I’m listening to Deep Forest’s Deep Forest, an album (or at least some of the songs on it) that a good few people around my age are aware of as it’s music we heard when we were very young children, and “Sweet Lullaby” was used on SBS quite a lot through the nineties. It was used so much that some people consider the song SBS’ theme song, or at least associate it with SBS more than anything else.

I can’t defend listening to this album. It is rather problematic when it comes to cultural misrepresentation. I can only imagine that Deep Forest had good intentions, but there’s a clear ignorance here, and the result is an album that puts forward culture and peoples as exotic. It’s also music that often is employed, unthinkingly, by people firmly entrenched in cosmic woo, and who often have shitty beliefs tied into their embracing of cosmic woo. Not all people, but it occurs often enough.

So I can’t defend listening to an album that, for all of its hokey sound and how it puts forward other people, I still enjoy. It’s a cheap and tacky album. Deep Forest were in a position to try and say something genuine and ask questions, and maybe that was part of their intent. Maybe they were trying to highlight the music of other cultures and how it wasn’t all that different to Western cultures. I don’t know. I don’t know what the whole intent was here, but it doesn’t land. And I can’t defend my enjoying it, either.

I’m not trying to defend Deep Forest, or Deep Forest for that matter. I feel that that’s not a good idea for a number of reasons. However, I do want to say that I do enjoy the album as it is enjoyable, despite what it is. There’s something about it and the way it is crafted that appeals to me, and sometimes it really makes me feel things. Right now it’s making me feel things and I don’t like that too much, but what can I do? I could listen to other stuff of course, but this is what’s on my mind. This is what my ears want to hear and so this is what I’m going to listen to right now. Of course I have choices, but right now it’s this. Later on it’ll be something else, assuming I even get around to something else. I could just stick to this and put it on repeat a few times.

For me, a lot of this album is about the sound of it and the way the sounds integrate with each other. Everything seems to fit quite well, which I guess is fortunate for the group, because if it didn’t this album would be worth more criticism. Then again, it probably would also be forgotten.

Listening to Deep Forest makes me wonder as to how much music we listen to that’s problematic that we’ll hand-wave any criticism because we enjoy it. How far will we go to defend the indefensible? I wonder about this, and I think it’s important to think about. I don’t think it’s something we think about enough, because we often engage in a lot of problematic content and often that is unknowingly. It’s quite easy to be an active participant in supporting issues we’re not aware of, and if we spent a bit more time thinking about what we consume, I imagine that this would start changing a bit. Or at least, I’d hope it’d lead to some changes.

What I think is important is that, if you are going to engage in problematic media, you have to be willing to discuss the media itself, why it is problematic, what those problems lead to, the history of them… all that stuff. If you’re willing to get deep on something that you like or engage with, you should be willing to get deep on how it fits within the cultural landscape and how it might contribute to various issues. Otherwise if you’re going to get defensive about enjoying a work, you might just not be mature enough to admit that you could be contributing to issues, or you might not be willing to be accountable for your own actions.

On a personal level, it can be a tell of who would be better to avoid and who would be better to keep in my life, because something I’ve found is that often people who aren’t willing to discuss issues are the same people who will spout heinous shit without thinking, then proceed to try and defend it.

This might seem a bit moralistic, but I do place a lot of importance on this stuff. I think it’s important as it can help people grow and be informed, and people who are informed can make better decisions.

So I’m listening to Deep Forest’s Deep Forest and I’m enjoying it, but I will not defend it. There is a good chance that it did have some positive impact and did bring a general awareness of other cultures out there, but I don’t know how significant that impact would have been, if indeed it had an impact at all. Sure, it was a massive album, but a massive album does not mean massive awareness. Sometimes that just doesn’t happen. Still, if it meant a few more people started thinking about things on a larger scale, then that is some positive change. That is some awareness gained, and so that’s a good thing, I think. But that doesn’t make the album any less problematic.

Where does this album sit now? Where does it sit in the present, against contemporary music? Has it been influential on the shape of sound? I don’t know. It came and went, and it lasted a while in some places. In Australia, as a child I heard it a fair bit, or at least a few of the tracks, and so did many people around my age.

The time it took to write one thousand words: 20:58:32

Slow. I was thinking too much about what I was writing and how to get it across. Happy with what I said, but not happy with how I went about saying it.

Written at home.