Rat Vs Possum: "I'm OK, you're OK"

It was called a ‘positivity and optimism’ seminar, my friend was telling me between still disbelieving gulps (of a large glass of wine). It was compulsory to attend, and so, one Friday afternoon, she and the other mopey bastards in her university administration office went off to learn some corporate-funded motivation so they’d stop whinging about broken systems and failed managerial strategies and shit co-workers. To learn how to ‘get on with it’, preferably with a smile on their faces so they weren’t tempted to take stress leave or quit (thus costing the university money) or didn’t upset the students (thus costing the university money) or didn’t take a baseball bat to the computer that had been stuck on the coloured spinning beach ball of death for half an hour (thus, etc).

There was a laughter therapy session. My friend and her fellow sad-faced comrades were instructed to lift their arms up in front of themselves and announce, “Ha ha ha ha ha,” then slowly fan their arms back down their sides – and again, “Ha ha ha ha ha.” They were to do this while standing in a circle until eventually they were so drunk on oxygen and forced laughter that they broke down and actually laughed. It didn’t work.

Then came the part they ripped off from Thomas A Harris’s best-selling self-help book from the early ‘70s, I’m OK, You’re OK. (And I know this because there was a time when I decided that the kind of help I needed couldn’t possibly come from a doctor who existed in the current world and would have to come from a decade more open to the idea of insanity – ie. the ‘70s.) The co-workers had to partner off and, pointing to each other as they said it, run through the four “life positions” until they reached the climatic fourth, at which they came upon the epiphany. “I’m not OK, you’re OK”; “I’m not OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re not OK”; “I’m OK, you’re OK.” And all their work problems were solved. Now, whenever the printer would go back to a default A3 setting and only print a quarter of the page, they could stand there calming repeating to the machine, “I’m OK, you’re OK,” and it would stop them from suffocating the nearest first-year with a university-branded enviro bag.

Needless to say the only ‘positivity’ my friend experienced was being positive that the corporation that had employed her – and the corporation entrusted with educating thousands of young people every year – was completely fucked in the head.

If the university had wanted a cheaper and more successful junket, they could have bought a copy of Melbourne jungle-pop outfit Rat Vs Possum’s debut album, Daughter Of Sunshine (out through Sensory Projects), and transmitted it over the loudspeakers. An album of continuously building layers of humming synths, loping guitars and vocal harmonies, there’s a real therapeutic quality to the record. Not in a hippie-remedy-tailored-for-corporate-courses kind of way, mind you, but each of the seven tracks chooses a vocal phrase and runs through various expressions of it – solo, choirs, altos, tenors – until you realise the phrase’s ‘worth’. And it strangely begins to make you feel calmer and somewhat better about your position in the world. (Heavy, I know, but then, I read I’m OK, You’re OK, so I’m allowed.)

Temple opens with five lazy guitar notes played over and over against a whistling wind until a floury drum beat starts up and dual boy-girl vocals commence the mantra: “Me and my baby in the front seat, one hand on the steering wheel.” The track Pills chooses the phrase, “I think I love you but it might just be the pills,” to follow down the hole until it turns from well-meaning drug-fucked uncertainty to a statement about general human connectivity.

I put the album on and my headphones in when I was at the airport waiting for a flight that had been delayed an hour and a half, late at night on the way home from a work trip amidst a battlefield of screaming toddlers, racist old men and women discussing the quality assurance lectures they had to give in the morning. And it was then, with the help of Rat Vs Possum (and a Valium, admittedly) that I stumbled onto the unpublished fifth and possibly best life position: “Fuck you all – I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK.”