It’s interesting to see how Xavier Rudd has grown in popularity over the years. Deliriously independent, socially conscious, so goddamn acoustic he makes Jack Johnson seem like Kerry King by comparison; everyone certainly seems to have warmed to him and his ways.
All of which is utterly alien to me, because XAVIER RUDD USED TO BEAT THE SHIT OUT OF ME EVERY DAY AT THE SCHOOL BUS STOP.
Yes, although Mr Rudd is only one year older than me, that’s worlds apart when you’re a puny year nine student. We both lived in the same street growing up, so caught the bus from the same stop every day. Xavier’s daily greeting to me was not the Aboriginal-inspired and touching tradition you’d expect – it was usually a basketball to the face, which I never saw coming due to my partial blindness. This only added to the apparent comic effect.
All of this adds up to why I have immense difficulty reconciling the beauty of his songs with the bullying maniac which tormented me in my childhood. You may be hearing him breathlessly croon “Let Me Be” as an unviolated piece of audio beauty – all I can hear are my own similar pleads 15 years ago to “let me be” while he rammed tanbark in my mouth then gave me an atomic wedgie, punctuating everything with a filthy fart in my general direction.
Now, kids can be bloody awful creatures, and I’m almost certain he’s nothing like that anymore. But who are we to know? The next Xavier Rudd album could reveal him for the bloodthirsty fearmonger he actually is. Besides, anyone who looks like a human Katamari Damacy that’s freshly rolled through an Allen’s Music store is certainly not to be trusted.
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My ‘No Xavier Rudd At Any Radio Station I Work For’ policy still stands here in Canberra – that’s me taking a stand for you, brother.
You may be tempted to point out that I actually have no control over what music does and does not get played. This would be cheap and unsavoury – but you would be mostly correct. There was that one time when his single was in a pile of new stuff “for consideration” and I flung it under a nearby filing cabinet, in full view of the Powers That Be – but for the most part his music is considered to be…shit. So take heart.
Tophe, this is how I find out who my true friends are. Can you also arrange for some old Mavis’s CDs to be retrospectively snapped? That would be brillo.
Funny you should mention them – we were doing an Australian music weekend for Australia Day (natch), and were having a brainstorm for some 90s Aussie music to throw into the mix. At one stage, someone said “Oh, there was that Mavis’s song?”
There was a pause.
And then the room erupted into laughter.
In WWJ tradition you will either
a) Get a letter from a lawyer representing Xavier Rudd asking you to take this post down
or
b) Have a strange and touching reconciliation irl
GOOD LUCK!!!!
strange and touching reconciliation irl
if there is touching please take photos :p