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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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