Kylie, INXS, Midnight Oil ... and Jet? What does ARIA’s hall of fame actually mean?

If you had to think of an Australian band or performer from the past three decades worthy of being added to the pantheon of our greatest ever artists – alongside the likes of Kylie Minogue, INXS and Yothu Yindi – who comes to mind?

Silverchair? Powderfinger? The Presets? Delta Goodrem? The Avalanches? All seem worthy, but all are yet to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame, the most prestigious prize an Australian musician can receive.

Australian band Jet are set to be inducted into the ARIA Hall of Fame.Credit: AP

How about Jet, the Melbourne band who released their debut album Get Born in 2003 to massive commercial success, followed it up with two less-than-stellar records, disbanded in 2012 and reformed in 2017 to play live shows? Um, really?

This week, Jet became the first musicians since Archie Roach to join the Hall of Fame, news that neatly coincides with their upcoming 20th anniversary tour which is yet to sell out. The announcement has drawn a mixed reaction, especially since the band is being inducted ahead of many other acts who had a bigger impact on the Australian music scene and peaked around the same time.

The question of whether Jet “deserves” to be considered alongside Midnight Oil, Divinyls and Paul Kelly really comes down to what the ARIA Hall of Fame is recognising. The main argument in favour of the recognition: Get Born sold over four million copies worldwide, an extraordinary feat for an Australia band. Its lead single, Are You Gonna Be My Girl, was ubiquitous, hitting number one on the Hottest 100 and featuring in a global iPod commercial. Beyond that, though, the arguments for their entry are pretty slim.

Jet’s sound, which they have admitted is derivative, as well as their follow-up albums that failed to excite critics and audiences, make it hard to see the band’s influence on the generations of Australian artists who have followed in their wake.

Given how notoriously insular and fearful of criticism the Australian music industry is, I’m sure there are Jet fans sharpening their pitchforks right now. But the argument isn’t that the band is objectively bad (though many have made that case), or that they don’t deserve recognition for being wildly popular in the early 2000s, it’s that the Hall of Fame is surely about something bigger than acknowledging a band that had one successful record 20 years ago.

Since the Hall of Fame was introduced in 1988 it has celebrated more than 80 iconic Australian bands and artists. Only 11 have been women, or women-fronted bands. Meanwhile, 11 men have featured twice, in their capacities as solo artists and separately as members of an inducted band. There are three Indigenous acts and only one woman of colour (Marcia Hines).

Given there are only a handful of more modern artists featured – including Kylie Minogue, Human Nature and Tina Arena – it’s understandable that ARIA was keen to add a more recent act to reflect the shifts and trends Australian music has gone through this time around.

Delta Goodrem won a number of ARIA awards for her best-selling debut album.Credit: Edwina Pickles

But is Jet really the best encapsulation of Australian music over the past 30 years? Even within their genre, the addition just highlights the Hall of Fame’s glaring omission of acts like Silverchair, You Am I and Powderfinger, who paved the way for Jet.

And what about other genres or correcting ARIA’s massive gender imbalance? Get Born wasn’t the only massively successful Australian album released in 2003. That year, Delta Goodrem dropped her iconic debut, Innocent Eyes, which sold more copies than Get Born, was the highest-selling Australian album of the decade, and is the second best-selling album in Australian history. On that metric alone, Delta seems a more worthy recipient than Jet, and that’s before considering she has consistently released music over the past two decades.

Dance acts like The Presets and Cut Copy also formed 20 years ago, and given the total absence of electronic and dance music from the Hall of Fame, recognising these kinds of acts would help ARIA demonstrate its relevance to a younger generation of Australians. Hip-hop is also missing from the Hall of Fame. Groundbreaking work from groups like the South West Syndicate and Def Wish Cast in the 1990s paved the way for the recent success of acts like The Kid Laroi, Australia’s biggest musical export in the world right now.

It’s possible these acts will be acknowledged in future years. But given how much catching up there is to do, it wouldn’t hurt ARIA to move faster and with more thought. Until the Hall of Fame starts to look a bit more like the actual Australian music scene and celebrate a broader range of truly great Australian acts, people will continue to wonder what point it actually serves.

Osman Faruqi is culture editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.

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