Tradie

 

Tradie music is its own genre, evolved over decades on work sites the length and breadth of the worksite across the street from the listener’s home. Loud talking in the crisp air before breakfast is the overture to an upbeat of vehicles coming to a screeching halt on nature strips, slamming of car doors, clamorous unbolting of trailers, with toolboxes rattling at about 100 decibels. The to-and-fro of onsite planning is rarely heard at ordinary plain-talk levels but must be raised to shouting for adequate reception, then tanked up further when musicians wish to have full vocal control over the entire site, if not most of the surrounding neighbourhood. Local listeners adapt slowly to tradie music as it seeps under doorways, tests window fittings, and emanates through solid walls. Introduction of dozers and diggers sets the tone for some weeks, as high-pitched tradie vocals can scarcely be heard under a savage mix of concrete clearance and subterranean excavation. Out with the old and in with the new, as the previous house is carted away in unpeaceful pieces upon thunderous lorries. Great trenches are mauled in the earth for swimming pools, foundation posts, and underground carports. Then they turn on the radio, Fox or Nova the choice, a case of out with the new and in with the old as greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and nineties blast across the battered terrain in attempts to entertain passengers in passing planes. Requests are not being taken from local residents, whose heads are now under three pillows or wired for sound to deflect the onerously unsonorous drone. Total erasure of the past is in keeping with the terra nullius vision of landscape, a void created that must then be filled in with tradie music as brute force, massive mechanicals, and unmanaged noise achieve the predictable, an apartment block overpriced even for this part of town. Google ‘tradie music’ for song lists, a jumble of pumped-up platinum, dad rock, and brickie’s trance. Though nothing compares to the verismo industrial sounds of jackhammers uprooting footpaths and blokes yelling from upper-storey scaffolding incomprehensible directions, incomprehensible even to the few people in the street who have not by now left the area for the day. This crushing combo of broad strine, 4WD revs, and nail gun staccato blasts unstoppably through the afternoon, where even a twelfth radio replay of ‘Enter Sandman’ is not a hint that it’s time to turn off the heavy machinery for another day and go get some shuteye. Crescendos continue like waves at a beach until abruptly, or gradually, depending on the thirst, tradie music disappears down the street until tomorrow in a last fart of acceleration and exhaust fumes.