Western countries, neoliberalism has become the dominant political philosophy in Australia since the 1980s. With the election of the John Howard-led Coalition in 1996 this impact has been reinforced. This article explores the neoliberal values appearing in Australian cultural productions through a number of popular Australian films from 2005 and 2006: The Proposition, Kenny, Jindabyne and Suburban Mayhem. The article discusses the nature of the proposition in The Proposition, the serial killers in Wolf Creek and Jindabyne, who remain at large, and the murder in Suburban Mayhem for which the wrong person is convicted and the real perpetrators are able to enjoy the fruits of their crime.

Using the Cronulla Riots as a starting point, this article explores the way in which neoliberal ideology, and the social and economic practices associated with it, have transformed Australia from an inclusive nation-state to one founded on the premise of exclusion. From this foundation, relative inclusion is based on a person's utility to the economic requirements of Australian capitalism. More and more people live outside of Australian citizenship which, previously, marked the limits of the inclusive state. In this new order of relative exclusion, many white Australians, who previously had felt themselves to be entitled members of the Australian state, experience an increasing disenfranchisement. Resorting to nationalism as a way of asserting their membership of the nation-state, the Cronulla riots were a manifestation of the frustrations of many white Australians. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At the same time, members of western countries have become increasingly anxious about displaced peoples: asylum-seekers and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those countries. What displaced people, people without the protection of the state and zombies have in common is that both manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls 'bare life'. Moreover, zombies have the qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The genre of the zombie apocalypse centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge for a group of humans. In these texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with displaced people who are 'threatening' the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people constructs them as similar to mythical zombies. This article includes analyses of a number of zombie films including Shaun of the Dead, Fido and Undead. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Over the last twenty years or so there has been a greatly increased anxiety in Australia over those people now often identified as asylum seekers. In this article I argue that this change of attitude is connected with the ongoing reconstruction of Australia as a neoliberal state. I link the importance of the border of the nation-state with the development of capitalism and go on to argue that there is a direct relation between the assumptions of neoliberalism and Giorgio Agamben's theorization of the state of exception. With this argument I suggest that the state of exception is fundamentally raced. I discuss the Australian relationship between migrants, race and capitalism, which historically worked in terms of the White Australia policy, and think about how asylum seekers are understood to threaten the racialized, neoliberal order of Australian capitalism. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

The five interlinked essays in this issue of Continuum consider questions of the (re)production of borders - biopolitical, spatial, legal, historical, symbolic - intended to contain and exclude asylum seekers. The essays situate these modalities and technologies of exclusion in the context of broader questions of nationalism, citizenship, biopolitics, neoliberalism and the transnational genealogies of colonialism and racism. They make the collective argument that the issue of border security is not the preoccupation of a single political party or government but serves to magnetize a cluster of concerns and issues that are central to contemporary formations of citizenship, identity, territoriality and statehood in the West. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This article considers the Australian film Lucky Miles (2007) in the context of the developing emphasis in Australia through the 1990s and 2000s on neoliberal policies. This emphasis started with the Labor governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating and was qualitatively reinforced by the conservative coalition government of John Howard. Lucky Miles is a film which narratives the experience of asylum seekers arriving on the Australian mainland. My focus is particularly on the impact of neoliberalism on the role of the border and on the popular attitude towards asylum seekers. To help develop this argument I also consider the film Children of Men (2006), which is set in Britain in a dystopian future. I analyse Lucky Miles to understand how it replicates anxieties about asylum seekers and the porosity of the border that are, at bottom, a consequence of changing attitudes bred by neoliberal policies. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

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