Game on, Moles
on DJ Albo on Spicks & Specks, and Australia's eternal 2008.
Last night, “part-time DJ but full-time Prime Minister” Anthony Albanese appeared on the ABC’s decrepit music quiz-show, Spicks & Specks, alongside Astrid Jorgensen, Zoe Coombs Marr, Benn Lee, and, of course, Adam, Myf, and Alan, who is still alive.
At the top of the show, the Prime Minister declined to repeat Myf Warhurst’s iconic catchphrase “game on moles” out of fear of the ripple effect such a soundgrab may hold.
“One of the downsides of my job is you can do things and they can be taken completely out of context,” he said. “It’s a risky enough proposition me being here at all.”
He is right. Taking such a moment out of context could be risky for the embattled PM, who doesn’t need help looking a fool right now. But putting this appearance in context also feels risky, in the same way smoking PCP does.
Watching DJ Albo on Spicks & Specks was unnervingly uncanny. Some things are so much like bits from my live shows that watching them — actually sitting down and taking them in — hits with a kind of nausea/whiplash which leaves me feeling like James Woods at the end of Videodrome.
Long live the new flesh, and may God save the Governor General, etc.
Seeing DJ Albo sitting beside Myf glibly talking about how distracting it was having Peter Garrett as a ministerial colleague hammered home something I’ve known about Australia for a long, long time: it is still 2008.
If there is a better encapsulation of our cultural and political stagnancy than this, I don’t want to see it. Seriously, if Kevin Rudd appears on a rebooted version of Rove [live] to let Rove know he is still “gay for his wife,” don’t tell me, I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it, it may be the thing that finally makes me go full Bickle-mode. But that’s where we are: stuck running on air two-feet past the cliff face of the Howard years, a nation of Wile E. Coyotes doomed to never look down, or else.
Hearing Albo tell a long anecdote about Dolly Parton and her tour busses that ends with her saying, from the stage, that she would like to “smear lip gloss all over him” should make one feel schizophrenic. Three days ago we learned that Australian air bases assisted with a US strike on Houthi weapon stores, that we are essentially bit players in yet another imperial proxy war, and that our Government, led by a part-time DJ, didn’t think this was something the public needed to know much, if anything, about. Islands in the stream, that is what we are, and we rely on each other, uh-huh. Images of Dolly Parton planting sloppy kisses all over DJ Albo’s neck-folds are blending with the images of fire bombings, mass graves, and dead children that have filled my newsfeeds non-stop every day for the past year.
This is the new psychosis, and we’re expected to just sit with it.
I wish I was the type of person who could keep these things separate. I wish I was Ben Lee, or Alan, who is still alive. But Albanese has become inseparable from the holocaust in Gaza, and seeing him yak it up with Adam Hills and co. on the national broadcaster while also scrolling twitter and seeing a video of Palestinians rushing to help a child injured by an Israeli sniper, only to be targeted and blown to pieces by a rocket from an Israeli drone, is, and should be, irreconcilably maddening.
Albanese’s optics are in what can generously be called a ‘bukkake death spiral.’ A year plus of dick tripping has left him neck and neck in the polls with Peter Dutton, a literal orc with the charisma of a Transperth guard, when he could (should?) be coasting off the unpopularity of the Morrison Government well into his second term.
Leaning hard into the “gormless ghoul with cannibalised beliefs” schtick has paid off about as well as one might expect for Albanese, who is clinging to his “hip Gen-X stepdad” persona like he’s Jason Bateman in Juno. He is propped up by an ever dwindling pool of co-conspirators, desperado rusted-ons, and, most grimly, a media and cultural class as daring in their politics as they are in their art (or should I just say ‘content’?)
There is almost no point in complaining about the cosiness between ABC-panel-show comedians (and adjacent) and the powers that be, but it is never not disappointing to me to see just how comfortable our political and cultural ‘elite’ are with one another. It speaks to an absolute lack of beliefs, outside the parameters of ‘identity,’ being integral to a successful career in the Australian arts industry right now.
So many of our success stories, like Zoe Coombs Marr, came to prominence via the performance of a certain mode of ‘politics’ that peaked around 2016-2018, and which worked, and continues to work, like a magic trick in Australia’s “2008 forever” cultural permafrost. This politics was good for branding, and was as digestible as it was, ultimately, unchallenging. For those reasons alone, it remains the industry standard.
It says so much about the all-pervasive apolitical liberalism of Australian comedians (and most performers/artists) that appearing on a quiz show with a Prime Minister that’s cosigning and abetting an occurring genocide is essentially unremarkable, vaguely rote, and not at all hack.
So it goes in a country where people still consider Shaun Micallef edgy.
It is almost as if our expectations of both our Government and our cultural institutions (especially the ABC) are so low that disappointment is the happy medium. Expecting or wanting better from either is the desire of cranks living on the loony fringe (hello). Any mild to heavy disgust one may feel at these cowed collaborations is met with eye-rolls and shushing from artists, fans, and the industry at large, so things keep chugging along as they are, which is as they’ve ever been.
It is hard for me, as both an artist and a commentator, to reconcile these crossovers with how uncritically they are discussed and how painlessly they are willed into existence by those who participate in them. You’re left feeling delusional, if not downright mad, for thinking that this is somehow wrong — that what it leaves us with is both a politics and a culture defined by an innate crappiness, and that that is what keeps us forever tethered to our backwards, banal, past — the long 2008, as I’ve come to know it.
It’s left us with a warped sense of what’s acceptable, and what is good.
There is a parallel timeline where Peter Dutton is doing blackface on a rebooted Hey Hey It’s Saturday, and I want you to consider that that is somehow less offensive than a genocidaire’s goon riffing with the mind behind the lyrics “I’m made of atoms / you’re made of atoms / and we’re all in this together.”
Not to go all Cronenberg again, but we need to reconsider what we, as both artists and audience, find perverse.
Taken out of context, Albanese’s appearance on Spicks & Specks can be seen as another boring media stunt in what’s soon to be a slew of them. Placed in context, however, it is a bleak marker of Australia’s complacency, and our sense that we, the people that lead us, and the people who entertain us, are somehow removed from the world, and the times, that we’re actually living in.
