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Hilarious moment Dr Chris Brown got punked at the Logies

<p dir="ltr">Dr Chris Brown revealed the moment he got punked by an imposter at last year’s Logies.</p> <p dir="ltr">The beloved celebrity vet told the hosts of <em>Triple M’s Mick & MG in the Morning </em>that the prank left him red-faced and wary of whether he’ll be allowed back onto the event’s red carpet this year, despite being the co-host.</p> <p dir="ltr">“I don’t think I’ll be allowed back onto the red carpet after last year’s Logies,” he said, and joked that he was shocked the incident didn’t get out into the public.</p> <p dir="ltr">Brown recalled that he had just arrived at the event and was minding his business when he started getting “strange looks” from a bunch of people.</p> <p dir="ltr">“So I’m on the red carpet and I’m getting a lot of sideways glances and not the kind you want,” he said.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Then about sort of half an hour into it I reckon about 20 people have given me strange looks … just looking disapprovingly in my direction.”</p> <p dir="ltr">The vet was confused as to why people were giving him strange looks until <em>Gardening Australia’s</em> Costa Georgiadis approached him.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Costa comes up with his phone and goes, ‘Hey, look, we’re mates but I thought this was a little unnecessary’,” he said.</p> <p dir="ltr">“Someone had changed their phone name, which you can do, to Dr Chris Brown (Bondi Vet), and was air dropping topless photos of me, shots of me emerging from the surf, paparazzi photos, air dropping them to random people on the red carpet,” Brown laughed.</p> <p dir="ltr">To the amusement of the radio hosts, Brown added: “I, to this day, have no idea how many people received a topless photo from me, apparently, on the red carpet.”</p> <p dir="ltr">Brown is set to co-host this year’s Logies red carpet alongside Sonia Kruger on July 30.</p> <p><em>Image: News.com.au</em></p>

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With the strokes of a guitar solo, Joni Mitchell showed us how our female music elders are super punks

<p>The iconic Joni Mitchell’s recent surprise performance at the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxiluPSmAF8&amp;feature=youtu.be">2022 Newport Folk Festival</a> prompted a world-wide outpouring of love and respect. </p> <p>This was her first musical performance since suffering from a brain aneurysm in 2015 that left her unable to walk and talk. Last year, she spoke of having <a href="https://www.nme.com/en_au/news/music/joni-mitchell-addresses-health-issues-in-rare-speech-at-2021-kennedy-center-honors-3112447">polio as a child</a> as “a rehearsal for the rest of my life”. </p> <p>The tributes for Mitchell celebrated her triumph from illness to recovery, but they also paid homage to Mitchell’s career that has pivoted on protest. </p> <p>Mitchell is largely associated with folk scenes of the 60s and 70s. She has produced a prolific body of work, advocating for social change. As a committed activist she has spoken against environmental degradation, war, LGBTQI+ discrimination, and most recently, removed <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/29/22907696/joni-mitchell-spotify-joe-rogan-podcast-misinformation-covid-19">her music catalogue</a> from Spotify in a protest against anti-vaccine propaganda. </p> <p>Now, with the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7wOdpxGctc">strokes of a guitar solo</a> she repositioned herself from folk hero to punk provocateur, defying the “permissible” ways older women “should” behave. </p> <p>In commanding public space and using one of the most traditionally masculinised expressions of popular music practice, she directly challenged the sorts of expectations many people have around gendered norms, particularly what women in their elder years look and sound like.</p> <h2>Not everyone gets to age on stage</h2> <p>Some of the most persistent social restrictions placed on women and gender diverse musicians are in relation to age. </p> <p>Ongoing expectations of older women are to be passive, quiet and very much in the background. They are rarely asked, or expected, to “take up space” in the same ways their male counterparts do. </p> <p>Whereas men step through phases of youthful experimentation into established music legends, there are tiresome obstacles for female and gender diverse people to do the same. </p> <p>And while exceptions are often exceptional, they are not plentiful.</p> <p>It’s not just age. Women have long been sidelined when it comes to acknowledging their skills on the electric guitar. Much like Mitchell.</p> <p>The electric guitar has been an important part of rock and punk genres. There is a symbiotic relationship between how these genres – and the instrumentation that defines them – have unwittingly become gendered. The electric guitar solo in particular has come to be associated with machismo: fast, loud, expert, brave. </p> <p>If you like to imagine a world where women don’t exist, google “best guitar solos ever”. </p> <p>A recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/02/opinion/grammys-rock-guitar-solo.html">New York Times article</a> suggested things are starting to change. Citing guitarists like Taja Cheek and Adrianne Lenker, the Times suggested the guitar solo has shifted from a macho institution into a display of vulnerability, a moment (perhaps many) of connectivity. </p> <p>Mitchell’s performance sits somewhere in this domain. </p> <p>For the hundreds of thousands of women and gender diverse guitarists world-wide, myself included, the electric guitar and the genres it is entwined with offer a cool, optional extra: to test the cultural norms of gender with other markers of identity like class, culture, sexuality and age, to blur ideas of what we should and shouldn’t do.</p> <h2>Australian women to the front</h2> <p>Australian women and gender diverse rock and punk musicians are often subject to a double act of erasure – missing from localised histories, and also from broader canons of contemporary music, which often remain persistently rooted in the traditions of the UK and the US.</p> <p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/55669013-my-rock-n-roll-friend">Tracey Thorn’s brilliant biography</a> of the Go-Between’s drummer Lindy Morrison is a love lettered homage that steps out the complex local, emotional, personal and structural ways that Australian women and gender diverse people are often omitted from cultural spaces. </p> <p>“We are patronised and then we vanish,” writes Thorn.</p> <p>The work of women and gender diverse artists is often compared to the glossy pedestal of the male creative genius.</p> <p>In this light, we don’t play right, we don’t look right, we don’t sound right. </p> <p>And then, somehow, we don’t age right. </p> <p>Other reasons are far more mundane. Women contribute around <a href="https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/blog/economics-blog/2019/Value-unpaid-work-care.html">13 hours more unpaid work</a> than men each week. </p> <p>Carrying plates overflowing with generous gifts of labour, the maintenance of a music practice – a largely underpaid endeavour – is often the first to fall by the wayside. </p> <p>Add to the mix ingrained social networks of knowledge sharing, and the dominance of men making decisions higher up the chain, and it is easy to see how women and gender diverse musicians stay submerged as men rise to the limited real estate of music elders. </p> <p>The problem isn’t so much about starting up. It’s about finding the time to keep up.</p> <h2>Our female and gender diverse music elders</h2> <p>There are so many Australian female and gender diverse music elders. Some are visible, but many ripple beneath the surface. </p> <p>Regardless of genre, in maintaining decades-long practice, they are the super punks whose legacy can be heard in venues across the country. </p> <p>The challenge now is to support the current crop of excellent musicians beyond the flushes of youth so that we have a more sustainable, textured and diverse Australian music culture. One where Mitchell’s defiance of expectations represents the status quo of how older women should and can be.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/with-the-strokes-of-a-guitar-solo-joni-mitchell-showed-us-how-our-female-music-elders-are-super-punks-188075" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

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What it really meant to be punk in Britain

<p>There is a current surge of interest in punk. The <a href="https://www.nme.com/news/music/sex-pistols-god-save-the-queen-becomes-top-selling-single-in-uk-for-platinum-jubilee-3239877">Sex Pistols’ God Save the Queen </a>topped the UK singles charts during the Platinum Jubilee. This was 45 years to the day after it controversially didn’t when originally released at the time of the Silver Jubilee. </p> <p>Famed director Danny Boyle has also turned his hand to dramatising the life of the band in his series <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KhxwG0eCiE">Pistol</a>, which traces the evolution of the Sex Pistols and the UK punk rock movement that grew out of London in the 1970s. The series, based on the autobiography of Pistols guitarist Steve Jones, has been the subject of controversy, including <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2021/aug/23/sex-pistols-win-legal-fight-against-johnny-rotten-songs-pistol-tv-series">legal battles</a> with former Sex Pistols’ frontman John Lydon who tried to prevent the use of their music. The lead singer <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sex-pistol-johnny-rotten-how-i-became-my-wifes-carer-0dbxpxgxt">dubbed the show</a>: “the most disrespectful shit I ever had to endure”.</p> <p>Almost all genres in popular music have subcultural connotations, signifying style in clothes and moral values. But arguably no other genre has stronger subcultural currency than punk. Musician and lead singer of the band Talking Heads, <a href="https://quotedark.com/quote/punk-was-defined-by-an-attitude-rather-than-a-mus__david-byrne">David Byrne said</a> that “punk was defined by an attitude rather than a musical style”. So what did it mean to be punk?</p> <h2>Rejection of the musical establishment and political authority</h2> <p>Unlike “prog” and “glam” rock before it, punk was anti-establishment, anti-mainstream and anti-commercial. It came to be in the early to mid-1970s when music had become less accessible, and to the next generation of audience, less relatable. This happened to coincide with a period of <a href="https://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/1662">economic decline and growing social unrest</a>. It was a time when the youth of the day felt like their future was fairly bleak. </p> <p>Breaking through the high-brow attitude and elitism was central to the punk attitude. The names of early British punk bands, such as the Clash, the Stranglers and the Damned, served as statements of both belligerence and provocation. </p> <p>The Damned’s <a href="https://www.loudersound.com/features/the-10-best-punk-rock-singles-by-the-undertones-michael-bradley">New Rose</a> was considered to be one of the first UK punk records, released in October 1976. The track was comprised of aggressive energetic drumming (played by the curiously named Rat Scabies), raw distorted, riffing rhythm guitar (switching on occasions to lead parts), underpinned by the bass guitarist attacking the root notes of the guitar chords. Chord sequences were simple and sometimes jarring by way of less obvious progressions. Vocals were sitting somewhere between being sung, spoken and shouted.</p> <p>Thematically, punk lyrics were often antagonistic, challenging society’s “norms”. Songs like Anarchy in the UK (1976) by the Sex Pistols, gave voice to a young generation that felt <a href="https://consequence.net/2021/08/best-punk-songs-list/11/">disenfranchised by its own country</a>. </p> <p>Punk was never limiting and was not subject to gender bias in the way preceding types of rock music were. Many females were active contributors and participants, of particular note were <a href="https://www.discogs.com/artist/80501-Siouxsie-The-Banshees?page=1">Susan Ballion aka Siouxsie Sioux</a>, who fronted the iconic punk group Siouxsie and the Banshees, and style icon <a href="https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/pamela-rooke-jordan-has-died">Pamela Rooke aka Jordan</a> (the Queen of Punk). </p> <p>It is worth noting that across the Atlantic there was also a burgeoning punk scene that preceded the UK punk movement. New York’s CBGB club, opened by Hilly Kristal in 1973, provided a place for the scene to crystallise. The Ramones, Televisionm The Voidoids, Blondie, the Patti Smith Group and Talking Heads all played early gigs there, going on to achieve prominence.</p> <h2>What punk meant to the ‘original’ punks?</h2> <p>Music journalist John Robb, who was also a vocalist in the punk rock band <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldblade">Goldblade</a> and bassist and vocalist in the post-punk band <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Membranes">the Membranes</a> opined, "It is impossible to define punk. It is subjective and means something different to everyone… [it is] exciting, confusing, exhilarating, an unpinned grenade, intellectual but not academic, revolutionary. It tore a hole in the fabric of pop culture and we all got through."</p> <p>Punk was multifaceted and was many things to many people. Something that was felt, enabling, empowering, contradictory, manifesting through individual and collective expression, but perhaps to understand what it was in the beginning, you had to be there.</p> <p>The musician Peter Hook’s origin story is firmly rooted in punk, in particular a <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/4f0B5rf6z2wYQpm5WNqsqP7/they-swear-they-were-there-sex-pistols-at-the-lesser-free-trade-hall">Sex Pistols concert</a> at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester in June 1976. It was reported to have been attended by around only 40 people, but many of them went on to become culturally important figures in British music. It was this event that inspired Hook the next day to buy a bass guitar and hatch a plan to form a band. He would become a founding member of Joy Division, which became New Order after the death of singer Ian Curtis.</p> <p>For dance music pioneer and co-founder of 808 State, Graham Massey, one of his first bands was the punk group Danny and the Dressmakers. <a href="https://youtu.be/GjB2VG8zejo">He has described</a>how he was denied access to music education at school:</p> <p>“With the spirit of rebellion, I entered music around the time of punk where no musical ability was required. There was a great spirit of just jumping in and making a noise.”</p> <p>The fact that musical training and virtuosity were not required meant that punk was not confined to musical elites and deep-pocketed institutions as it had largely been in the past. Massey also talked about “the creative thrill” of “reinvention” in the wake of the dismantling of the musical establishment.</p> <p>The DIY spirit was very much part of the movement. Punks created fanzines, bands created their own labels and people made their own clothes as a form of cultural expression. Manchester band, The Buzzcocks and their manager Richard Boon created New Hormones, the first independent punk rock label in the UK. They were also responsible for organising the Sex Pistols’ Manchester gig attended by Hook, and others.</p> <p>From the late 1970s, punk lost its initial cultural impetus and fragmented (as is always the case with musical and cultural waves), into such styles as anarcho-punk, street-punk and gothic-punk. These movements subsequently gave rise to further new movements (including the new wave). However, the very term “punk” lives on used to describe nonconformity and subversion.</p> <p><em>Image credits: Getty Images</em></p> <p><em>This article originally appeared on <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-it-really-meant-to-be-punk-in-britain-185729" target="_blank" rel="noopener">The Conversation</a>. </em></p>

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Pink’s daughter Willow debuts new “punk rock” haircut

<p>Carey Hart has taken to Instagram to share his love and pride for his daughter’s “punk rock” makeover. </p> <p>The 44-year-old pro motocross competitor shared a special photograph of his eight-year-old daughter Willow’s brand new half-shaved haircut. </p> <p>The proud papa, who is married to pop star Pink shared a sweet message of support by saying: "Loving my punk rock daughter.</p> <p>"Remember everyone, fly your own flag. There is no box to be put in. It's better to be your own self. Own it, and love it. </p> <p>“And if anyone has a problem with it, tell them (politely) to move on. Can't wait to see the woman you grow up to be. </p> <p>“I have a feeling you are gonna be strong, fierce, compassionate, and caring. I'm so proud of you, Willow," he concluded.</p> <p>Hart also shared a meaningful message for his wife’s 40th birthday on September 8, thanking her for constantly inspiring him. </p> <p>"Welcome to 40 baby. I've celebrated 18 birthdays with you, and I can say it's amazing growing up with you,” he wrote. </p> <p>“The person you have grown into is inspiring. You have become a successful business woman, superstar, dedicated mother, philanthropist, supportive wife, wine maker, motorcycle mama, and amazing friend to all around you,”. </p> <p>He and Pink also share a two-year-old son Jameson and have been married since 2006. </p> <p>Scroll through the gallery above to see the pop star’s family throughout the years. </p>

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