EVENT CANCELLED
The event organisers have been in touch to let us know the Everything I Learned About Wellness from Listening to Music, 1974-2026 - A Talk By Craig Schuftanshow has been cancelled and will no longer take place at Heaps Normal Health Club, NSW .
A message from the event organisers:
'Unfortunately Craig Schuftan can no longer perform his talk due to personal reasons. The venue will still be open, so feel free to drop by for a free schooner of Heaps Normal. We will contact you when Craig's talk is rescheduled.'
We're sorry for any disappointment caused.
ILL COMMUNICATION: Everything I Learned About Wellness from Listening to Music, 1974-2026
A Talk By Craig Schuftan
Heaps Normal have opened a Health Club to promote their idea of wellness. Craig Schuftan once ran a Culture Club, which did pretty much the opposite. As a radio show, a book, and a series of events devoted to the history of music and popular culture, the Culture Club was full of bold ideas, exciting forms and undeniable bangers. But if you went to it looking for ideas about how to live a long and healthy life, you’d be shit out of luck. Health isn’t just conspicuous by its absence in pop, it’s almost like it goes out of its way to promote the opposite. Pop celebrates images of waste, addiction, unbridled hedonism and wanton destruction. Its heroes, from Siouxzi Sioux to Cherry Rype, My Chemical Romance to FKA Twigs, draw their inspiration from feelings of alienation, despair and anxiety, and often style themselves to look like they’re about to pass out or die of some 19th century disease. Indeed, if admiration can be measured in the proliferation of t-shirts, it would seem that we most approve of the artists who made themselves so sick they wound up dead. This isn’t wellness. It’s not even not-too-badness or I’ve been-betterness. It’s badness, and not in a good way. Craig Schuftan surveys the wreckage of 50 years of pop history and an even longer history of unwellness going back to the romantic era in the 19th century and asks what, if anything, we can learn about living well from people who went out of their way to not. In the process, he asks us to consider whether our whole idea of wellness needs to make space for its opposite, in which case, the list is longer, and the talk much more interesting.