Mahaes S. Hannon on violin and Melissa Hunt on Bass. Jex Lopez on everything else. Self produced on Bundjalung land with guidance from Cameron Blanch. Mastered by Michael Worthington.

This song is inspired by my artist friend Salem’s queer and grotesquely beautiful clown face series. I wrote the song in a time of grief for my late friend Candy Royalle. Despite feeling very down and lonely I had to persevere with the shows I had organised. The goals I kicked artistically felt bittersweet. I needed my performer friend for advice, for support, for recognition. Her fierceness and her legacy though, sent a clear message to struggle onward and upward. Even though rationally I knew I was grieving, I still blamed myself for feeling crazy, for being depressive, for ‘not getting over it’. That led to thinking about alienation more generally in a capitalist system. We, the alienated, the mental, blame ourselves for our struggle instead of blaming a mental world. We seek medical and pharmaceutical help. Queers, POC, the unemployed, the overemployed, etc. I love the irony of the old story of a depressed guy going to the doctor to ask for help and the doctor telling him to go and see the funny clown to alleviate his sadness only to find out that the guy he was treating was actually that clown. Being a performer can be tricky because on the one hand you can use it to connect with people, but on the other hand you can let it disconnect you and succumb to the adrenaline highs and the lonely come downs.
Candy and I spoke years ago about how she consciously chose not to use humour in her work even though she could easily make people laugh (she was a crack up personally). Her role was not to make people feel comfortable. It was to challenge, to disarm. We need more of that.
Obviously my background is quite different in this regard after having done drag and character comedy and having been a sort of children’s comedian/puppeteer for years. I value humour as a way to open hearts and deliver important messages. I am also acutely aware that I have used humour to disguise my shadow, my depression, my anxiety my PTSD. After years of day in day out acting ‘the clown’ in my day job, I was exhausted. In retrospect, I craved the freedom to express the full gamut of emotion daily. That is a big reason why I have been drawn to music in the last three years. Where else but in the artistic realm is being a total emo actually useful?? Yeah I can be funny but I’m also angry, disillusioned, fearful, brave, confused and probably more than anything, really sad about the state of the world.
Have you seen the film Chocolat? It’s based on Rafael’s life- an Afro Cuban man born into slavery who ended up performing as a clown in Parisian circuses at the turn of the century. He was always the butt of the joke, the silly, the childish, the friendly scapegoat, which is why crowds accepted him despite the fact that black performers were not generally accepted. Some say he defied the stereotype by diversifying and honing his skills. He was extremely talented.
As far as the Australian context goes- I remember consuming self-deprecating/silly ethnic stereotypes on TV in my own childhood lounge room. Comedy company, fast forward etc. Think Con the Fruiterer, Effy. Even though I loved the characters and maybe these characters made ‘wog’ less threatening and more palatable to an Anglo Aussie audience back then, I must admit I stopped putting my hair up in a frizzy mop of curls on my head cause I didn’t want people to think I was ditzy like Effy. I was studious, I was smart, I was complex. No one wants to be defined and put in a box by mono-cultural peers. Australia has pumped out a lot of similar examples of cultural stereotyping in comedy since- amongst them Summer Heights High. Recently I had to sit in a social situation where someone was Trumpeting ‘Mexicans are taking over the US’ type crap but then raving about how good a ‘negro’ singer was the other night. These ideas are not incongruent. The mainstream crowd wants to feel comfortable. Wants to be entertained by the ‘Other’. But not challenged, and definitely not in a situation where they are perceived to be outnumbered.
Lately I have been calling my genre of music ‘Fantasy Revenge’. Maybe the dark clown has the last laugh in my song. Maybe the audience needs to run.
Note that this work explores a very small aspect of racism, in the area of comedy and entertainment. It does not explore the more fundamental racism that is the theft of Indigenous lands in this country and in so many countries around the world and the continued dismissal of Indigenous culture, knowledge and history.