The Elements of Style
Leikeli47, Look Blue Go Purple, Beat Rhythm Fashion, and Belle and Sebastian
There will always be songs that stand alone, songs that can occupy my mind forever without demanding a place in a larger narrative, and this is an attempt to do justice to four of them.
Leikeli47 (AKA Hasben Jones, also not her real name) is an artist I discovered when checking everyone who’d collaborated with Pussy Riot. That aside, I know just two facts about her – she performs in a face mask and other coverings, which is a clever way to be distinctive within the culture industry while remaining apart from it, and one of her early videos features in an episode of Beavis and Butthead, where she’s rapping over trap beats. This may be where she got her start, anyway I had a good listen to her 2022 album Shape Up, which starts off with rap braggadocio ‘Chitty Bang’, a little like Miki Minaj, it’s a decent track, as is the sexy ballad ‘Done Right’, but there wasn’t a lot for me on this album until I hit track 7, ‘Free To Love’, which has a relatively low play count on Spotify, but is an absolute killer, one of the best songs I heard in 2022, and easily the best R&B song I’ve heard in years. ‘Free To Love’, which is written (by Hasben Jones and five other people) in such a perfect 70’s soul ballad style that I assumed it was based on a Smokey Robinson sample or suchlike, but appears to be an entirely original composition, comes across like an answer song to one of Kanye’s raps about bad male behaviour on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. The bass playing, the guitar pecking away at its melody like a chicken in the corner, the synth string washes, the drop-outs and bass booms, the vocal layers and the “brrr” chirps (like the sounds The Chairmen of The Board’s General Johnson made on ‘Give Me Just A Little More Time’), and that bit where Leikeli47 stops herself saying “damn hoes” again, add up to some heartbreaking magic.
Damn, I was just outside
Looking for yo' ass
Knowing I got work at nine
See, we both from the street
So I was quick to adjust
But I gotta look both ways when you bring up trust
Something tugging at my heart
I thought I had me a soldier
We was two seeds in the dirt
Tryna come up roses
What? This shit hurt
And it's like I told you
So, I'ma let you go
Just like I supposed to, baby, you free
Heard you was poppin' bottles
You and ya niggas tryna flex for models (hey)
Room key, hotel doors (hey)
And fuck up on them damn hoes
Now ya head hanging low
Wishing you was back up with yo' damn, uh
Let me stop, let me don't hate
Hoes gotta ho, so, baby, go be great (hey)
Baby, I so sorry (hey)
Please forgive me
You gon' come back, and I ain't gon' feel it (hey)
I'ma put you through some hell to get me back (hey)
How the hell you walk outta Heaven? (Hey)
Go be free
I don’t know if you’ve ever pissed off a real woman, but this is what it feels like; Liekeli47’s singing is so present, so raw that you can feel all the pain on both sides, and all the power on hers. The rest of Shape Up I can take or leave, but I’m always going to listen to ‘Free To Love’, just in case I need reminding.
Look Blue Go Purple, for those not in the know, were the all-female band in the “Dunedin Sound” scene of the 1980’s, and Bewitched was their first EP. The five women involved also played, with men, in other bands, but LBGP was a tight unit with its own identity, and its members were important in another way, as the core of a glue that held the scene together, organising and hosting the cocktail parties where we got to know each other and lay our plans. The socialising influence of women – it’s a powerful thing, and a lot of what we call “Flying Nun” today wouldn’t have happened without it. Why cocktail parties? I don’t know if it’s ever been mentioned in the musical histories, but the 80’s Dunedin scene, especially that of the Dunedin natives, had a strong early 60’s aesthetic; the bands and their fans dressed like Dylan in Don’t Look Back, or the Rolling Stones and the extras on Ready Steady Go, or Edie Sedgwick and Jackie O, a smart way of expressing their individuality and musical taste at work and at home in what was still a very conservative city. Hence the title of Bewitched, a nod to the Elizabeth Montgomery TV show of that name (1964-1972), a supernatural comedy in what we’d call today a Mad Men setting, which was all about the hidden female power behind the scenes of a, supposedly, male-dominated world.
The music of LBGP is propelled by rapid surf-style strumming of the two guitars and bass and Lesley Paris’ driving drums, movement overlaid with relatively languorous and quietly-mixed voices and Norma O’Malley’s flute or Yamaha organ melodies. ‘As Does The Sun’ is a love-spell, imagining the state of an infatuated young man, which reminds me of the music of Clementine Valentine today, but the most spell-binding and best-loved song of the four on Bewitched is ‘Circumspect Penelope’, which uses scenes from The Odyssey to reveal the thoughts of the stay-at-home girlfriend, each verse separated by Norma O’Malley’s circular organ phrase, a pan-pipe like simplicity somehow manages to evoke the Greek island setting, and each short harmonised vocal line from Kath Webster is punctuated with a response, led by shifts in Lesley’s drumbeat on every third and seventh bar of each verse; the rhythm throughout the song has a shifting, restless quality, like the sea, or like resourceful Odysseus.
Fall in love with Nausicaa
But remember who you are
And where you want to be
Back with your Penelope
She’s been waiting twenty years
and you just walk in
telling stories of the sea.
She should hate you, your Penelope.
The ending implies she doesn’t quite, yet, hate him enough to set him ‘Free To Love’ like Leikeli47, not after having waited twenty years for him (and, in the original, having watched him, with their son, kill every other toxic male who’s been harassing her).
Beat Rhythm Fashion were a trio in the Wellington post-punk scene, based around the Hong Kong-born brothers Dan and Nino Birch, and I remember, as a rival muso and punk, looking down on their pre-B.R.F. bands, because they were hairdressers, which seemed inauthentic, and were influenced by The Cure, which seemed too pop and modern, and because they were emo and we were “cool”, as in obscure or defiant. But I was young, wrong and stupid, and as B.R.F. they recorded some of the Kiwi songs I came to love best soon after I left Wellington (Nino also played bass on another favourite Wellington track, L.I.F.E.’s ‘Have You Checked The Children’), beginning with their two contributions to the **** Wellington scene LP, which are the first two tracks on this compilation:
Followed as it was by the first BRF single, ‘Beings Rest Finally’ (its flipside called ‘Bring Real Freedom’), a gorgeous tribute to a dead friend whose troubled end was the subject of a Listener article at the time, and then the sublime ‘Turn Of The Century’.
By the time of ‘Turn Of The Century’, any “emo” vocal styling had become something more like the flat affect of post-emo, a representation of early ‘80s alienation, the worst seen in New Zealand in my lifetime; this was the era when bootboy violence was the terror of the post-punk scene, when Neil Roberts blew himself up in a protest against New Zealand’s first centre for the collection of surveillance data, and when DMA (2,5-dimethoxy-4-methylamphetamine, also known as ‘STP’1), our brown acid, a drug which caused a grinding trip that lasted for days, was by far the easiest hallucinogen or stimulant to buy.
It was a nihilistic, dystopian period in New Zealand, especially in Wellington, its seat of government, and the future was hard to believe in - “End Of The Century” captures that ethos; the BRF sound, relaxed and mechanical, is joined by a luscious synth, which the vocal languishes over in its downward sweeps of beauty. Play ‘Turn Of The Century’ in a car alone on the motorway at night to understand that this was New Zealand’s answer to Krautrock.
There are no dissidents
in the homeland
There is no dissidence at home
The marketplace will survive
It's alive
Breathing pipes will be free
the association will pay
It's a long project with no prospects
But I'd still like to see the turn of the century
The marketplace did survive, of course, it’s doing better than ever, and the Birch brothers did see the end of the century, Dan resting finally in 2011.
’Fox In The Snow’ is a song I first heard on Myspace, played by Rasputina – Belle and Sebastian were a band I’d heard of before, but hadn’t really connected with. They’re such a byword for overquiet tweeness that even The Clientele dissed them. But ‘Fox In The Snow’ is a perfect song, the song I most wish I’d written, and it gets me every time.
The fox is an ambiguous symbol, standing here for cleverness but also persecution and hunger. Snow evokes the British winter, and town and country life. It’s thus a symbol of nostalgia, but also of inhospitability and the concealment of opportunity, like the towns clever children grow up in.
Verse two:
Girl in the snow, where do you go
To find someone who will do?
To tell someone all the truth before it kills you
[Lines I should have made the motto of this stack]
And listen to your crazy laugh before you hang a right
And disappear from sight
A sense of motion, which in the next verse will be explicitly that of cycling youth (popular kids drive cars), and this bridge -
What do they know anyway?
You'll read it in a book
What do they know anyway?
You'll read it in a book tonight
When your world is small, the authors of the books you find (under the snow, so to speak, in pre-internet days) will know, understand, and teach you about so much that the people around you don’t care about.
Boy on the bike, what are you like
As you cycle round the town?
You're going up, you're going down, you're going nowhere
It's not as if they're paying you, it's not as if it's fun
At least not anymore
When I was in my early teens my parents encouraged me to lift my shiftless, bookish game by getting a paper round. I’d arise before dawn and cycle to the Southland Times building where the papers were edited, printed and bundled. The other lads were competitive in ways I couldn’t muster, so I always left the depot late, and without the extra papers the others would con out of the depot manager, which they could sell to random strangers for 5c a pop. And being the lowest member of the pack, I was given, and forever retained, what was by far the longest, least rewarding run, through the industrial zone behind the railway tracks, a mile or two of bad road where only two or three papers could be delivered. Snow and ice were more common than they are today, as were punctures, the paper count was often short, and if men on their way to work wanted to buy The Southland Times from me on the way to work I often lacked the courage to refuse them. Thus, my meagre pay was docked; I made more money in the quiz competition at the A&P show one year. But it wasn’t about the money, because my parents took reasonably good care of me; the whole Dickensian LARP was my opportunity to absorb the work ethic, and I did; to this day I’ll cycle five miles in the snow to deliver the news before cycling another five miles to piano lessons, another five to Southland Boys High School to entertain, and disrupt the learning of, the rest of the class, and another five miles home to finally eat, read a handful of books at once, and rest.
To peak-experience as unique the snowness of each snowfall, one ought to be, or to become like, not a fox, nor an unheard girl or an overworked boy, but an innocent child, its foxiness yet unborn:
Kid in the snow, way to go
It only happens once a year
It only happens once a lifetime, make the most of it
Second just to being born, second to dying too
What else would you do?
Algorithmic insanity - ‘Fox On The Run’, The Sweet.
STP allegedly stood for “serenity, tranquility and peace”, but was far more likely derived from the zinc dithiophosphate-based engine oil additive of that name popular in the USA, and associated with high-speed auto racing.