5. Original Pirate Material - The Streets
2002. My 18th year.
I’m in uni. I was balancing that with hanging out with mates I’d made at my first job.
Our schedules were chaotic, between night shifts, early morning shifts, split shifts and everything else in between.
But we’d still manage a few nights a month, indulging in our shared interests — namely beer, pizza and video games.
Often we’d head out, empty a few jugs of beer, talk nonsense all night, have a dance maybe and then pile into my mates VB Commodore and head back out to the south-eastern suburbs of Melbourne.
Then back into the weektime real-life — uni, family, friends, reading, music, TV, movies.
All pre-smartphones.
These were fun times, but they weren’t the stuff of music, movies or television.
These were fun for us, but boring and never really talked about by anybody else.
It was hard to find music that reflected our lives, what we were doing.
The pub songs of the 80s and 90s weren’t really relevant and the hits of the day didn’t apply.
Our nights were fun, but compared with the Hollywood stories played out in music we were hearing on the radio, they were dull, pointless, boring.
Then I bought Original Pirate Material, and heard these lines over a screeching piano line, twisting into a bouncing beat:
Turn left up the street
Nothing but gray concrete and deadbeats
Grab something to eat, Mickey D’s or KFC
Only one choice in the city, don’t voice in my pity
Now let’s get to the nitty gritty
This was hip hop, but without the distant references of the American version.
It wasn’t drive-by shooting, flash cars or drowning in diamonds.
This track — and the whole album — captured the moments in our monotony.
This guy was describing parts of our lives.
We’d had similar conversations, recoveries, and experiences.
Here he was, rhyming about the spilled beer, wet coasters, smoky bars (back when that was a thing), the tall tales, the routine, the limited options, the banter, the nonsense, the teasing, jostling, escalation and blurred lights of a big night out.
That’s it who’s got dough?
Hey, you know I’d pay but I’m broke, only got coinage to show
Putting off walking home on my own to my thrown
Two empty takeaways ashtrays and remains of the day stoned
Pick a bottle off the table, peel the label tell a fable
Offer opinion for free and a solution to the latest big news story
The stop at the chicken shop on the way home, the dicey crowd fuelled by 2-for-1 beers and testosterone:
Out the pub about three to the takeaway
The shit in a tray merchants
Shops got special penchant for the disorderly
Geezers looking ordinary and a few looking lairy
Chips fly round to the sound of a ladies chantry and ascendry
Waitin’ to blast, no arm with a contest who can throw the furthest
Behind the counter they look nervous
But…carry on cuttin’ the finest cuts of chicken from the big spinnin’ stick
The breakfast the next day, the greasy plate, war stories, bleary eyes and headaches:
A new day, another morning after
Leanin’ back on my chair in a greasy spoon cafeteria
Last night was some bit leeriness done our way
But again we’re back in like a day
Chattin’ shit sittin’ at the wall table telling jokes
Playin with the salt looking out the window
Girl brings two plates of full English over
With plenty of scrambled eggs and plenty of fried tomata
These stories were a lot more familiar than the ones we were used to hearing about.
I’ve written before about how music was, for me, a relatively solitary pursuit.
This album helped open that up, it was a record we could share.
It made sense to my mates as well, it became a bit of a soundtrack to what we were up to.
And listening to it now, it’s a time capsule, a telescope back to this other time.
Then the girl in the cafe taps me on the shoulder
I realize five years went by and I’m older
Memories smolder, winter’s colder
But that same piano loops over and over and over
The road shines and the rain washes away
Why does this matter?
Why have I written about it in a series that’s meant to at least have some tangential connection to the financial world, or going through a major life transition?
No real reason, but if pushed I can say:
Beauty can be found in anything. Sometimes it takes hindsight to find it, sometimes it’s better described by somebody else. But there are moments of beauty to be seen no matter what you’re going through. And finding them, and noticing them, and talking about them, brings that beauty to the fore. It pushes the pain, or the boredom, or the monotony back and makes it easier to keep moving.
This beauty does not have to conform to a standardised concept of what’s beautiful. Everything we saw back then was about the wonders of an exciting lifestyle we were never going to experience (ahem, Instagram…).
But when Mike Skinner started rhyming about greasy tables, war stories, Kronenbergs, or rolls out a verse like this:
You rain down curses but I’m waving, your hearses driving by
Streets riding high with the beats in the sky
All stare, eyes glazed, garage burnt down
The fire raged for forty days and in forty ways
But through the blaze they see it fade
The sea of black, the beaming heat on their faces
Then a figure emerges from the wastage
Eyes transfixed with a piercing gaze
One hand clutching his sword raised to the sky
They wonder how, they wonder why
The sky turns white, it all becomes clear
They felt lifted from their fears
