A revolutionary aims to have a tight grasp on the reality without the converse necessarily being true
It is an affliction, forgetting music is. That numbing forgetfulness that gives a muffled day enough fuel to become carnivorous and gobble row after row on the calendar, stacked days shuffled through without any exposure to the rush of recognition that this melody, this flow, this anguished plea of a voice that cracks at just the right frequency - each in its own way confers exactly what is needed at this moment to express what this moment might amount to if a self could only get outside of itself. Show me that lever, Archimedes.
It takes all kinds. Sometimes it is four-on-the-floor transitioning to a melodic, barbed hook (Jeff Rosenstock, No Dream) sometimes it is throwback to some fierce vintage with the staying power to gobble up Maybach Music like a airy canapé at a black tie affair (Rakim, When I be on the mic; Mos Def, Redefinition) and sometimes it is that salve that speaks to a broken not-quite-yet-bled out person because it makes the Humpty-Dumpty fracture real (Bonnie Prince Billy, The Way, Phoebe Bridger Halloween). A dagger through the heart, a jolt that no facsimile can approximate, a defenestration that continues long after the body and the broken glass have been swept up - it’s all that and a schmear of more fully felt sensation on top. And then it seems momentarily impossible to be lulled back into the absent-minded worrying over and worship of a list of tasks that is the hustle and the lifestyle-design creep it lionizes.
Yoking awe and drawing it right up against the dally of the saddle horn takes practice, and practice doesn’t make perfect, but it does enable keen kernels of lucidity that can be spiked into the ground so that I won’t float back away into those numb, monochrome days and succumb to that baffling, cunning delusion that wearing this facepaint of will and control is what will render everything A-Ok. Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, and then it seems like sustaining escape velocity will be possible, after all.
