Silverchair's Frogstomp (33 1/3 Oceania) - Softcover

Thompson, Jay Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798765113349

Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic, 2025

Synopsis

Revisits Australian rock band silverchair's globally successful debut album Frogstomp (1995) and asserts that the band is not an imitation of American grunge nor an emblem of Gen X angst.

Frogstomp transformed Australian rockers silverchair from an(other) unknown teen garage band to an internationally popular rock outfit. The album was released in 1995 and became a global sensation. Due to silverchair's grunge aesthetic, the band's success has often been attributed to its imitation of North American grunge bands and associated Generation X stereotypes. Jay Daniel Thompson demonstrates that the album has greater musical and cultural significance than that framing suggests.

This book argues that Frogstomp is culturally significant not only due to its international success, but because it suggested an impact of globalization on Australian music in the late 20th century and because of its eclectic, and little-discussed, array of pop culture influences. Through an engagement with Arjun Appadurai's work on 'global cultural flows', scholarship on Australian 1990s popular culture and grunge music and textual analyses of both the album's track list and silverchair's live performances, Frogstomp is seen in a distinctive new light.

About this title

About the Authors

Jay Daniel Thompson is Senior Lecturer of Professional Communication in the School of Media and Communication at RMIT University, Australia. His research explores the imbrications of journalism, digital hostility, networked disinformation and media ethics. He is a 1990s pop culture tragic.

Jon Stratton is Adjunct Professor in UniSA Creative at the University of South Australia and a member of the university's Creative People, Products and Places Research Centre. Jon has worked at universities in the UK and Australia and held a Rockefeller Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 1998. His areas of interest include Popular Music, Cultural Studies, Australian Studies, Jewish Cultural Studies and Media Studies. He is the sole author of 12 books and has co-edited four. In 2002 he published Australian Rock: Essays on Popular Music. His most recent books include Black Popular Music in Britain since 1945 (edited with Nabeel Zuberi, 2014), When Music Migrates: Crossing British and European Racial Faultlines 1945-2010 (2014) and An Anthology of Australian Albums: Critical Engagements (edited with Jon Dale and Tony Mitchell, 2020).

Jon Dale is a writer and researcher based in Melbourne, Australia. He teaches across a number of fields (popular music, experimental writing, media studies, criminology, sociology, screen studies) at a number of institutions. He also writes for the English music magazine Uncut, and contributes liner notes and essays to a number of record labels and other publications. He is currently working on several books about DIY and post-punk music, and texts on experimental film and diary film making. He also runs the record labels Tristes Tropiques and Rose Hobart.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798765113349
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 152