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The Conversation
The Conversation
Jess Carniel, Associate Professor in Humanities, University of Southern Queensland

Is Shaddap You Face Australia’s best ever novelty song, or a poor ethnic stereotype?

Terry Lott/Sony Music Archive via Getty Images

American Australian performer Joe Dolce’s 1980 one-hit wonder Shaddap You Face was recently inducted into the National Film and Sound Archive’s Sounds of Australia collection, which also named it Australia’s best novelty song.

For its fans, the song presciently predated the rise of Australian “wog humour” in the late 1980s – comedy by and about the experiences of migrants and their families in Australia.

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