AFL Grand Final Entertainment: Hear her roar, loud and muddied

 

 

Firmly in her ‘Flop Era’ (according to a recent piece in Broadsheet HERE) or what could also be termed an annus horribilus for those who remember the last UK monarch’s reference to her experience of 1992, Katy Perry could be highly motivated to put on an old-school showbiz hustle, a real ‘double threat’ dazzler in order to refloat her career that is decidedly not waving, but drowning if you believe the critics in Hollywood.

 

But the critics I have in mind aren’t hosting Entertainment Tonight or diving into dumpsters for TMZ…they live in the next Aussie suburb and have an active Facebook account.

 

It’s not new that the subject of AFL Grand Final entertainment gets tongues wagging, usually for negative reasons. From ‘Just let the game speak for itself’ (the game speaks for almost three hours, it can’t be too pressing to have 20 minutes of hype around the biggest event of the year, surely?) to ‘It’s too much money’ (my favourites are the ‘we should be spending it on schools and hospitals’ comments. I look forward to the NAB AFL Auskick Children’s Hospital being 2025’s priority…and commenter Dave from Dandenong South following on from his outrage at the AFL to delve into his vaping, punting and beers with the boys budget to nano-fund education as a role model) you could almost set your watch to it.

 

More common this year – or so it seems to this observer – is the looming spectre of nativism and what can only be called a reverse cultural cringe (see also: the popular morphing of Anzac Day from a moment of contemplative commemoration to jingoistic celebration and continued response to January 26th discourse with snarky ‘Happy Australia Day!’ quips six months plus after the fact).

 

It’s not just a problem that Katy will be singing, it’s that she won’t be singing from the same national songbook that gave us Kylie.

 

I’ve lost count of the number of people who respond to articles with assertions that having anyone from overseas perform at the MCG for our day of days is tantamount to sacrilege. Moreover it’s not just that they don’t like the idea of non-Aussies parading on the hallowed turf, but that only local artists can be great and every Yank, Pom or Canuck (heaven forfend a non-Angolsphere artist ever got the call up) is doomed to bomb and it has ever been thus.

 

Huh?

 

Since the VFL/AFL introduced entertainment at scale to the pre-game festivities almost 50 years ago, only recently have international artists been invited to perform. Lionel Richie was arguably the first to do so in any meaningful way for the 2010 replay (remember grand final replays? Now that’s a return to tradition I could get behind…), and he knocked it out of the park. KISS, The Killers, Bryan Adams, Sting, Robbie Williams, Tom Jones and Ed Sheeran…the vast majority of musicians who didn’t grow up on kangaroos, meat pies and Holden cars have had blinders.

 

Messrs Loaf in 2011 and Anderson two decades earlier arguably cancel each other out…or even appeal in a spectacle of the macabre, batmobile crash kind of way.

 

It betrays and belies the experience. ‘It’d be better to have an Aussie’ – who? While dinky-dis have run the gamut from ‘shithouse’ to ‘bonza’ mostly the Aussies have been considered a lukewarm Clayton’s at best in the light of the morning after. The response is usually to double down however ‘Nah they just picked the wrong one…they need to be fresh/a classic, a genre hero/broad appeal…’. The one red line is no foreigners allowed (if I had a lot of money and influence and was particularly invested, I’d like to book juke box heroes Foreigner to play, just for the memes).

 

It’s also echoed in the ‘it was better when it was the VFL’ cries that grow louder. It’s not enough for footy to be local, it must be hyper-local. An appeal to a time when things ‘made sense’ and most rational arguments against this rose tinted view are doomed to failure. But that’s a topic on its own for another time.

 

Now bear with me here, as we are getting away from the footy-adjacent side for a moment. Canadian philospher on media matters, Marshall McLuhan’s famed quote is ‘the medium is the message’. Like many fine pop-philosophy sayings it can be read a number of ways in this day and age. Mine is rather blunt. Think the medium is the message ala Zoolander’s files are in the computer joke, if said joke actually bore fruit. Just like Donald Trump (and Meloni, Farage, Le Pen…) is the message; however grotesque his delivery is, it is quite literally beside the point. He gets cut-through because he simply ‘is’. Katy Perry as pantomine villain works in this case because you can’t say what you want anymore and inflation and Welcome to Country and the stand rule and negative gearing and immigration and Halal Vegemite and AC/DC won’t play the granny.

 

Having international acts at the AFL Grand Final is a sign of growth. Growing the game and its influence perhaps, growing the league’s sway for sure, and even growing the potential audience for footy. Is that such a terrible thing?

 

My counter is that growth is good, if you strip it back from the crony capital and crypto tinge that drives so much of the narrative…it’s arguably the catalyst of the most good any of us are likely to ever do (taking a very generous yet general measure of what ‘good’ is) be it growing a family, knowledge, experience and wisdom or even the best damn tomatoes you’ve ever tasted. But it’s also associated with that most ick-inducing of words – ‘change’. We hate change, don’t we? Therein lies the rub.

 

Perry isn’t exactly my cup of tea, nor do I delve into the back catalogues of the other mentioned artists very often, but at 1:40pm on that one Saturday in September (or October) success is to be found in a bloody magic performance, much as it will be for the following three hours.

 

Maybe I should try another angle: give Katy a crack. It’s the real Australian way.

 

She might just be a teenage to nonagenarian dream.

 

 

 

 

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