When I was a kid, the monsoons that came at the end of the summer seemed almost magical. I would often get up in the middle of the night just to watch the storms. We kept our shades drawn in most parts of the house so I went to the half-bathroom near the laundry room to peek out the unshaded high window.
There’s one storm in particular I’ve never forgotten. It had huge bolts of acid green lightning shooting down from solid cloud cover. Watching it from below, out that high small window, I immediately understood why man had invented Zeus.
*****
Midnight Oil was another one of those bands I liked devoid of context in those isolated high school years.
There are several obvious reasons; I like fast energetic masculine music, and this certainly fits the bill. I also was pretty much, as my friend likes to call it, a “bearded lefty” at that time, so the earnest progressive message of their lyrics probably resonated with me as well.
But I have also thought that there is something deeper than those two obvious surface reasons, something that has kept my affection for them around all these years.
That affection survived through the late teen-NYC years when I really really wanted to just listen to what was cool, and anything so painfully earnest was most certainly not. It continues even in recent years, when I pretty much otherwise exclusively want to listen to dance music made by stoned robots.
I think beyond the surface reasons, my fondness for them boils down to: these are sounds made people who know what it is to live in a very hot place. A place where the ruthlessness of nature occasionally resurfaces and, like the Old Testament God or all the angry and frequently petty gods in Greek poetry and drama, puts the humans back into their place. For all the lunarscape hermetically-sealed safety of this town, it does still has the lurking threat of gorgeous violence right outside.
*****
In the desert in the dry
Before the breaking of the rain
The temperature in the shade
Had reached a hundred and ten again
In the desert in the dry
On the overland telegraph line
Don’t take the law into your own hands
Don’t go looking for a fight
I’ve heard the bullroarers
In the desert in the dry
Sun sits so high
Long day’s mile and the
Radio crackles and the bones bleached white
It’s a knock-em-down storm
See the tin roof shake
Wild dog howls and the long grass
Whistles and the tall trees break
I’ve seen the wild horses
I’ve heard the bullroarers
I’ve seen the wild horses
Shifting sand and broken plans
Lead me on to my homeland
