Behind the Beat Submission - Nick Dudley

ALRIGHT YOU WANT TO HEAR about a song let me tell you about Luv Sic Part 1 by Nujabes. This isn’t my favourite song. In fact, it’s not even my favourite Nujabes song. The reason I am picking this song is that out of all the fucked up, gut-wrenching stories and their respective musical memories, the most visceral experience I get out of music to this day is this dusty ass beat and a terrible teenage love story. And so in an attempt to win $5000 with a compelling story I am going to tell you about how I was in love with a girl when I was 14. So buckle up.

I FIRST HEARD THIS SONG when I was head over heels in love with a girl lets just call her Amelia. I wish I had more objective memories of this time of my life but honestly over the years the tinted glasses have just gotten rosier and I don’t even care.

I COULDN’T BREATHE WITHOUT THIS GIRL actually that’s a lie I felt out of breath every time we spoke because I was unbelievably self-conscious around her all the time. Not in general, in fact I was a pretty cocky teenager all up but around her I could not have been shyer. I thought she was amazing and yeah, she fit just about every teenage girl stereotype you can come up with, and you can call me biased but to this day I think she’s special. She had this inquisitive energy that I just couldn’t stop thinking about like every conversation I had with her was just so fascinating. We would only ever talk about random shit like we were 14 but even at that age I was so bored with the other people around me. I’d chat to my friends about our hot Spanish teacher and what time we were jumping on halo tonight and I would chat to girls about how their school was going and how good the new Vampire Weekend album was. I would brag about how I kickboxed and girls fell all over it and dared me to show them some push-ups and I was a 14-year-old boy so you can bet your ass I dropped to the floor and gave ‘em 20 and they would cheer but it bored me to no end. But not with Amelia. Every time we spoke she would just ask me the strangest questions and we would just let our imaginations take over and we’d invent these completely insane stories with wild characters and big questions and our conversations would drag on for hours and hours and we would be at a party with 60 other people and not say a word to anyone else. In fact, the second we left each other I’d pull out my phone and we would keep texting about it. The more I think about it the more I realise I've never had a connection on such an imaginary level. I’ve never felt so enthused with a conversation and I've never felt like someone has been LISTENING like that before and by god she would just stare at me and contemplate every word I said. It was hard to focus because she would literally never break eye contact with me so I tried to hold it fiercely but fuck me her face was so precious and every time I saw the emotion change across her expression it sent me for six and I had to break to just look at my feet and remind myself to breathe. Our conversations would dip in and out of reality and sometimes I would try and invent a character that felt the way that I felt about her so that I could somehow explain it without having to look her in the eye and admit it to her. I loved her.

YOU’D THINK I COULD catch a break when we weren’t directly talking but no I could not because I literally could not take my eyes off her. I would be talking to my friends and my eyes would dart to her so many times they asked if I had a twitch. My mates older brother used to call me Shifty (a name that unfortunately stuck for many years) because my blatant distraction at social events apparently made me look like a shifty bloke. But god was she distracting. Everything about her mannerisms and body language was just so expressive and unique, and for a girl with a lot of issues she had such a profound confidence. We were 14 years old everyone was just copying the personality of a tv character to try and appear more attractive to the opposite sex (myself included) but not her she was and always has been fundamentally herself, even under a thick layer of insecurity and self-doubt. I just couldn’t fathom her social confidence; one time I was staring at her while we were watching a movie and she turned around and saw me and I literally froze like I went bright red and as my fight-flight response system sent a million different explanations into my brain she simply caught my gaze, wryly smiled and put her chin down on her arm. She just stared back at me for 10 seconds without even saying a word and I’m still at panic stations go but she just whispers to me “you have really thick eyebrows you know” and she gently strokes one of them. Then she squishes my nose in, giggles and moves over to me to rest her head on my shoulder. I haven’t been such a strong mix of confused and overwhelmingly happy since.

I TOLD MY FRIENDS I was gonna ask her out after exams but I pussied out. And then my best friend at the time asked her out and she said yes. I was fuming but what could I do they were two of my close friends and the other guys in the group didn’t give a shit and I couldn’t kick up a fuss without admitting to Amelia that I liked her, so my hands were tied. I watched them date for 10 months. I watched her stare at this guy and a fucking gunshot could have gone off and she wouldn’t have stopped looking at him and giggling and stroking his chest. But that didn’t stop our friendship. We still had these wild conversations all the time and any time there was an issue with the boyfriend I was first in line to hear it and undermine him. In hindsight it was a pretty dick move to be sabotaging their relationship, but I was 14 and I couldn’t sleep or focus because I was stuck thinking about this girl all the time. I dated two girls in the meantime and I really tried to project onto them, but it did not work at all. I think both of them were just so excited to have a tall Australian boyfriend, but I was just being shifty and trying to mask my feelings about Amelia from everyone. Amelia and her boyfriend broke up and the day after I mysteriously broke up with my girlfriend at the time. Again, subtlety was my game. Amelia cried her eyes out to me about him but eventually she settled, and she just lay on me for a while. When she was in a silent mood, she wouldn’t say a word for hours, but she never seemed to get into these moods disingenuously. Again, this is the bias kicking in but our group used to have such “emotional anguish” and in hindsight it was all so pathetically for attention but it never seemed to be like that from Amelia. If she was sad she’d behave the same if she were by herself or around people. She was just closed off. But not to me. She told me all about the breakup then just asked me to play with her hair. I could not tell you how much time passed because I was genuinely dazed as she lay on my chest and I played with her hair and stroked her face in total silence, but eventually her mum knocked and said “it’s time for Nick to go home now”.

SHE ACTUALLY KISSED ME, again probably because I was such a pussy about it. I was 15 by this point and I was still enamoured with her. We were at a friend’s house and we had been playing a god damn clapping game which seems so stupid but I think it was just so we could touch each other. We played for 2 hours because it didn’t matter what we did with each other because we entertained each other so thoroughly. But then she played the piano for me. She hopped on my back and said “think you can carry me upstairs?” so I took her up and she just hopped off and sat at the piano and started singing Fix You by Coldplay. I know you probably think we’ve hit maximum cliché at this point but I am not shitting you when I say a single tear rolled down my cheek as she played. It genuinely happened.

She had an amazing voice. Even without me being biased. Pretty sure she still sings at pubs to this day. And it’s always the timbre of the voice that really moves me as opposed to the lyrics anyway. After the performance she turned around and hugged me and said she was tired and wanted to watch a movie. She now stood on my feet and made me walk her into the study with all the DVD’s and I stroked her hair while trying to pick a movie and she just turned around and kissed me. I would describe it but I literally blacked out from sheer ecstasy. She stopped and buried her head on my chest and said “oh noooo that was not good nick this is not good” and I said, “actually I thought it was pretty hot” and she laughed. We cuddled the rest of the night until my mum called and screamed at me to get home. I texted her two days later and was like hey what should we do. She said, “I’m not sure, I think the kiss was more of a friend kiss, sorry to confuse you nick”. I cried. And then I chucked on Luv Sic Part 1 by Nujabes for the millionth time and I cried again.

MY POOR READER if you have made it this far, I now simply want to paint the mental picture that eventually took up in my head every time I heard this song. I was the one at the piano this time, belting out the tune on the piano at the friend’s house. I was yelling the lyrics and tearing up and Amelia was standing at the door. And suddenly she knew. She understood the love that I carried for her. Not because I had said the words “Amelia I love you” but just from the sheer emotion carried through the beat and the incredible delivery of the lyrics. At the 3:47 mark of the song when the chopped trumpet sample comes in, I stop and breathe deeply. I turn around and she’s there. She comes in and just dances with me gently until the close of the song.

ITS GENUINELY INEFFABLE why this song sits with me in the way it does because objectively the lyrics are not overly profound (especially the hook). It just has to be something in the delivery. Right from the get go as Shing02 launches in with “love sick like a dog with canine sensitivity” I AM UNDERSTANDING HIM. That gentle strain behind his voice as he pelts these lyrics into the microphone. The poetic nature of the lyrics themselves. The slightly improvisational tone to the bars. This amazing yet confusing instrumental. The guy is singing about love plain and simple. Now I’ve heard a thousand different dudes on a thousand different songs rapping, singing or yelling about love but none of them have hit me like this. I've never found these other tracks believable or powerful even if they might be more compositionally creative or have an objectively more direct and concise message of love. Maybe this whole essay is pointless as I am sure you, the reader has had a profoundly different experience of love as a concept than I have. But the way beat lays the groundwork for Shing02 to just sing his heart out with these vague but beautiful, poetic lyrics just drives something home with me.

I AM 23 YEARS OLD NOW. And you’d think I’d be doing better by now, but I am not. The existential weight of my age only grows with every passing day that I waste. I’ve tried so many careers and degrees only to drop out of them all. I've been fighting a losing battle with an anxiety condition for 6 years now. I’ve had 2 major relationships, one for two years in high school and one that lasted 3 years. Both of them ended because I didn’t love her. I’ve had a fair amount of meaningless sex and I swear every time it gets even more miserable. I never feel lonelier than when a content girl is sleeping next to me and I am wide awake. Because she doesn’t see me for who I really am. And I look at her and try my hardest to feel something and there is just emptiness. I feel like as everyone gets older I just get colder. When I broke up with my ex she screamed and cried in my passenger seat and after bleating for an hour she finally yelled at me “do you even care about me at all” and I replied “no” and I meant it. I am cruel and barbed and I relentlessly push people away. You thought I was bored of conversations at 15, every conversation I have these days is relentlessly dull! If I have to ask another mutual acquaintance how their new grad job is going to receive the reply “yeah really well actually!” I’m going to have a breakdown. I struggle with my masculinity every day. I realise pushing emotions down and only ever showing anger is not a smart coping mechanism but after 23 years of habitual practice at it I am struggling to change. I want to reach out and get help, but I am too pessimistic about my options to even bother (being broke also doesn’t help). I can be such a tremendous asshole to those around me and sometimes I can feel myself being so venomous to people who do nothing but love me.

Now if you have managed to suffer through this cheesy teenage love story and late-night accidental confession of issues under the guise of a musical essay, I only want you to take away one thing. While not completely hopeless, I am a cold and messy young man who can barely even remember the concept of joy. But every time I hear Luv Sic Part 1 by Nujabes, a little light shines within me. I scream the lyrics at the top of my lungs in my car and I cry. Even after 9 years of listening to it. I am not trying to tell you it’s a perfect song, nor even that you should have the same response that I should to it. Just know that despite everything, this song makes me believe in the most erroneous concept on the human emotional spectrum. Love.

For Amelia