Death Mattel

DAN1386
Nonzero, 2005

I get anxious a lot. Today it's because I have a story due for a magazine and not enough time to write it. I haven't written an in-depth music feature in a year or two, and I'm worried that I've forgotten how to do it. This morning I sat staring at my blank computer screen for a good four hours, shaking and struggling to breathe, before giving up and deciding to write this column instead. Anxiety seems to be a difficult sensation to express in pop music. Unlike anger or excitement - or even paranoia - I've never heard it captured very well in song. There are a few tracks that come pretty close, though. One of them is called 'Free', by Sydney band Death Mattel, from their album DAN1386.

'Free' opens with a happy little piano melody and imagery straight out of a suburban fantasy. It only has a few lines of lyrics: "There is the sun, it's out/ A symbol of warmth and happiness/ Your shopping is done and rent is paid... you're free." On the first iteration, the words are sung in a relaxed voice and the keys prepare you for a quirky pop song in the vein of Ben Folds Five. There's no warning about what comes next. On the forty-eighth second, right on the enunciation of "free", an enormously loud drum loop and electric guitar crash down like the sky falling to earth. The effect is paralysing. In the background you can hear a woman singing the original lines over and over again, just too far out of earshot to hear the words properly, while layers of impenetrable noise build up over the top and a drum machine goes tst-tst-tst-tst-tst like a skipping CD that you can't turn off.

That description probably makes it sound horrible, but 'Free' has been one of my favourite songs since I heard it a few years ago. Needless to say, it reminds me of anxiety – the claustrophobia, the person's voice just out of reach, the nervous tic of the drum machine and especially the sheer irrationality of it all, as if the original song was crushed beyond recognition for no discernable reason. Most of all, I like 'Free' because it is so incredibly loud that when I put it on it drowns out every thought in my head. Noise as silence. You used to be able to hear it on Death Mattel's MySpace page. Maybe they'll put it back up.

Sonic Youth

Goo
Geffen, 1990

Just as LL Cool J was starting to remake himself in the eyes of his estranged black male fans, who had given him a right kicking after the sappy crossover hit 'I Need Love', he got a kicking from the white kids as well. Sonic Youth's 'Kool Thing', the lead single from their major label debut Goo released a few months before Cool J's comeback record Mama Said Knock You Out, was a not-so-subtle dig at the rap star's masculinity that became the New York art rock band's most recognised tune. Singer Kim Gordon, who used to name the rapper as one of her favourites alongside Run DMC and Schoolly D, became disenchanted after interviewing Cool J for Spin to discover that the tough guy act he maintained in his songs didn't come off when he left the stage.

With lyrics derived from the titles of Cool J's records and a spoken word diatribe smacked in the middle, 'Kool Thing' was like a rusty little needle aimed at the balloon of the rapper's sex symbol status. Gordon took the signature line from his most recent single, "I don't think so...", and slipped it between mock sexual invitations. The film clip showed her dolled up in various combinations of go-go boots, silver hot pants, leopard print tights and a feather boa, striking poses from Cool J's album covers. On his third record, the rapper appeared squatting in an alleyway with a black panther, a symbol of black militancy. In the clip, Gordon reclined on a couch petting a young black housecat as she mouthed the line: "Kool thing, sittin' with a kitty..."

However there is another film clip, of sorts, for 'Kool Thing' that is even more memorable. A few years after it was released, the song was used in the film Simple Men by director Hal Hartley. As in most of Hartley's films, the characters are odd and uptight, and express little or no emotion. The whole thing has a air of deliberate stiffness to it. But about half way through, for no discernable reason, one of the minor characters hurtles down a dirt road in a truck, skids to a halt and throws himself out of the cabin. "I can't stand the quiet!" he screams, and the camera cuts to a single three minute shot of everyone performing a choreographed dance to 'Kool Thing'. Absurd but brilliant.

LL Cool J

Mama Said Knock You Out
Def Jam, 1990

One of the most striking examples of gangsta rap's rise to the top of the hip hop food chain in the early '90s was the reinvention of LL Cool J from teen magazine pin-up to street thug, pivoting on his best-selling album Mama Said Knock You Out. James Todd Smith III made his name as a teenager, under the acronym for Ladies Love Cool James, with a series of rhymes about how good he was at rhyming. And he was good. On his first album Radio he boasted incessantly and threw around disses that walked a fine line between stupid and hilarious, like: "Why are you so stiff? Is it something that your mother did?/ Maybe you grew up around can't-dance people when you were a can't-dance kid."

In his eyes, the only thing Cool J did better than rhyming was loving. He pioneered the sort of sensitive rap ballads that would become regular crossover hits in the pop charts with early cuts 'I Can Give You More' and 'I Want You'. In '87 he nailed it with 'I Need Love', a sappy single with a soft-focus film clip that painted him as a lonely artist trapped in the eye of the storm that was his fame, and ended with a heartfelt plea to the camera: "I need true love, and if you want to give it to me girl, make yourself seen. I'll be waiting for you." It went straight to number 1 on the R&B chart.

But such sentimental crap wasn't going to cut it for much longer, as black fans and critics began to embrace the heavier sounds of radicalised groups like Public Enemy and NWA. Just three years after 'I Need Love', Cool J found himself out of touch. He remedied this, quite successfully, with the comeback record Mama Said Knock You Out. The title single's eloquent rhymes were a reminder of how he'd made it to the top in the first place, but something was different. Mixed in with the jokes and boasts were constant references to violence and imagery of towns being bombed. By the time his next record was released, the transition was complete. It was called 14 Shots To The Dome and featured the heartfelt lines: "I fuck you in the head just to let you know/ Stick you for yo' dough and spit on your flo'."

The Mark Of Cain

The Lords Of Summer
Phantom, 1988

Joy Division have been so successfully canonised this decade that it's hard to imagine anyone possessing enough balls to challenge or tamper with their legacy. There are now umpteen books, films and essays detailing the rise and fall of Ian Curtis, as well as a range of products plastered with the cover art from Unknown Pleasures, from shirts and posters to sushi boxes and sneakers. Last week I read a review that ever so gently criticised the release of yet another "best of" compilation, but backed up by saying that any of the band's songs on any record had to be a good thing – not once, or twice, but three times in as many paragraphs. Talk about walking on fucking eggshells!

Of course, I'm probably as guilty as the next person of buying into the story of Joy Division As Untouchably Brilliant Artistes, or at least I have been in the past, so when I heard The Mark Of Cain's first single 'The Lords Of Summer' - a reimagining of sorts of the British post-punk band's 'Dead Souls', released just a few years after the original - I was mortified. How dare some dudes from Adelaide rip off Ian Curtis so blatantly, I hollered (though at the time they recorded it, circa 1988, it may not have been so controversial). It took me a full year or so to pull my head out of my arse and give it another spin.

I actually now enjoy that song more than 'Dead Souls', and not just because The Mark Of Cain are Australian and I've been banging on about the virtues of local music so much lately. For one thing, I like it simply because it couldn't possibly be recorded today, for fear of offending pretty much everyone who owns a record player. The other reason is because once you get over its initial wrongness, the idea of Ian Curtis being reincarnated as the frontman of a suburban heavy metal band from Adelaide is actually pretty cool. The Mark Of Cain went on to hone their own sound and become widely respected, but I like 'The Lords Of Summer' more than most of their later work, which is generally too loud for me. You can find it on the Tales From The Australian Underground record or the reissue of their debut album Battlesick.