Culture Club

The Culture Club is a radio segment I've been presenting and producing for triple j since 2001. It's about art, literature, philosophy and modernism - and it tells the story of how those things have shaped the music we listen to today. The ideas are big, the duration is short, and the music is loud and defiantly populist.

An Alternative History of Alternative Rock

Featuring Sonic Youth, The Pixies, The Breeders, Hole, L7, Nirvana, Blur, Oasis, Elastica, No Doubt, Beck, Radiohead, The Smashing Pumpkins and Pavement.

Modern Art, Rock and Roll, and Other Stuff Your Parents Warned You About

Featuring Beck, The Breeders, The Sex Pistols, Bloc Party, Fluxus, The Situationist International, Gnarls Barkley, Salvador Dali, Luigi Russolo, Grandmaster Flash, John Cage, The Velvet Underground, David Bowie, Marcel Duchamp and Ben Folds

The End of Civilisation as We Know It

Featuring The Smashing Pumpkins, Weezer, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, John Keats, Robert Burton, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Kanye West, Friedrich Nietzsche, MGMT and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Hey! Nietzsche!

Featuring The Gossip, Kings of Leon, Ben Harper, Queen, Meat Loaf, Richard Wagner, AC/DC, Arthur Schopenhauer, Lord Byron, William Wordsworth, William Blake, Dizzee Rascal and My Chemical Romance.

Acceptable in the 80s

Featuring Ladyhawke, Peaches, Cut Copy, Mylo, Calvin Harris, Run DMC, Madonna, Marcel Proust, Giorgio Moroder, David Lee Roth, Theodor Adorno, Karl Marx and Michael J. Fox.

Nothing to lose

'Its time now for all the "fortunate" ones, the cheerleaders and football jocks to strip down naked in front of the entire school at an assembly and plead with every ounce of their souls for mercy and forgiveness, and to admit they are wrong. They are representatives of gluttony and selfish values, and to say that they are sorry for condoning these things, no that will not be enough...'

heathers | winona ryder | nirvana | kurt cobain

No fun

Sir,

The Times has just announced the projected demolition of the Chinese quarter in London. We protest against such moral ideas in town planning, ideas which must obviously make England more boring than it has in recent years already become. The only pageants you have left are a coronation from time to time, an occasional Royal marriage which seldom bears fruit; nothing else. The disappearance of pretty girls, of good family especially, will become rarer and rarer after the razing of Limehouse. Do you honestly believe that a gentleman can amuse himself in Soho? We hold that the so-called modern town planning which you recommend is fatuously idealistic and unnecessary. The sole end of architecture is to serve the passions of men.

guy debord | michele bernstein | potlatch | boredom

National malaise

'I see my sister and her husband. They're living the lives of my parents in a certain kind of way. They got kids, they're working hard. You can see something in their eyes... I asked my sister, 'what do you do for fun?' 'I don't have any fun,' she says. She wasn't kidding.'

bruce springsteen

Bogus Journey

'The writers of classical antiquity were on the whole as little concerned with the future as the past. Thucydides believed that nothing significant had happened in time before the events which he described, and that nothing significant was likely to happen thereafter. History was not going anywhere: because there was no sense of the past, there was equally no sense of the future... It was the Jews, and after them, the Christians, who introduced an entirely new element by postulating a goal toward which the historical process is moving - the teleological view of history. History thus acquired a meaning and a purpose, but at the expense of losing its secular character.'

e.h. carr | history as progress | bill and ted's excellent adventure

The weak become heroes

'The class struggle is a fight for the crude and material things without which no refined and spiritual things could exist. Nevertheless, it is not in the form of the spoils which fall to the victor that the latter make their presence felt in the class struggle. They manifest themselves in this struggle as courage, humour, cunning and fortitude. They have retroactive force and will constantly call in question every victory, past and present, of the rulers. As flowers turn toward the sun, by dint of a secret heliotropism the past strives to turn toward that sun which is rising in the sky of history.'

the streets | mike skinner | walter benjamin | class struggle

Choose a fucking big television

"The range of choice open to an individual is not the deciding factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual... Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide range of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear."

herbert marcuse | trainspotting