In Moments Like These
In moments like these, there’s always music.
- “Abracadabra” — Anna Wise (w/ Little Simz)
- “Distant Land” — Madlib
- “Waltz #2” — J Mascis
- ”Me & Magdalena” — The Monkees
- “Conversation” — X-Cetra
- “Lark” — Angel Olsen
- “The Man Who Played God” — Danger Mouse & Sparklehorse (w/ Suzanne Vega)
- “Say Hey There” — Atmosphere
- “The Sins of Memphisto” — John Prine
- “Cream Puff War” — Grateful Dead
- “Blood and Thunder” — Mastodon
- “Huck” — Thirty Ought Six
- “Brinstar” — Sammus
- “Quite Buttery” — Count Bass D (w/ MF DOOM)
- “Let’s Get This Over With” — They Might Be Giants
- “Palo Alto” — Radiohead
- “What A Fool Believes” — Self
In moments like these, there’s the release of anger. You want to break things. You want to scream and swear, and there’s a wall of distortion, of rage, of utter brutality. There are the ragged edges of hardcore lyrics we can’t understand and don’t need to because no words will match how we feel. You see black, and you see red, and you see the fully blown drive of noise and metal and punk and everything that comes with it. You dip your head, and you soak it in. It beats you up, and you welcome it.
In moments like these, there’s the warm blanket of despair, the sad, heartbreaking strum of breakups, death, and our own inconsequential lives, floating through space with little more than a wet sleeve and a runny nose. There’s the wailing and the quiet desperation; the tragedy and sadness in those sad, sad songs, in which we find catharsis in other people’s pain. In our own.
In moments like these, there’s the justifiable anger for the truth. Someone to curse at you. To curse for you, on your behalf. To borrow from convention and redraft — to sample, to subversively rearrange. There’s centuries of injustice, and it’s spit out with poise and a knowing middle finger. You have your proxy in the form of a thousand hip-hop songs. They’ve suffered, and they’ve written, and they speak for you and to you and will for as long as there’s suffering to be written about.
In moments like these, there’s the distracting power and energy of pure, unadulterated pop. There’s the rhythm and the undeniability; that mainline of brightness blinds you from the darkness. It does not make anything go away, but it washes it out — for a moment. It is joy despite the times. It is the freedom to be unashamed.
In moments like these, there’s really anything. There’s anything you need. And you need it, make no mistake — there’s sound, and there’s cover, and there’s shelter, anywhere from the slowest dirge to the fastest manic explosion. Because our souls don’t like this quiet, as much as we desire it. Our souls know the quiet doesn’t stay that way for long — it fills up with whatever it is that’s after us: the hate, the lack of empathy, the addition, the voices that have tried to stop us from being who we are for as long as we’ve been trying to be who we are and for fuck’s sake, that’s what the music is for.
To fill that space, to bump out those thoughts.
In moments like these, there’s always something to fill the silence. For the grief. For the sadness. For the fight. For the fucking fight.
You scream your “fucks” and you cry your tears. You fill that silence with anything that might approximate an answer or a sliver of empathy; to know someone else was there too. They made this music when they were feeling the same way, and it might have helped or not helped, but one thing is for sure: it meant something. You don’t have to create it to feel that release: you don’t have to own or even like it. You just need to be there.
So when you’re looking for the way out, know it’s nowhere specific. It’s holding on. It’s being kind to yourself. It’s not worrying about blame and, instead, worrying about solutions. It’s listening. It’s fucking listening. Roll up your sleeves. Start oiling up for the fight. And turn that shit up as long as you need it.