A decade or so ago I was living in a brick one-br flat in Bacchus Marsh, hanging out with the apple farmers and meth smokers. The brick flat, besides being cold as shit in winter and a kiln in summer, had salmon pink exterior paint faded enough to make it look ready to meet the apocalypse. They’re ahead of the curve in Bacchus Marsh in ways no one suspects, no kidding.
Being outside of the salmon-coloured front seat to the apocalypse sucked a more than being inside of it anyway, so it worked out. I set up a crappy DAW on the cheap and went to work giving my neighbours ear cancer. I’m pretty sure I succeeded.
Speaking of ear cancer, I also have a cousin who, amongst other things, plays guitar. We both got into Van Halen as kids back in the 80s. Van Halen were one of the best things about the 80s, anyone who says otherwise is a liar. We tended more to part ways after that point; he never liked Run DMC enough anyway.
At one point he sent me a WAV of some guitar noodling, something he had been working on. It really wasn’t my cup of tea. He likes funk and blues, except he’s a stiff cracker who doesn’t like black people music when it doesn’t say nice things about crackers. Or has too much funk apparently.
White people need to be so careful we don’t end up sounding like our genre of choice’s answer to Vanilla Ice. I’m pretty sure I’m ear cancer’s answer to Vanilla Ice at times.
Anyway, I made the original version of this tune all the way back when on basic monitors. I took samples from the guitar WAV and slowed them the shit down, and found one that seemed to fit. I think it’s slightly off-key, which seems to actually work given the theme of the tune itself.
Further down the track I was gifted improvements from a deceased estate (Simon Millar RIP. I try to abide by the ethic of class solidarity you lived by my brother. You were always loyal). I remade the tune. In between the old and new set of monitors, and EMDR therapy, and a few other things, my cousin had also gotten respectable and decided his mental health problems were entirely my fault, even though we hadn’t seen each other since I went interstate and out of my way then to catch up double digit years ago.
Back in the Front Seat to the Apocalypse in Salmon, I had sampled something he had been working on in the name of inadvertent collaboration I guess. My cousin doesn’t love music made with jumped-up abacuses like a lot of people, but as far as I understood trying to find middle ground was what loyalty and family was all about.
Anyway, I got set up with monitors that helped me do a slightly better job of hearing what I was doing, the guitar sample not least of which. I called the original version ‘Monkey Funk,’ that being what the WAV file was named. Maybe he thought I was trying to make something of it. Who knows, he didn’t say anything.
He did say a bunch of other shit though, but nothing about conservative families with toxic authoritarian internal dynamics that punish nonconformity with pileons and trauma-bonding in the name of prioritising being normal over being happy. Smile through your teeth for the camera.
But yeah, post-demonising and discard by a blood relative put a new angle on this one. The title pretty much wrote itself.
I wonder if that has anything to do in fact why you’re struggling Mick, you nutsack. Ask me how I might know.
