On Nerve
Or, the eternal recurrence of rude boys?
I've no brand loyalty, my identity isn't tied to a particular style or convenience. I flip about the streaming services, the radio stations, the newsletters, friends who think they have their finger on the pulse. I’m always looking for the indie weirdness of bandcamp with the algorithmic power of Spotify - I haven’t found it. I'm currently flirting with Youtube Music and recently whilst settling into a Floating Points track that seemed to atomise my trivialities, a big honking, skankin' shouty twist of a song presented itself in my suggestions - Ol' Nerve, Brisbane's own beats and brawn boy of hard work, walk 'n' talks and independent machismo.
Those introductory piano stabs subtly warp in and out of pitch enough for me to lightly disassociate, which was just as effective as Floating Points, until he started shouting about the matrix, this environment within which he's sick, like he's disaffected by his talent for pushing out endless "bangers" - it had me front and centre - asking "Is this his grunge phase?" but its this compact anthem of despair and frustration, maybe closer to My Chemical Romance's Welcome To The Black Parade - maybe this is his emo phase? The more it carries on the more I heard that Hilltop Hoods sing–a-long Cosby Sweater - a crossover song that brings the bag (as the kids like to say). Swimming in loose associations, I became unstuck in time sensing the cycles of infinity were getting quicker, like it was only yesterday that MCR released Black Parade and I'm about to rise up with my comrades to kickstart an emo revolution.
The great benefit of being intoxicated with cultural cycles is similar to activating no clipping mode in a video game and losing yourself to the scaffolding of art not usually meant for you. Here you can glean little nodes of perspective: Wasted isn't identical but is largely indistinguishable, Toby's sickness is our collective innate sickness of wanting novelty but not change. This young rapper's anthem is Nietzche’s Amor Fati, the matrix is the very thing you desire and the very thing that makes you sick. Let him get his bag and on his ascent use it for travel sickness; cash soaked in stomach acid.
After pulling my head out of this augmented reality, I could clearly see the pulsing nerve. Here we have Tobes, stuck in an environment, oppressed and ignored. Apparently Tobes is in something of a ghetto - Wasted rewinding to the new-wave and rude boy of the 80’s, a 40 year cycle of haphazard nostalgia or possibly just the savvy sensibilities of a reductive rap-punk to revolve from the garage and grime back into rocksteady (which suggests that the centripetal force of cultural cycles is extending beyond the 40 year orbit) I mean, Spotify has it in both Rock and Hybrid playlists and I’m now front-and-center singing The Paragons “The tide is high but i’m holding on, I’m going to be your number one, I’m not the kind of man that gives up just like that, It's not the things you do that really hurts me bad, But it's the way you do the things you do to me…”