Yeah, I’ve said it before – I’m not a lyrics guy. I get reminded of this often. I usually like the sound of a song more than it’s underlying message. Slings and Arrows is one such song. I’ve just opened up the lyrics in Spotify and it’s… grim.
Maybe I’m missing the point, but it feels like a tale of an explosive relationship that is on the cusp of breaking into some form of violence – verbal, physical or emotional. I’m not sure which. Not gonna lie, it’s now made me look at the song a little differently. I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve felt backed into a corner sufficiently to let loose in an aggressive way. It’s not really in my nature, so the lyrical content suddenly makes this song feel like quite an alien concept.
Of course now I’m chuckling to myself while having a very specific flashback. This one time… in an English class… at age 15… a chat with one of my best mates got quite out of hand. The teacher had left the room for five minutes. I’m not quite sure what I had said or done that prompted him to flip the bird at me, but I immediately saw red. Something else took over. I knew I’d made a mistake when I hurled my enormous heavy pencil case at his head.
He was a tall and incredibly fit Samoan bloke. Just… muscles on muscles. Not from any particular sport he played or training regime. He was just built that way. He leapt from his seat, took three paces towards me and smacked me right in the face. Next I knew I was waking up on the floor with the teacher bursting in the room asking what had happened.
I was urged by most people older and wiser than myself to take some blame for what had just happened. At 15 all I was sure of was that my own friend had just laid me out cold. He was clearly completely to blame. I relive this lightning fast series of events in my head occasionally. As an adult I can clearly see it was absolutely my fault as much as it was his. It took me a few good years to reach that conclusion and see the wisdom in what the adults had asked me to consider at the time, but I got there in the end.
I’m actually not sure why I was chuckling at myself now. Flashbacks to physical trauma? Yeah, hilarious. It’s actually a horrible story.
So anyway… Back to Slings and Arrows. Musically I absolutely love it. First we get hit with a chunky little 8-bit melody that fires off my own nostalgia for the computer games of yesteryear. Commodore C64. ZX Spectrum. So many quality hours from my youth. And then BOOM. Big brass section. So very, very “Kiwi”. All the good songs from the 1980s in New Zealand included a brass section, and its super cool to hear Fat Freddy’s (and NZ dub music in general) keeping this tradition very much alive. Slings and Arrows has always been a go-to for “getting shit done” for me – especially at work. I know I get a lot done when I have hard hitting, angry music on. Maybe it was the underlying aggression in the song that I was picking up on? Who knows?
I’m just re-reading that paragraph.
“First we get hit…”?
“BOOM”?
“I get a lot done when I have hard hitting, angry music on”?
Hrmmmm… Well this little sojourn into my internal monologue has fished out some interesting thoughts to process.
My ADHD Playlist 