32. Monster / Who Will Survive in America - Kanye West

There’s a particularly powerful humiliation that comes with moving back home.

 That’s amplified when the reason you’re doing so is because of a financial shortage.

 Even more so when that shortage is because of your own foolhardy decision to start your own business.

 This is the story of how that humiliation led me down the garden path.

 Literally.

One of the unexpected outcomes of moving home is that you end up with a lot more time.

 Not (solely) because some of those chores you previously had to do yourself get rolled into the household activity.

 But because the reason you’ve moved home (financial, generally) also limits your other options for activity.

 So you end up doing less – leaving you more time at home.

 Filling those hours can be interesting. It can’t be all-work, all-the-time, because that’s a one way ticket to burnout and bitterness.

 You need to find a hobby, something beyond your day-to-day.

 For me, it was gardening.

My family and I have always gardened.

 Or, more accurately, we’ve always put some effort towards maintaining our yards.

 I’ve mowed lawns since primary school (and wrestled those infernal machines for as long).

 We’ve always kept compost heaps, buried green waste, kept the yards vaguely tidy, dug holes, taken cuttings, watered and grown plants.

 We haven’t been Gardening Australia level participants though – somewhere between that and pottering around the yard.

 And by the time I’d moved home, I hadn’t really been involved in a garden for years.

 (Well, beyond helping my dad cut down trees in a manner both slow and thrillingly out of step with modern safety practices)

But after a few weeks at home, I started reading some of our old gardening books and decided it’d be nice to start growing some vegetables.

Out came the shovel, the pick and the fork.

I marked out three beds in the backyard, making the foolish decision to put them in the spot that was sunny in the morning – and the morning only.

I dug up the grass – place shovel, drop foot, slice soil, lever back, lift clod, dump clod, shake the soil loose, toss grass into the wheelbarrow, repeat.

Once that was gone, I realised how poor the soil was. Sandy, but not loamy.

Just…sandy.

I didn’t want to use chemicals or fertiliser to change this, so the only way to ‘fix’ the soil was to improve the organic structure.

Which means digging it all out, one spit at a time, then backfilling with as much manure as I could respectfully haul in with my car.

Some grass clippings on top, some green waste, then paper, water, more grass, water and then bury that lasagna of potential.

While that’s breaking down, I planted some seedlings I gathered from the Clearance shelves at our local Bunnings – perhaps the greatest value secret in Australia. Bring those spindly, brown plants home and chuck them in a bucket of water for a day. Half won’t come back, but you can fill a garden with what’s left.

It was spring, so these seedlings took off, shooting up the framework of stakes I’d shoved into the now-loose soil.

Before too long we had tomato’s reddening on the vine, cucumber’s hiding on the ground, beans struggling to sprout and some real regret about not putting the mint in a pot.

Most days, and every weekend, I was out there working in the garden beds.

Clearing, weeding, mulching, digging, planting, feeding or watering.

It was meditative and satisfying, seeing this little patch start to give up its modest bounty.

I quickly realised that planting as a means of subsistence requires far more planning and space than I could dedicate, but the comfort from eating produce you’ve grown yourself is pretty hard to match.

It was time-consuming, at first, because there’s a lot of effort involved in clearing square metres of grass stubbornly unaccepting of its new reality.

And to help fill that time, I had my old, black 80GB iPod.

Before I had a phone with enough memory to hold a decent amount of music, before I knew what Spotify was, I had this trusty iPod.

I made sure I wore the shorts had the not-too-deep pockets, so the headphone cable wouldn’t be stretched. I’d stand on our back step, scroll around on that wheel, find an album, hit play and step down to the shed to get my tools.

Sure, I was tuning out the chirping birds, buzzing insects, rustling leaves, crunchy grass and neighbourhood noises – but I had all the music I could think of, in my pocket!

And the album I kept coming back to was Kanye West’s My Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy.

I have very mixed feelings about Kanye.

On the one hand, he has said things that many people wouldn’t, puncturing the hubris and arrogance underpinning the power hierarchy.

On the other hand, he wore that bloody hat.

Regardless, I think this album is a masterpiece.

It’s dark, creative, confident, bonkers and crudely poetic (or poetically crude?).

The beats bounce all over the thick rhythms he somehow constructs out of all those samples.

Famously, he built a 9-minute track – Runaway – around a simple piano melody and the hook ‘toast for the douchebags, let’s have a toast for the assholes’.

It was that this album was often playing as I worked in the garden.

 The imagery amuses me, when I think of it now.

 There’s a guy in his 20s, drowning in humiliation and frustration, hands buried in the dirt of suburban Melbourne, listening to a millionaire construct tunes about inequity in America.

But the time I spent in that garden – on my knees, pulling weeds, sweating in the hot sun, with oddly dirty elbows – meant that I could really listen to this album.

Which I did.

Many, many times.

The big two, for me, remain Monster and Who Will Survive in America (best to assume all links are NSFW on this one…)

Monster is a fierce track that kicks down doors just for the sake of it. I imagine it was meant as a showcase for all the guests, with Nicki Minaj shoehorned at the end for some reason.

Then, BANG, her verse on Monster is so good she leaves Hova, Rick Ross and Kanye in the shade, and it excuses just about anything she’s done since.

Every element of her verse is outstanding – the lines themselves, sure, but the delivery is assured and bold, her range is perfect and the tune embedded in the rhymes is great.

It’s a playful and authoritatively hostile takeover of the track. It’s the sound of an upstart wresting back control from the incumbents.

It’s the almost-perfect response to the various other misogynist verbiage over the rest of the album.

Almost.

I would have replayed just her verse dozens of times, filling my iPods scroll wheel with dirt and sweat while trying to find the exact start point – 3.33 for those playing along at home – and bouncing my head while weeding, trying to keep up with her line-spitting perfection.

Then there’s Who Will Survive in America, the 1:38 conclusion to the whole mad enterprise.

It comes right on the heels of Lost in the World, the autotune-battle between Kanye and Bon Iver, where Kanye makes that dreaded sound engineering tool sound humane and vibrant.

All over those propulsive drum rolls, pushing towards the end of the night. It’s a hand-clapping ode to the end of the night you don’t want to end because then you’ll need to deal with what’s happened.

Then it slides into the driving, percussive beat built around Gil Scott-Heron’s incredible beat poetry, bemoaning the great disappointment of America.

I’m not terribly familiar with Scott-Heron’s catalogue, but I love this verse. It’s the confident delivery, sure, but also the rolling cylinder of the words themselves.

It is, obviously, poetry and a wonderful ending to an album all about the alienation of the Other –specifically the African-American Other-ness.

I also love the line ‘and a children’ for that pesky ‘a’ in the middle…

I can’t imagine how many times I listened to this album over those months.

I can, however, now see just how important that time was.

I’d taken a big tumble, that had left me embarrassed, lost and reeling.

My confidence had taken a huge hit and being able to stay home and build that garden afforded me the chance to let my confidence recover.

Slowly, but surely.

And by doing so through gardening – where failure is much more common than success, where time and mother nature dictate the outcome much more than anything you do, where failure is obvious but temporary – helped ensure that what confidence I was rebuilding was rooted in humility, not hubris.

It’s hard to be arrogant when your hands are pulling weeds out of cool, dark soil.

And I’ve found that it’s hard for me to feel lost at the end of a day in the garden, in that hour of golden light and abundant insects.

When the bees are glowing in that late afternoon sun as they flit between the rosemary and the thyme flowers.

When you’re dragging the hose behind you, watering those plants you’ve grown from seed.

When you’re walking, barefoot, around the garden beds.

Which is why these songs – these strange, challenging, completely unrelated songs – always make me think of sitting in my mum’s backyard, at the end of a long day, satisfied in the garden I’d been lucky enough to build.

And the incredible fortune I had to have such options.