Bogan: An Antipodean description for a person who likes AC/DC, beer and Fords or Holdens. Named after the Bogan river in Australia. The term is widespread in New Zealand and Australia but there are bogans in all corners of the earth.
- Urban dictionary
The older I get, the more I fall behind on all culture. I can't help it as I get older. Entire sub-sub-sub-genres of things that are heaving on TikTok, or social media platforms I haven't even heard of.
I lost track of gamer culture first - there hasn't been a console in the house since 2002, and I swiftly missed out on many games (When I do make time, I still play the same sort of shit I always played, and it's usually at least a decade old.) I try to keep up with all the good new music, but fall hopelessly behind because there is just so much of it. I'm six months behind on movies, but I've always been six months behind on movies, and there is so much TV now there can be five seasons of something before I even hear it exists.
And my 15-year-old self would honestly be fucking disgusted by how much I don't know about the current Marvel and DC universes, mainly by the fact I don't even really try anymore.
But I always thought I had a safe haven in bogan culture. Maybe not the necessities of the each particular facet of the wider bogan community, but the general vibe was unchanging.
I grew up a bogan, most of my best friends are bogans - working class people, slightly trashy. We all have to like Metallica, and The Castle - the second best Australian film ever made, after Mad Max 2 obviously - was the closest thing to a documentary about our lives
So when the biggest rock station in the country has a top 1000 countdown, you bet your arse we're following it with keen interest. (They literally hired a stadium this year to count down the last few dozen songs, and got a decent crowd to come and headbang to a bunch of very loud music videos in an otherwise empty cavern.)
And the #1 song - the most popular among all the bogans in the land - was always something obvious like Enter Sandman or Smells Like Teen Spirit or Killing In The Name Of or some shit like that, and I'm cool with that. But I knew I had completely lost track of my bogan roots when the top song this year was Lynard Skynard's Simple Man.
I'll ride and die for the guitaring on Freebird, but so much of their other stuff is cheesy and cringe, and I always thought a bit less of the Skynard when I heard that they were just a bunch of chancers from fuckin' Florida who glomed onto redneck bullshit for the money, but none of that's the point.
It's that these things come from nowhere - Simple Man was apparently slowly clawing up that Rock 1000 list for several years, and now it's already a foregone collusion that it's this kind of ultimate classic, as embarrassingly mawkish as it is, and I did not see that fucking coming.
I can't even sneer at the kids like all sad old bastards get to do, because it's a song that was put out two years before I was born, so I guess I just missed all the crate parties and pub crawls where Simple Man was such a staple - the greatest rock song in history.
Apparently. What the fuck do I know anymore?
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