30. Cigarettes Will Kill You - Ben Lee

A touchstone I’ve kept returning to in writing this series is just what I’m writing about.

I’m not writing about songs I love (but, happily, a few of them have been) or about songs I like, remember, hate or were popular.

Instead, it’s about songs that have some sort of meaning in my life, songs with a  resonance that continues to echo through to today, so that when I hear the riff, the tune, melody, chorus, refrain or crescendo I’m reminded of something, someone or sometime in my life.

It doesn’t have to be a song that I love.

But it has to be a song with meaning.

High school wasn’t particularly difficult for me.

I had the great fortune that my wiring aligned pretty well with the expectations of the public education system.

Not having to deal with the difficulty of battling against those expectations made for a much easier path through those years.

I could be an arrogant little twerp about it though, and I wish I’d learnt about the theory of multiple intelligences a lot earlier. Being tone-deaf really punctures the arrogance of being able to process quadratic equations…

Scores ain’t all, is what I’m saying…

Anyway.

I was also tremendously fortunate to have a close circle of wonderful friends, who I’ve written about before.

These two realities kept high school from being the nightmare I know it was for many, many other people.

For which I’m terribly grateful.

I had a friend at school who didn’t have as easy a time with it.

He was (and probably still is – we fell out of touch during school) an incredibly gifted guy – clever, articulate, curious, quick-witted.

But also angry and cuttingly sarcastic. It’s little wonder we got along.

Unfortunately, he had a mishap once and was lumped with a nasty nickname that followed him through school.

That didn’t really do much for his demeanour – but you definitely can’t blame him.

Looking back, I don’t think I participated in the teasing, but I know deep down that I can’t say that for sure.

Or, at best, I stood idly by as it kept happening.

I imagine most people have the same feeling, but sometimes I really wish I’d been a better person growing up.

But history is immovable, sadly, so we are where we are.

The reason I mention this is that, later on in our school lives, we all attended the big school athletics day.

Even then – as someone who was having a pretty easy run through school – I could sense that a lot of it was exclusionary rubbish.

(But it was better than the big swimming day. Even then – pre-social media – the idea of having kids change into their bathers and swim in front of the school shouted at every cliché of student insecurity and dysmorphia)

I had/have the build and aerobic capacity of a tree stump, so participating in anything beyond disgruntled discus throwing was out of the question.

So, like most other kids – disinterested in athletics, but pleased to be out of school – I sat in the stands or on the grass and talked, shouted, jeered and laughed with my friends.

One of whom I’ve introduced already – and who had a Discman with a copy of the Triple J Hottest 100 from 1998.

It must have been 1999, which was kind of a make-or-break year for my class. We were in a programme where you essentially skipped year 9, going straight to year 10.

This acted to splinter the class, but also create some element of bond between the 20-25 of us now swimming out of our depth.

The splintering meant that the nickname chasing this kid would become more prominent, but the bond also meant that it was entirely normal for us to sit there and talk about music.

As I’ve written previously, my discovery of music was a late-run, and relatively lonely thing.

It’s probably the same for any music fan – finding the sounds you like must, by necessity, be an individual thing. But finding other people looking for similar certainty along the way makes it that much more enjoyable.

Which is why discovering that my friend also liked the Ben Lee song, Cigarettes Will Kill You, was a nice little revelation.

Today, it’s still a helluva song.

But back then, in 1999, it was at the tip of the spear puncturing Australian music’s bogan habits.

Not for Mr Lee power chords and smashing pots. His voice is thin, nasal and reedy, but utterly confident and bracing as it dances along that melody.

Instead, it’s a seemingly simple drum loop, triumphant piano tinkling and lyrics dripping with tasty contempt (seriously – there’s more references to food here than on a certain Channel 7 cooking show).

And it’s oh-so-singable:

“You fry me in a pan

You cook in a can

You stretch me with your hands”

For those of us that fell in love with it 20 years ago, anyway, and held it out as the kind of love song our cynical and naïve generation could cling on to.

“I want

A TV embrace, and;

I’m getting off this

Boiling plate”

It’s toe-tapping regret at the toxicity of a dead relationship, built on one of the many melodies that seem to pop into this bloke’s head the way most of us wonder if we left the TV on.

All with those harmonies’ underneath; that staccato, singular harmony propelling the song to it’s resigned ending.

“I wish I could say

That everyone was

Wronggggg

I wish everyone was

Wronggggg”

And he was so young when he wrote it! He wasn’t much older than us when we were listening to it.

I can’t overstate the impact that has on kids, when somebody of your cohort captures the emotions pumping through your system (fuelled by hormones and insecurity) and has that message accepted by people. The same system that’s always been telling you how insignificant you and your worries are.

I think there was a ban against having any sort of headphones at the athletic day (fancy enforcing that today…) so we huddled up the back of the stands to surreptitiously listen to the handful of CDs we’d smuggled in.

We lacked the vocabulary and self-awareness to properly discuss this track, other than that we thought it was damned cool and fun to listen to.

So we sat up there, surrounded by bags, kicking back, sharing a set of headphones, listening to the same great song, between bouts of ridiculing other kids for committing the cardinal sin of giving a damn about something.

It wasn’t a big, or memorable moment – in fact, as I’m writing this I’m quite nervous I’m mis-remembered huge details – but it was a moment.

And when you’re a teenager, hell whenever you’re trying to work out something about your life, those moments stick.

One of the great privileges we have in the western world is the selfishness of adolescence.

Our lives of sloth and comfort make it possible to indulge in every hormonal tribulation, to inject them with perceived import out of alignment with their actual impact.  

Which makes us bring down the shutters when we’re interacting with other people. Everything becomes visible through the lens of ‘me’.

But, oddly, this means that those moments where that lens is put down, even for a fleeting second or two, become amplified.

You don’t always realise it at the time – I had no idea I’d still remember this some 20 years later – but they’re important.

It’s that connection with other people that makes any of this worthwhile.

Sometimes I worry that we’re losing that ability to connect, that I’m losing the openness to these moments I didn’t know I had.

That technology is prolonging our adolescence, that our constant proximity to a shining screen is drying us out.

Until all that will be left will be human husks, completely closed off with nothing but our ever-scrolling thumbs moving.

But that whole stream of thought makes me sound – and feel – old.

And it’s also a hypocritical way to end a post all about sharing a moment of connection over an electronic device and a shared pair of headphones.

The one thing I want finish on is simple and not particularly controversial:

These things - connections, moments, people – matter in our lives.

They’re why, 20 years after listening to it with a childhood friend, I’m transported back to those uncomfortable benches up the back of the stands at an athletic track every time I hear this wonderful, catchy pop tune.

So.

I think that qualifies as a song with meaning.