Beyond Selidor

I got tagged over on Tumblr by ienthuse to do a meme about music where I talked about ten songs that I fell in love with. I've moved things over to Dreamwidth because I prefer to do longform blogging here.

As anyone who's ever met me knows, I am completely overinvested in music, so the hard part of a meme like this is trying to narrow it down to only ten songs! I've tried to get in as wide a range in mood as possible, but given that I tend towards melodrama and big emotions (I literally have a Tumblr tag called mellow is not a genuine emotion), and tend to overidentify with song lyrics (and associate songs with people, relationships, and/or phases in my life), certain themes are likely to be apparent here.


1. 'Mezzanine' - Massive Attack
My favourite song of all time, by my favourite band of all time, on my favourite album of all time. I think Massive Attack are absolutely brilliant — their songs have this perfect blend of ethereal, soaring female vocals, whispery male rap, and sinister music that gets inside your bones and your blood, and their lyrics are always a tangle of puns and intertextual allusions to other music, literature, and British politics. It doesn't hurt that they have a collectivist, left-wing politics that extends to teh democratic way they create music (with a rotating set of vocalists who are essentially part of the band).

2. 'Blinding' - Florence + the Machine
I identify with this song so, so very much. It's an emotionally intense song about getting out of a destructive, damaging relationship (which is depicted as a kind of sleepwalking, as well as being like Snow White in the glass coffin), and being able to walk at last in the sunlight and the land of the living. I spent a large part of my early twenties being lost in a love that was unrequited and hurtful, and the sheer relief at finally seeing the truth of that, and being able to walk away is so perfectly captured in this song.

3. 'The Song Formerly Known As' - Regurgitator
Look, I was a teenager in Australia in the '90s. It's kind of a rule that you have to like Regurgitator. I adore the way that they revelled in their geekiness, and the way they conveyed the experience of tedious Australian suburbia, and that sense that nothing of importance ever happened there. (Also, Australia being Australia, my mother vaguely knew Quan Yeomans' mother, because, well, Straya.) Also, I don't go to parties, baby/ cos people tend to freak me out [...] I'd rather dance in ugly pants in the comfort of a loungeroom in suburbia was kind of my life philosophy circa 1997-2008.

4. 'All Systems Red' - Calexico
The album this song comes from, Garden Ruin, is basically a shout of impotent fury at US politics in the early 2000s (i.e. the era of George W. Bush, the Iraq war, and the hopeless despair this period engendered), and 'All Systems Red' is this album at its most resignedly furious. It's about watching horrors unfold on the other side of the world (staying up with the blue screen grow/ forgetting everything you ever dreamed years ago), knowing you're responsible, and knowing you're powerless to stop them. I was probably at my most politically active during those years, and this song is the perfect reflection of what it felt like (amplified by a thousand, given that I was Australian, and thus from a tiny nation being dragged into this mess that even if it left would still remain). Although the song was written in response to Dubya, I've been playing it a lot this past year — just look at those lyrics and you will see it works for the current horror show too.

5. 'Heartbeats' - The Knife
Look, I'll be honest here. This song is one I associate firmly with my previous relationship, which damaged me in ways I've never fully acknowledged (mainly because we share mutual friends, and harmony in our social circle was important to me). I've talked about it a bit above in this post in the section on 'Blinding'. In spite, or perhaps because of those associations, 'Heartbeats' is an absolutely AMAZING, AMAZING song, especially in this live version.

6. 'Indestructible' - Robyn
To be honest I could've picked anything from Robyn's Body Talk album — it's phenomenal. Robyn is one of the great geniuses of music, and that album is a masterpiece. This, however, is one of the songs that Matthias and I think of as 'ours', so it's very important to me.

7. 'Black Water Lilies' - Aurora
Most of the songs on this list are fairly old — I'm terrible at finding new music, and generally rely on others to find it for me. This is a rare exception. I went to an Aurora gig last year knowing nothing about her music (although nymeth had mentioned that she was great live), and was blown away. I was particularly overwhelmed by how generous and giving and healing she was with her audience. I loved this song so much that I ended up walking down the aisle to it. It makes me so happy that this is a song about love that equates love with the joy of swimming in the ocean, because that's always been one of the purest joys of my life, and that sense of movement and joy and freedom is echoed in my relationship with Matthias.

8. 'Tonight We Burn Like Stars That Never Die' - Hammock
Look, I love ambient synthy music, and I love outer space. This song is fucking awesome. I walked out of the registry office to it after my wedding ceremony, so it was the first song I heard as a married woman.

9. 'The Tempest' - Pendulum
Because sometimes you're just completely overcome with raging fury, and nothing but eight minutes of angry, shouting drum n base with lyrics that you can scream along to will do.

10. 'Deeper Water' - Paul Kelly
I've never quite been able to sum up Paul Kelly in one sentence to non-Australians. 'Contemporary Australian folk stories to the tune of fairly standard Australian pub rock' is the best I can do, but that doesn't even scratch the surface. I find myself needing his music more and more since I've become a migrant, because he talks about beaches, about scorching summer Christmases, about the grungy parts of inner-city Sydney, about tiny, profound moments in Australian suburbia, and about ten-hour-long road journeys under endless, burning skies — about my childhood, about all those moments and places I can't go back to in a way that hits me right in my bleeding heart.

I was going to pick 'Everything's Turning to White', an adaptation of Raymond Carver's short story 'So Much Water So Close to Home' (and then, in a further act of adaptation, the song was adapted as the Australian film Jindabyne). In that song, in less than five minutes, Kelly tells the story of a woman whose husband and friends discover the dead body of a girl (implied to be raped and murdered) in an icy mountain stream, but instead of reporting it, they carry on with their fishing weekend and don't report it until their holiday is over. But that's not all he manages to convey in the song: he also manages to capture the absolute horror of the woman (whose perspective is that of the song) at her husband's actions, and her dawning realisation that in prioritising his fishing over justice for the dead girl, her husband embodies the same toxic masculinity that caused that girl to end up murdered in the lake to begin with. It's one of the few times that I've ever found a man's depiction of a woman's thoughts and experiences to feel real, empathetic, and genuine, and it's an unbelievably clever song.

However, murder ballads (which I guess is what this is, genre-wise) are not very typical of Kelly's work, and so I chose a different song of his to be tenth in this list: 'Deeper Water'. This is a deceptively simple song about the passage of time, using the motif of a person going from childhood, to adolescence, to mature adulthood, and to parenthood, swimming in the Australian ocean, being helped out beyond the breakers, and helping his own child in turn. I identify with this imagery so much, because it was my own experience: I first swam in Sydney's beaches as a one-year-old child, held by my mother at the shore, and as I got older, she (and sometimes my father) took me, and later my sister, out beyond the breaking waves to the deeper water, where we could not stand up, but where the waves were rolling and gentle, and those same beaches and waves have carried and held me throughout adolescence and adulthood, and one day I will carry my own children into them, and so on and so on, until the seas boil dry.

Looking at this list, the other common element (besides EXTREME EMOTIONS and overidentification with song lyrics) is the sea, and water more generally. I guess it makes sense. I feel all the feelings about the ocean, and it's had a profound effect on my life, like a watery thread running through everything.