Good Or Shit: The Shift

Someone told me once that if you ask the I-Ching whether the world is going to end in December 2012 the ancient Chinese philosophical fortune telling mechanism will confirm it for you. Now my mother – who loves a good conspiracy theory – has been what we call “doing the I-ching” for as long as I can remember. You know shit's gone awry when you can hear the sound of coins dropping on a table somewhere in the house. And given her interest in aliens and apocalypses, I just knew she would want to put this theory to the test. What we didn't expect was for the I-Ching to tell us something that could be interpreted as the world's ending in December 2012, but it did. It told us that the world as we knew it was going to end. Which could mean anything really. Meteors and comets and the realisation of Cormac McCarthy's imagination.

Or, it could mean the coming of what new age spiritualists have been referring to as the great shift in consciousness. Where we stop being a pack of self serving egotistical pricks and become peace purveying all-round lovers and acceptors. This is the one I want to go with. The one I choose to believe in because… because… because I watched the movie adaptation of The Road and post apocalyptic worlds scare the shit out of me.

Now I don't know whether it's the whole world or whether it's just the age I'm at but I have felt many significant shifts this year and as is the case with most people, they were all accompanied by a soundtrack.

There was the beginning of the year wandering around town with a smashed heart and Damien Rice's O on repeat, which slots into a genre I like to call “good wrist slitting music”. But smashed heart isn't all ballads and wailing is it? There is rage, there is anger, there is a kind of vampiric darkness. So, there was a lot of Band Of Skulls, the lyrics on which I hardly paid attention to but I did appreciate the dirty dark rock'n'roll vibe. The Black Key's El Camino got a lot of air time, I mean what hurt and angry person doesn't like getting around singing “I'm a lonely boy”, “I'll run right back to her” and “a broken heart is blind”. I played a lot of Queens Of The Stone Age. But, to be fair, I also do this when I'm feeling sexy.

R&B really picked its shit up. Discovering artists like Delilah, The Internet and Solange Knowles, had my shell-less clams tickled pink. I think it shows a great shift back to influences from '80s and '90s R&B in order for there to be a shift forward, like, really forward. So forward we can no longer hear the past decade's output in this genre.

Not a year goes by where I do not play an Immortal Technique track (or twenty) – I like to get drunk and rap all the lyrics to Obnoxious. I think I'm great at it, in reality I'm not – but this year he really outdid himself by actually coming to Australia and putting on an audio visual spectacle that left me feeling as though I had been in the presence of greatness. I suspect, I'm not 100 percent sure, but I suspect he may be the Messiah. We should know this within the next 48 hours if we don't already.

By mid-year I shifted my physical self to the other side of the world to find a soul. While searching for that I found two young English boys making house music I really, really liked – this is also indicative of a shift in my musical tastes – and I have been blasting anything by Disclosure ever since.

And while I was truly impressed with the shift in mainstream hip hop by way of Kendrick Lamar, Macklemore & Ryan Lewis' Same Love deserves the award for biggest shift in consciousness so far. To see someone in hip hop tackle homophobia and this ridiculous stand against gay and lesbian couples having the right to marry in what we like to call “modern society” is truly heroic. The track is dope, the clip will make you weep.

Whether or not we as a planet are on the brink of a master shift right now is beyond me. I'm just a woman trying to learn how to be a woman. Which is probably why I've watched Lena Dunham's Girls 17 million times. Finally someone has produced a real portrayal of young womanhood, a part of life that I like to call “ugly but interesting”. This show contained one of my favourite musical moments of the year – when Marnie comes home to find Hannah dancing to Robyn's Dancing On My Own. Since this show's release I have come across many young women who will put this track on and not so much leave their anguish behind, but embrace it as a close friend on a dancefloor. It makes me think we're always shifting. That life as we know it is always ending. What else should we do but dance with it.