Tall Poppy Syndrome and One Who's Made It

One of my assignments for my class "The View From Australia" was to write a blog and my catergory was music so here's my blog:

Most Americans assume that since Australia has great cities like Sydney and Melbourne that living in Australia must be the same as living in America. I have found that to be untrue in more ways than one including the music scene. On the weekends I have noticed that ninety-nine percent of the music played at pubs are Australian musicians playing American songs. I find that interesting because I assumed that Australia would have their own set of popular artists and hits. I say that this is different from America because they are American songs because of something I learned that is called the “tall poppy syndrome” which is an Australian slang term.
In Australia tall poppy syndrome is a term used to describe people who have distinguished themselves from the rest because of their talents or achievements. According to Urban Dictionary.com tall poppy syndrome is defined as, “Australian slang for the tendency to criticize highly successful people (ie, tall poppies), and 'cut them down'.” Here in Australia, people do not want to distinguish themselves from the rest because of the resentment that others feel towards them and the instinct for others to cut them back down to their level. Because of this, there is not an abundance of Australian musicians living here in Australia. I have found that most go to the UK or the US in order to become famous and make themselves known. Even musicians coming here to Australia have a harder time pleasing the crowd because audiences can generally be harsher in their judgment of a performance.

A recent example of this was Whitney Houston’s concert in Sydney which got ripped to shreds by Australian fans on television and in the newspapers. The Daily Telegraph also thinks this may have to do with the tall poppy syndrome. In an article on the concert journalist Jamie Campbell says that it was a mixture of wanting to tear someone down who has had huge global success (tall poppy syndrome) and that reviewers deciding that because of her widely known drug problem that she would not be up to it. This is just one example of how Australians can be critical and hard to please but there are of course musicians who become big in this country. For example, AC/DC got their start in Melbourne Australia when the Young Brothers migrated from Australia from Scotland.

Another musician who is one of the most famous singer-song writers of Australia and is less known to Americans is a man named Paul Kelly. Rolling Stones magazine said in a review of his CD “Under the Sun” that “Nobody who writes as many topdrawer songs as Paul Kelly does should be as unknown as he is” and gave the CD four out of five stars. Paul Kelly didn’t always start out big of course. Born in Adelaide, South Australia Paul Kelly traveled to Melbourne where he settled in 1976 and began playing gigs in pubs becoming involved in the pub rock and drug culture. Paul Kelly was part of music groups including Paul Kelly and the Dots and Paul Kelly and the Coloured Girls (which later got changed to the Messengers). From 1992 on Paul Kelly did mostly solo work with collaborations with other musicians. He has even currently worked as a composer for film and television scores. Paul Kelly has also done a lot of song writing for other musicians including Marilyn Manson. He was quoted in 2008 saying, “Quite often, I'm trying to write a certain kind of song and it's more ambitious than what my voice will get to. That's how I started writing songs with other people in mind.”

Paul Kelly has been writing songs for the Australian people for thirty years. His songs are a mixture of rock, folk, bluegrass, and country and he is a talented musician who sings, plays guitar, and the harmonica. He has captured the hearts of the Australian people with his lyrics about his countries landscape and culture and his life has been told throughout his songs. Paul Kelly has been nominated for fifty one awards and has taken home twenty four of them. The most recent win was in 2009 for Vocal Collaboration of the Year at the Country Music Association of Australia (CMAA) Awards for the nominated work “Still Here”.

While there is definitely an underlying sense of the tall poppy syndrome pulling Australian musicians down, there are still musicians who make it. AC/DC is an example of a band that went internationally pulling fans from all over the world while Paul Kelly is an example of a musician who charmed the hearts of his own people and beat the tall poppy syndrome.