Cancel culture, racism & Collingwood & Carltons club songs

[btdg]

To add a perspective on the original topic, I think it is interesting to think about if things were going the other direction.

Let's say a Tasmanian team gets added to the competition. They develop their name, colours, etc. Then someone writes a song that has fairly uninspiring lyrics but a pretty catchy tune. And it turns out, they adapted something equally inappropriate - lets say, they decide to write funky new lyrics to something like 'Turning Japanese' by The Vapours (a 20-odd year old song that is probably a bit whiffy today...)

Would that song get through? Or would they telll them to go away and try again? I think the AFL nixes it before it hits public release, and it would definitely be a Thing.

Now, that's not quite the same here. I don't know enough about the history but I suspect a) Carlton adapted an adaptation that had already cut the worst parts of the original, and b) more people today know the Carlton song and very few make connections to the more tame version, let alone the (pretty horrible, lets face it) original. Plus there is something different about keeping something vs creating something new...

Just a perspective. Really the far bigger question is around reconciliation. Is there a way that dialogue with Hagan and others can clean this up? I reckon in some ways it is better to keep the song but publicise (say, on the web page, etc) the history and use it as a way of addressing the past, but its not really for me to say. Carlton seemed to deal with it reasonably well to start with in consulting widely, so maybe that's it. Then again, it took Hagan 10 years to get the N-word taken off a major sports stadium and presumably people in Queensland saw that issue as a bit of a WTF when it first came up too, so maybe we all think differently a decade from now...

 

[underthestars]

Meaning is in the intepretation, and no one interpreted the navy blues as a salute to minstrels and black servitude. no one until a certain agitant discovered its origins when eagerly trawling through internet history looking for something potentially offensive in an attempt to recapture that high of past success.

 

[btdg]

Dot painting was invented by a white person. In the 1970s.

Far more recent than the apparently racist Carlton song.

No, it wasn't. It is incredibly facetious to say so and doing so is to erase from history the indigenous people and artists responsible.

A white art teacher went to work with a group of indigenous people and encouraged them to adapt their traditional art to western methods. In the process, they (the indigenous artists) settled on the use of dots in place of personal/sacred symbols.

Indigenous Australian art - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Behind the dots of Aboriginal Art

There is an amazing story behind the story of Aboriginal dot painting. Tap to discover how the last great art movement was accidently born from secrecy.

www.aboriginal-art-australia.com

The artists then created the artwork, style, etc. The fact that a white person was part of the process and helped facilitate or initiate it doesn't invalidate the work of the actual artists who developed and popularised the style. Dot painting drew heavily on traditional art forms, and transformed them into seomthing new, modern, commercial, etc. Yep - that's what artists do, and you give credit to the artists.

All art has patrons, backers and supporters (and depending on how you view it, people who exploit them). But don't erase the indigenous people from what is a fairly interseting story about the emergence of a uniquely Australian contemporary indigenous art form - one that we should be proud of as a nation.