This song did not come across my radar when it first came out. I in fact wasn’t aware of it until Fi introduced me to it many years later.
I was aware of the artist’s perhaps most well known hit, in which he counselled a younger man caught in flagrante delictio by his partner to say the supposedly perfect answer – “it wasn’t me”.
That song was very much a duet, with RikRok doing a lot of heavy lifting to allow Shaggy’s buzzy, rumbling bass vocals to shine. Having an awareness of Jamaican traditions through my interest in Dub particularly, I thought he was good, but essentially a one trick pony.
One of the things I love about the musical side of our relationship is how often Fi has enlightened me over the years. I don’t know if Boombastic takes Shaggy out of the one trick pony category, but if it doesn’t it shows he has such a mastery over that trick to transcend.
Ok so obviously I bit off more than I can chew. I was able to sustain a post a night for some time, but it’s not something I’ve ever been able to do.
That being said, the project continues, just not leading up to the 50th song happening on Fi’s birthday in a couple of days. That ship has clearly sailed because no I am not writing another 31 posts – even of the most phone-it-in variety before next Saturday.
The project has also widened. We’ve got this domain for a year, so after I’ve given Fi my choice of 50 (plus extras) songs I’ll hand over the controls and she’ll do her countdown from 1975 to today. I’m interested to see what she comes up with. This process has also made me want to blog more regularly on my site, so we’ll see.
Today’s post is inspired by a concert we went to a few years ago now. To be honest, it was a band we’ve both been fans of since their heyday of the early 90s, to be honest they were always about an indulgent sound, and to be honest while I love their songs I found their set to be low energy compared to the local support band, Regurgitator.
To be honest, I didn’t connect with them until the encore and that was when I discovered that a secret dream of my heart was to be in a room (however large or small) and sing this song along with them.
Now, Fi told me to phone it in but I’m not capable of doing that, quite. Instead I’ll observe a small aspect of our relationship that the first lines of the song make me think of; “what’s with these homies dissin’ my girl/why do they gotta front?/what did we ever do to these guys/that they’d get so violent?”
Fi and I have a couple of times encountered aggressive people. One was a neighbour at our old house who found me checking on his 2 year old who had been left in the front yard in a pram at 10pm at night, and the other was a guy parked in a disabled parking spot without a permit when there was non-disabled parks mere meters away.
In both of these situations, the people objected to polite inquiries and threats ensued in the form of offers to be knocked around. In most situations involving physical threats, I work very hard to de-escalate as an ingrained habit. Not so much Fi. It wasn’t a case of the homies dissing the girl but more the girl was dissing the homies.
Now, further threats did further ensue, but not actual violence. It’s been a long time since I dodged punches from skinheads in the Auckland punk scene and I’m not sure I’m still that good at dodging.
OK so today’s song was going to be a wonderfully sweet sounding one. Linger is a beautiful song but on re-examination, really terrible to link a song about a relationship to. Unless that relationship includes someone begging their unfaithful lover to let them go because they can’t.
Dolores O’Riordan does, however, link well into the topic this post’s actual song leads us into. Slightly younger than me and a little older than FI, she’s a contemporary who lived a life greatly impacted by mental health struggles. Her loss in 2018 hit us both deeply.
Our lives have also been impacted by mental health struggles. It’s one of the ways we connect, it’s one of the things we understand and recognise in each other, and it’s one of the things that drive us apart when we’re both in dark places at the same time.
Until a few years ago, my mental health had been stable for a long period. Inevitably when that changed on me, it changed in a big way and very quickly. I’m proud to say that Fi stepped up in a huge way. Together we have learned to walk a path of being co-carers without being codependent. It takes a lot of conscious thought and forthright discussions, but we get there.
This shared journey provides us a platform from which to offer our daughter support in her own journey. We forget sometimes, but having had a mother who became disabled when she was three has created its own trauma, a third thing to manage alongside her already very complicating ADHD and autism.
Fi’s been telling me how deeply she was in to hiphop at during these years, so today’s song is a fun riff on being plain nuts. Take it away, Cypress Hill.
*Full confession: I’m guilty of bad research here. I wanted to include this song, and good old Google told me it was released in 1991. Google was wrong, and I having seen one of the first post-Split Enz concerts featuring Crowded House and Schnell Fenster in approximately 1988 I should have known. I’ve already written this and I want the song in so here we are, I’m breaking the rules. If you want an actual 1991 song listen to Shiny Happy People.
Anyhow
Apparently I said the words first. I can’t remember the specifics of it so many years later but Fi will tell you I said “I love you” before she said it to me.
It’s a funny phrase. So much meaning can be packed into it. It can be used as a connector, a reminder, even in an accusatory way.
Science fiction author Robert Sheckley wrote a short story about (and called) The Language of Love. In it a young man, Jeff Toms, is challenged by the object of his desire to genuinely be able to tell her he loves her. He of course takes himself to an academic institution and enrolls to study under a professor who is the master of the language of an alien race, the Tyanians, which had a multitude of words for love in the same way the Inuit were said to have a multitude of words for snow.
At the end of an adventure into language and the shades of love Toms now fully equipped presents himself back to his paramour ready to disclose the depths of his affection in exquisite detail. He comes up with “I’m rather fond of you”. That was the end of that, as you can imagine.
I’m more than rather fond of Fi, however I’ve been receiving commentary that in this exercise of blogging I haven’t been making my posts all about her in a way she’d like. The truth is my language of love is expressed through our life together. There are many things about her that I absolutely adore, but what we have together is bigger than that for me.
Today’s song is another from Split Enz. I’ll let is speak for itself, and for me.
Fi and I had a shared play list on the Grooveshark platform in our long-distance days. We have talked about aspects of our relationship during that time being asynchronous – chats when we were both busy being one such example – and having a shared soundtrack to listen to was one way we managed that distance. As musical people having a shared beat to dance to was important.
I say had, because Grooveshark closed down in 2015. By that time of course we were busy with a baby and I don’t think we even realised immediately it was gone. We can each remember parts of the playlist but I’m not sure we’ve ever recaptured them all.
One song I remember was today’s, The Ship Song by Nick Cave.
Friends of mine at the time this song came out loved Nick’s music but I wasn’t so sure of his sound so I didn’t really know too many of his songs to listen to. I certainly don’t remember this one.
I remember it now. Of the list it speaks to me of a deeper connection we have always had. It talks about a couple fighting, then surrendering to each other.
I met Fi at a time of my life when I was despairing of getting what I saw as honesty and accountability from anyone in close relationships, rightly or wrongly. What I found in her was someone who would be honest even when it served her no good end other than honesty itself. I in turn have learned to be able to offer the same back to her.
The singer of the song invites cataclysmic actions if that’s what it takes for a partner to move forward. That’s how it can be for Fi and I sometimes – the need to feel heard is strong in both of us and it can come forward urgently.
It says, despite all the hardships and differing opinions, there is the opportunity to make a little history. I think we’ve managed to make a little of that so far.
I know the hipster thing is to say you were into a band before they broke big. I wasn’t into They Might Be Giants before they broke big, but I was into them immediately when they broke big. Mulitplatinum album Flood was their first release with a major label, and aged 19 I owned a copy at the time.
This band is one of the many musical threads Fi and I have in common and seeing them at The Zoo was one of our most treasured early dates we got to go on once I was living in Australia.
The set was wild and weird and included a ten minute puppet show. I blotted my Brisbane copybook by disagreeing with friend of Fi’s brother Norman and local notable Spencer Howson when he expressed astonishment that some people saw TMBG as a novelty band. I countered that they were, in fact and in many ways, a novelty band. The conversation kind of ended there.
It’s a big thing to move country. New Zealanders have always been big on parochiality, and Australians were a big target. How they spoke sounded silly to us; I remember our cousins visiting asking if they could have a “bescuit”.
We could be very parochial within the country too. One famous photo depicted an eight year old holding a sign saying “I hate you Auckland”. He’d done some lovely colouring in too.
That being said, New Zealanders and going overseas go together like white on rice, as they say. Fi tells me New Zealanders are known for “coming over here and taking our jobs and women”.
I didn’t set out to do that. In fact, immigration would never have occurred to me. Until I came to visit Fi, I’d travelled overseas once on a family trip to Sydney when I was twelve. Being anywhere but in my country of birth wasn’t in my plan.
I’d like to claim it was just romance that changed that point of view, but it wasn’t. I’d achieved my major career goal a couple of years before I came here, and in the process of finding that wasn’t all it was cracked up to be, I lost a marriage. I had lots of friends in Auckland, but no real ties outside of my family. Coming across the Tasman in hopes of getting to know Fi better and maybe starting a family together was a gamble, but with a life suddenly unencumbered by other baggage I wasn’t risking much other than pride. Do I have to tell you it was worth the risk? It was.
Now any Kiwi parochialism is entirely gone. I’m a dual citizen as of last year, and honestly I love it here. Australians aren’t as different to New Zealanders as the more one-eyed think and while each landscape is beautiful in different ways, I don’t miss the Auckland weather.
I don’t know if today’s song made much of a splash in New Zealand. While I was starting to get into different musical genres, I was more aware of American acts like Faith No More and Suicidal Tendencies than I was of The Go-Betweens.
The Streets of Your Town is a gentle and reflective song that flies right through the centre of the guitar-led indie sound of the time. I don’t know if it would have stuck with me back in 1988 but having listened to it several times while writing tonight it’s quite a balm for this émigré who’s gone from the city of One Tree Hill to the city of the Go Between Bridge.
I recently had a conversation with our daughter about what I was and I wasn’t allowed to call her.
Apparently I can comment on her fashion choices, tell her that she is looking pretty as a result of her fashion choices, but I’m not allowed to call her beautiful.
I briefly tried to make a case for special rights as a father, but only briefly. I’d always prefer where possible to allow her to exercise her own judgement. If she only wants to be complemented on things she put an effort in, so be it.
She’s the same as her mother in that. I deliberately get myself in trouble with Fi but adding “but you always look beautiful to me” when she’s got herself ready to go out. I am, however, good at giving specific feedback. I’ve been interested in fashion for sometimes and can sometimes even attempt to turn some kind of a look myself.
My case for special rights as a father in this particular discourse relates to today’s song. When she was tiny and needed to be comforted on her way to sleep, I’d hold her in the dark, play songs on the phone to her and sing along. One such favourite was a cover of “Sweet Child o’ Mine” by Guns ‘N’ Roses.
Famously the original was created when guitarist Slash was warming up for a practice by playing a series of broken chords. To his annoyance (according to some retellings) the rest of the band insisted on building a song around the exercise and thus one of signature sounds of their first album was created.
The lyrics, I admit, are more of a romantic love than a fatherly love, but equally they’re sentimental and loving rather than raunchy and given that our daughter does indeed have eyes of the bluest skies, it worked well enough, particularly when sitting up in the small hours of the night.
Now, I’m well aware I’ve broken the general theming here by talking about our daughter rather than Fi, but you see if you look at one you are looking at the other. Photo stolen from Fi’s Facebook page, captions hers.
I mentioned the version I sang along to was cover. Flat Pack was a project that put out one song, the cover built around the vocals of Katty Heath. The particular remix I stumbled across was put out by another electronic artist/producer, Mylo that I’d been previously introduced to by my friend Andrew. I find it truly… beautiful.
Full confession, before Fi and I were together there was some flirting going on.
She was quite the fashion queen in her time (and still can be when she chooses) and she’d post outfits on Twitter for review. I’d comment honestly that the outfit would look great and the only thing that could improve it would be a smile.
Yes, I know, I was doing the refined Twitter version of telling a woman she’d look great if she just smiled. It wasn’t the vibe I was intending to come in with and thankfully it wasn’t the way Fi received it. I’d be rewarded with a picture of her brilliant smile while she was wearing an already great outfit. Her smiles for me were (and still are) very genuine and made (and make) me very genuinely happy.
In the context of today’s song I guess I’m perhaps the crafty one.
She’s Crafty was released by the Beastie Boys on their first album, Licence to Ill. Driven by a hook stolen from Led Zeppelin, it is an irreverent narrative of an encounter by one of the newly-famous band with a cute fan. On his way through getting to know her he hears rumour after rumour which he disregards only to find at the end that she’s stolen the entire contents of his apartment. Despite all this, as the chorus says, she’s just his type.
Fi is not, of course, a home furnishings thief but she and I do share a connected love for early hiphop and the journey of that artform through to modern examples. For me this particular album was a favourite until it was confiscated and disposed of. I mentioned that loss on my personal blog as one of the factors that contributed my approach to working in the library profession, and of course working in the library profession led me to meeting Fi.
So there you go.
Just before I drop the track, I’d like to introduce an awesome resource discovered while researching today’s post: Who Sampled. Pretty nifty.
Fifty for Fifi 