Nice Fade #4: Boyz n the hood; Satan not guilty

The dancing season is now well under way and, like Verdi, we have celebrated in four movements. Sleeveful of Slight's latest "movement" is a big one. Those watching will have noticed it's been percolating for two weeks. Thus we lay rest to our celebration of the indie disco DJ with an in-depth look at an enigma (who looks vaguely like the other dude from Dollar Bar?) and the devil himself. Readers: we hope this series has given you a new appreciation for the arcane craft of making people dance. DJs: cheers. Ric's: how about a slot?

Hoodie Guy

Who is this guy? Goatee, greasy hair, worn out grey sweater. I’ve seen him countless times, hunched over the decks downstairs, smiling wryly and nodding his head while some fantastic chart pop sets glittering bodies to move. The music is always good, the floor is heaving more often not but still, I know nothing about him. It’s not just that I haven’t done my research. There is something very enigmatic about this DJ. He is what Winston Churchill might have called a riddle wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a hoodie.

If the records were ever taken and the charts ever tabled, I believe that Hoodie Guy would be shown to be the most consistent Ric’s DJ of the post-Heinz era. He only plays good songs. As he makes his journey from Madonna to indie rock each track on the way seems to be the perfect pick to engage the dancefloor as a whole. This isn’t rank populism. It’s that precious intuition that allows great DJs to guide the night using their taste without scuttling the dance floor through some misjudged personal indulgence. Each song has to be known to enough people to keep the floor full while being unexpected enough to be exciting. Our hoodied mysterio negotiates this course masterfully. He can make you miss your last train – the mark of any great DJ. Yet for all this, I feel that he is the DJ that I know the least. I caught him playing The Rolling Stones’ ‘Hey You Get Off My Cloud’ very early one Saturday night. It sounded brilliant but other than that, I couldn’t tell you where his personal tastes lie. If he didn’t think that his favourite song was a surefire floor filler, I suspect that he wouldn’t play it.

There's almost a wryness in the way he keeps his personality in the shadows. One Saturday night I caught him DJing downstairs while Trigger was on upstairs. Being in frequent need of fresh air, I was swapping between the two dance floors via the back stairs and as I did, I observed that Hoodie Guy was absolutely killing it. Patrons were drawn to him like iron filings to a magnet. Each time I arrived upstairs it was a little lonelier while downstairs grew more crowded and euphoric. By the time of lockout, upstairs was all but abandoned while downstairs was an ebullient swarm of dancing humanity. Just as the night peaked Hoodie Guy dropped ‘Don't Look Back in Anger’ – Dave from Trigger’s signature song. Maybe it was pure coincidence but it seemed a terrifically dry piece of humour. As if to say, “I can steal your patrons and do what you do too.” Good humour, of course.

Still, I can’t help but feel a little disappointed by Hoodie Guy. Though the music is close to impeccable, I feel that he’s holding something in reserve and we’re poorer for it. He’s a cool guy and if he gave his own tastes a freer rein, the dancefloor might be a bit emptier and people might make a few more trips to the bar but I think at the end of the night, those who were still around would go home having experienced something special.

All this speculation may be a moot point. I have it from a good source that Hoodie Guy is moving to Melbourne in the next few months. That’s a loss for us but we wish him luck all the same. Godspeed Hoodie Guy, we hardly knew you.

Harvey Satan’s Fightclub

I hate Guilty Pleasures[1]. In fact, to borrow a line from a far greater writer, I don’t believe in the death penalty but if the inventor of Guilty Pleasures was being shot tomorrow, I would turn up to watch. Irony has its place in modern culture but I don’t think that the concept Guilty Pleasures has anything to do with irony. It’s about style over substance. Songs are either good or they’re not. It’s often difficult to tell at first. One tends to notice style and feel the visceral impact of a song first and then shape this into an opinion later. When something is stylistically different from the traditional lay of one’s tastes, it’s tempting to recoil in horror from the impact that it makes but one shouldn’t. These moments of doubt are the budding edges of one’s character. If one can dwell in them open-mindedly, it can lead to revelations, the growth of the self. You might just end up deciding the song is shit but still, it’s something worth doing. To deny these moments and simply dismiss these songs as guilty pleasures is to neuter the parts of your personality worth sticking around for. This is how people deteriorate. You give into Guilty Pleasures. Pretty soon you stop putting in the effort required to get the difficult stuff and just buy records that sound like things you liked when you were still cool. You’ll end up as some sad fuck granting your husband “his own time” on Saturdays, claiming him for things you want to do on Sundays and compulsively reading bad vampire novels.

One of the things I like best about the Ric’s DJs is the way they play R&B, chart pop and indie music alongside one another. It celebrates how good music is simply good music and by trusting that everyone is smart enough to realize this, it creates a winning atmosphere. It wasn’t always this way. Legend has it that back in 2004, the first time that DJ Heinz played Britney Spears ‘Toxic,’ half of the dancefloor sat on the ground in protest. Thankfully, the sitters have either lightened up or fucked off to some darkened alley where they’re still sitting cross-legged awaiting the revolution. What is clear is that when Harvey Satan is presiding over his Fightclub of a Friday night, this attitude is happily absent.

Harvey Satan’s personal tastes seemed to be skewed towards scuzz rock. If it’s slightly dark, slightly distorted and slightly danceable, chances are he’ll play it. But he mixes it deftly with the more danceable hip-hop, the more innovative R&B, liberal doses of indie classics, the odd well-placed Prince song and the songs which will be cluttering the year-end top 10s. His Satanic majesty is even liable to play the odd request. Through this he creates vast tapestries of songs whose one common thread is that they’re terrifically enjoyable. No other Ric’s DJ who is currently spinning has quite as much craft as Harvey. His sets seem to be structured as complete pieces and more often than not, he does it well. When he does, it doesn’t matter if you don’t know or like a particular song. You’re likely to be dragged along by the momentum he’s built – a good thing. I haven’t figured out how he does it. Playing a lot of Santogold seems to be a characteristic of late (another good thing). Further, he exploits the one indispensable record of Ric’s DJing - The Rapture’s ‘Pieces of the People We Love’ – better than any of his counterparts. The Rapture should really be taking a cut from the Ric’s DJs. One hears them about four times a night but it always sets the floor alight and I can’t say that I’ve grown sick of them. But where other DJs seem to toss “Whoo! Alright Yeah...Uh Huh” out there as a get out of jail free card or more slops for the braying idiots, the Beast with the Beats uses the Rapture as the axis along which the rest of his night runs – the impossibly danceable mix of pop shine and punk noise that links ‘Date With The Night’ and ‘Milkshake’. It ties his diverse nights together and highlights what a special band the Rapture are. This is what DJs can do.

‘Red Right Hand’ is Harvey’s recessional hymn and I’ve been amazed to look about the dancefloor when it gets played at the end of the good set. It’s not exactly a dance number so instead, people stand exactly where they are and talk to one another. There are smiles, there is lots of nodding and laughing and lots of gesticulation that suggests outpourings of feeling, if not meaning. Harvey Satan is not the new Heinz, he’s his own man. But as long as Harvey is on the decks, the legacy of that visionary DJ who had the audacity and belief to play ‘Toxic’ alongside ‘Take Me Out’ will be in safe hands.

[1] Is everyone familiar with the concept of Guilty Pleasures? They are club nights which apparently “took the world by storm” a couple of years ago at which the DJ plays a whole heap of songs from the past which you’ve always had a secret, embarrassing affection for. At Guilty Pleasures nights you can let your hair down and indulge these feelings without shame. It sounds a bit tacky but everyone has so much fun. I just went along with some people from work but etc. etc.

Nice Fade #3 - You'll be the one to always complain

Remember when Yves Klein Blue gave Ric's what they obviously thought was a folksy, backhanded compliment (although it was phrased a little carelessly) and thus provoked a personalised reproach from the venue itself in the form of a public press release? That sort of thing might have been one of the reasons Sleeveful of Slight chose like me to write under a pseudonym. But as SOS's previous columns have made abundantly clear, his love and hope for this city's nightlife are great and with that investment comes great concern (check the word count). I give you Nice Fade part 3: "the critical instalment". All opinions are those of the author yada yada but I've got his back in a fight.

Hutch, Kleenkutt and Butterz – the old school hip-hop team of B B Bounce

I don’t like hip-hop but a lot of people do. Still, you wouldn’t know it by looking at the barren upstairs dancefloor every second Friday when B B Bounce is on. I don’t know where the fault lies and I’m not saying that the dream is dead but something is definitely wrong.

DJs Tablesalt and Bluebeard

While everyone else we’ve looked at so far dates from the Heinz era, either as a DJ or a punter with a fully formed persona, DJs Tablesalt and Bluebeard represent a new generation of disc spinners. This pair isn’t a DJ team but they share the same temperament and their faults as DJs. One night I turned up at Ric’s to find Tablesalt downstairs and Bluebeard upstairs and their sets were indistinguishable. You’d rush away from one dancefloor and arrive at the next only to hear the very song you’d just tried to escape being faded in. To save with repetition, I’ve grouped them together.

If the problem with these two DJs had to be summed up in one word it would be obviousness. Remember when Triple J promoted the Hottest One Hundred by giving away a cardboard box in which you could package all the Hottest One Hundred’s released to date? I swear that that box is all that these two bring with them when they play. Their sets are bludgeoning in their obviousness. It’s not that the music that they play is all bad. In fact, being obvious, a lot of it is quite good. The songs that you know you’ll hear and are looking forward to when you step out the door in the evening are all there, but they are together in such an uninspired fashion that the experience is considerably less than the sum of its parts.

There is no vision or intuition in their work. They don’t seem to be striving to create a tangible experience for their audience or playing off them. They just want “to DJ” and go about it in the most paint-by-numbers fashion possible. It’s as if they’ve commissioned a survey of songs that music fans in Brisbane want to hear when they go out, taken the 20 songs that appeared most frequently, isolated and distilled their key common features (by this stage they amount to a big chorus, big beat, possibly Triple J airplay) and then put this into a computer that compiles a set of songs that best match the criteria. All the heart, risk, individuality and all of the magic is drained out of the night and you’re left with a shitload of Queens of the Stone Age and the one Strokes song that you’ve heard too many times battering you about the head. On paper, this might not seem like such a problem. Obvious songs are good songs – what more do you want? Had I not seen it in practice, I’d be convinced by this proposition but I have and the reality is something quite different.

String a few obvious songs together in succession and you start to feel a strange feeling in your chest. It’s as if your capacity for positive belief is draining out of your veins and being replaced by a cold, empty dread. This vague uneasiness grows and as a new song fades in, it takes form in the thought that the possibilities for the night are narrowing. Just when the night should be going stratospheric, this thought becomes a conviction. Bluebeard and Tablesalt are masters at conjuring this feeling. I hadn’t felt it since going to The Depot and hearing ‘This Charming Man’ slide into ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ week after week. But at least at the Depot, the feeling that you could be stabbed at any moment provided some excitement to offset the disillusionment. Ric’s is a nice place – you won’t get that. Instead, you’ll think that perhaps you could try to talk to a stranger but dismiss it as ridiculous. Those kind of conversations require an ecstatic delirium that you’ve noticed has just vanished from this room. You realize that you feel a whole lot more sober than you did before and think about getting a drink but you remember that you’ve already spent more money than you were supposed to tonight. As you turn these thoughts over, the last of your fervoured expectations for the night drain away. It happens just when you should be leaping into a deep and meaningful conversation. Best to go home. There’s a bus in twenty minutes and as you walk to it you reflect that maybe you do go to Ric’s too often. But where else is there to go in Brisbane? You wait for your bus and think about moving to Melbourne or London.

I’d suggest that Tablesalt and Bluebeard go out on a limb more but to tell the truth, these guys are at their best when they stick to the script. ‘Last Nite’, ‘The Bucket’ and ‘Paper Planes’ will be dropped in brutal succession but they will be the highlights of your night. It’s when they get into the “DJs pick” slots on the printout that you really start thinking whether you know anyone sitting at the tables outside. There’s Bluebeard’s trawl through late nineties Australiana (Girls Like That, The Song Formerly Known As, Buy Me A Pony); there are the nostalgic signature tunes (Bluebeard – P.U.S.A.’s ‘Lump’; Tablesalt – Cake’s ‘The Distance’) and then downright stumpers (Foo Fighters ‘Monkey Wrench’ and The Offspring’s ‘Come Out and Play’). Just because you remember it, it doesn’t mean that it’s good.

It’s not a completely lost cause. Tablesalt deserves plaudits for his early spinning of the John Steele Singer’s ‘Strawberry Wine’. While nepotistic circle-jerking is an ever-present ingredient in the inability of local music scenes to rise out of a square ditch of perpetual mediocrity, this is a song which earns its place alongside the songs we come to hear. Any DJ who realises this, plays it and, through this, inspires local bands to make music that people might actually want to dance to deserves credit. And Bluebeard – who's been singled out for a lot of criticism here - always pulls a few dance moves from behind the decks which bring an energy to the turntables that I’ve not seen before. If he could harness that to a bit more vision - who knows?

It’s been said that you can’t knock a tryer and these guys do try. They are out there more than I care for, spinning tunes into the small hours and this kind of enthusiasm shouldn’t be discouraged. It is essential to any great cultural scene. The enthusiasm and ego of indie DJs is an unseen thread that runs through the history of pop music. That burning desire to share and encourage music is what seeks out promising bands and gives them the self-belief and chance to actually deliver something good. It’s behind every good club night and every good indie label. It reaches its apotheosis in the reckless, almost self-destructive devotion of the Alan McGees of this world without whom we’d have no My Bloody Valentine, no Primal Scream, no Oasis, no Ride, no Jesus and Mary Chain and no Teenage Fanclub. Where would we be then? Fucked - that’s where. But enthusiasm itself is not enough. Give them a fulcrum and they could move the world but fucking hell, it’ll take some engineering.

Having a Quiet One

Have you ever lied to a co-worker or hairdresser that you had "a quiet one"? Maybe because you couldn't be bothered explaining what you actually got up to, or perhaps because you just knew you couldn't do justice to the special picture held in yr memory? I had both last week.

~

Last Thursday night I joined an audience of no more than a dozen people in the poky basement of Tongue and Groove, where the stage was pushed back so that the bands played almost in the round between the other musicians' equipment and the awkwardly placed poles.

Local improvisers Blank Realm played first and were surprising as always. They started with their backs to each other crouched over guitar pedals, keyboard, bass/amp and a whistling doolackey covered with knobs, noodling and occasionally coming into chorus like a group of elderly people struggling collectively to remember some haunting tune from 70 years ago. The players and their drone rose until they bust through the clouds to peaceful weightlessness before... floating there for a little while. And singing. It was unexpected and very nice. Before they crashed down into - and here's the surprising part - a groove, of sorts. They weren't exactly chooglin' but there were no wave kinda drums and you could nod yr head and tap yr toes. They progressed through several movements and while their mental connection was palpable - I was impressed to learn that none of the parts were pre-written - instead of the set as a whole having some compelling form what remains in memory is a series of moments: a Jah Wobble bass riff; an accidentally polyrhhythmic guitar loop; piercing keyboard scree; ethereal singing; the pounding climax and unpretentious tail off. Heroically, one of them went straight to his night shift.

I went home to have some ice cream and do the washing up and came back to find Anonymeye (for whom this gig was a foreign tour fundraiser) plucking two acoustic guitar strings while fingering his laptop to produce digital rumble, which he cut off abruptly as he said "Thanks". I guess he sets up quickly.

Unlike the Realm, Secret Birds clearly worked out their parts if not the whole set beforehand judging by the 10c-sized turns and meaningful looks when cues were missed. Whittled down to a power trio of dblack and two kids he enticed by waving a bag of weed (just kidding: two talented musicians I didn't recognise) they performed A Celebration of The Riff In Rock Music With About Five Sweet Examples. The guitar channelled Sabbath via Sonic Youth with high melodic bass and syncopated drums straight from a '70s place somewhere between Faust and Santana. Crucially, the riffs were sweet. The band - but mainly the guitarist and his pedals - explored each one thoroughly, only going a bit long on one occasion. Perhaps the constant shapeshifting that keeps Secret Birds surprising for us also keeps it fresh for them because their effort was commendably disproportionate to the number of people in attendance. Unfortunately, I couldn't stay for Collapsicon.

~

Friday night was even more intimate. In a bookshop I didn't even know existed, three orphic musicians reclaimed the descriptor "singer-songwriter" from the jaws of Cerberus before a seated, friendly crowd. Try that one out at the watercooler.

Helen sang gentle songs of empathy and ecstasy (not the kind discussed here in a previous post) with a timeless voice accompanied by graceful guitar, in a style somewhere between a folk lullaby and a spiritual. Just what I needed, and still do - one hopes for a record.

Brutal Hate Mosh is not a metalcore or oi-punk band. It is a drunk young woman fiddling with her ipod, laughing and occasionally singing along or strumming a guitar and it was as great as it could have been terrible. "Tell your girlfriend you've got gingivitis," she sang, kneeling on the floor and drumming on her chair. When you can express your lust for life through that sort of nonsense and chuck a Cat Power without being obnoxious, you're great.

Personality-wise, Harriet from Melbourne was the polar opposite of Ms Mosh. She was the sound of a person curled up under the covers, singing softly to herself in an old-time warble, one arm emerging to pluck a detuned guitar. As singular and special as this was it was also depressing. I exited, still quietly buzzing from the first two acts.

~

This weekend promises to be eventful. The Tongue and Groove is bound to be a much tighter fit when No Anchor aweigh tonight and everyone should check out the launch of new indie dance night "Stolen" at the Step Inn on Saturday. Now and then, though, it's nice to have a quiet one.

Nice Fade #2: Do the Robot; Be Lame

In the second part of our series on indie DJs, Sleeveful of Slight sets his sights on three more contenders for DJ Heinz's coveted crown: an Anglophile, a robot and an icy fan.

Dave and Robot Girl

Dave and Robot Girl host ‘Trigger’ upstairs every second Saturday. Dave’s tastes tend towards all things Oasis (he is rumored to have never refused a Kasabian request) while Robot Girl has a penchant for kitsch from the seventies and eighties. Their sets teeter on the brink of an inspired populism that draws people onto the dancefloor and an indie version of wedding DJing. When they’re on form, it’s very good. You’re amazed all over again by how good ‘Dancing in the Dark’ by the Boss is. However, too frequently it lapses into an exercise in Guilty Pleasures and you find yourself dancing vaguely to a song from the eighties you know from an ad and thinking sadly about the passage of time and whether most marriages are formed out of people settling for second best. At 3am you’re belting out ‘Don’t Look Back In Anger’ with the rest of the dancefloor but there is a nagging sense that the communal vibe has less to do with a loved-up coincidence of brilliant youth than it does with lowest-common denominator tribalism of football hooligans.

I don’t mean to be too harsh on these two. Trigger may lack the sense of infinite possibilities that comes with the very best of nights but there is a genuine positive side to its unique approach. All those friends who say they’ll meet up with you on Saturday night but disappear after fifteen minutes in search of “music that they know” are actually an each way bet at Trigger. They might stay and if they do they’ll dance all night - this is a good thing. Further, if a bunch of English slappers have stumbled off the Brunswick Street Mall into Ric's and you'd like to cop off with one of them, you'd want Dave and Robot Girl on the decks. Of course, this latter point poses the following consideration: with RGs next door, the Fringe bar down the street and the Down Under Bar but a two minute train ride away, do you really choose to come to Ric's so that you can spend your night trying to cop off with English slappers? The answer is yes.

Dave and Robot Girl are good sorts but I can’t help but feel that they could push themselves further – a little less ‘Let’s Dance’ and a little more ‘Sound and Vision’.

Penny Lame

I have a friend who is still telling the story of the first time he heard ‘Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand on a Thursday night when Heinz was DJing upstairs at Ric’s. He was dancing with a strange girl and both of them were desperately disappointed that the other couldn’t enlighten them as to the song’s identity, so knocked out they were by its brilliance. “It’s a great story” he assures me and to be fair, it’s not bad but there is always some distance between the sparkle in his eyes and the received tale. That said, I understand why he’s still telling it.

The first few times you hear and appreciate a really good song are always a special moment but when this happens on a crowded dancefloor the experience is intensified exponentially. The volume, the lights and the close proximity of cool people combine to create euphoric sense of the here and now - an ineffable moment. Dancing to new music as it comes out is the best way to enjoy music and the enjoyment of that experience is always reason enough to drag yourself of out of your house. I would go so far as to say that if you froze the clock at a point in either recent history or the near future, the fullest and most advanced expression of what is good about human civilization would be located on a dancefloor on which the best songs of the last 12 months were tumbling out while positive people danced joyously.

Penny Lame aka Fan Girl respects this more than any other DJ at Ric’s. She has a surly front. One time she refused a song request so coldly I felt like a rapist. Nevertheless, she has a surprisingly warm-hearted dedication to the celebration of the here and now. If you’re going to hear your new favourite song while out, chances are Penny Lame will be on the decks. She was playing Black Kids ‘I’m Not Going to Teach Your Boyfriend How To Dance’ back when you could only download the EP from their myspace and she earns extra kudos for her embrace of the Teenagers' ‘Homecoming’. Of course, devotion to the cusp of the new doesn’t always come off. One time I witnessed the downright bizarre selection of ‘George Washington’ – an excellent youtube clip but hardly a floor filler. But fuck it, I’d rather hear an odd pick than hear ‘The Bucket’ being flayed to the marrow once more.

The most serious criticism I’d make of Penny Lame is that while she’s always good for a few threads of song selection, she never seems to draw the night into a cohesive whole. But even this, I suspect, might be on the wane. The other week I witnessed a half-hour that was pure Heinz. Indie flowed into Destiny’s Child and back into indie without a hint of irony or poor judgment. There were leaps from the best songs of the day to brilliantly appropriate classics ('Atomic'!) and I swear that despite the constant flow of people up the stairs not a soul left the dancefloor. Everyone was smiling (excepting Penny herself, naturally) and one could have almost plucked the euphoria from the air. All this lasted until the very first song that the next DJ played at which point half the dancefloor went to the bar or toilet. I don’t think Penny Lame is quite ready to claim the throne that is the upstairs DJ pen at Ric’s and rule the Brisbane indie scene as DJ Heinz did just yet. She lacks the Shakespearian breadth of vision and the inspiring flights of personality that defined Heinz at his very best. But pretty soon, she’s going to have her first complete night and everyone who is there for it is going to have blinding fun. I hope to be among them. Tick tock!

Cheapening the Summer of Love

"Australia's at the dawn of its Summer of Love" - me at Splendour in the Grass, quoted in Is By Bus, 6 August 2008

"I don't think attitudes to drugs have changed ... a lot of people still feel that drug-taking is morally wrong and extremely risky, they're just making a purely economical decision." - 20-year-old Brisbane university student who requested anonymity, quoted in Brisbane Times , 2 September 2008

I bet that twat goes to QUT. Specifically, Gardens Point. I should know because I went there for four long years and actually spoke to people that used the phrase "real world" to describe the inane shit they couldn't wait to sit in traffic for after graduating from that brutalist Lego space station. Surely only those walking shells could think the increase in ecstasy consumption amongst young Queenslanders is due solely to the federal government's "alcopop" tax?

No. Professor Jake Najman of the Queensland Alcohol and Drug Research Centre seems to agree (although I am more willing to believe the paper has quoted selectively than I am to believe the good professor's a total nonce), sharing the insight that "Young people will make a trade-off where they see the benefits of a switching to a cheaper product." So does the managing director of Gategrash Security (sic in Brisbane Times) who notes helpfully, "The average price of a pill is now about the same price as a six-pack of bourbon and cola." Fuckin' sweet mate.

I don't doubt that the price of drugs (plural) has a bit to do with their respective popularity. But have these people ever heard of, ooh I don't know, youth culture? Let's break that down further: culture?! Will the next "study" prove that increased sales of fluorescent clothing correlate to the rising cost of natural dyes? Is the current popularity of electronic music dictated by a cold cost comparison between guitars and sequencers and the economically justifiable decision to sack the bass player?

As hackneyed as my Splendour revelation was, it's bleedingly obvious that the last few years have seen a gradual then exponential blooming of ecstasy music, ecstasy fashion and ecstasy consumption. But despite the impressive properties of the drug itself, I don't believe it (or its relative price in units of alcopops) can take full credit. Humanity isn't that boring. Economics would be a whole lot easier if it was. There's no straight chain of causation. It's a web. But that spider's spitting music.

You can have the music without the accoutrements just like you can have the sticky string without the web, but not vice-versa. All those jocks would start to feel mighty silly in their little pink shorts if they were still in the pub listening to Nickelback. Far fewer of the girls who brought their hair-straighteners to the festival would be taking four pills at sunset if they were about to see Grinspoon and Silverchair. I didn't get hugged by a single stranger at this year's RATM-headlined Big Day Out, only 6 months before that Splendour love-in. And speaking of Splendour, did you get a chance to compare the crowd sizes and frequency of bodily movement at Wolfmother and The Presets at the end of Sunday? Yes, these seem like obvious comments. That's because they are. Or should be.

The people behind the analyses of Queensland youth your parents are reading in the paper are the ones that advertise in the street press for recreational drug users to come and answer a survey for $50 (apparently the report quoted in the Brisbane Times was based on a study of 80 recreational drug users). Leaving aside the skew their advertising placement and student/junkie-baiting reward must put on the results, if the researchers want their numbers to reflect reality in any way they will need to revise their questions. To include "radio", "Myspace", "Triple J", "Cleo CD covermount", "TV", "ads", "Facebook", "footy culture", "Daft Punk revival", "Cutters", "Juggers", "indie-dance crossover", "disco punk", "fluoro", "sunglasses", "glowstick", "clothes", "celebrities", "friends", "people" - it goes on - and especially "music". Of course, this is impossible.

I'm not being anti-intellectual. I'm being realistic and giving culture - popular culture, youth culture, music culture - the respect it deserves. And I'm not complaining either. Every cultural development gets exploited by wangs trying to sell shit to kids. Long may the kids remain that little bit too fast.