Apparently my end-of-year Top 10 wasn’t enough for me; now I’ve written an end-of-an-era Top 10. It concerns the period prior to 2020, when I first used the word “trans” to describe myself. Believe it or not, that date is not as arbitrary as it sounds, since both the way I hear music and the way I make music have morphed as my gender has morphed, or as I have morphed to fit my gender. So here are 10 songs from another phase of life, 10 signposts in the half-light, 10 reasons to stay alive.
The Rolling Stones: '2000 Light Years from Home' (1967)
I don’t remember when I first heard it, but this song is my earliest recollection of rock music. I remember the video clip, strangely, viewed on a staticky TV screen, and the cover of my dad’s cassette tape of Through the Past Darkly Vol II. Most of all, I recall the sinister seductive groove, the androgynous vocals, the message: “It’s so very lonely…” It’s almost a shame that it’s been remastered, because surely that mono mix smothered in tape saturation only enhanced its enigma. When I listen now, it makes perfect sense that I would love it. The blown-out rhythm guitar shorn of transients, the shimmering haze of Mellotron, the close-mic’ed maraca – it’s shoegaze meets Madchester, Spacemen 3 vs Stone Roses, and a celebration of alienation the likes of which my former self couldn’t help but relate to. I went on to love the Stones, of course, at least circa 1967-1972, but this uncharacteristic left turn shaped me more than any of their more emblematic moments.
David Bowie: 'Moonage Daydream' (1972)
The big one. This song, this album, and especially the 1973 Bowie concert film, taken together, changed my life more than any other musical work. My dad, so the story goes, disturbed by my 12-year-old self’s penchant for Poison and Bon Jovi, asked his British ex-rocker friend what he could give me to break the spell, and came home with a VHS copy of Bowie-as-Ziggy at the Hammersmith Odeon that I must have watched 20 times over the next few years. If my mind was blown by the cover of Look What the Cat Dragged In, it was melted, reshaped, and reconstituted by Ziggy, by his sheer gall and self-belief and apparent indifference to gender norms, and by the hypnotic effect of the best of his tunes. To me, 'Moonage Daydream' has always been the best of the best. It’s literally meaningless, just the squawking of a pink monkey bird, but deep as a plunge to another dimension. A non-binary make-out song so sultry it ends with one of the most orgasmic guitar solos ever, for a kid in suburban Adelaide in the 1980s this truly hailed from another reality.
Lou Reed: “Kill Your Sons” (1974)
This may be controversial, but Sally Can’t Dance is my favourite Lou Reed solo record. 'Ride Sally Ride' is sweet-and-sour comfort food (“Oooh isn’t it nice when your heart is made out of ice”) and 'N.Y. Stars' is vitriolic glam-rock gold (“The fa**ot mimic machine never had ideas”). But 'Kill Your Sons' is the song that haunts me, ever since my dad thrashed it late nights in our pot-smoke-filled loungeroom when I was a kid. Remember, I identified as a son then, if owing to a lack of other options, and though I doubt I made much of the verbose lyrics of the verses (two-bit psychiatrists, electric shocks, thorazine, crystal smoke, mental hospitals) I have no doubt that malevolent snarled chorus sunk in. Hell, maybe I even clocked that line about Lou’s mum and dad: “He took an axe and broke the table / Aren’t you glad you’re married?” I don’t recall any table axings in those days, but I would have understood the sentiment. Brutal truth in rock form. The Lydia Lunch version is also excellent.
Suicide: 'Frankie Teardrop' (1977)
I’m not including any Stooges songs here, but this song should immediately imply an intimate knowledge of the Stooges. “Dirt” could be, and probably was, Suicide singer Alan Vega’s mantra, and though mid-twenties me felt rocked to the core by Raw Power, it was Suicide that stuck with me a few years later when the kicks and adrenalin had subsided. That was my “undead” phase, as I called it, following the second time I probably should have transitioned, when my life was one unending attempt to dissociate from itself. Well, through that fog Suicide spoke to me, and especially “Frankie Teardrop”. The story is black as pitch, a kind of a sequel to Lou Reed’s axe-wielding father, and I guess Frankie also wasn’t so far from my dad (“20-year-old Frankie / He’s married, he’s got a kid / And he’s working in a factory”). But it’s Vega’s delivery – primal, uncensored, straight from the gut – that makes this song magic, along with its driving mechanistic pulse. I doubt a classic song has ever been less catchy or contained less notes. It’s a minimal aural social-realist manga for the post-industrial age. It’s iconic.
Joy Division: 'Transmission', live on BBC TV (1978)
Did I say Ziggy was the big one? In terms of his affect on my life in general, sure, but Joy Division was the music that most shaped me as a musician. I still recall the first time I saw this performance. It was electric, utterly. I don’t even know what the song is about – I didn’t know then and I don’t know now – but I feel it still, on a level beyond understanding. It’s there at 2:20 in the live version, when Ian Curtis yanks the mic from the stand and belts with such force he loses the tune, but that lapse is sublime, and the look in his eyes as he again chants the refrain – first beseeching then awestruck, as if for a couple of seconds he’d been enlightened – is so powerful, so human, that I tear up every time I watch it. Then, with a look of sheer relief, as if he knows he’s really communicated, Curtis finishes the song. And Bernard Sumner’s fingers tremble on the neck of his guitar, and Hooky pounds that low-slung Rickenbacker, and Stephen Morris grinds and flails behind the kit. It’s monolithic. Closer is the masterpiece, but these poorly mixed three minutes in a London TV studio are my musical Ground Zero.
The Jesus & Mary Chain: 'Cracked' (1985)
I imagine to most listeners this will sound like tuneless noise, and it’s true, this is the Mary Chain at their least tuneful. Some might say that’s a shame, since these boys were nothing if not tuneful, even in a context as brutal as Psychocandy or their indie-smash first single “Upside Down”. Those are great records, but this throwaway Psychocandy-era b-side, the music for which was obtained by slowing down the backing track to “The Living End”, and over which less tuneful JAMC brother William Reid moans and cusses at someone named Johnny from the depths of an oil-can reverb, is a one-of-a-kind favourite that has enthralled me for decades. In fact, I’ve long maintained that Barbed Wire Kisses, the “b-sides and rarities” album that includes “Cracked” and a handful of other William-led b-sides, is the best of the three scant JAMC albums after which I lost interest (the third is Darklands). I don’t know if that’s true really, since I do so love Jim Reid as well, but nothing compares to this feedback-drenched semi-improvised nihilism. Guaranteed to never get stuck in your head.
My Bloody Valentine: 'To Here Knows When' (1991)
Astonishingly, in early 1991, Tremolo, the EP of which this was the lead-off song, hit number one on the UK indie charts. Granted, there’d been some ropey arrangements on those charts, but for a tune that fooled some listeners into thinking their CD players had broken, that, imo, is some kind of achievement. With beguiling vocal melody buried under screeching woozily modulated buzzsaw guitars, mesmeric synths competing for the topline, and programmed drums barely audible, it’s easy to imagine how this mix might have sounded unintentional. Luckily for MBV, by that stage their wildly inventive (if ropey) first album Isn’t Anything had shifted the UK’s musical Overton window so far to leftfield that ecstatic disorientation was in vogue. I still remember the first time I heard Loveless, the album that followed “To Here Knows When”. From the moment the first guitar riff crashed in I was sold – it was exactly what my drug-and-young-love-fuelled mind craved – and over the following weeks of sex and LSD I learned to love this, its strangest song, most of all. Check out “Honey Power” from the Tremolo EP too; it’s a corker.
Slint: 'Nosferatu Man' (1991)
For those who know Slint, this may be the least surprising song on the list. To say it’s unique is an understatement; I, at least, have never heard anything quite like it, except, to some degree, the five other songs on Spiderland, which some of us consider a contender for greatest album ever. I almost wrote “greatest rock album”, but Slint stretched the boundaries of rock such that they helped invent post-rock, so let’s just say the greatest album by four kids playing drums, bass, and two guitars. And “Nosferatu Man” is hands down the greatest track on that album, a stop-start melange of quiet-loud odd timings and face-melting fuzz riffs that, to me, makes a patented rock epic like “Paranoid Android” sound like a pallid cut-and-paste exercise by contrast. Every component of this random-seeming composition sounds natural. The trick, apparently, was weeks of rehearsing, so that by the time Slint entered that Chicago jingle studio they could play it through in a few takes. To me, the most inventive/inspiring document of four guys playing live to emerge from the 1990s.
Alec Empire: 'The Ride' (2002)
I dunno what happened to rock in the mid-late 90s, but after Slint I kinda lost interest. I won’t pretend I stayed well informed. Instead my attention split between old classics and the future classics appearing in that golden age of electronica. In the early 2000s I dug Primal Scream’s Exterminator, but even it was patchy and largely programmed, and I bought a copy of The AllMusic Guide to Hip-Hop and started educating myself on that other golden age of the 90s. By 2002/3, licking my wounds in the Adelaide Hills after 5-6 years away, I hate-watched Rage compulsively and, as I remember, three songs struck me: (1) 'Come Undone' by Robbie Williams (his self-excoriation amazed me); (2) 'I Know What You Want' by Busta Rhymes featuring Mariah Carey (Rick Ross, who did Tupac’s 'Tradin' War Stories', produced it); and (3) 'The Ride' by ex-Atari Teenage Riot frontman Alec Empire (it kicked ass). Not that I’m claiming 'The Ride' is rock, of course – it’s nasty electronica with tuneless shouting over top of it – but it did rock me. “I wanna just lay down and die,” snarls Mr Empire. But then: “I change my mind, I decide to hide inside myself.” Prophetic words.
Low: 'Quorum' (2018)
Did you notice I just jumped forward 16 years? So what happened in the interim? I maintained. After the third time when I probably should have transitioned, in an effort to quell what surely must have been a fantasy, I got married and became a step-parent, and lived what I came to see as my “Last Temptation of Trans Christ” phase. Or, not to be so vainglorious, I was like Captain Jean Luc Picard when he raises a family on that alien planet only to wake again on the bridge of the Enterprise. I now associate my own awakening, if symbolically, with the lead-off track from Low’s Double Negative, which caressed the speaker cones like claws from another life as I drove home from Lismore one night through the rainforest. I still recall my awe at its irreverence, my spine-chilled exhilaration. Where MBV had buried their vocals, Low carved theirs up, chopping words with vacant space until they were indecipherable. They could have been saying anything. From that pulsing void in the music a message, direct from my unconscious, tried to reach me. And then the breakdown, words suddenly clear: “What are you waiting for?”
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