VBS.TV
December 7, 2009
I just finished watching a documentary on VBS.TV which is an offshoot of Vice magazine’s Viceland.com website. This website specializes, in a sort of, all subculture specialties. This doesn’t just like in American underground rock culture, but it entails everything from covering the underground Gun trade in Pakistans to North Korea to American Domestic Terrorism groups. The documentaries are extremely realist, and tend to work in the “fly on the wall” brand of journalism where there is not P.O.V. of the camera person or interviewer. They usually let their subjects to the majority of the talking. And if there is a host, they usually try their best to be as objective as possible, which is refreshing in our American corporate controlled “news” media. I really don’t watch the news, because i don’t even have television, but I find I often get more out of this than I do out of a newspaper.
What I just watched tonight was a documentary on the “Heavy Metal Gangs of Aboriginal Australia”, (or something close), of the town of Weydaye. (sp.) This was something I think really the rest of the world would have other wise never heard of, and still for the most part, probably never will. This documentary investigates a small village in Australia, created by Christian missionaries some 50 years ago to educate and civilize the aboriginal people. When this happened it brought loads of tribes together who had never lived together before. Normally they had tribal boundaries, but now were forced to live together. Over time, this turned into rivalries and violence, and strangely enough, in recent years, many of these different tribes went onto to form gangs assigning themselves with names related to western heavy metal music, like Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and even, sadly, Evanessence. This documentary investigated the supposed violence of these heavy metal gangs only to come back with much different story than was read in Melbourne city newspapers. Rather than fighting, the gangs of this village, (made dry from alcohol by govt. mandate), would have totally sober parties, where each gang would dance to their respective metal bands song, in a sort of dance off. This documentary left the the viewer and the host to come back enlightened and hopeful, something that wasn’t expected.
I believe VBS.TV does a great job at trying to connect an audience to a world that needs them. Their work succeeds at this without trying to appeal to a certain aesthetic or political agenda. It does it with honesty, smarts and taste.
see it for yourself.
http://www.vbs.tv/watch/music-world/heavy-metal-gangs-of-wadeye-1-of-2
