#but it's not like it has the kind of standard time with a heavy downbeat that you need to execute a musical fight sequence

[mlentertainment]

is wolfgang’s 5th symphony the Best remix of beethoven’s 5th? i personally don’t think so. was it the right choice musically speaking for hi fi rush? absolutely

[storyunrelated]

Rare, Not Indispensible - Times are tough all over

My initial enthusiasm for my cackhanded ‘We made monsters to fight other monsters oh no the world is ending’ story has waned somewhat, mostly because I’m easily distracted, partly because the tone of the piece was so dour and downbeat - even by my standards! - that it was exhausting me.

And if I’m exhausted by the downbeat town of something clearly it’s hitting the right spot. Well, we live in hope at least.

Anyway, none of you care but here’s a bit. I am sure someone will complain about the length, hah!

-

“Can I come in?” She asked, lingering on the threshold. Hawthorne, head still resting in one hand, waved the other limply in her vague direction.

“Door’s open,” he said, slurring a little at the edges. In Rue tip-toed.

A pause. There is often a pause. 

“I’m sorry I yelled at you,” Rue said, deciding to get things rolling. Hawthorne’s head snapped up. His eyes were very red.

“You’re sorry? I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have flown off the handle like that. It’s just-” he started, but Rue cut in before he could get started again.

“Things not great out there?” She asked.

Hawthorne let out a noise that landed squarely between a laugh and a sob and ended with a kind of strangulated hiccup, his head flopping back into both hands. There he stayed for a second, rubbing his face, before sucking in a breath and sitting up straight in his big boss chair. It looked especially big at that moment, or he looked especially small.

“Yeah, yeah you could say that,” he said, sniffing.

Rue had no idea how things were going in the greater world. She honestly hadn’t given it a whole lot of thought, being as how she felt she had enough to be getting on with anyway. Now that the issue had been raised however she did have to admit to a certain amount of mounting curiosity.

“How bad are they?” She asked, delicately.

“Things?” Hawthorne asked. Rue nodded. Hawthrone sighed and slumped, shoulders sagging.

“Bad. More Interlopers every day, you know? And even when we stop them - and we do stop them - that’s still a hundred, a thousand more people that need care. That adds up. And that’s also however much property damage, people’s homes destroyed, businesses...that adds up too. Everything’s falling apart. The shit we do isn’t cheap and it needs people to keep going - we’re all part of a chain and that chain is just...falling apart…”

He sniffed again. Initially Rue had figured his eyes had been red because of the drinking - the smell was difficult to ignore - but now she thought that crying might have had something to do with it as well.

“And it’s, you know, the longest, hottest summer we’ve seen in something like four decades or something. Hasn’t rained the length of the country in over a month - a month! And that’s just here. Other places are on fire. Spain, on fire again. Greece, on fire again. Russia, also on fire...you can see the smoke from space, did you know that?”

“I did not.”

Hawthorne shook his head, reached for his mug, thought better of it and then sat back again, hands in his lap behind his desk.

“The planet was dying before but now it’s just getting worse. What are we doing? What did we do?”

There wasn’t any answer to this, at least as far as Rue was aware. Hawthorne sniffed some more, wiping his nose on the back of his shirtsleeve. He then looked at the results of this and grimaced, then sighed.

Then finally, actually, properly looked Rue in the eye for the first time since she’d come in.

“They’re starting - they’ve started talking about withdrawing care for anyone recovered from a fear zone. Based on age. Younger gets priority. Older? Not so much. Hard numbers, fucking hard numbers. People live or die by numbers. And they have to! You can’t have everything! You might want to but life doesn’t work like that! Everything’s give and take. Just - who’s going to be the one who’s going to have to be on the end of that chain? The one who has to make it happen? Explain to the family? If there is one. The one who’ll have to…”

He trailed off. Not that continuing would have added much. Silence was especially heavy now. It made Hawthorne’s uneven breathing particularly easy to hear.

“And I broke my mug! I liked that mug!” He then blurted, sounding like he was trying to swallow at the same time.

[backseatstorytime]

1/29/2016, 1:14pm – country.

Names, dates, times, and specific details have been modified to protect my riders’ privacy. If you have reason to believe that your story is being told and you’d prefer it not to be shared, please message me and I’ll be more than happy to take it down.

For those who don't know me personally, I'm really big on music. I play a few different instruments, I write music, I've jumped from genre to genre over the years, and I've come to really appreciate all kinds of music. Any time someone gives me something to listen to, I listen to it the whole way through. I'm always open to learning about new music, learning to play new music, and just expanding my repertoire. Music was my first love, and nothing has changed.

I don't really have a particular go-to driving playlist. Often times, I just play what I feel. Sometimes I'll have a Queen playlist going; other times, I'll have showtunes. While I'm on the clock, I avoid anything particularly harsh or offensive, so I avoid music with shrill screaming or songs about "bitches and weed," so to speak. That means normally, I don't have a lot of rap or hardcore metal. I tend to learn towards the chill side of music, learning towards mellow beats, acoustic sounds, things that are more relaxing than anything else. That also means that normally I opt not to throw on something like Animals as Leaders.

Lately, you'll find me listening to two different playlists: my showtunes playlist or my Chance the Rapper playlist. A close friend of mine had recently shown me a song from the new Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen called "Waiting Through a Window". I was in love from the get-go, and I built a playlist around that sort of uplifting, pop-driven musical theatre style. On the other hand, I've also been on an on-and-off Chance the Rapper binge. I think it's safe to say that he was my favorite artist of 2016, and I still haven't fallen off the wagon. I keep finding myself coming back to his album Coloring Book or his work on Donnie Trumpet Nico Segal and the Social Experiment's project Surf. On top of that, I also picked up Telefone, the album by Noname Gypsy, who's been featured on a few of Chance's songs. It's got similar vibes and it falls in the mellow side of hip hop that I've been really enjoying recently, so I've got a bunch of Chance and Noname on the same playlist.

Last Sunday, I put the latter playlist on. I drove around Burbank around noon, and Chance filled the air in the car. I made a pickup on a corner by a cafe. In came a young guy named Rommel.

Rommel was almost the perfect image of the millennial stereotype—early 20s, contemporarily dressed and accessorized, sporting round-framed, half-rimless glasses, earphones, and his cafe work uniform in hand. The second he sat down, he pulled out his phone. There's nothing inherently wrong with any of that; speaking as a millennial as well, it's the norm of our generation.

I didn't really gauge much of a conversation incoming, so I let the music fill the air. The song switched from Noname's "Diddy Bop" to "Wanna Be Cool" by The Social Experiment, which featured Chance pretty prominently.

"Hey, man, I'm pretty into Chance, too," Rommel said from the backseat.

"Oh, for real?" "Yeah man, Chance is pretty good. I like a lot of the stuff he comes out with. My brother's way more into him than I am, but I dig his stuff."

"That's awesome, man," I began. "I was actually having a hard time figuring out what to play in the car today, but I settled on Chance." "I know what you mean," Rommel laughed, "I listen to a bunch of different kinds of music so it can get pretty hard to decide sometimes."

"Same here man, I'm all over the map. I've been listening to a lot of weird stuff lately." "Oh for real? Try me."

I'm always a little overconfident in my music knowledge. More often than not, I do it in hopes of being wrong so I learn something new, but I find some satisfaction in being right.

"How about 'Tennessee Whiskey' by Chris Stapleton?" "...Alright, you got me there."

Country was the last thing I expected from the African American twenty-something sitting in my backseat. California doesn't have a heavy country music scene, at least not one I'm familiar with, nor one that I'm aware of at all. I can probably count on one hand the number of people I know that regularly listen to and enjoy country. And at that point I only really appreciated the genre, but I never actively sought it out.

"I know, man, usually I don't bang country either, but my roommate sent this to me and said, 'You're gonna call me the whitest dude ever but just listen to this,' and I got into it!"

Rommel was living with a roommate, working two jobs and making a living for himself while devoting the rest of his time making music. I thought I was big on music discovery and learning about new music until Rommel told me that he would toss on whatever random playlist Spotify would throw at him and listen to it the whole way through. "Sometimes it's hit, sometimes it's miss, but it's worth it when you find those really good songs like these."

Once we hit a red light, I opened up Spotify to play the song.

Right from the get-go with the walk up into the sweet guitar solo in 3/4 time, it hit me. My head impulsively reeled back, matching the song's cadence and dropping down on the next downbeat. My eyes closed and rolled back into my head for a moment as my eyebrows furrowed ever so slightly and as I mouthed a silent "ooooh". I was swaying, and before I could even get a word in, Rommel already had a smile on and hit me with "Right? It's good!"

He wasn't kidding. I'm not sure what your stance is on country music, but I don't actively seek it out. The music itself doesn't elicit a reaction from me, but it's the lyrics in particularly evocative country songs that get me. This was a song in which the music hit me right off the bat and where the lyrics got me not long after. By whatever unspoken standard I hold my music to, this lived up to it.

I let the playlist run as we kept talking about country. Rommel brought up something that changed the way I viewed country music.

"I've been noticing it a lot the more I listened to country, but country and hip hop have a lot of similarities."

I was pretty surprised by this hearing it initially, but after the sweet surprise of "Tennessee Whiskey," I was prepared and even anticipating to hear what he had to say about it.

"I mean, think about it. They both have those similar moments. You listen to the subject matter that rapper rap about: drugs, money, expensive shit, 'bitches,' common themes in the rap game. It's not all that far off in country music, either—country singers will sing about their booze, their bars, their pick up trucks, their girls in daisy dukes... it might not all line up the same way, but there's a bigger overlap than most people really notice. And both of them have some really cheesy songs. You've got all these songs in rap with crazy metaphors, like "Broccoli" or, like... "Panda," you know? Country's got a lot of cheesy shit like that, too, like..."

While he was talking about this, "That's Why God Made a Front Porch" was playing on Spotify. "Like this song, right?" I asked him.

"Yeah man, like this song!" he laughed.

We were both laughing as we neared his stop. He thanked me for the trip and said "Hope we cross paths again, man."

That was my last trip for the day; it was a good point to call it. The whole way home, I let the random country music playlist play and I found some really awesome music.

It's really funny thinking about it. Bo Burnham recently ripped on country music in his latest comedy special, and as far as I could tell at the time without really knowing country music, it seemed accurate enough. Peering from an outside perspective, country music as a whole seemed a lot like pickup trucks, whiskey, and resonator guitars playing simple chords with violins riffing in the back. But thinking about hip hop in the same way, from what it may sound like to someone that doesn't listen to it, hip hop just seems like girls, drugs, lavish spending, and deep bass hits behind either sampled hits or generic synth melodies with people in the background yelling "HEY". They both have their moments that perpetuate the stereotype, but they have some absolutely solid moments hidden underneath all the generic-colored variety.

At the end of the day, every genre has its gems hidden beneath a lot of plastic. That's why I don't have a particular favorite genre or a particular favorite band—there's too much good in every genre to really narrow down one thing I like best. And it's fine if you've found the one or two or few things that resonate with you deeply. There's no wrong answer in the realm of music; if there were, we wouldn't have jazz and... well, most music today. All that matters is that you've found something that elicits a positive response. Music is magical, after all. I think it's one of the few things in life that's truly universal. Whatever you enjoy, whether it's top 40 pop music or NWOBHM, play on. Don't be afraid to try new things; you might like something you didn't think you would.

As always, thanks for reading, and I'll see you next time.