Enter the Confessional 2: Angry Girl Music of Any Persuasion

Using music to hurt people. It's easy, it's a weapon. Mandy did it: when she didn't think the crowd was worth much, she'd telegraph that by playing her most commercial tracks (and bear in mind that in this context, 'commercial' would be more correctly spelled with a silent '-unt' after the first letter). I remember one night at Slide she played that fucking Sneaky Sound System song three times in one set, just to make the point... well, and because Micky particularly hated it. I remember Micky shaking her head and grinning just a little bit more each time. I remember laughing.

I once saw Armand van Helden do it too, in Boston, too many years ago to count. I was standing behind the DJ booth, watching while he played, and his disdain for the crowd was palpable. I don't know what we'd done to offend him, but whatever it was, he took it out on us for the full two hours, striking the final blow with Stardust's 'Music Sounds Better'. He knew this track would go over big, and fuck, did he resent us for it. It was all over his face and all over his hands as they moved across the decks, even going so far as to cut it for a few bars in that bit where the music drops out and it's just the chorus, to catch every single person in the capacity crowd belting out the lyrics. Except that it backfired: the moment was so perfect - strangers in harmony, lasers going mental, manic thronging bliss - that instead of showing us what commercial losers we all were, he showed himself up as a complete twat.

(Interestingly, I saw Paul Oakenfold at the same club two weeks later, and although he was by every measure a bigger deal than Armand van Helden - more skilled, more established, heaps more respected - he sang and danced along with his tracks like a teenager and generally looked to be having the time of his life, and the night was infinitely better for it. There's a lesson to be learned there.)

I do it too, but the battles I fight are mostly in my own head. 'Paper Planes' by M.I.A., that's a big one. I can't hear it without recalling the days/weeks/months when the lyrics of anger and explosions pushed a very particular button for me. 'Bulletproof' by La Roux, that's another one that carries a few connotations, some from the same time as 'Paper Planes', some from earlier. And 'Leaving Home' by Jebediah. Every angry teenager's wet dream of a rebellion song, to the point that I've integrated it into my own memories from years before I heard it. Ev, Amy and Kat used it as the themesong to a roadtrip they took years before I met them, a roadtrip to which I came no closer than seeing a single photo of the three of them at a waterfall, and yet in my head I'm there, in the back seat of Aims's little car, cheering along with a chorus I wouldn't learn for several years to come.

I guess it's not new, then, the way time gets lost in my head. The second half of 2008 doesn't exist for me. Much of early 2009 is a blur too, but late 2008, I honestly could not swear to anything that happened. It's gone, vanished. And I realised last week that the same thing has happened over the last six months: September 8th marked six months since I left Sydney, and I have no idea how that happened. I cannot account for the time, or the things I've done, or most of the people I've met. All I know is that I must be nearing the statute of limitations on the phrase 'just moved back from Australia', yet to me it feels as fresh as a torn fingernail. I still say 'heaps' and flatten my short 'a' sounds; I still write 's' instead of 'z' and say zed instead of zee; I've recently offered a chef I've never met in person very, very dirty sex in exchange for recreating the laksa I miss to the core of my being.

I don't know how to stop being the person I've been for the last 11 years. It's more than I can get my head around.