Janet McAllister: Slow passing of the bard baton

Dominic Hoey, AKA Tourettes.

My Waitangi week started with an old-school Pakeha moment: Sam Hunt performing Denis Glover's The Magpies for a Ponsonby bar crowd that included Dick Frizzell. Alan Curnow couldn't have conjured up a more nationalistic happening, unless it was at Eden Park and Pinetree Meads loomed overhead. (And quardle oodle ardle wardle doodle, the magpies would have said.)

New Zealand's arts scene being a tight squeeze, our "icons" tend to rub noses. Hunt knew Glover personally, as he knows Frizzell, who has not only daubed Hunt's poems on canvas but also captured Glover's hope-breaking socialist anthem in a classic picturebook painted with energy and menace. (For those who didn't learn it off by heart in standard two, The Magpies recounts a farming dream destroyed by harsh land and harder banks.)

I imagine a timeless woolshed where all these icons hang out and put on little soirees. Maybe that's where Hunt met his support act for his Golden Dawn gigs: Dominic Hoey, better known as Tourettes, an icon in the making.

Tourettes is already his own man in hip-hop, and if the Hunt/Hoey pairing is part of a slow passing of the baton, for the title of young(ish) folk poetry bard of the nation, then I like it.

In place of Hunt's well-pickled rural mythology, Tourettes offers urban legends of drugs, sex'n'drudgery, with a touch of Glover's radical politics. In 97, he lists cops, landlords and noise control as reasons why "nothing good begins with a knock at the door". His poems use well-structured repetition for humour and bite. A letter to Santa has him asking for "ethical yet perverse pornography", "some kind of left-wing revolution" and he pleads "Oh please Santa, won't you help poor Wes Anderson return to form?"

Another poem tells us his parents were working class hippies, which meant "we ate organic Granny Smith apples but were allowed to swear at the television".

This now sounds like all of Herne Bay, and much of inner-city Auckland besides. I know these people; I often am these people.

So Tourettes was a relevant revelation, even before the beloved Hunt trademarks: the red wine, the stovepipes, the cockatoo hairdo, the white shirt. (For a shirtless Hunt, lounging on Takapuna Beach like an antipodean Rod Stewart beside some sheila, visit the Robin Morrison 1970s photography exhibition at the Auckland Museum.)

Hunt's eyes are now boot buttons, but they're still amused and gleaming - and combative. "You ruined Yeats, I hope you die," he said to an unfortunate patron - one of Tourettes' fans, judging by the high tattoo-to-skin ratio - who'd scraped his bar stool on the floor at the wrong moment.

There were echoes between the generations. Hunt, talking about earthquake god Ruaumoko: "It pays, I think, to let him know you know who he is." Tourettes, talking about meeting God in a urinal: "I could tell that he was stoked that I recognised him." As saviour? Wry reverence has become sly flippancy; old school turned new.

Tourettes' website: filthyandbeautiful.net