John Farnham Has Stolen My Childhood
The Voice to Parliament ‘Yes’ campaign has corrupted an Aussie icon, the nuclear disarmament movement… and my very childhood
In 2019, the autistic Swedish crisis actor, Greta Thunberg, went on international TV and accused us of stealing her childhood.
I say “us” because it is clear she was not addressing the global corporate superstructure, at whom her invective was ostensibly directed. On the contrary, Greta is a darling creature of the corporations she would have us believe she fights against, and I am convinced her words were both written by and spoken on behalf of this very establishment.
Greta’s intended target was of course us – the common people of the world, or more accurately, the useless eaters, to use the words of her WEF pal Yuval Noah Harari.
Technically, Greta’s childhood has indeed been stolen by The Machine, but this privileged young woman knows nothing about loss. Greta has no frame of reference – what innocence she may have had as a little girl was subsumed at an early age by the predetermined form that her life was set to take: a polished PR functionary of the New World Order; a propaganda starlet.
And Greta has embraced this role happily – her smugness is palpable, to the point where she is now even satirizing herself – but who wouldn’t embrace such privilege at such a young age? “I should be back in school,” she whines. Yes, you should Greta, but you’re not, and you’re absolutely loving it, aren’t you.
Greta knows nothing about loss because she didn’t have a childhood to lose. Nothing has been stolen from her – rather, she has been given everything: A-list fame, and the backing of the entire global elite, guaranteeing her a highly lucrative career of bogus activism in perpetuity.
Someone’s childhood has been stolen though – yours and mine.
I don’t know exactly when or where I first heard John Farnham’s iconic rock anthem “You’re the Voice”, I was too young to pinpoint key cultural moments, but it would have been around the age of six or seven and I was probably in a supermarket, or riding in the back of my grandma’s car, or playing at a friend’s place – somewhere there was a radio station playing the hits of the day in the background.
It was the mid-80s – the economy was still booming, a woman was still an adult human female, and an average middle-class family could still afford a spacious four-bedroom standalone house on a quarter-acre section.
We are all likely biased toward the decade in which we spent our golden pre-teen years, but I’m going to go right ahead anyway and say that the 80s were a special time to be a kid. The internet was still science fiction; we climbed trees, rode bikes, and read books; the kids in the neighbourhood all knew each other and would roam freely from one house to another from dawn ‘til dusk; we played in parks, built forts, and splashed about in creeks, and TV was a treat at the end of an energetic day, a visit to the video store on a Saturday evening to pick out a movie on VHS – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Ghostbusters, The Goonies, or Back to the Future. And running through all of it was a medley of mostly great music – real songs written by real people, played on real instruments; songs that were popular because they were good, not because they put people in a dissociative trance. It was a time when you could listen to the radio without becoming physically ill. It was a time when John Farnham’s “You’re the Voice” was everywhere.
It was my childhood. And if you’re of similar age to me, or older even, it is likely synonymous with your youth too.
There is something special about those background radio hits that gilded the childhoods of we who were fortunate enough to grow up in the time before ubiquitous on-demand streaming. There was none of the angst and ambivalence of today’s choice overload; you listened to what was on, and this wasn’t a problem because most of it was pretty good. But standing out amongst this easy-listening backdrop were true greats – the kinds of songs that even thirty years on, transport you straight back to a sunny afternoon in the springtime of your life.
For me, it’s songs like Simple Minds “Alive and Kicking”, Tears for Fears “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”, Ice House “Great Southern Land”, INXS “Original Sin”, Dave Dobbyn “Slice of Heaven”, and many others, equal to but no more iconic than “You’re the Voice”.
These songs, and especially the big anthems of the time like “You’re the Voice”, have the feeling of belonging to humanity – not to the record companies that produced them, or even to the artists themselves, but to the people of the time who fiercely lived and loved in these moments – simple moments like driving up to the mall to get an ice cream with grandad; roller-skating on a Friday night with your school mates; perhaps even a first kiss – moments when living and loving was still something real and physical that people did spontaneously, without the zombifying LED interfaces of today.
Underpinning all this, however, was a darker, but no less unifying force. This was the height of the Cold War and “You’re the Voice” was one of the era’s marquee anti-nuke protest songs. While this aspect of the song’s history has been largely swallowed up by the passage of time and the piece’s enduring popularity and now classic rock status, it provides important context for the vibe I’m attempting to describe here.
As a child I was very aware of the threat posed by the thousands of thermonuclear weapons the USA and USSR had pointed at one another – perhaps more so than most kids my age; my precocious interest in geopolitics led me down the rabbit hole of the 1983 made-for-TV movie The Day After, which terrified the bejesus out of me. This precipitated a pathological anxiety which persisted into the early 90s where it was exacerbated by Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and took the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union to finally quell.
A general air of existential profundity permeated 80s culture at large though, and through songs like “You’re the Voice” I think we found a kind of collective solace, whether we were old enough at the time to know it or not.
Importantly, the Cold War dynamic, while gruesome in some respects, also gave our existence some structure – we knew who we were and what we stood for, and even as the influence of Christianity waned, we in the West still had the ideals of freedom and democracy to sing us to sleep at night, even as the missiles idled in their silos; and we also had great songs like “You’re the Voice”.
So when I heard that John Farnham had agreed to let the ‘Yes’ campaign for the Indigenous Voice to Parliament referendum use his song I was saddened and angered on a foundational level.
They can’t leave anything alone, can they? Nothing is sacred. Nothing is off limits.
The Machine will co-opt, bastardise, and blight everything that was once good about our culture. And they will do it not only in pursuit of profit, but – much worse – for perverse political ends.
The Voice is a nakedly racist and anti-democratic power grab by the global establishment, seeking to entrench a permanent extra-parliamentary lobby group in Australia’s system of government, which will not serve the grassroots interests of indigenous Australians as it is pitched at the credulous hoards of urban liberals upon whom the ‘Yes’ campaign is pinning its hopes, but rather serve as a legislative side door for big-monied corporations and NGOs with an interest in subverting the popular will and enacting authoritarian policies that benefit only the international elite.
I discussed this in my essay The Real Reason Pfizer Supports Australia’s Indigenous Voice to Parliament. I also predicted this whole clown show in my piece Australia Has Fallen... Further 16 months ago after the Labor government came to power, so I am not at all surprised to see Australia following New Zealand down the path of self-flagellating white guilt into a permanent state of indigenous grievance apologism which can be exploited by politicians and their financial backers – but I had been holding out hope that John Farnham would not succumb to the dross.
It went without saying that the aging Aussie rocker would be hotly petitioned by our starry-eyed Neo-Marxist ‘Yes’ zealots to grant them permission to use his song, so obvious was the potential grift, but with the referendum barely a month away I was beginning to think perhaps he would not capitulate.
But capitulate he has.
John Farnham has sold out. He has cheapened and beclowned his entire legacy in a way the previous licencing (for chocolate bars and voice-activated car stereos) could never have done, and he has shown a stiff middle finger to at least half his fan base.
John Farnham has taken a timeless anthem of unity whose message was one of true universality; a poignant and rousing cry of the human spirit in the face of existential doom; one of the precious few remaining cultural artifacts that was not sullied by partisan politics or subsumed by the slavering, faceless miasma of globalism, and he has coated it in filth.
How dare he?
He has stolen my childhood.
I’d like to say I’m not going to take this lying down – that we who understand the true meaning and value of this song will reclaim it, rehabilitate it, rescue it from the clutches of The Machine.
But while we may keep it alive and kicking in our own playlists and enshrine it, in its original form, in our memories, its public persona is now bought and paid for; forever divisive; and it won’t be long before the slimy new ‘Yes’ video advertisement begins assailing our frame of reference.
Can “You’re the Voice” survive the assault of The Voice?
I’ve been listening to it as I wrote this, and it still rings true for me… for now. But the question is perhaps one that should be more broadly applied – not just to the song, but to Australia as a whole.