Culture Club 3

Learn the secrets of success with Weezer, Oasis and Satan's favourite art teacher, Sir Joshua Reynolds.

A short history of unhappiness as a songwriting resource, 1621-1995. Featuring Robert Burton, John Keats and The Smashing Pumpkins.

Anatomy of mellon collie by Schuftronics

AC/DC. Not only the greatest rock and roll band that ever walked the face of the earth, but also the living embodiment of the mature philosophy of legendary 19th century nutbar, Friedrich Nietzsche.

High voltage by Schuftronics

Hello? Is that Tommy Lee from Motley Crue? Yes, I'd like my umlaut back please'. Meet Richard Wagner, godfather of the infamous rock dots, and the only 19th century composer to have a whole subgenre of rock and roll named after him.

Long slow loud by Schuftronics

What's the worst thing about being a singer in a world famous rock and roll band? No, I can't think of anything either. So why do they all look so unhappy? 'It's a pose' says 19th century hellraiser Lord Byron. 'I should know, I invented it.'

We don't do smiles by Schuftronics

It seemed to the people as though life was without purpose, and that boredom and sufffering would be their lot for all eternity. 'Who will save us?' they cried, 'who will show us how to live?' Then, verily there appeared before them a wandering minstrel named Ben Harper and his relentless brethren. He played for them a song originally recorded by Queen and David Bowie. And lo, the people understood!

The terror of knowing by Schuftronics

What's it like being an Australian rapper? According to Dialectrix, it's very lonely indeed. "I'm an outcast!", he says. This has been a problem for all artists since the French Revolution. It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for them - but not quite.

I'm an outcast by Schuftronics

One woman against the entire universe. She's outnumbered and out of options - if she's going to get through this thing, she's going to need... a partner! Read it in a deep gravelly voice and its a trailer for an action movie with Angelina Jolie in it. Sing it over disco and it's the Gossip's song, Heavy Cross. Translate it into a philosophy of life, and you're doing what the philosophers call 'living Romantically'.

It's a cruel world by Schuftronics

Armand Van Helden and Dizzee Rascal drag early 20th century cafe talk kicking and screaming onto the dancefloor. "Society labels me insane", muses Dizzee, "but perhaps madness is close to genius. After all, they shut up De Sade, they shut up Nietzsche..."

Bonkers! by Schuftronics

Find out what puts the Romance in My Chemical Romance, with special guest star Rosie Beaton.

When i was a young boy by Schuftronics

Some of these Culture Club stories are condensed versions of chapters from Hey! Nietzsche!, others take ideas from that book and expand on them by applying them to songs that were being played a lot on triple j at the time, like The Gossip’s ‘Heavy Cross’, Dizzee Rascal’s ‘Bonkers’, Kings Of Leon’s ‘Sex on Fire’ and Dialectrix’s ‘Outcast’. The intro is a re-creation of 'Another Brick in the Wall', achieved with some samples from the soundtrack to a hit musical of the late 70s, a group of high school kids who came in for a tour of the station, and a terrible electric guitar I bought for $60 from cash converters in 1998.

I Life

"Could it be that we come to the city in order to achieve solitude? Such has been the unspoken premise of the modern city of utopian individualism. By solitude I do not mean isolation. Isolation is a state of nature: solitude is the work of culture. Isolation is an imposition, solitude a choice."

Infancy and Progress

"The whole human species, looked at from its origins, appears to the philosopher as an immense whole, which, like an individual, has its infancy and its progress … The totality of humanity, fluctuating between calm and agitation, between good times and bad, moves steadily though slowly towards a greater perfection."

Said nobody, at any time in the last one hundred years. Nowadays, our view of the future is more like the one seen from the middle ages than the Enlightenment. But from where he stood in 1750, or perhaps sat, on a chair a bit like the one pictured above, the French statesman and economist Jacques Turgot could look back on the past five centuries and see a gradual transition from primitive agrarians torturing and killing each other over superstitious nonsense, to the confident era of the Enlightenment, with its stupendous advancements in astronomy, medicine and physics.

enlightenment | progress | history | kubrick | 2001

Lost Paradise

'Thus it is well known that a child learns to walk, talk and to know his way around the world just by trying something out and seeing what happens, then modifying what he does (or thinks) in accordance with what has actually happened. In this way, he spends his first few years in a wonderfully creative way, discovering all sorts of things that are new to him, and this leads people to look back on childhood as a kind of lost paradise. As the child grows older, however, learning takes on a narrower meaning. In school, he learns by repetition to accumulate knowledge, so as to please the teacher and pass examinations. At work, he learns in a similar way, so as to make a living, or for some other utilitarian purpose, and not for the love of the action of learning itself. So his ability to see something new and original gradually dies away. And without it there is evidently no ground from which anything can grow.'

guns n roses | axl rose | daniel bohm | childhood | creativity

No Satisfaction

'That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is given over to boredom; and that boredom is a direct proof that existence itself is valueless, for boredom is nothing more than the sensation of the emptiness of existence. For if life, in the desire for which our essence and existence consists, possessed in itself a positive value and real content, there would be no such thing as boredom: mere existence would fulfil and satisfy us. As things are, we take no pleasure in existence except when we are striving after something—in which case distance and difficulties make our goal look as if it would satisfy us (an illusion which fades when we reach it) ...'

Moral Motifs

'There is a sentimental rhetoric which readily waxes emotional about deserving paupers and unhappy millionaires alike, and which rails against money... These melodramatic and moral motifs are part of the everyday lives of poor people. Verbal propaganda of the rich, they make up the greater part of the average person's ideological baggage. Disguised as an indictment of money, they justify wealth by reducing it to a mere accident of the human condition...'

mo money | mo problems | lefebvre | biggie smalls | notorious BIG

Monster

'The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self - these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live... Ours is an age which obsessively pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. The truths we respect are those born of affliction. We measure truth in terms of the cost to the writer in suffering - rather than by the standard of an objective truth to which a writer's words correspond. Each of our truths must have a martyr.'

kanye west | spike jonze | susan sontag