Does anything mean anything? What is the purpose of life? If I am meant to live presently, what do I do right now?
I often find myself swirling around in some pretty abstract thoughts. This morning I went looking for some music to write about and shuffled into this one (electronically, although, like my other Freddie King post, this song is pretty toe turning and waist twisting).
Sometimes it's just fun to have fun.
It's probably one of the greatest albums I've never actually listened to all the way through. It's a hard go when you have a song like transitions at the front.
Anxiety can be tricky. I play a lot of pickup basketball these days. I play too fast. You can see "the game speed up" for me, and I make bad decisions.
I think there's a lot of wisdom in life to the new things we do being scary, or just overly stimulating, or overly exciting, so we tend to speed up to try to get them over with. In reality, we should probably slow down, work the fundamentals, wait for the right shot, and take it. Worse comes to worse, we pass, reset and learn.
Making that real happen in real life is tough. But music really helps. I know it's been called the quickening art before, but for me, it helps take that thrum of excitement and feeling I usually have and slow it down; it seems to peg it to a rhythm and give it a melody that soars over that percolation in a way that is predictable, fun and true.
Here's to excitement, anxiety, and finding something new.
Song here -- Birth by El Ten Eleven.
There's a special class of songs that slip into different songs in the middle of themselves. Doin the Cockroach is a little like that with the difference between it's verse and bridge (bridge comes in about 2:00 minutes). Transitions has like five pieces of song woven together than make multiple movements of songs in what's a ten minute epic. But maybe this one is special because it really just flips over right in the middle and is a tight four minutes. It also didn't feel too cheeky or cheesy or gimmicky to me in doing it (I feel like this is something drake does in his songs; yes, here's one March 14th, but again it feels cheesy).
I do think part of it is the authenticity. The voice whispering a specific name, "what are you thinking about // what are you dreaming about." I say it feels authentic, but that's probably more of a reflection of how I feel about my life, rather than a close analytical assessment of logic as a person and this song. By that I mean, when I get in my own head, I ask myself and wish people would ask me "What are you thinking about // what are you dreaming about?" I think my bar for authenticity is sometimes how much something resonates with my own life experience, or rather, how much of my life experience I can resonate with something.
I'll also say the transition at around 2:17 feels like a surprise, and also like a photo negative. In my mind it feels like the song just effortlessly pivoted on it's toe and changed direction. It goes from rushing forward to this reflective, floating, inverted world. It's got a below the water anime sound that makes me think of Miyazaki movies. I just love it, and it doesn't feel effortful or forced. I have no idea how it they made it so natural.
In talking about the song, Logic had this to say
"when you first hear me rapping I'm laying in bed at fifteen years old and all the things racing through my mind, from the eviction notice on my door, you know, just being on food stamps and welfare and not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow and just, all the wonders. And then the beat changes up and I actually fall asleep. So this is my inner-most subconscious thoughts that I didn't even realize at the time, at fifteen years old, but now, you know, at twenty-four and looking back, reminiscing, I know that those are the things that are on my mind, because growing up in that situation, no matter what, um, the only time I was special, the only time I was anybody was when I was asleep. When I was asleep I was a famous basketball player, baseball player, I was a rapper/artist, I was a singer, I was an actor, I was dancer, I was an astronaut, but when I woke up I was just a boy from a broken home, and that- that was very hard to swallow" (from Genius)
Yeah. Wow. The dreams, the childhood music soundtrack. The way it's related to the waking world but inverted. Damn. That's art. Shoutout to the producers: Tae Beast, Skhye Hutch, Frank Dukes, and 6ix.
Song here
