You Got Me by The Roots and Erykah Badu

This skater kid Blair (who got suspended two weeks into our first year of high school for smoking weed in the bus stop in front of the principal's office) is the guy who introduced me to real hip hop. The year was 1997, we were 12, his brother was into Nas, and he let me borrow It Was Written to take home and dub onto a cassette tape.

Within a week I'd gone to Sounds in Riccarton Mall to buy Ol' Dirty Bastard's Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version (the first album I ever bought with my own money), then somebody gave me a 2Pac cassingle featuring How Do You Want It, 2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted and Hit 'Em Up, then I borrowed Outkast's Aquemini, found Usher's My Way, and my small New Zealand mind was blown.

It was a perfect 90s moment in New Zealand where skaters were hanging out at the same parties as break dancers; every American skate video had hip hop on the soundtrack; and I was quickly learning what I loved (a mix of cool New York rappers, funk-and-soul-inflected Atlanta artists, and West Coast party anthems), and hated (Limp Bizkit and Korn).

Two years later I was visiting my mate Dale in Wellington and he played me You Got Me by The Roots and Erykah Badu. Once again, my mind was blown. It was hip hop being played by real instruments that featured parent friendly!!! lyrics and a hook I wanted to sing on repeat for 18 hours a day.

I don't listen to it too often these days but I was in a restaurant in Soho having lunch last week and it came on and I was like damn 20 years later it still sounds just as good as the first time I heard it.

"If you were worried bout where, I been or who I saw or, what club I went to with my homies baby don't worry you know that you got me."

I LIKE YOU!

Ugly by Deb Never

Cyber stalking is 100% responsible for my love for this song and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I was scrolling through Instagram one day in 2015 when I came across a cute girl dressed in streetwear named Tavia Bonetti. I clicked through and saw that she hung with a whole crew of cool skater girls in LA, and I followed them all. One of them was Deb Never.

Fast forward a few years and I'd see them going to Deb Never's shows in bars and small venues around LA, and I didn't think that much of it until my mate Amrit went on tour with her earlier this year and I was like wow this is gonna be a thing because Amrit is a lord and only works with the best.

Did I go and listen to the music? No.

Fast forward a few months to approximately 18 days ago and Deb Never posters got wheat pasted all over downtown Manhattan, including on my block. That caught my attention because I was like wow if there are posters there's money being spent on marketing and if there's money being spent on marketing there are people investing in the product and of course I also had the personal connection of having known who Deb Never was for a long time and so I got this little burst of pride when I saw her name on a wall by my house.

I flew to Paris a couple of days later and started listening, and her song Ugly nailed me straight away. It's slow and sad and her voice is way forward and the lyrics tell the story of a relationship gone wrong and it has this simple piano chord sequence and then the beat kicks in and it builds to a climax then fades away and it was the perfect song to listen to on repeat for six hours when I was trying and failing to fall asleep while rain pelted the huge windows I looked up at from my futon on the floor.

"Why can't we separate? Am I that desperate to feel the way that we used to?" :/

Right now it has just over 1.5 million listens on Spotify. I imagine that's gonna change real soon.

I LIKE YOU!

This Modern Love by Bloc Party

After listening to a lot of hip hop, r'n'b, Led Zeppelin, The Cure, Radiohead, Blink 182 and a few other bands through my teens, sometime around 2005 I started getting into the new rock'n'roll and electro that was coming out of London and the States, like Pete Doherty's bands, Kings of Leon, The Strokes, LCD Soundsystem and Bloc Party.

These two New Zealand dudes Steve Dunstan and Marc Moore — fashion designers at Huffer and Stolen Girlfriends Club, respectively, but also a DJ duo — were throwing these parties called People of Paris where they'd take over the clubs 4:20 and Rising Sun on K Road in Auckland Central. We'd go crazy dancing to their mix of the aforementioned bands, post punk new wave, hip hop bangers and the mashup remixes that were huge at the time, like Biggie's Juicy mashed with Aloe Blacc's I Need A Dollar.

It was a huge musical learning curve for me, and I'd be lying if I said it didn't heavily influence me when I eventually started DJing: Because of them I first heard All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem and This Charming Man by The Smiths; plus they always played Close To Me by The Cure, which, as you might have read, is probably my favorite song of all time.

[Sidenote: That's the first time on this new blog that I've linked back to one of my other posts, which is a classic blogger move to keep you trapped on the site foreverrrrrrrrr.]

Around this time, I borrowed the compact disc musical album Silent Alarm by Bloc Party from my friend John Randerson and never gave it back. Sorry John. I played it in my car on repeat constantly. My three favorite songs were the three saddest songs: So Here We Are, Blue Light and This Modern Love (but my favorite party jam was Positive Tension).

When Bloc Party toured New Zealand in 2007 to promote the album I went (in a party bus hired by Marc Moore and Steve Dunstan!!) and at the end of This Modern Love when Kele sings, "Throw your arms around me," the girl standing next to me did just that, embracing me in a huge hug, and I remember thinking to myself, I'm going to remember this moment until the day I die, and so far this is true, and two weeks ago Bloc Party did a special one-off concert in Central Park, playing Silent Alarm in its entirety, and at the end of This Modern Love when Kele sings, "Throw your arms around me," I returned the favor, hugging the man and woman standing next to me, and at least one of us began to cry.

I will never forget that moment until the day I die!!!

The original version of This Modern Love is incredible, but there's something about this live version recorded by La Blogotheque that kills me. Kele got coerced into singing an impromptu acoustic version of the song outside a pub in Paris and it's so raw and vulnerable and real and I love it.

I LIKE YOU!

Summer Games by Drake

I'm a diehard Drake fan because of the album Take Care. I've listened to it start-to-finish more times than any other album in my life, and every time he releases a new one I'm always hopeful that I'm going to love it, but I usually only like it. That said, there's always at least one song that I play over and over again, and on Scorpion it was Summer Games.

Important to note my favorite Drake song of all time is Marvins Room, so I like my Drake heartbroken; and my favorite musical genres of all time are Post Punk/New Wave/Synthpop, styles that commonly deal with themes of depression and lovesickness. Summer Games falls neatly in the middle of that venn diagram.

It's a breakup song with a synth beat — a 2018 take on a late 70s, early 80s style. Over an electronic beat that sounds like a skipping rope hitting concrete in an echoey room, Drake addresses what went wrong with the relationship — they jumped in too quickly, it fizzled out quickly, she quickly jumped into another relationship with another famous guy just like him despite telling him she needed somebody with fewer complications.

Pettiness ensues (hers, not his): "You say I lead you on but you followed me / I follow one of your friends, you unfollow me / Then you block them so they can't see you liking someone just like me."

I spent most of last summer listening to it on repeat. I also spent most of last summer in a dark cloud, battling my inability to connect with other human beings in a meaningful way and the fear that I would die alone. It was the perfect soundtrack to my mood.

Needless to say a relationship did not immediately materialize, but when it got colder in the Fall I did end up dating a nice lady, and although it didn't work out we are friends to this day (and unlike Drake and his girl we still follow each other on Instagram). She told me she reads this blog. Hi Aliyah.

I LIKE YOU!

Wish I Didn't Miss You by Angie Stone

I spent the whole summer DJing The Surf Lodge in Montauk, which, if you haven't been, is a riotously successful party spot/restaurant/hotel situated on the farthest point of Long Island, New York. They call it Montauk, End of the Earth — that's how far away it is — and it's a onetime sleepy surf town converted into the biggest summer party spot for young New Yorkers with money to spend. You'd hear stories of the bigger bars making multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars of liquor sales a day, multiple days a week, June through September.

To get there from my house on the East side of the East Village I'd traverse Manhattan to Penn Station on the West side then catch a train due East, changing at Jamaica, Queens, passing through Westhampton, Hampton Bays, Southampton, Bridgehampton, East Hampton, Amagansett, and finally arriving at Montauk. The whole trip apartment-door-to-hotel-room usually took me about four and a half hours, and I'd do it in reverse every Sunday, always leaving on the 7:06pm train, and hopefully arriving home just before midnight.

On a Friday, no matter what time of day I left to try and avoid the crowds, the train would be standing-room-only, and I'd park myself right next to the toilet because at 35 years of age I have not yet mastered the art of going multiple hours without peeing.

I spent most of those journeys listening to audiobooks and podcasts, but I needed a lot of music to play during the four hour sets at Surf Lodge. It wasn't always a wild party; there were quieter moments, like Friday afternoons before the crowds showed up, and the more chilled out Sunday breakfast sets. Wish I Didn't Miss You by Angie Stone served multiple purposes: I fecking love a breakup song, so I'd often pass 20 or so minutes listening to it on repeat on my headphones on the train, but from a DJing standpoint it was the perfect transition song to take me from relaxed to party in three easy steps — the beat starts off smooth and chill, but the chorus goes hard and mixes perfectly into Smooth Operator by Sade, which mixes perfectly into Together Again by Janet Jackson, and boom the party was on.

The funny thing is I'd forgotten about this song for years, and then on a random day in April or May the lyrics, "I can't eat I can't sleep anymore," popped into my head so I googled them, and here we are.

I LIKE YOU!

So Into You by Fabolous ft Tamia

One of my best friends lost her virginity with this song soundtracking the momentous occasion and if that's not one of the most romantique things you've ever heard then you and I have very different definitions of romance.

I didn't actually know So Into You by Fabolous ft Tamia was a remix until years later — the original Tamia version came out in 1998 and rules but the 2016 live cover version by Childish Gambino on an Australian radio station is literal baby making music.

I remember the summer this song came out. I was 19 and my best friends Sheida and Nic and I drove up to Whangarei at the top of the North Island of New Zealand and listened to it on repeat along with Can't Let You Go — Fabolous' other hit song from his 2003 album Street Dreams — plus a lot of Common, Talib Kweli, Angie Stone, Dead Prez, Erykah Badu, that one song Flake by Jack Johnson, Blink 182 and Fleetwood Mac. We'd change the words of So Into You to our own last names so that when he raps, "Since you been asking our good friends how'd you like it if both our names had Jackson on the end?" my line would be, "Since you been asking our good friends how'd you like it if both our names had Hindin-Miller on the end?"

NB: I write that without cringing.

This is one of my favorite songs to play at the end of the night when there are a bunch of late-twenties-or-30-something-year-olds in the room and they want a singalong dripping in the nostalgia of their teen years spent driving around listening to soft r'n'b and rap songs that they'd burned on CDs.

I can't really explain it.

I LIKE YOU!

Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen

Continuing the theme of melancholia, Famous Blue Raincoat by Leonard Cohen is one of those songs I sometimes force people to sit silently and listen to, which is both hypocritical because I wouldn't like it much if someone did that to me, and justified because it's that good.

It starts off in the middle of a cold night and Leonard Cohen is living on Clinton Street in the Lower East Side just a few blocks from my actual apartment here in New York and he's singing a letter he's written to the new lover of his ex. The new lover is someone Leonard Cohen obviously knows extremely well, but instead of rage or malevolence he seems to have accepted what's happening with a weary resignation.

My Dad used to play a lot of Leonard Cohen at home when I was growing up but I rediscovered this song in 2016 and then listened to it on repeat after my ex and I broke up in the winter of 2017. It was the perfect song to blast in my headphones with my hood up while walking around in the freezing cold feeling devastated. I say blast but it's quiet contemplative folk music so I just liked when his voice drowned out the sounds on the street.

I like lyrics. I like to learn them and I like to think about what the singer is really saying. There are references to Scientology, "That night you planned to go clear. Did you ever go clear?" and the raincoat in question was apparently a Burberry jacket he wore and loved for years. This song has one of the most powerful lines I've ever heard and it nails me every time I hear it.

"And thanks for the trouble you took from her eyes I thought it was there for good so I never tried."

God damn.

I LIKE YOU!