Soft music for hard times

In case you're wondering, no I don't know what this blog is or is for. The original World of Bollocks nee The Weak In Sport was a place to park quips and shit-takes about sport, but there's an entire podcast for that now. Sometimes it's going to be deeply considered thinkpieces, sometimes it's going to be morning coffee dumps (not that kind of morning coffee dump) and sometimes I have a throwaway idea come up at the end of a podcast record and I need somewhere to think about it more.

Anyone who's regularly been part of a podcast (which is most of the internet) knows that the afterthought stuff that comes up just after you switch off the mics is generally better than anything you intended to record. It's basically how our sport podcast spawned a music podcast - originally titled BALLS After Dark - and it's why we record everything, even the bits between the intros and outros. 

This week on the pod(s) we had old mate Adam subbing for regular cohost Beeso, who was otherwise occupied trying not to be reclaimed by the sea off the coast of Noosa. We all deal with our midlife crises in our own ways. Adam brings a slightly different vibe to the music ep, not just on account of being a gigging muso and classically trained pianist (with a hard T); having known him back since Metallica and RHCP were listenable and original, we share a more common music listening history than me and Beeso, who spent much the 2000s being an evangelist for Aussie hip-hop through running various bars, venues and accidentally his own label. Which was why I was a bit surprised Adam didn't know of Millencolin, stalwarts of the Scandinavian skate-punk scene - who'd come up as a comp for Norwegian pop-punk act Death By Unga Bunga, whose new album was on the slate for review this week, along with Bad Bunny and the Wombats.

DBUB's vibe reminded me massively of Millencolin, but Adam not so much, largely because he couldn't remember them. We'd had a common friend (name redacted) in period who would have absolutely punished us with that kind of stuff, but clearly it hadn't stuck. On listening back to their work (after the pod outro proper) he remarked it was much sharper, much harsher on the ear. To a fault, in fact.

And he's absolutely right, while the vibe is definitely similar the production is much softer for essentially the same genre in 2025 vs 2000. Same for other skate/pop punk acts of that era, like Bodyjar (the sort of Melbourne suburban band Adam was probably referencing with his own comp which I rudely shot down probably because I hadn't thought about Bodyjar in about 15 years).

But everything's softer now, it was noted. Hard, harsh music lives in increasingly vanishing niches of music, with gentler vibes being sought. What Hottest 100 day would be complete without the hilarious cacophony of washed Gen Xers and elder millennials bleating vehemently about how modern Triple J is just limp yacht rock and breathy, wombling indie jingles, and by derivation, everyone under 30 is a fucken moron and/or the ABC should be defunded for not meeting its mission for the YOUF OF STRAYA. It's more fun than the countdown itself (because it's full of limp yacht rock etc).

I have a theory about that (actually I had a throwaway thought at the time and now I'm claiming it's a theory). And no it's not that everyone under 30 is a fucken moron. Not for this reason anyway. Nor is it the oft-spouted idea that the kids like their tunes soft because life is hard, man. My theory is less to do with music styles and genres and more in how music is consumed. Thirty years ago music was much more likely to be consumed through sharehouse loungeroom speakers, car stereos and other public, external spaces. Now most music is consumed through earbuds and on-ear noise cancelling headphones. While in previous eras change like this was led by production decisions - the loudness wars arms race was the result of deliberate choices by producers - this might be more like evolutionary selection at the level of music, with listeners broadly gravitating towards less brutal vibes since they're being piped directly into their skull. Do I have any evidence for this? Hell no, it's an evolutionary biology theory, a field that loves a just-so explanation which can't be tested or falsified but sounds cool on first listen.*

And speaking of: something I saw surfaced on socials the other day, audiologists proposing a link between noise-cancelling headphones of the kind many people use these days to hide from the GENERAL STATE OF FUCKEN EVERYTHING and the rise in auditory processing disorders being diagnosed, the theory being that constant filtering of background noise might create some kind of impairment. By what mechanism, you ask? *waves hands* *shrugs shoulders*

Now look they could absolutely be right but what seems a lot more likely to this non-specialist** is that (a) specialists are generally terrible at thinking holistically beyond and outside their own sandpit and (b) they might have the bold arrow of causation flipped arse-about. Neurodiversity is a spectrum, and there is clearly a whole load of undiagnosed, sub-clinical neurospicy stuff Out There which has probably always been Out There and which people have been battling and masking through, only later in life being picked up with formal diagnoses or just self-diagnoses (figuring out ways to work with and around their conditions). ASD is a complex, condition that presents differently in every person but auditory processing issues are common just like other cognitive and sensory processing challenges. People who gravitate towards NC headphones might be doing so to help mask existing, ongoing processing disorders, which subsequently show up in increased later-age diagnoses. Or more simply: correlation does not infer causation. 

How did we get from Scandiwegian pop punk to the aetiology of hearing issues? Fucked if I know. Don't ask me, I can't hear properly anyway. More a result of too many rock gigs, music festivals and F1-11 flyovers at Gold Coast Indy than That Neurospicy though.

The Doctor is OUT.

*For the avoidance of doubt this is not a anti-evolution take, this is a spent-a-few-years-in-related-fields take

**Hashtag not that kind of doctor, obvs

Stovetop of the morning to you

The gurgle of a Bialetti or Moka stovetop espresso maker on a gas burner in a dimly lit pre-dawn-kitchen is low-key one of my favourite aesthetics. Or not even pre-dawn, you can get the same experience just by moving to the very arse end of the South Island; this February morning was simply grey and drizzly, and yet as dark at half-seven as it will be well into winter. The spark of the blue flame, the anticipation of the brew, the surge and whoosh of the whatever-you-call-it-when-a-stovetop-espresso-espresses. The day begins here. It has to begin somewhere, apparently.

Stovetops for me have a strong association with holidays - most places we go there’s some kind of hotplate, coffee can be a variable experience away from home, and we take our coffee punishingly seriously in la Casa del Yobbo (local roaster, freetrade beans, ground to spec) so the venerable stovetop and fuel to fill it are always first on the packing list. Since we don’t get away that often, and out of an abundance of wanting to drag-and-drop some of those holiday vibes into the slow early weeks of work, when we came back from our last break I decided to keep making my morning constitutional with a stovetop. 

The stovetop in question is an alleged six cup with a broken lid hinge (rewired with a wallhanging nail) which like most of my T-shirts dates from the early 2000s and wears its advanced age and hard life accordingly. We have more than one perfectly good* proper coffee machine in the house; this is entirely a vibes-driven choice. 

And because for some reason, that stovetop shit hits different. Sure maybe it’s because you can generally cram more coffee in an alleged six cup stovetop basket but it could be the slightly gentler pressure of a stovetop produces a bigger and rounder flavour. Or maybe, like an old wok in a well-used kitchen, it’s the years of seasoning and the residue of thousands of past coffees which inform and infuse today’s flavours.

We are, allegedly, a month away from builders cutting a remorseless swathe through our house, ripping off the roof and smashing through the kitchen and bathroom like human-scale kaiju (it’s OK, we’re asking them to.) The new kitchen cooktop, when it comes, won’t be gas. It’ll be the first time we’ve not had gas in fifteen years. (Fart joke! Wahey!) As regular chef I’m ready to move on from gas; while it’s arguably better for certain kinds of cooking, aside from being environmentally thoroughly shitful vs NZ's largely renewable electricity supply, it’s a massive ballache to coordinate gas bottle deliveries and cop the angst from sweary delivery people over the narrow down-stepped route to where the bottles get parked and piped in. I won’t miss much about gas cooking, but I will miss the aesthetics of a first-thing stovetop coffee on a gas burner.

...aaand fuck it’s gone cold while I was brain-dumping this. I will miss less the aesthetics of a first thing stovetop coffee which needs to be reheated in the microwave.

The Doctor is OUT.

*OK it’s an op-shop-rescue Breville with aging seals but as long as you don’t pack too-finely ground coffee in like a concrete hockey puck it’s fine, honest.

 

Friendship is rare (do you know what I'm saying to you)

As a man dedicated to efficiency, I endorse the practice and practice the endorsement of making use of major event days as a place to park other important life events. Get engaged on Christmas Eve. Get married on Labour Day weekend. This not only gives you a second reason to do something on said event day, it reduces by 50% the chance you will forget an anniversary of importance to someone. Efficiency.

Not heat compliant

I once moved countries on Valentines Day. This wasn't necessarily so I could save time and memory space, more that it was when the flights and job contracts lined up. That country was Aotearoa New Zealand, that Valentines Day was 14/2/2005. Twenty years here. It was going to be three, and then it wasn't. But we have lives here that we couldn't have had in Australia - or rather there isn't a place in Australia we could have had these jobs, this house, this lifestyle. So there will be more years here. Besides, the black lab would melt to an oily puddle if she ever crossed the 42nd parallel.

Compare the pair

Could I move back to Australia? For a variety of reasons, no. Do I miss it? Good lord yes. Home is home, and that never leaves you. I have a strong affinity for this place, but it is not my place. Aotearoa New Zealand teaches you a lot about place. A major feature of any traditional Maori meeting or greeting is pepeha, where you talk about your whakapapa - the lands, waters and mountains you affiliate with, and the people you descend from. 

Obviously First Nations people have an affinity for country which any mongrel child of immigrants can't pretend to have but I still know what my mountain is, even if it's basically a small hill in firebreak country out the back of a coastal National Park. I also know I need to live within earshot of surf to feel normal (blame the infrasound maybe; there's probably another entire blog in that) even if over here it's surf you can maybe dip three toes into on the hottest day of the year.

But it's not the mountains (lol), or the beaches, or the heat, or the insects, or the gambling ads, or Murdoch papers, or the fuckwit tradie utes on the M1 that I miss. To mangle another bit of te reo which corporate types love to begin meetings with just before they announce more rounds of redundancies:

He aha te mea nui o te ao? 

He tangata, he tangata, he tangata!

What is the most important thing in the world? It is people, it is people, it is people.

I miss my people. Almost all my old friends are OLD friends, people I've known since before the Late Show was on TV. The corollary is that I don't make new friends; or rather, setting aside work acquaintainces, all the capital-F Friends I've made since moving to NZ have been internet friends who don't live in NZ (including that fella I've podcasted with for ten years; no, we didn't know each other back in Brisbane). This could lead you to conclude either (a) I am increasingly repellent and/or neurospicy in my old age; (b) New Zealanders are difficult and unpleasant, or (c) dudes just don't make new friends over the age of 30. 

Spoilers, the data suggests it's (c). (To be fair it's also definitely (a) and partially (b) too but that's just because they find Australians too fucking loud and haven't forgiven us for Trevor Chappell underarming a grenade onto the Rainbow Warrior and killing Phar Lap, or some shit I dunno.)

Men just suck at making friends and keeping friendships going. Whether it's because of family commitments, work stress, lack of connections, loss of societal third spaces or a general inability to externalise emotions, there are a hundred thousand thinkpieces on that there internet cataloguing and deconstructing the male friendship crisis, or variants thereof. 

This is not thinkpiece number 100,001 in that series; I don't have a explanation for any of that, except to say yes, it appears to be a thing, and any or many of those reasons could be why. And I don't have a solution, either. Except to get on more planes and have more beers with my people. 

The Doctor is OUT. 

Not for me, Clive

Aaaand we're back. Something that has come to me with age has been the understanding, however glacial it got here, that some things are Not For Me, And That's Fine. There are plenty of examples from back in the day - many of which recorded in the regrettable gibberings on this website before its recent Big Sleep - of your correspondent, as a white middle class male, refusing to accept things are Not For Me, and loudly complaining about them in obnoxious quasi-comedic fashion which hasn't dated at all why do you ask.

With time I have grown to understand certain truths, such as: don't have an easily searchable archive on your blog, and some things are Not For You. And that's fine. They bring other people joy, they don't materially affect yours, everyone's stuff can exist in the world without preventing your stuff from existing. It's not the zero-sum game of the monocultural 1900s; all the ludicrously niche shit you are into is no longer starved of sunlight by All That. The Gen X foundational dogma of socially stratifying by how loudly you can hate on what other people are into is as dead or irrelevant as most of our cultural icons. Basically, don't yuck people's yum. Unless their yum is the phrase 'don't yuck people's yum' because that's fucken ick.

 

This is Not For Me. (Shouts to anyone who gets this reference, we could be friends) 

Pop music is Not For Me. It's not made for me, it's not aimed at me, it doesn't care if I performatively stan it to appear relevant to the youths (brat summer is rizz!) or think it's shit. It certainly doesn't fucken care if it gets reviewed on our new music podcast so we very rarely do so. Superhero movies are Not For Me. Golf? For me, no. MAFS: NFM. Royals coverage, free-to-air news, kombucha, UFC, the last twenty years of Triple J, the continuing existence of Ed Kavalee? Not for me, Clive.

With that said, I watched the F1 75 Season Launch Event overnight. If you ever needed a sign of how much F1 has changed since the Seppos bought it, it probably looks a lot like cramming the O2 Arena with celebrities and LED screens to unveil a bunch of old show cars wrapped in 2025 team kit, and to savour thirty seconds of facile banter between F1TV faces and startled looking drivers while the next show car gets readied on the hoist. It was all about shiny objects and bright lights, celebrities and stars, and absolutely fuck all about what long-term F1 fans might call 'the point' of a 2025 F1 season launch: showing 2025 F1 cars.

But it wasn't for those guys (because we are old and need the kiddies' help to tune the transistor radio into YouTube), it was for the new wave of F1 fans of the post Drive to Survive era, who came for the drama and the drivers, for whom the cars and the sport are largely incidental. The Netflix Plastics you might call them. If you were a miserable old prick refusing to let things not be for them. 

But that was fine, because none of that was for me, and by accepting and making peace with the whole not-for-me-ed-ness of the night, I was allowed to find my own highlight of the night: seeing old mate Nigel Mansell replete with Roy Keane fisherman beard looking so bored he hoped the ceiling would open up and the car hoist might snatch him away into the South London night, but alas. Mansell was on a table of Auld Legends posted up right near Mario Andretti, two guys who famously fucking loathe each other from their various stints as teammates. And that moment showed me that deep down, beneath the glitz and glamour, someone at F1TV properly understands and respects the history of the sport, and I celebrate that.

Also, the crowd booed the shit out of the FIA logo, so even the plastics know what time it is.

The Doctor is OUT. (do we still do that bit? - fix in edit)