“The birds sang, the Proles sang, the Party did not sing.”
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (p.176)
There is a bit of a myth that football is all about the players, especially the great ones. Or that it’s all about the high mark or the bone-crunching shirtfronts or the long kicking. This is all wrong. Football is about the crowd. And more than that it’s about the noise which only a huge crowd can make. At the footy it’s acceptable to shout and scream and pour scorn on people as it is not elsewhere. And, apart from “happy birthday,” the footy is almost the only place where people gather together and sing.
It is very disturbing then that the AFL wants to silence the crowd. I mean the use of very, very loud sound systems to blast out commercials, inane announcements or pop music whenever the game is not actually in progress (or maybe I speak to soon, and in a few weeks they’ll be filling this “dead air” as well.) I noticed this eight years ago at the new Docklands Stadium. Richmond was in with a chance against St Kilda at three quarter time and the Tiger Army had started their chanting. For a moment I had a tingle down my spine but in seconds the chanting was blasted out by commercials played over the PA at 100 decibels. I had to lip read to get what they were saying.
It used to be that one of the great things about going to a game live, as against watching it on TV, was that there were no ads. Well, now there are and the supporters who have paid to get in are not equipped with a mute button. It’s not just annoying, the way ads on TV might be. It’s much sadder than that, it’s a crushing of the timeless human urge to get together and make a noise. We hardly do this anymore and when we do some corporate tyrant drowns it out.
It would be bad enough if this tendency was merely about making money. But even when nobody is paying them their noise continues in the form of very loud music or moronic announcements, as if the crowd could not possibly entertain itself for five minutes.
And it’s not just the AFL. I saw the Poms win a test at the MCG a few years ago (as I write that I feel like the last man to have seen a Tasmanian tiger) and the Barmy Army sang them home like a choir of drunken angels. But during the most recent Ashes tour the Barmy Army was deliberately split up inside the grounds through the allocation of seating. The singing and chanting were subdued and sometimes barely-audible. The authorities’ claims that supporters were split up to avoid trouble were rubbish. The truth is that the corporate mindset which governs professional sport hates authentic crowd atmosphere because it can’t be controlled and it doesn’t provide a revenue stream.
It also happened in the Rugby World Cup in 2003. Again the English supporters sang the house down wherever their team played. But when their team won the final the ground’s PA system blasted out one pop song after another. These were songs which crowds of people simply cannot sing in the way they can sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The supporters were being forced to sing songs selected by the sporting authorities. This sort of tyranny goes way beyond commercial concerns. It reveals a pathological urge to control others, particularly crowds. Why is this? Is the crowd which sings “Jerusalem” or “Tigerland” this evening going to be singing the “Red Flag” tomorrow?
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four. (p.176)
There is a bit of a myth that football is all about the players, especially the great ones. Or that it’s all about the high mark or the bone-crunching shirtfronts or the long kicking. This is all wrong. Football is about the crowd. And more than that it’s about the noise which only a huge crowd can make. At the footy it’s acceptable to shout and scream and pour scorn on people as it is not elsewhere. And, apart from “happy birthday,” the footy is almost the only place where people gather together and sing.
It is very disturbing then that the AFL wants to silence the crowd. I mean the use of very, very loud sound systems to blast out commercials, inane announcements or pop music whenever the game is not actually in progress (or maybe I speak to soon, and in a few weeks they’ll be filling this “dead air” as well.) I noticed this eight years ago at the new Docklands Stadium. Richmond was in with a chance against St Kilda at three quarter time and the Tiger Army had started their chanting. For a moment I had a tingle down my spine but in seconds the chanting was blasted out by commercials played over the PA at 100 decibels. I had to lip read to get what they were saying.
It used to be that one of the great things about going to a game live, as against watching it on TV, was that there were no ads. Well, now there are and the supporters who have paid to get in are not equipped with a mute button. It’s not just annoying, the way ads on TV might be. It’s much sadder than that, it’s a crushing of the timeless human urge to get together and make a noise. We hardly do this anymore and when we do some corporate tyrant drowns it out.
It would be bad enough if this tendency was merely about making money. But even when nobody is paying them their noise continues in the form of very loud music or moronic announcements, as if the crowd could not possibly entertain itself for five minutes.
And it’s not just the AFL. I saw the Poms win a test at the MCG a few years ago (as I write that I feel like the last man to have seen a Tasmanian tiger) and the Barmy Army sang them home like a choir of drunken angels. But during the most recent Ashes tour the Barmy Army was deliberately split up inside the grounds through the allocation of seating. The singing and chanting were subdued and sometimes barely-audible. The authorities’ claims that supporters were split up to avoid trouble were rubbish. The truth is that the corporate mindset which governs professional sport hates authentic crowd atmosphere because it can’t be controlled and it doesn’t provide a revenue stream.
It also happened in the Rugby World Cup in 2003. Again the English supporters sang the house down wherever their team played. But when their team won the final the ground’s PA system blasted out one pop song after another. These were songs which crowds of people simply cannot sing in the way they can sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot.” The supporters were being forced to sing songs selected by the sporting authorities. This sort of tyranny goes way beyond commercial concerns. It reveals a pathological urge to control others, particularly crowds. Why is this? Is the crowd which sings “Jerusalem” or “Tigerland” this evening going to be singing the “Red Flag” tomorrow?
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