Sometimes songs live in certain moments, in certain times and a lot of the time in certain places. You can try to judge a song by how tacky it is now or even how tacky, shitty, absurd or overblown it was then. But the truth is if a song exists to you at any time in your life with any meaning, that meaning will radiate back when you hear it again. There will, one day, be eighty-year-old women listening to One Direction for just this reason. Here are five songs that stick in my mind as something more than they intend to be…
Big Balls- AC/DC
This was jukebox selection. I was 12 and the plural of a spherical sporting object was amusing to me. Naturally when the old man gave us a few bucks to play pool and feed the jukebox as youngsters the first thing we would do is play this amusing ditty and show each other trick shots.
Clearly we were two young to realise the euphemism power in Australia’s most famous band, it was simply a guy singing about his nut-sack in detail. Which is the absolute height of genius and humour when you are that age.
Then, Later…
You realise that each of the lyrical phrases are open enough to apply to both his nut-sack or a literal social ‘ball’ (black-tie rave to the uninitiated). In essence you see the whole point of the song and wonder, for a moment, why you enjoyed it so much as a 12 year old. Because the whole point is precisely in how you enjoyed it. While I run across it, time to time, and certainly enjoy the sex stuff, to me this song will always be playing pool while my dad gets drunk, laughing at the lyrics and admiring the hell out of the man who had the sack to sing about his Balls.
Strutter- Kiss
When hormones overwhelmed me and I didn’t have a girlfriend because girls are dumb and I needed to take some highly emotional anger out, this is the song that did it. Emo wasn’t even a thing yet, but I found emo ; in one of the most lauded party rock bands of all time.
The thing that really appealed to me was the first verse:
I know a thing or two about her
I know she'll only make you cry
She'll let you walk the street beside her
But when she wants she'll pass you by.
It made women seem shitty and, therefore, made me seem more normal for not achieving them. Granted ‘going out’ at the time meant holding hands during lunch, but it sure would’ve been nice to hold some hands.
My brilliant solution then, was to blame the girls. They, like me, were pre-teen to teen ages and weren’t totally sure of whats going on. But they knew enough to know enough to dodge me. The fact that I was too afraid to talk to a real life female never occurred to me.
Phase two of my brilliant solution was to turn strutter up on my soccer-ball stereo, listen to it in the dark and curse all the women who passed me by.
Lou Bega- I Got A Girl
We all know Mambo No. 5. No-one really knows why it was the 5th Mambo, or what notable Mambos came before it. And from the fifth Mambo (I capitalise for reasons unknown to me) we all know that Lou Bega wants little bit of a ton of chicks.
What very few went on to learn is that he has a ton of chicks. Like, a ton. They are everywhere, even in the Vatican dome.
The reason I went on to learn this about Lou Bega is that I had the album. The album? A Little Bit Of Mambo.Though it should have been called ‘A Smear of Mambo, and a Whole Lotta Songs Abouts Chicks’. It was new release when I got it which means I was 10 at the time.
The result of a Christmas that was the perfect storm of good intentions and bad ideas. As a result I had a portable stereo, a Lou Bega CD, D sized batteries and four hours of driving to a fishing trip with real men, my father and his friends. Being that the album is 43 minutes long, it was played at least 8 times, and still it exists in my head as the soundtrack to a fishing trip.
Van Morrison- Days Like This
Van Morrison exists as something beyond myself, something so profoundly before me whose work will so profoundly outlast me. This particular song lives in my Aunty’s kitchen. It was always the one I registered, late in the night when everything for foggy on wine and good memories. I was a kid so was only faintly aware of adult business, but this song always stuck with me.
When I was living in Sydney with another Aunty and working through her extensive collection of rom-coms this song showed up at a montage of reflection and nostalgia. It was well placed. It suited well, an anthem to swallowing life’s endless shit and moving forward, which is why I bought this one and an album from the next artist when I needed to start swallowing shit….
Running Scared- Roy Orbison
I had a panic attack at town-hall station. Shortness of breath, foggy head, blind fear and flashes. The whole deal. I slumped in a corner and two distinct things jumped out at me; Van Morrison and Roy Orbison. I’d had a strange urge for two things that linked me, irrotrievably, to me childhood. My father, the drunkard and hopeless but relentless fan of ‘Roy the Boy’ and my mother, the ditzy and vague but keen Van Morrison listener, despite a voice coming out of ‘something so ugly’. I rushed to a CD store and bought both these men’s greatest hits.
It was a trip down memory highway, so much each taking me somewhere else. To some little patch of my younger years. Then, Running Scared.
My dad should have died in the war. He was born just shy of any real conflict but has a real tendency toward songs of the tragedy and beauty of war. Plus he is also a die-hard Roy Orbison fan. The two combined to make his ideal song and my ideal memory.
At the time we had a big Valiant AP5 and would drive up to vacant parts of the Lithgow valley as the old man would tearily remind us that Roy the Boy is singing from the perspective of a young soldier, scared but willing to go and do what he has to.
Now when I hear it, its a road yacht cruising to the end of the earth, an emo father and the voice of an angel.
NP
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