"Home": Avantdale Bowling Club
Production: Chico Hamilton and Tom Scott
Album: Avantdale Bowling Club
‘And our heroes wore black/ And we fought back / And we thought that the world was flat for a fact / cause the furthest we’d been from home was the laundromat.’
Balladry and storytelling are one of Hip Hop’s oldest features and something which Tom Scott pushes to dizzying heights with his seminal album Avantdale Bowling Club. The song Home takes the listener on an odyssey like journey where in 5 minutes Scott ruminates on his longing to be back in the place of his childhood, imagines the scene of his triumphant return only to be crushed by the reality of the situation where he is greeted by a place that he has outgrown. The dead fern on the window sill is a crippling reminder of the decay of his hometown and the dislocation from the place he left so long ago. Scott leaves the listener with a picture of home before he left it: a forgotten enclave left to rot in neglect, a place where globalism did not touch, where ambition bred crabs in a bucket and left a people to wash up on the north shore almost extinct. Home is poetry and balladry at its finest.
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