On Julia Jacklin

Or, The Second Coming of The Sea Peoples

Julia Jacklin

These days, I’ll readily acknowledge that I’m getting old - Nothing quite like some bird watching soundtracked by Ryuichi Sakamoto. With the bird of temporality on my shoulder, I seek out the what the kids are subjected to, I do this through the state-sanctioned youth culture buzzer Triple J. 

As you’d readily believe, I was driving to pick my kid up from daycare and was letting the FM curation revitalise me when I was dumped into the haze. This song came on, this Julia Jacklin song. Damn, it hung me. Jacko has this absolute knack for hanging you. I remember that song Body - set in the same tone, same register, same timbres, fuck probably the same key - Jacko occupies this space so well, it hangs me up and I’m all for it. This song, Lydia Wears A Cross, it’s off this new album Pre Pleasure which I have gone on to listen to and have enjoyed it but it’s lost on me as I’m always dumped deep into it from this opening track, Lydia Wears A Cross. 

Firstly, it messes with my steady emotional state - I’m become conflicted with a duelling diseases: longing for the return and escape from the now. I become confused with nostalgia. And, while I recognise the triggers - you see, my parents ran the local theatre troupe, you know, it allowed mum to grow her beard and dad to play the baby Jesus - With that said, besides the trauma of musical theatre, Jacko is obviously deep in the reflective mode of this song. Whether she’s telling the truth or not, I don’t care; this kind of compassion for a childhood among delusion is where I’m thinking that this disease is hanging me from. The desire for the simultaneous return and escape suspends my entire being in an impending sense of doom that is a freedom soggy with melancholy. 

Ah, this song. 

Anyway, I was driving to pick my kid up from daycare and entered a fugue, a Won’t-Someone-Think-Of-The-Children hysteria, feeling sick with nostalgia and thinking up a storm about the theatre of religion, of escapism, of the state - power, corruption and what motivates a mob. Whether we’re at war with Eurasia or sipping on the soma, I won’t begrudge a man for turning to a greater power when facing a blue ocean event, I won’t disparage you from turning to Star Wars Episode 63 when faced the theatre of a fair capitalistic system. Survival is mental as much as physical.

Where I really get going is when Jacko sings “I’d be a believer if it was all just song and dance, I’d be a believer if I thought we had a chance”. I’m far from the frictionless apathy of my youth so as I hear this I begin to sympathise with the sea peoples of antiquity, there won’t be time for being diseased by nostalgia, I have a kid to feed, I have a kid that needs to learn how to negotiate the social contract, how to maraud those high on hog. I have a kid that needs to be collected from daycare.

Oh, man. The dynamic crescendo across Lydia Wears A Cross helps to reconnect my head to my body, no longer suspended I’m rockin’ and revitalised. The dead water of the arctic may lap around the ankles of my heirs but you better believe that their swords will be the sharpest.

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