“At times I contemplate moving to a warmer place,/ then the lake and skyline give me a warm embrace.”
-Common, “Reminding Me (Of Sef)”
Hi friends,
I hope you’re doing well. It’s been a minute since I last wrote to you all. I’m a father now. It is fulfilling and exhausting and has taken up much of my head and heart space and thus these dispatches have become less frequent. I’ve had several good ideas for letters but who knows if I’ll ever get to them so you simply must believe me that all the ideas are unimpeachably good. Ha.
Anyway my homie Lamar gave me a prompt the other day that I want to share with you and charge you to take up, if you care to. Lamar asked me to make a playlist of my musical tastes from 7th Grade through high school. He made a playlist of his taste and it was excellent and nostalgic and 19 hours long. After thinking I started building my own and currently it’s nearly 40 hours long and 600 songs. I keep remembering things and adding them. I changed the prompt slightly and had my own wrinkles to the prompt, which I’ll share:
I focused on music I either owned and/or saw in person at a show during that time. (shoutout to burning CDs and also music piracy for letting me own way more music than I could’ve legally afforded).
I excluded R. Kelly’s music because he’s obviously vile. I’m from Chicago in the 90s/00s so there was a lot of R. Kelly in my early influences but we can be honest about that and leave that dude muted and over there. I didn’t parse any other moral stances about what I listened to because that felt too unwieldy for me.
When I remember albums I owned I simply go back and add the songs that I loved or replayed the most. Some of the music aged horribly but that’s the nature of time. I’m curious about capturing my previous taste more than judging it.
I expanded the timeline slightly. I went from my first CD purchases to when I left for college which means basically from about 1999 to August 2008. Also my first albums were Will Smith’s Willennium and WWF Aggression. lol.
There’s a fair amount of stuff I loved that’s not on streaming so those aren’t here.
I named the playlist after the chapbook I wrote in high school so give yours a cool name.
I’m still adding things as I remember them so this is a living document.
It’s a fun little exercise and easy enough to do with a baby strapped to my chest so it qualifies as a thing I’m into right now. Here’s my playlist. If you make one for yourself feel free to share.
I really listened to a stunning amount of music as a young person. Some of it aged terribly and some of it really exposed me to interesting and powerful ideas. A lot of my current political analysis is rooted in the music I listened to as a kid. Thankfully a lot of it is not. Maybe for these letters as a little postscript I’ll drop a short meditation on a single song from the playlist based off whatever comes up on the shuffle. That might be fun.
Peace,
Nate
PS. Today’s song is U.B.R. (Unauthorized Biography of Rakim) by Nas.
This song basically taught me who Rakim was when it came out in 04. I think this song plus the song Microphone Fiend being a throwback one day on 106 & Park pushed me to buy 2 Eric B. & Rakim reissue CDs to learn more. I don’t really think this song stands up as super profound today but I appreciate the simple beat and the fact that Nas was citing his influences. The album this song came from was the double album Streets Disciple which is not a very good album in retrospect but I actually bought it when it came out and I remember loving the album art fold out and the fact that it had so much music for the price of one album. Back in my day you just had to convince yourself a mediocre to bad album was pretty good because that was what you had to listen to. Good times/terrible times.
I'm in the process of making mine and realized that I was essentially a generic pop / emo / country white girl and it's completely unsurprising lol
I didn't exactly know how to download music unto my "MP3" player so I grabbed some off your desktop computer. I needed something to listen to while walking or at the gym.....got some pretty wild shit in my ears...lol. #throwback