Redneck Wonderland
Midnight Oil, Sony, 1998
Review by Paul Mitchell
Zadok Perspectives Issue No. 61
Winter 1998

Midnight Oil's latest album, Redneck Wonderland, has more in common with the band's Head Injuries period and experimental Red Sails in the Sunset phase than any of their mainstream albums. Taking cues from hip-hop, electronica and pop punk, they have released their most contemporary sounding album in years. Buzz-saw guitars regularly meet synth punctuations, providing the appropriate pernicious soundscape for Peter Garrett's iconoclastic vocals.

As the title broadcasts, this album is concerned primarily with Australia's current political climate. Never a band to shirk a cause, it's clear from the urgency inherent to Redneck Wonderland that Midnight Oil did not wish to be voiceless in arguably Australia's most important political moment in the last half of the 20th century.

Given the exposure the most recent single (and title track) has received, Redneck Wonderland could lift Midnight Oil's voice to the levels of Blue Sky Mining. It is not necessarily a better album than its two predecessors (Earth and Sun and Moon and Breathe), but 'the Oil's' publicity machine is in full swing this time around.

A lyric from the title track provides the wet finger for Redneck Wonderland's prevailing wind: "I can see the beauty treatment draining from your face/It is vision free, it's poor bugger me/Something less than grand/Redneck Wonderland." Why does that lyric evoke an image for this reviewer of Pauline Hanson's face melting and gradually disappearing? Because, I believe, it's supposed to.

The album often speaks against the individualism, xenophobia and prejudice considered to be in the hearts of those Australians especially, but not exclusively, inspired by One Nation. Lyric after lyric peels the moulding rind from the fruits produced by the aforementioned 'states of heart':

"So you got coastline for fence/It could be your first line of defence" ( "Comfortable Place on the Couch"); "If you can't conceive of better lines and better times then let silence bury you/In the end you will be condemned" ( "White Skin, Black Heart").

While the album provides an accurate rear-view mirror for whoever may wish to drive the nation toward civil unrest, there is on Redneck Wonderland a relative failure to deal with the interplay of forces which have brought upon us serious schism.

An example: while several tracks, most notably "Concrete", lament the perceived soul destroying effects of urbanisation, no obvious connection is drawn between this and the fact that the economic policy behind "Manhattanisation" is one of the fuels for One Nation. It's all good and well for Midnight Oil to attack urbanisation, One Nation and economic rationalism simultaneously, but to do so without providing some paths forward does little more than provide sound and fury for the opinion pages of the Fairfax press.

That's not to say that Redneck Wonderland is devoid of compassion or spiritual directives. It possesses threads of both. But they are of the kind that if pulled they would relinquish their hold on the album immediately. The thread representing the band's invective of, well, "rednecks", is overlocked into the album's seams.

There are two things you'd better avoid being in this country at the moment: a member of the conspiratorial "intelligentsia" or a brain-dead, gun-toting "redneck". And while it is not difficult to understand Midnight Oil's righteous anger at the levels of intolerance and bigotry unhinged in this land, it begs the question: Is their attitude helpful (especially given the fact that their album is titled Redneck Wonderland) in an information culture where perception is truth?

In these pages author Veronica Brady has proposed the path of loving and understanding 'rednecks'. Henry Rosenbloom, Robert Manne and others, while not travelling that path entirely, have at least proposed the nation listens to those disaffected currently outworking their condition via intolerance. Midnight Oil have drifted toward a culture of blame on Redneck Wonderland. Their position is frustrating when one considers that their 1996 album, the under-promoted Breathe, contained "Time to Heal", a song infused with the spirit for which Australia is thirsting:

"Where is the ground, the beloved country/Women and men who have fallen silent/Where are the words that can speak forgiveness/Now is the time to heal."

Paul Mitchell is Associate Editor of Zadok Perspectives.