No, not the band Wagons. Commercial radio is unlikely to take much interest in them until they sound approximately 500% more like U2. Similarly, REO Speedwagon are probably unlikely to get much bogan airtime these days, particularly since they’ve so wholeheartedly embraced the adult contemporary idiom. Despite its considerable merits, or perhaps because of them, Teenage Fanclub’s crucial 1991 opus Bandwagonesque is also unlikely to pass bogan muster. Indeed, a venn diagram correlating bands bogans like, bands with ‘wagon’ in their name, and bands with a habit of performing on wagons or other wheeled conveyances, is unlikely to contain many bands in the critical zone of triple overlap. To be fair, it’s best to put these matters out of your mind, because these are not the type of bandwagons to which we refer.
Instead, for the purposes of this post, we refer to a bandwagon thusly: something popular enough to present potential adopters with a relatively low risk of winding up in the unenviable position of having adopted something unpopular. The risk-averse bogan will rarely jump into something which hasn’t already achieved critical mass. Obscurity is not something the bogan desires; indeed, a bogan who stumbles across obscurity runs the risk of other bogans branding it weird, poofy, intellectual or somehow foreign.
Much like the North American buffalo or the Wildebeest, the bogan is a herd animal which finds safety in numbers. This herd mentality explains why the bogan will choose to graze at a particularly depleted cultural pasture, leaving adjacent areas verdant with foliage and entirely free of bogans. To avoid straying too far from the pack, the bogan will continue to chomp intently at the all-but bald hillside, awaiting the en-masse migration to another place. In this way, the tracks of the bogan herd crisscross the nation’s cultural landscape in a piecemeal fashion, thankfully sparing many fertile gullies and gulches for more intrepid creatures.
The bogan hivemind is profoundly suggestible, and those perennial manufacturers of bandwagons, marketing and advertising people, know this innately. In their inestimable cruelty, they inflict bogankind with all manner of worthless fodder – from Ed Hardy t-shirts to Power Balance Bands – comfortable in the knowledge that the bogan will attempt to derive nourishment from this crapulence, just so long as many others are also doing so. However, as with the recent collapse of Ed Hardy’s reign of sartorial terror, this spell is easily broken. This is when, much like yapping cattledogs or teenagers on four-wheelers, marketing and advertising people must quickly divert the bogan herd towards the next big thing.
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