Review Summary: Kick your head around like you the ball and this was soccer
I still remember the day I met Joel Turner. Ruddy-faced and bleary-eyed, not older than eighteen, looking like he’d just come off a big night on the piss, JT (as he was then known) impatiently paced the concrete and colorbond undercroft of a primary school, looking like he’d rather be anywhere else. Surrounded by a throng of squealing kids sweltering in the summer humidity, Turner, brow dripping in a black hoodie, black cap, and baggy black jeans spent ten uncomfortable minutes on the handball court with a knock-off SM58 clutched tight in his right hand; his left gesticulating in the air while he boomed and sputtered glossolalic impressions of hip-hop beats.
It was my first introduction to beatboxing.
Almost as suddenly as it had begun, Turner’s people called time on the performance. Turner muttered some words about an anti-bullying campaign — ostensibly the reason for his tour of local schools — before being shuffled off by his handlers, pushing through the crowd toward the carpark. At the gate, a middle aged woman thrust a pudgy ten year old into Turner’s path, extolling his skill as a beatboxer.
“This is my son. You’re his hero. He wants to grow up to be just like you.”
Turner grimaced.
Much has been written on the meteoric rise and vicious rivalry between Turner’s two compatriots, fellow inaugural Australian Idol contestants Shannon Noll and Guy Sebastian. Comparatively little has been written about the then-fifteen year old kid who was launched to national stardom after auditioning for a singing contest by beatboxing — the vocal equivalent of bringing a knife to a gun fight, as it were.
The sheer balls of Turner’s flagrant disregard for — or misunderstanding of — the commonly understood rules of singing contests won him a legion of fans. It’s hard to overstate just how ubiquitous Brisbane’s own future world beatboxing champion was for those few years in the mid-00s. His face was inescapable; plastered across TV and print media like Big Brother had suddenly taken on the image of a slightly chubby pubescent kid. He dominated the radio waves to such an extent that if you pulled up a spectrogram of any prime time radio show in late 2004 or early 2005, I’d half expect it to coalesce into a ghostly impression of his baby-faced visage. A year after his first appearance on TV, his contract snapped up by failed-former-pop-star-turned-regional-evil-overlord Mark Holden, Turner’s debut album,
Joel Turner and the Modern Day Poets finally dropped.
Lead single “
These Kids” came a few months before the album proper and immediately seared itself into the minds of everyone under the age of thirty — to the point where thousands who came of age in the early ‘00s still can’t hear a Csus2/#4 arpeggio (the one chord that makes up the entirety of the track) without immediately breaking into the song’s saccharine chorus. An ode to homeless and disadvantaged youth, “
These Kids” sounds exactly like what it is: a well-intentioned, if self-consciously repetitive demo put together by a moderately talented teenager. Blending looped acoustic guitar, beatboxed percussion, breathy, pitch-corrected blue-eyed soul vocals and a completely out of the blue guitar solo that pedals between major seconds in the vein of latter-day Slash, “
These Kids” successfully sanitised aural elements of the still-controversial hip-hop culture for mass consumption by suburban White Australia. While at points undercut by awkward lyricism, especially during the rap verse supplied by Turner’s brother, “
These Kids” made up for whatever refinement and finesse it lacked with youthful exuberance and a socially conscious message.
The rest of the album though? Yeah, it’s nothing like that
at all.
Joel Turner and the Modern Day Poets roughly alternates between two types of tracks: short skits and interludes focused on Turner’s beatboxing skills, and “proper” hip-hop tracks. The ten beatbox-focused skits and interludes are exactly what you’d expect: mildly entertaining showcases of vocal contortion wherein Turner twists his vocal folds to imitate everything from a chopped and screwed Amen Break (“
Drum and Bass”) and a Latin tinged hemiola (“
Jungle Beats”) to making engine noises (“
Rally Car”) and a somewhat insensitive impression of a tracheotomy patient sputtering and coughing through an electrolarynx in an anti-smoking PSA (“
Smoker”). These tracks are lighthearted, but provide little replayability or value other than their time capsule status and potential to be a treasure trove of samples for plunderphonics enthusiasts.
The rest of the album though, made up of attempts at full-production hip-hop tracks, pushes Turner to the back of the mix, relegating him to timekeeping duties in favour of featuring Turner’s cousin and brother — one presumes the titular Modern Day Poets — as emcees. C4 and DubLt (apparently pronounced “Double Tee”, not “Dub Lieutenant”, to my eternal dismay) are at best passable rappers, with a basic command of language and meter, and lyrical foci ranging from the frankly hilarious 50 Cent inspired braggadocio of “
Brisbane City” to the too-awkward-to-listen-to, never-touched-a-woman down-badness of “
Lady”. The flaccid attempt at shock value derived from maintaining as close a linguistic proximity to swearing as possible without actually doing so on “
Funk U Up” and the completely limp appeal to their legitimacy as artists on “
Respect” don’t do much better. Even tracks which aren’t immediately offensive or hysterical belie their low effort musicianship and creative bankruptcy with such generic titles as “
Hip Hop” and “
Up in the Studio”.
The dominating presence of C4 and DubLt on an album supposedly developed to showcase the talents of their younger relative is both inexplicable and incomprehensible. To add insult to injury, Turner’s beatboxing, ostensibly the album’s drawcard, finds itself alternately drowned out and entirely replaced by drum machines on many of these tracks. Almost as though C4 and DubLt, in true older sibling fashion, decided to storm the studio, take Turner out of the booth, hang him from the wall by his underwear and threaten the engineer with a swirlie if he didn’t record them instead, Turner is effectively missing in action for half of his debut album — a state of affairs that not even including
”These Kids” twice (
!) on the tracklist remedies.
The true jewel in the sphincter of this album, however, is second single “
Knock You Out”. Featuring a guest spot from controversial footballer-turned-boxer Anthony Mundine, “
Knock You Out” consists mostly of stitched-together vestiges of the dying rap-rock sound ignorant enough to make even the most disagreeable suburban single dad nod along in approval. Imaginative lyrical comparisons between boxing and beatboxing duck and weave between such brilliant one-liners as “I'll run up in this ring like Mundine and begin to punch guys/Like Rocky”, all while Joel Turner utilises his trademark “third voice” throat singing technique to imitate the main riff from Survivor’s “
Eye of the Tiger”. The equally absurd music video alternates between shots of a teenage Turner and a middle-aged Mundine slapping each other around in the ring, and shots of them both dancing a conspicuously respectable distance from a group of scantily clad women. The whole package is capped off with another lacklustre guitar solo pedalling between two notes while saturated in arena-ready delay; attempting to portray the aesthetic of epic with both feet planted firmly in the mundane. The result is farcical; it is stupefying. If there was a contest for worst hit single of the 21st Century, “
Knock You Out” would be in the ring with a chance.
It’s brilliant.
In retrospect, it’s not hard to see what happened with
Joel Turner and the Modern Day Poets. A record label and management team eager to capitalise on the transient popularity of a young celebrity before the opportunity for profit fades stuff an album full of filler and guest spots to get it over the line in time, no matter the cost. Given time to develop as a musician and songwriter, Turner could well have delivered an album of substance and relevance — his four victories at the Beatbox Battle World Championships are testament enough to his technical skill and ability to apply himself. Instead, what we got was an album replete with low-grade filler, barely representative of the man whose face appeared on the cover. At best, it is pure profiteering; at worst, it exploited the youth and naïveté of Turner, preying on a dejected, disadvantaged teen’s dreams of fame to make someone else money. Given the above, it’s almost inconceivable that even twenty years later, at least two of the tracks presented herein retain some place in the Australian cultural consciousness — two more than would ever be expected from such a situation, and testament to Turner’s undeniable, if altogether too brief, star power.
Joel Turner and the Modern Day Poets is a postcard from an era long since passed; one near-indecipherable to those who didn’t live through it and its immediate aftermath. More adventurous and mature artists would soon take the rapidly growing cultural cachet Australian hip-hop was developing and transmute it into much more artistically coherent and creative endeavours. Any enduring musical or cultural value it may have is purely as a result of its legacy as a harbinger of greater acceptance for hip-hop as an acceptably mainstream artform for White Australia, and has nothing to do with its musical or lyrical content.
I keep cards and trinkets with sentimental value in a box in the bottom-right hand drawer of my desk. There they stay, mostly ignored; often forgotten. But some days, when I’m feeling nostalgic, I’ll crack open my desk and leaf through bundles of old postcards and packages of Polaroids — messages from former lovers and long gone friends; souvenirs from my travelling days.
And some days, when I’m feeling really nostalgic, I bust out one postcard in particular — and reminisce about the time I met Joel Turner.
