January 27, 2006

# 33

It was Australia Day yesterday (Thursday, January 26th). Please skip to the last paragraph if you'd like to read about that.

I spent most of it in the foetal position under a sleeping bag on top of a heated mat in my apartment while nursing a mongrel of a head cold. Drums of pulsating rhythms reverberated wherever my eyes peered, even when my eyelids shut limply and ebbed the trickle of liquid pain. The feeling of a microscopic entity not originally of this earth blowing its multiple-stomachs' contents into the back of both of my eye sockets became as real as the black sun outside my window. Maybe my diagnosis is way off but I've seen enough of David Lynch's artistic endeavors to know it's possible, if not plausible.

In between the rhythmical hysteria and concentrated pain, it dawned on me that Triple J would be broadcasting the 100 most popular songs of last year, as voted by listeners of that radio station, which used to include me. So I tuned in via the web at roughly the # 70 mark where I got an earful of what I had missed in the world of music as featured on Australian airwaves circa 2005. To be honest, I've been in the presence of a variety of animal species in the act of procreation where sounds with more discernible qualities could be heard; I've personally made bodily emissions with more creative flair.

The reason for this sweet discovery o' mine was as obvious as the split ends on W. Axl Rose's poorly maintained nether region: I was no longer young enough to be interested in a couple of guitar cords and pseudo-angry lead vocalists throwing an insightful word (like fuck - ooh, there's some serious taboo for ya) to form the backbone to a frenzied aural raping.

Unless I'm mistaken, it is said that good things came to those who masturbated... And wouldn't you know, the sole shining example of morning glory that separated the chaff from the diarrhea was Australia's own Architecture in Helsinki (as linked in Andy's Muses over to the right there). I hadn't heard as much from them as I had heard of them, but the track of theirs, which I guess was around the #60 mark, was a roaring success with my ears. In fact, had they been slightly larger they would have reached around my face and clapped until my nose bled.

Anyway, I cut the cord and parachuted to safety shortly after by popping a couple of dozen soluble headache tablets into a vat of water, inserted the pirated version of 2010 into the hard drive and fell asleep for a few hundred hours.

To those of you who spent the day at the one-day game at Adelaide Oval, or to those of you who spent it listening to Triple J's Hottest 100 somewhere in the 40-degree heat that can only be an Adelaide summer, I send a belated Australia Day cheerio to you. If you happen to be on the east coast, somewhere between Cooktown and Brisvegas, I hope the wet weather and annoyance factor of the latest cyclone to the region didn't extinguish your desire to be Australian on Australia Day. If I had a Cooper's Ale, I'd raise it right now in salutation that you get through the next few days unscathed.

4 comments:

Kaufman said...

Thanks for that solid contribution. You were obviously up all night.

Aminah said...

I listened to Triple Js Hottest 100 and realised that I stopped caring about most of the music they play on Triple J and it just hadn't dawned on me until now. There's only so much Wolfmother and Gorillaz you can listen to before you start to doubt the sanity of all who voted for those bands. I've become one of those sad people who listen to songs and think, "they just stole that riff off the Beatles/ Stones/ Doors/ Led Zeplin/ Monkees/ etc". Once you realise the superiority of the music the rest of the world churns out, it's so hard to appreciate rehashed Australian, British and American tunes.

I'm going to stop writing now...

Kaufman said...

Personally, I don't mind if a band is ripping off cords or sentiments or looks or porking the same groupies as bands of yesteryear as I think music is a constant regeneration of ideas (meaning there's not much left to explore) and I am never obliged to give such bands more of my energy than I'd care to. Methinks the present music buying audience becomes aware of sounds from years ago through what is performed, marketed and sodomised by contemporary bands/musicians, causing older people to roll from their graves and call the new wave of noise merchants every name under the sun.

I have no hairy qualms about that what-so-ever.

I think it's when a batch of bands decide that a specific sound should be mutilated at the one given time (within the space of months or a year) that things start scraping me in all the annoying places. I mean, I felt I had had enough of a look into the year of music that was on Triple J after thirty minutes, so I hardly have grounds to complain, but fuck me gently with a garden rake if I wasn't appalled by the lack of musical scope on display during what had until that point seemed like a poll representative of the quality of music out there. Sadly, I think I can no longer class myself as a devout Triple J listener, although I will never see commercial radio as an alternative.

Piracy. Surely there can be nothing more personalised than that.

Kaufman said...

PS A very good friend of mine from Adelaide sent me over a (the?) Wolfmother CD about six months ago, with a post-it note saying 'current big thing in Oz.' I gave it a brief once-over and promptly tossed it in the bin, not because I had no better use for it but because I'm always sprung as the guilty party whenever throwing CDs out of my second storey apartment window; the English text on the CD is like free, slaughtered rabbits: a dead giveaway.