Joelistics (Joel Ma) was born in Sydney to a jazz-collecting Chinese father and a politically active Anglo mother. He later moved to Melbourne, and started influential hip-hop outfit TZU in the auspicious year 2000. TZU have released three successful studio albums, including the J Award-nominated Computer Love in 2008. Joel has long kept a foot in the spoken word camp, doing a cappella gigs in between hip-hop touring. He’s played for Wordplay three times: May 2008, February 2009, and July 2009.
A nomadic character, Joel hitchhiked around Australia after high school with a dog and a note book. He travelled through India in 1999, Europe in 2007, and the world from Mongolia through to Paris in 2009. He DJs house parties when he feels like it and pub gigs on the odd Wednesday night, where he proves that he dances well when drunk – just watch out for the elbows. Recently arrived back in Australia, who knows what’s next. He writes the odd article or poem, and holds hopes of becoming Prime Minister, or of owning a video shop that only has VHS and Beta tapes. Hell, maybe he can even do both.
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Virtues
I am by virtue of my own nature a passionate creature.
I’m a pizza eater, a police deceiver, a fire-breathing truth-speaker
with a meat cleaver ready for the head of
Eddie McGuire and Anthony Callea.
I mean, I’m a dreamer, like Martin Luther or Mark Viduka or Seargent Pepper,
I’m a flesh computer with a brain Beretta,
the living personificaton of the alphabet right down to the last letter.
And language is a living entity, according to Terence McKenna.
I am by virtue of my ancestors a travelling man…
like a troubadour or a minstrel.
But I’m a minstrel with principles.
I’m a minstrel with principles that are simple.
I’m a minstrel with simple principles that are sensible,
like don’t fight a war over petrol,
don’t follow governments that are deceptional,
and people who get plastic surgery look extra-terrestrial.
What else?
If Jesus ever does comes back you’ll find him at some hippie festival
getting technical in a teepee, drinking chai, eating seaweed,
using his testicals in rituals, getting mystical and sexual,
saying things like “Everybody be cool!”
And I’ma be like, “Word, bro. Pour me another glass of merlot.â€
I am by virtue of my first few acid trips
a foot soldier of the infinite paradox.
I use a mic like a cattle prod,
and I rattle locks when I connect the dots.
I’m a long list of issues to work through
staying out way past my mental curfew,
and I’ll immerse you in the glue of my world view
and do whatever works dude, but I warn you,
when I corner you with my point of view
and I coin a few linguistically catchy platitudes,
I’m just a pawn like you.
And my attitude is a growing feud between a brain that’s bruised
and a heart with a very short fuse.
Touch me and I will go boom.
I am by virtue of my Y chromosome
another Napoleon Hitler Osama Bin Al Capone,
in that I’m capable of doing things that you can and you can’t condone.
I am Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist and Christian,
both perpetrator and victim,
I’m the dictionary definition of the human condition
with a self-sabotage gene, and when it kicks in
I’m capable of doing things which will make your head spin.
I am by virtue of my five senses in full support of pulling down fences,
from the imprisonment of the defenceless to Middle East tensions,
to world leaders with tempers whose policies are senseless.
Every day I wake up and wonder where the dissent is.
I ask the previous generation but no one remembers.
It seems their fire burnt down to embers,
they forgot about the emphasis,
and got fat like that singer from Memphis did.
Now they’re busy in 9 to 5 trenches, paying mortgages on weekenders
where they holiday in Decembers buying white goods and blenders
Land Cruisers and Mercedes Benzes.
But I am by virtue of my intellect
…just another goddamn hypocrite
full of bullshit like a televangelist at a pulpit
or a full sick Lars Ulrich.
I listen to Bill Hicks and I’m painfully aware that this world is broken
because the human race is fixed.
It’s sick, it’s the pits, and we’re all in it’s grip
and it sits in my mind and it starts to play tricks.
But I still think of myself as an idealist,
with a wish list and a clenched fist and a French kiss
for everything that exists from Tehran to Texas.
I’m a bleeding-heart leftie
pacifist amorous anarchist activist Cassius Clay kind of brain,
with a massive appetite for change.
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The City is on Acid
Language is a virus, it breeds in the silence,
it feeds on the minds of the people who devised it,
the books and the poems and the slang that designed it,
reality defined by the words we assign it.
We gave a name to the apple and the diamond,
we dive in the depths in the realm of Poseidon,
we speak with a breath that’ll ring like horizon,
meaning has a melody that rings like a siren.
Sings like a siren, spins like a deejay
playin’ for the players in the Arkham Asylum.
Now, hit the replay and analyse the timing,
and look what I made, harnessing lightning
to battle the right wing and travel the day,
see what the night bring, get out of the way.
I’ll paint a picture with language and memory,
beaten into shape with the rhythm and the melody.
My performance more like therapy,
translate poetry to punishable heresy.
Wordplay, grey matter, designed for damaging,
down for chaos, gettin’ up to anarchy,
and I’m managing, heartbeat galloping,
and I’m actually gravity’s mannequin,
and I’m back again, there in the front,
tryin’ to make sense but sense don’t come.
I got a problem with space – there’s lots of it,
and in the city, you can’t get enough of it.
I like the touch of it, infinite rush of it,
in life, we stand on the cusp of it.
In death, we dress in the best of it.
That’s the promise that we keep when we borrow from it.
It takes a body and a heartbeat to stay solid.
You got a heart – tell me what you get from it?
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Myriam’s Song
This is the story of a girl and boy,
who fell in love and then love kicked them both in the groin.
It all began when they were both young, fresh out of high school
clutching at their hearts like a soldier does a rifle.
She was on a holiday, he was on a road trip –
they both arrived up north like postage.
He was from a working class suburb of Sydney,
she was from a European family of privilege.
And then they met, and suddenly there’s romance,
they took the ride like “Look Ma, no hands!â€
Six million human beings living on the planet,
these two managed to meet and make magic.
She said she saw him for the first time outside
dancing in the rain to the rhythm of a swing band.
He said his memory of meeting her was vague –
he claimed that his friend introduced them on the boulevard.
They had a chemistry like lightning and kite flying.
They both recognised fate in the fine print.
She had a quick mind he had a sharp wit.
They used to make love and both feel their hearts skip.
They lived together on an island on a river,
coconut diet, fresh fish caught for dinner,
naked in the morning when they bathed and washed,
they were happily lost like time had stopped.
They were first time lovers in an endless summer,
sleeping in a hammock with no need for covers,
hearts full of courage reminiscent of thunderstorms,
learning how to love like it never been done before.
It make me sad when I think about it now, how
they fought hard when they made it to the third round.
Mistrust crept in and they both dropped the ball,
neither one read what was written there on the wall.
Eventually she left and she flew back home,
to start a new life in a different time zone.
He got a phone call five years down the road –
maybe they could meet, have a drink and maybe say hello.
They had dinner and compared their memories,
had a little cry about all their petty jealousies –
he didn’t blame her and she didn’t blame him,
first time love is such a delicate thing. And still,
since then they’ve become good friends,
they talk about their new lovers in the present tense,
and as a monument to what had come and gone,
They sat down together and they wrote a sweet love song.
