Musings on an Educational Pedagogy

Commonly, when people critique our educational systems, they like to talk about the issue of rote memorization versus critical thinking.

"We're only teaching our kids to spit facts back out, we're not teaching them to REALLY THINK," they insist, full or moral righteousness and deep, undying care for the youth of today. As you might have noticed, I have many issues with these people. But to start, I'd like to make a claim: I was, in my specific educational path, taught to think. And, not to pat my back too much, I was taught really well. I was privileged enough to be born into a middle-class, suburban family that valued education highly, to be able to attend public schools that were able to afford quality teachers followed by a fairly prestigious private high school and am now attending a prestigious private liberal arts university. This is also probably a good moment to mention that I'm white and a cisgender male, which generally makes everything easier. The point being: critical thinking is a skill I've been taught all my life, and it's one I've gotten pretty good at. And it's also a skill that's served me really well for problems that it's good at solving.

"So what's your problem, then," you ask, astute as always.

My bone to pick is this: critical thinking is pretty much all I was taught. It was all that was on the curriculum, at least. All that I, from an institutional standpoint, was told was important. The message that sent was simple: all you need in life is good critical thinking. If you master this skill, all the primary and secondary schooling I've ever received seemed to say, all of life's problems will simply melt away in front of you with nothing but the faintest mental effort.

Needless to say, this is not true.

While I would probably have told you that that wasn't true for many years before now, it's only in the last six months that I've really realized just how strongly I had considered it to be true. And even now, I still live it, if you will, despite knowing that it's not true. It's one thing to declare a proposition false, it's another thing entirely to try to throw off 12 years of institutional education enforcing that insisted that proposition was correct.

I don't care who you are (or what you study), it's not possible to make it through this life happily and successfully with nothing but intelligence. And nor should you want to. Intelligence is a remarkably limited way of interacting with and understanding the world, leaving out everything from the wonder of childlike naivete to the solid grounding of centuries-old wisdom that's only wisdom when it lives in your bones and not in your head.

And so, reader, I now come to you for help: how do you get out of your head? How do you access modes of interaction and understanding that aren't intelligence? I could use some help learning.

Parody Part 2: "And So I Watch You From Afar" to "Catch For Us the Foxes"

Hey y'all. I know it hasn't quite been a week, but I've got a pocket of time, and I figured I'd write a bit about how the music project has been going. Since last post, I've listened to 26 albums (including several that I only have one song on) and am working on my 27th right now. I'm averaging solidly under 4 hours a day, which is concerning because it means that this whole project is going to take over a month to complete. But that's fine, because I've actually been finding it a lot easier than I had expected I would. When I like the album that's on the docket, I have a lot of fun listening to it. When I don't love it, I usually am able to put it on the background enough that I can absorb it without getting too bored. Walking from my apartment to campus has been a blessing in this regard.

What it hasn't quite been, though, is as meaningful as that first bit was. I haven't had a moment quite like the moment that I had with "Ambient 1." There have been some fun moments: "Antics" by Vundabar is a really fun album that I always forget about, so it was nice to have a reminder. "I Got Mine," the only track I have off of the Black Keys' "Attack and Release" is a really quality single. "Brother, Sister" by mewithoutYou is one of my favorite albums, and coming back to it in this context made it more meaningful, somehow. But on the whole, I've spent a lot more time not quite focusing on the music than I'd like. It's somewhat of a necessary evil, as I mention above, but I do wish I had more patience.

Overall, not a hugely informative chunk of time, but I am still enjoying myself. And this is also the longest I've ever held myself to a challenge like this, so that's pretty cool.

Every album I've listened to since the last update:
"And So I Watch You From Afar" by And So I Watch You From Afar
"Antics" by Vundabar
"The Argument" by Fugazi
"Bound for the Floor" off of "As Good as Dead" by Local H
"I Got Mine" off of "Attack and Release by The Black Keys
"An Awesome Wave" by Alt-J
"Bastion Original Soundtrack" by Darren Korb
"BBNG2" by BADBADNOTGOOD
"Hedron" off of "BBNG3" by BADBADNOTGOOD
"Novocaine for the Soul" and "Not Ready Yet" off of "Beautiful Freak" by the Eels
"Bestiary" by Hail Mary Mallon
"BetterOffDEAD" by the Flatbush Zombies
"Black Sabbath" by "Black Sabbath"
"(Boyle) and Piles EP" by RED WALL
"Brother, Sister" by mewithoutYou
"Bryter Later" by Nick Drake
"The Mission (M is for M is for Milla Mix)" off of "'C' is for (Please Insert Sophomoric Genitalia Reference HERE)" by Puscifer
"Cage the Elephant" by Cage the Elephant
"Camouflage" by billy woods
"Cancer for Cure" by El-P
"Cape Verde" by Super Chron Flight Brothers
"Cardboard Castles" by Watsky
"Lazy Eye" off of "Carnavas" by Silversun Pickups
"Cast the First Stone - EP" by The Virginmarys
"Catch For Us the Foxes" by mewithoutYou

A Parody of Myself Pt. 1

If you know me well (or not that well), the conceit of the following blog will make a lot of sense.

I've decided to listen to every single album I have on my iPod in alphabetical order. From "All Hail Bright Futures" to "You're Dead." That's 178 albums containing 1,853 songs by 121 artists. The total runtime is 5.3 days, or approximately 127 hours. At about 4 hours a day, that's almost 32 days of listening.

Never let it be said that I'm not ambitious.

The start of this project was very much as a challenge for me and a challenge to me. It is going to be a challenge to not deviate from alphabetical order, to not fall back into something I'm more comfortable with, to not skip something I don't love. But it's also a challenge to me. Why do I have so much music that I have made immediately available to me? Why don't I listen to all that much of it? I generally cycle between 5-10 albums regularly, with another 30 or so thrown in occasionally. There's music on my phone I've listened to once, and probably more that I've never listened to. And yet, when I try to clear out how much music I have, I always end up keeping the vast majority of it. Why can't I let go of music I don't listen to? And, on top of the challenge, it was also borne out of an urge to explore. I like music a lot. I want to find new music that I like a lot. I want to rediscover music that I've let go of. I want to expand what my ear can handle.

Any while all of those things are definitely still true, of course the journey has already taught me more than finishing probably ever will.

So far, I've gotten through 3 albums: "All Hail Bright Futures" by And So I Watch You From Afar, "All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" by Califone, and "Allelujah! Don't Bend!Ascend!" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I'm currently working my way through Ambient 1: Music for Airports by Brian Eno. "All Hail Bright Futures" was a great one to start out on because it's an album I really enjoy, but don't listen to too much. So it sounded fresh and set me off on the right track.

"All My Friends Are Funeral Singers" is an album I've listened all the way through perhaps once, although there's one track on there ("Funeral Singers") that I love and have listened to many times. I was surprised by how much I enjoyed listening to it. I didn't feel any of the sense of impatience that I usually associate with trying to force myself to listen to certain music. And while I highly doubt the album will be cracking my Last.fm top weekly listens for a while, it's certainly one I want to return to.

"Allelujah! Don't Bend! Ascend!" is also an album that I haven't listened to entirely that much, although again I have one track ("Mladic") on it that I particularly love. It's a relatively short album for the band, clocking in at only 55 minutes (as opposed to "Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antenna To Heaven's" 87 minutes), but it's still an incredibly experience. Godspeed truly are the masters of long-form post-rock, and this listen was as magical as I expected it to be.

Where things started to get kind of interesting was when I started listening to "Ambient 1: Music for Airports" by Brian Eno. I've listened to it several times, although none recently, so I'm not super familiar with it. I listened to the majority of it while walking around campus, which caught my attention because it's not the type of music I'd normally listen to while walking. It's, as the name notes, very ambient, very relaxed, and not super driven. My most recent walking go-to, for contrast, has been "The Argument" by Fugazi, a rocking post-hardcore album. And yet, I found the experience of walking while listening to "Ambient 1" truly beautiful. I wouldn't say it was life-changing, but it was the sort of bubble of presentness and peace that I strive for everyday. I walked along totally absorbed in what was right in front of me, acutely aware of the buildings in a way I'm not normally, feeling the cold on my face with an appreciation I had been lacking. It was a wonderful walk across campus and back home, and it all seemed to be driven by the music, which shook me out of my normal routine and into something just a bit more magical.

And so, I again learn the importance of presentness, and hope to incorporate that into this challenge. If I can experience that sort of awareness through every 4th album, then this month will be an incredible one.

I will (hopefully) update again in about a week!

Ideas

I'm hoping this will be the first in a series of regular blog posts, outside of (what I hope will become) my normal output.

See, one thing I've never really struggled with in my incredibly short time as an artist is having ideas. They seem to come to me out of nowhere, and I've recently been really good at creating a smooth pipeline from an impulse to a more fully-formed idea. And that's where the issue starts. I often sit on half-formed ideas for a long time, unable or unwilling to develop them further. So, in an effort to jostle some of those ideas loose, I'm putting them here. I'm hoping that the act of publishing these ideas will push me towards taking them more seriously, and I'm also hoping that any comments on these ideas will help me to develop them further/find collaborators who are interested in pushing the idea towards reality. I am going to do my best to post ideas here bi-weekly, but bear with me if I'm not totally punctual.

So, without further ado, here's this week's batch of ideas:

The first idea is (probably) for a play (or maybe a screenplay?) inspired by a lot of the protests and counter-protests happening around police brutality and racism sparked by the death of Michael Brown in August. Something that specifically compels me about these events is the constant presence of counter-protesters, people who take to the streets in support of Darren Wilson or police in general. It confuses me that there are people who could look at the way this country, and especially our police departments, are structured and NOT see the incredibly injustices happening. I find it really hard to see the humanity in those types of people. And, of course, as soon as I see something hard to do, I want to do it. The central character of this narrative would be one of those protesters. But instead of focusing only on this person as a political entity, it would show this character as a regular person. A person who is a husband, a father, a friend, and not necessarily a bad one of any of those things. I have some ideas for confrontations with a child and a coworker, but those are still getting fleshed out. What I do know is that the goal for this project would be to go beyond just exposing the hypocrisy that I believe is present in someone who is a loving father/husband/friend but then actively supports and peddles in hate towards other people, but to explore how this hypocrisy is maintainable. How does this person ignore cognitive dissonance?

The second idea is a performance art piece. The impulse here is the idea of self-righteousness. I'm someone who believes very strongly in what I believe in, and will generally speak up for those beliefs. But I also do believe that how you stand up for what you believe matters a lot, and I do believe that self-righteousness is not just distasteful, but also harmful, or at least indicative of a harmful attitude. Self-righteousness to me indicates that the person talking is more interested in being morally superior than making a difference. And the sort of messed up thing is that you can self-righteous about anything. So, the idea here is to create probably 4-5 different monologues that are supposed to sound self-righteous. They would each be structurally identical and (hopefully) come across the same emotionally, but would each be about a different topic. These monologues would then be performed. I'm currently trying to decide how I want them to be performed. I think the idea of them being interwoven into each other by one performer is really cool, but I worry that it could be really hard to follow. Having them performed all at once, on top of each other, would be incredibly visceral, but would lack some of the more intellectual engagement that I want to happen. Having them performed one-by-one would allow for that intellectual engagement, but feels very un-engaging. As of right now, I'm feeling a mix of those three, but I'm not really sure how.

The final idea doesn't fit quite as easily into a single medium. It's inspired by the way music makes me feel, and especially by the way that a great album makes me feel. I'm really inspired by the way that each track on a great album feeds the whole and adds to the emotional resonance of the tracks around it. So, the idea I had was to take a really good concept album (I'm currently thinking The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, but I am very open to other ideas), get as many writers as there are tracks on the album, and have each writer write a scene for a single track. Each scene would be (about) as long as the track, and would (ideally) be heavily inspired not just by the emotional content of the track, but by the lyrical content, the feel of the whole album, and the place that track has in the narrative of the album. These pieces would then be workshopped together to help them fit together like the album does, and then performed, possibly with the album playing underneath. This idea seems like the most likely to become a reality within the relatively near future, but who knows.

So. Those are them. If you have any comments, ideas, thoughts, concerns, questions, etc. please comment/email me/tweet at me/tag me in an Instagram post, do whatever feels most comfortable to you. If you want to email me but don't have my email, I can give it to you through some private means of communication.

Thanks!

Why I'm Annoyed by Epistemology

One of my classes this quarter is called "Theory of Knowledge", an area of philosophy more formally referred to as Epistemology. I've found the class to be a pretty frustrating experience. Some of my frustration has to do with just generally being frustrated at classes in general recently (they're getting in the way of my education), but I do have some specific complaints about this class in particular.

My first complaint is that I simply find the class almost completely useless to me. The types of knowledge that we most commonly deal with and the examples we're using simply don't affect my day to day life in any meaningful or profound way. One idea that we've tossed around is that we can't really know anything, an example being that if our entire life is simply an illusion, we would have no way to tell. This question is irrelevant to me. If we were living in an illusion, my view on life and my day to day behavior would probably vary very little. I'm a firm believer in the idea that this life is all we have and therefore we should make the most of it, and this life being an illusion does not affect that philosophy at all. The examples that bother me come when we introduce an epistemological theory and then, after discussing it briefly, talk about counterexamples that might prove that this theory isn't correct. The issue I have is that often these counterexamples are excruciatingly specific. There was one example to counter reliablism that goes like this: "Brian is a normal peron with accurate and well-justified beliefs about the world around him. Brain is Brian's mental duplicate. Brain has experiences just like Brian's. And Brain's beliefs are analogues of Brian's. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is eating a hot fudge sundae, Brain believes that he, Brain is eating a hot fudge sundae. When Brian believes that he, Brian, is taking a stroll in the park, Brain believes that he, Brain, is taking a stroll in the park... Brian is right about each of these things, as he usually is. Poor Brain is wrong every time" (Feldman 94). I have two issues with this example. For one, it's just bizarrely specific and petty. It's based in no such reality that I'm concerned with, and seems to have constructed an absurd situation for the specific purpose of beating the rule. The second is that, instead of spending more time discussing the theory and how we might actually apply it, we spend the majority of the time that we're talking about the theory talking about this and other counterexamples. To me, that is not a useful way to spend our time, especially if the ultimate goal of a field like epistemology is to help us to understand how we understand the world around us. 

The second issue I have is a metaepistomological complaint related to the different theories that have been floated. The way we've been talking about these theories has been in a very cleanly scientific way that I find offputting. The book and the class are both very entrenched in the idea that there is a "correct" theory that will cover all cases of knowledge perfectly. I very strongly disagree with this idea. Epistomology, other areas of philosophy, and the social sciences are not Newtonian physics and they should stop trying to be. It really bothers me that we're treating the human mind and how it understands the world like a pure scientific experiment where if an idea doesn't totally fit the world, then it's entirely wrong. Many areas of knowledge are not going to collapse neatly into a simple little formula that we can use every time to describe what's around us. The social and philosophical world are inherently messy and any theory that attempts to explain the world without acknowledging that are going to fail. Something that would be interesting to me is the idea of combining these different theories so that the theory can match the type of knowledge that it produces. We've acknowledged the idea of different types of knowledge in class, so I don't think that would be a huge jump.

Works Cited:
Feldman, Richard. Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003. Print.

I'm Back (With Some Oppression Politics)!!

It's been a LONG while, but I'm feeling the urge to write again, so here I am.

The issue I want to address here is a bit different from the usual topics of this blog. Previously, I had focused a lot on my own artistic sensibilities, creations, and reactions. This blog post is much more political, specifically politics of the oppression type.

Oppression politics is an area that I've had increasing interest in over the last year and a half or so. My interest has especially increased since arriving at college, an experience I'm sure many people can relate to. I find a lot of meaning and purpose in learning about the issues that fall underneath the umbrella of oppression politics (sexism, racism, LGBTQ issues, just to name a few).

In this article, I want to talk about a Buzzfeed quiz that's been making its way around recently, entitled "Are You A Feminist?" I find this quiz to be a little bit problematic in ways that take away a lot of the power that other people are finding in it away from me.

To pause here for a second, I just want to insert that I do consider myself a feminist, and a fairly radical one at that. I'm currently working my way through "Feminism is For Everybody" by bell hooks and it's INCREDIBLE. And, at the end of the day, I do think that this Buzzfeed article is a positive happening. Like all Buzzfeed things, it's a bit manipulative (that title is such click-bait it's ridiculous), but I'm all about the egalitarianism of anti-oppression movements.

My issues with it come in two threads. The first is sort of semantic, relating to the way the single question of the quiz is framed. To me, far too often the idea that equality means treating men and women the same too often gets translated into treating women like men, which is not the point of feminism. It also very explicitly uses the gender binary, which is always problematic. This ties into the second issue that I have with the quiz which is that it ignores the intersectionality that HAS to go along with feminism in order for feminism to truly accomplish the goals it wants to. Sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and all other types of oppression are inherently tied together and ignoring those ties leads to an incomplete solution to the problem of oppression.

The way I understand feminism, I think the question that should have been used in this quiz is "Do you believe that each individual human has the right to be treated with dignity and respect and have their full humanity recognized?" To me, this question encapsulates all oppression politics and holds a higher standard for people to reach, a standard that allows EVERYONE to retain their dignity.

The Art of Creation

I'm not going to be melodramatic: I have not always felt a desire to make music. I enjoyed playing Alto Saxophone in grade school and middle school, but it was always a side hobby, not something I was seriously interested in. In the early years of high school, I thought I was really interested in it, and signed up for a music theory class. The class didn't run, and I ended up not pursuing it any further.

Recently though, I've found the time and the creative energy to make music, and it has been an incredibly gratifying experience. The key to this has been my computer. Using music production software has freed me from my somewhat-lacking technical skill with the guitar and has allowed me to translate the music straight from my head. I've been using it for about a month now, and although I have only finished two songs since then, that has more to do with my own sort-of-perfectionist nature than a lack of creation. I have plenty more on the way, but if you'd like to hear what I have so far, check out my Soundcloud. 

What I've Been Listening To

In an attempt to keep up with my blogging, I've decided to do an easy, monthly blog simply detailing what I've been listening to in the past month. No criteria as far as how many acts I want to post about, just whatever has really captured me as of right now.

First up for the past month is, of course, my man billy woods. His album Dour Candy, produced by blockhead, dropped in July and it has become a daily listen for me ever since. Expect to see this guy on this list pretty consistently, especially with his collaboration with Elucid, Armand Hammer, dropping a mixtape  real soon and an album later on this year. 

Number 2 is another rap album GNK by YC the Cynic. Very moody and grimy, YC and Frank Drake deliver a really interesting bunch of sounds and rhymes here. I still haven't totally wrapped my head around what YC is saying just yet, but until then Frank's production and YC's flow and delivery are keeping me plenty interested. 

And finally, and perhaps most importantly, I have been OBSESSED with the single that Arcade Fire just dropped, Reflektor. It's dancey as hell, while still keeping the trademark, heart-aching melancholy sound and lyrics that makes Arcade Fire so damn great. I pre-ordered the album purely off this single and cannot wait to hear it. 

And that's basically it as far as music that has really ensnared me over the past month. If you have any recommendations, leave a comment or hit me up on Twitter (@jsonc_). I'm always looking for new stuff to listen to, so don't be shy. 

Gary Vaynerchuk is the MAN

Now, as a self-pronounced liberal, musician, artist, and general consumer of counter-culture, one would not expect me to be obsessed with a businessman. But Gary Vaynerchuk is no ordinary businessman. He is a businessman of the 21st century, one who is more comfortable on Twitter, responding to a customer or a fan than sitting at a board meeting, discussing the bottom line.
He believes in the passion as a business plan, and caring as a marketing strategy. And if he sounds like a pansy businessman to you, know that he built his dad's local wine shop from $5 million in revenue to $50 million. And he's only 37.
For my senior writing project, I read two of his books, Crush It!: Why Now is the Time to Cash in on your Passion and The Thank You Economy. I tore through both of them very quickly and found both of them to be very interesting and fulfilling books to read.
As can be guessed from the title, Crush It! focuses much more on personal achievement and betterment. It's all about how to take something you love doing and monetizing it. His advice basically boils down to creating conversation about it, then bringing in ad revenue. Whether you write book, keep up a blog, or star in videos, creating quality content is the key to success. What's interesting about this book is that from a more objective, analyzing-the-writing-style lens, it's not that amazing. It's perfectly functional, but the actual writing really fails to take my breath away. What fascinates me about this book is the raw passion that you can feel he put into this work. He believes in the work he's doing with all of his heart, and it really shows. In addition to the fantastic insights that he makes in this book, that passion is what kept me reading.
The Thank You Economy is a bit more polished, but it still is filled with fairly raw passion. Its point is much broader, focusing not on what one person should do to succeed but rather on what companies should do to succeed. There are many relating themes to Crush It!, especially considering that his main advice for these companies is to be personal. The companies that succeed, he argues, are the ones that create an emotional connection to their customers through excellent customer service. He crushes the ethos here, pounding example after example, including his own. Less empowering than Crush It!, but much more convincing, I found that I enjoyed this one much better out of the two.
If you need a self-empowering boost, or are interested in learning about a very alternate style of business, I would highly recommend checking Gary out. He has plenty of free talks on YouTube and if you want more, definitely check out his books.

The Music Industry

Yes, I know I'm writing about music AGAIN. Sorry if you're not that into it, but I am.
Don't worry though, I'm not going to talk about some artist that you'll probably never listen to again. This time I'm going to express my opinions about something that people might have more of an interest to people: business and the music industry. This article here was tweeted by Anthony Fantano, whom I've blogged about before and I think the question it raises is incredibly important, and it's one that I have a very strong opinion on.
The question it raises is whether you own digital MP3s in the same way that you own physical CDs. In other words, do you have the right to sell your digital MP3s like you would be able to sell a physical CD. My view, and it's shared by the people who made ReDigi, is absolutely yes, you should be able to. Especially in an era of technology where one can pull a file off of a CD with ease, it doesn't make any sense to treat the files as different from the CD.
In fact, I'm pretty sure the only organization that would unanimously disagree with this idea is the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA. Colloquially referred to as "the recording industry", this collection of labels and distributors has been fighting tooth and nail against its own impending death, and the legal battle that they'll bring to ReDigi and other businesses like it are only the final thrashes of a dying beast.
A little background. Until very recently (the past decade, or less) the RIAA was the place as far as music went. The way for a band to hit the top was to sign a label that was part of it, and pretty much every dollar related to music went through it. Because of the limited nature of CDs, they had very tight control on "intellectual property" and attacked copyright infringement with a vengeance. Recently though, their pedestal has been falling. Acts like Macklemore or Watsky have made it big without signing labels, and sites like Bandcamp allow artists to effortlessly sell their own music without going through the distribution of the RIAA. Radio and CD, the Association's two big mainstays are on the down fall and digital distribution and cheap, quality recording equipment have contributed to a massive democratization of the creation and distribution of music.
The trends of the last decade have pulled the power out of the hands of large organizations and corporations and into the hands of regular people and artists. One needs to look no further than Amanda Palmer to understand how extremely the shape of the music industry has changed. She has made a living by giving her music away for free. Confused? Watch her TED talk. Not only is it a brilliant example of how the RIAA is losing control, it's an inspiring speech with many different applications, even outside of art.

Album Review: "History Will Absolve Me" by Billy Woods

Now that I’ve listened through it multiple times, I want to write a review of “History Will Absolve Me” by Billy Woods. Rather than doing a regular, broad look at the whole album though, I’m going to look at each track individually. That’s not to say that the album doesn’t have a cohesive feel or that I feel that the album as a whole is not more than the sum of its parts, ideas that I will discuss in my last paragraph. I just found that I had so much that I want to say about each track that it would feel incomplete not to write it all out. So, without further ado, here we go.

A Mis Enemigos (High Tide)

What an opener. Although it’s definitely not my favorite track on the album, it is a spectacular first track in the sense that it is a solid taste of what this album is going to sound like. Featuring a mean, catchy beat by Marmaduke, some great demonstration of Billy’s unusual flow and a taste of his lyrical genius, it perfectly introduces all the traits of a Billy Woods track while leaving plenty of room for the album to swell. Pretty much my only complaint about this track is the extended sample at the end. It’s not terrible, and it definitely fits for a certain amount of time, but I find that it kind of drags on and I start to wonder when it’s going to end after the first couple of seconds.

Favorite Moment/Part: The beat

Crocodile Tears

If you thought the previous track was raw and angry, wait until you hear Crocodile Tears. The production by Willie Green (featured 8 times on the album) is absolutely awesome: incredibly aggressive, very catchy, and original. And Billy Woods is absolutely pissed on this album, dropping some of his harshest and most direct criticisms as well as a great in-your-face hook. Lines like “The problem with the army is they wanna be the boss/the problem with the secret police is they’re like a dirty gun you can’t toss” or “32 bars on how to rob and kill your neighbors/still have the nerve to ask god to save you” really stick out as some of his best, not just on the track but on the album.

Favorite Moment/Part: Tied between the beat and the hook

The Man Who Would Be King

Literary References: The Song. Referencing Edgar Allen Poe and Rudyard Kipling as well as the Bible many times, this song is probably the most intellectual on this album. It also has a really dark hook that I really enjoy as well: “Take up your burden, the savage wars of peace / Fill full the mouth of famine and bid the sickness cease / And when your goal is nearest, the end for others sought / Watch locked and heathen folly bring all your hopes to naught.” This line is actually almost a direct quote from White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling. The only difference is that Rudyard's poem starts with the phrase “White man's burden” instead of “Take up your burden”. While I’ll admit that most of his lyricism goes over my head, I can feel the anger and thought Billy throws behind the words he’s saying. I’m not a huge fan of the beat, but it holds its own and Billy really kills it.

Favorite Moment/Part: the lines: “With that holy trinity, who can argue my divinity under two red suns / Return like Kipling’s dead son, summoned by monkey paw / A thousand Philistines slain with a donkey’s jaw”

Ca$h 4 Gold

Perhaps his most direct criticism, Billy Woods takes on a very specific group: the kind of man who visits strip clubs. With a trippy, almost sleazy beat, the song paints the ugly truth of what goes on in strip clubs. He criticizes them on many levels, from how they pay (“tossing my child support on stage”) to the lies they manage to convince themselves of (“disbelief suspension, pretending I’m rich and she’s twenty years old”), ultimately painting these men as possibly the most disgusting humans on the planet. I’m a fan of the ending hook as well: “make it rain on a slow night / Roxxane turns out, you gotta put on that red light / stimulating simulation, the simulac(??) is faceless / put her on stage, she knows the basics / the apes is impatient / (something else)”. Nothing in particular stands out as fantastic, but it’s just another great example of how much energy and emotion Billy puts into his music.

Favorite Moment/Part: the hook at the end

Body of Work (feat. Roc Marciano and Masai Bey)

My second favorite track on the album, right after the closer, The Wake. Another Willie Green produced track, the beat on here is (of course) absolutely nasty. It’s probably my favorite on the whole album, as a matter of fact. It’s also the first track to feature guests, and the result is somewhat mixed. While the first guest, Masai Bey, pretty much kills it, the next guest, Roc Marciano doesn’t quite live up to the quality already established. Roc brings a style pretty similar to Billy’s: very asynchronous and asymmetrical. He so matches Billy’s style that for a while I actually thought it was Billy rapping, for better or for worse. His lyricism is also very much up to par with Billy’s. He actually drops what might be my favorite group of lines on the album: “positive warns me of the deceptions of negative/Negative is trying to convince me to believe positive is a sedative/I pondered this and learned that they both are relative to life on earth/and sometimes feels like a repetitive burn/ashes to ashes, held captive in the urn”. Masai’s style is much more straightforward and much less interesting. He has two thoughts, and they rhyme so he says them. While I think his voice is pretty cool, I don’t find his lyrics interesting or his delivery passionate. His mediocre performance is more than made up for by the beat though. Evoking the image of a mine, the beat is composed of a halting, powerful bass line with this really neat float-y flute over the top. Combined with the female vocals on the hook, it creates a very catchy and interesting background to rap against, and both Masai Bey and Billy Woods take full advantage of it.

Favorite Moment/Part: Tied between the line mentioned above and the beat

The Foreigner

This a middle ground track for me. It's not bad by any stretch of the imagination, but it simply doesn't measure up to some of the other highs of the album. The lyricism, as usual, is probably my favorite part of the track: “that’s that honor amongst thieves / my enemy’s enemies are always well-received, served, ordeoureved / tricks up sleeves”. The gist of the track seems to be attacking hypocrites, and he certainly does it eloquently and passionately. The beat has a pretty mean bassline and some neat, kind of muted drums over which some dissonant strings play. It's a very enjoyable track, but the fact that I don't have much to say about it is perhaps the best indicator of how this track didn't really hit me like some of the other ones.

Favorite Moment/Part: the line mentioned above

Billy Cosby

The almost snarkily named Bill Cosby is one of the more unusual tracks on the album, and that’s certainly saying something considering that this is far from what might be considered a “normal” album. Spoken from the perspective of a man who failed to use protection and regrets it, this is another pointedly critical track. By spending time in the mind of this man, he points out all the ways this man has failed. While not quite as vicious as Ca$h 4 Gold, in my opinion, this track certainly brings it. It's also a bit of an oddity in the album, the only song clocking under 2 minutes. But it's length is not in any way a detriment. Every song has its own length and I definitely think the 1:50 of this track fits. It's also got a really neat beat with a repeating flowing piano arpeggio and some aggressive drums, again brought to you by the amazing Willie Green. This is kind of a sleeper track for me. I always kind of forget about it when listing my favorite tracks, but whenever I listen to it, I always have a moment where I realize that this track is actually really good.

Favorite Moment/Part: The beat, definitely

Freedman's Bureau (feat. Elucid)

For the sake of being blunt, this is one of my least favorite tracks on the album. The beat is pretty good, but nothing to phone home about, and it's probably the best thing about this track. The first verse, which is the guest Elucid, is delivered with this really raspy voice that tries to be a lot grittier than it is. His insistence on this delivery also seems to force him into a very unnatural, halting flow, which I'm not a huge fan of. And while I haven't sat down and parsed all of his lyrics, nothing sticks out to me when I listen to it. Then the chorus hits, and the beat shifts to something much simpler and less catchy than the verse beat. The only vocals on this part sound like they've been put through several filters, and have been dropped several octaves, again in an attempt to sound really gritty and mean that I'm just not a huge fan of. Luckily, the chorus only hits twice and Billy's verse, which hits right after the first chorus is as good as expected at this point. That's a pretty general theme on this album, actually. The parts of the songs that I don't like are always points where Billy isn't rapping. Unfortunately, there's a lot of time on this track where Billy isn't rapping. I do like this track, I guess. It just pales in comparison to many of the other songs on the album.

Favorite Moment/Part: The beat

Blue Dream (feat. L'Wren)

As an example of a track that Freedman's pales in comparison to, here's Blue Dream. What's interesting about this track is that I'm actually not a huge fan of Billy's flow through all of it, and the beat is definitely not one of my favorites. But the whole concept of the song, as well as the beautiful chorus really make it one of my favorite tracks. The first verse paints this picture of a relationship that seems to be going well. Lines like “It was like time didn't move for the count of one (one) two (two) / Then we're flying” and “Truth is when she around it's ill how words spill / But we don't have to say a thing just let that blue sing” make it seem like this relationship he's in is positive. Sure, there's some conflict because he doesn't want to give up weed for her, but the relationship itself is mostly painted positive. Until you get to the sample. Featuring a women yelling at a man about how he's “selfish, arrogant and so stupid”, this sample hits pretty hard, although not as hard as the chorus which drops right after. Featuring some very pretty vocals by L'Wren and pretty heartbreaking lyrics, this chorus really makes the song. The rest of the song lyrically doesn't thrill me. While Billy certainly is capable of expressing himself originally, the problem he's describing doesn't really strike me. But that chorus, and the shift in the beat that accompanies it, are really fantastic.

Favorite Moment/Part: The chorus- “You know you had me from the very start / And in my heart I thought we'd never part / Hazy days mix red and green / Purple nights of those would dreams”

DMCA

Just in case you thought Billy was getting soft with Blue Dream, he's back angrier than ever on DMCA. Focused on the topic of music tastes and practices amongst the population, he takes aim at music ADD (“30 days? If you're lucky, flavor of the week”) and pirating (“torrents got your whole album, and the instrumentals”) in a very catchy song. This song is possibly the best example of Billy's flow and rhythm, and the beat behind him is excellent. The production on this track is perhaps the most musical out of the album, featuring a melody played by a crisp, clean, finger-picked electric guitar and a neat bassline that meshes very well with the melody. Discussing the melody and the bassline about this song though is really missing the point. Looking big picture, this song is really one of the most complete in my opinion. Every part of it really meshes musically, Billy is on the top of his game lyrically and in his delivery and the samples used perfectly add to the atmosphere of the song. One of my favorite tracks.

Favorite Moment/Part: Gonna cop out here and just say the whole thing.

Pompeii

This track reminds me of “The Man Who Would Be King”, not in terms of the beat or any sort of musical similarity, but because I like this song for its lyrical content and social criticism more than I like it for its musicality. He drives home this idea of people using “following orders” as an excuse and really brings it to the people who use this excuse, absolutely laying into them for hiding behind these “orders” instead of taking any sort of real responsibility. He also gets into commentary on racism and white supremacy, talking about how the oppressors have changed their military uniforms for business suits. The chorus is pretty powerful, although I'll admit the language about the postmen goes right over my head. Other than that, this track really doesn't do too much for me. The beat is interesting, but lacks any of the catchiness that some of the other tracks have. Billy's flow is even more halting, personally a bit too much halting. It is not my least favorite track though, simply because the amount of meaning and anger he packs into it.

Favorite Moment/Part: The lyrical content

Duck Hunt

Really an interesting beat. Starting out with what sounds like audio pulled from the actual Duck Hunt, the main part of the song features some 8-bit and videogame-like sounds. And although I'll admit that I have no idea what the subject of this song is lyrically, the beat really holds it together. I think that confusion about what Billy's talking about here is my least favorite part of this track, and I'll willingly admit that probably has more to do with my own lack of intelligence than a lack of meaning put into the song. What kind of interests me is one line in the chorus that I can't help but construe as anti-DRM: “Yeah, it comes with the game but ain't a damn thing free”. While I'm sure there are a dozen other meanings that could come out of that, for some reason I hear it as anti-DRM. If it sounds like I'm BS-ing, it's because I kind of am. I find it hard to talk about this track because it's so middle ground for me. I really dig the beat, but other than that nothing sticks out as particularly good. That being said, I really can't find any complaints either. It's just a solid track, but nothing too special.

Favorite Moment/Part: The beat

Nigerian Email

Especially with the amount that “Freedman's Bureau” has grown on me, this is probably my least favorite, or second least favorite song on the album. The beat sounds disconnected and it commits a fatal flaw on a Billy Woods album: a large part of the song is spent without Billy rapping. As I mentioned above, there is pretty much nothing on this album done by Billy that I dislike and this song is no exception. I like his lyrics and his flow in the song, it's just that the rest of it doesn't seem to do him justice. The beat has this weird flute that floats above the rest of the beat without connecting to it solidly, and the rest of the beat feels sporadic and lacking solidity. The samples were kind of fuzzed out and had a good amount of reverb put on them, so understanding them is impossible and while some of them were still able to transmit emotion, most of them just kind of fell flat. Considering that my biggest complaint about the album as a whole is that it is simply too long, I would have liked to see this get cut or put into a bonus album or something. It just doesn't have enough emotional weight to feel like it deserves to be on the album.

Favorite Moment/Part: Billy's rapping, I guess

Pump Up The Volume (feat. L'Wren)

Unfortunately, this is the other contender for my least favorite track, although this one is much less subjective. While I have many complaints about the song, my biggest is how the chorus was layered on. I don't know if L'Wren was not around to record this in the studio, but there's an incredibly obvious volume and audio quality difference between Billy's rapping and the beat and her chorus and it is simply jarring. Every time the chorus hits, I feel like I just got slapped in the face. It is simply an unpleasant experience that has prevented me from enjoying the chorus in any way. That could be forgiven though, if the verses were absolutely killer. Unfortunately, they're really not. The beat feels awkward with some out-of-place background singing and a very static bassline. Regardless of what Billy might be saying, which I'm sure if passionate and relevant, I simply can't find myself forming any sort of attachment to this track because of these issues.

Favorite Moment/Part: I'm honestly not even sure.

Famous Last Words (feat. junclassic and MarQ Spekt)

Phew. We made it through the rough section of the album. It's all smooth sailing from here on out. This track might be the most normal on the album, taking much more of a bravado and bragging tone than many of the other tracks. The production is back up to standards with a really catchy beat that is built off of some head-nodding drumming and a heavy bassline and complemented on top by these sort of metallic synths. While it doesn't break quite the barriers that some of Willie Green's other tracks on the album do, it does the job of setting the appropriate tone. Only one of the guests actually drop a verse (MarQ Spekt) and it's perfectly functional. It's a bit more aggressive and shallow than much of Billy's stuff, but I dig his flow and style. The other guest, junclassic, drops the chorus in his deep, dark voice and it absolutely works. It sounds badass and it sounds heavy, both of which fit into the song perfectly. And of course, Billy kills it as well. His flow here is actually very normal. He fits into the beat more than he usually does, and while it perhaps makes the song less interesting, it certainly fits the tone, adding to the power and anger. His lyricism is, of course, brilliant and

Favorite Moment/Part: Tied between the chorus and the line “Shoot coward, you're only gonna kill a man”

Sour Grapes (feat. Elucid)

Pretty solid track. It's got a nice beat from A.M. Breakups, and it features Elucid again. The beat focuses on the drums, which lay down a catchy beat that some synths lay some interesting chords and hits behind. Elucid, the guest, has pretty good lyricism but his voice, like I mentioned above, is very scratchy and gruff, and it sounds to me like he's really forcing it. It works for the chorus, but I'm not a huge fan of his verse. Billy kills it as usual, but unfortunately he only has one verse on this track, which for almost 4 minutes features a surprisingly small amount of actual rapping. This track for me kind of like The Foriegner in that it feels like filler track. Again, a filler track by Billy Woods track is an amazing song overall, but it doesn't hit the same level of emotional power as a lot of the other tracks do.

Favorite Moment/Part: The chorus, “A day late and a dollar short / thanks for your support, yo let's pop this cork”

Human Resources

I'm a bit split on this track. There are a lot of parts that I really like, but on the other hand there are quite a few parts that I'm not a huge fan of. I really like the intro part, but I feel like it transitions into the full song really awkwardly. The intro part tends a lot more towards sad, while the regular song is a lot darker and more disturbing. And while I like most of the beat, the little pieces of female vocals that got stuck in there kind of rub me the wrong way. Some of the lyrics are absolutely amazing though, even more than usual. “the only problem with being your own god is you still gotta die” might be the best, although the whole song is sprinkled with very profound or even just really cool sounding lines. Not my favorite track, but it's pretty damn good.

Favorite Moment/Part: The line mentioned above, as well as the lyrics in general

The Wake

Goddamn. Where to even begin with this one? It's far and away my favorite track on the album, and probably one of my favorite tracks ever. The first time I heard it, on YouTube, I looped it for a straight 45 minutes. It's just so beautifully melancholy. The beat, again from Willie Green, features a simple, repeated piano line with some very hip-hop drums and a simple bass line underneath it. He also puts what sounds like either sneakers squeaking on a gym floor or some sort of whistle in the background that for some reason just screams sadness to me. Billy is at his least rant-y but most emotional, both lyrically and in terms of delivery. He seems to wander through his whole life in his mind, casting back to times that were mostly bad, and delivers some absolutely gorgeous lines. “10 years ago she was just some ho / 5 years after that, I'm in love / if you ask me today I could give a fuck” is quite possibly my favorite, although you could literally close your eyes and point to a line and I would love it. I actually named the blog I write after another amazing line in this song, “a dollar short and 24 hours late”. Ultimately though, there is really nothing that I can put into words that expresses how much this song hits me emotionally. There is no way to experience it other than to just sit and listen to it 3, 4, 5 times in a row and just letting the emotion soak its way into your ears.

Favorite Moment/Part: All of it

And there we have it. All 18 tracks. I certainly have my complaints, but this is one of my favorite albums of all time. What I think is really interesting about it is that it doesn't really have any sort of central theme other than Billy Woods. He manages to make these collection of tracks sound completely unified by injecting his passion and emotions into every track. That being said, I do feel that the album could have been a lot leaner. At 18 full tracks, it really drags on at times especially in the middle. Personally, I would have cut Freedman's Bureau, Nigerian Email, and Pump Up the Volume in an attempt to make this album a bit more punchy. While it's still a bit lengthy even without those tracks, I think the raw power of Billy Woods would be enough to tie it all together.  

My First Concert Experience

This Monday, I went to see George Watsky in concert at the Paradise Rock Club and it was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

For those of you who don't know him, George Watsky (known just as Watsky) is a rapper and spoken word poet from San Francisco, California. He just released an album, Cardboard Castles and is currently touring all across the country in support of it. The album, while not the greatest rap album I've ever heard (History Will Absolve Me has a pretty strong hold on that claim), is a very high quality album. It's catchy, with pretty solid production and a lot of incredible singles. What's most interesting about this album, and Watsky in general, is his ability to flip from deadly serious and deeply emotional to silly and borderline immature. But I digress. 

I went with a friend of mine from school, as well as a kid I met through theater who's in college and one of his friends. As we walked into the Paradise Rock Club, the first opener had already started. We walked over to the merchandise booth, bought what we wanted and started paying attention to the music. 

The concert opened with a DJ whose name I can't recall playing a set. It was okay, too brostep-y for my tastes but not terrible. After that, a neat hip-hop/ska band called I believe was name B-Kat played after, and got the crowd going a little bit more. They were a tad generic, but I'm an absolute sucker for horns and enjoyed their brief set. After that, Danny McClain sang a couple of covers in his heavenly voice with Pat Demetri (Watsky's guitarist) and Watsky's pianist whose name I didn't catch. After that, Dumbfoundead, who has been opening for Watsky on the whole tour, came on. The same DJ from before was producing for him, and I dug some of the stuff they were playing. He didn't entirely enthrall me, but tracks like Ghengis Khan were pretty mosh-ready. Nothing too profound seemed to come from him, but some of his tracks were pretty dope. Then Watsky came on.
While I can't remember for the life of me his entire hour and a half set, several moments really stuck out to me. The first was somewhere from halfway to three quarters of the way through the concert, when he went from Glowing Screens pt. 1, a catchy, hopeful tune into Tiny Glowing Screens pt. 2, a desperate, emotional spoken word poem and then right into Wounded Healer (Deer Tick Sample), an emotional song anchored by a really nice guitar part. These three songs right in a row was just such an emotional punch in the gut, in all of the best ways. What I love about relatively underground artists like Watsky is that you can feel and see the passion and emotion he empties into every word of these songs. He writes all his own song, and you can tell that he poured his heart out into these tracks. It was enthralling. 

The next moment that stuck out to me was his last song of the night, right before the encore. Watsky announced that because of the ordinance laws in Boston, they had to close down for the night and walked off stage. After a second of silence, he stormed back on, declared "But I forgot, f*ck the popo and give no f*cks" and launched right into the song IDGAF. Now, that might sound juvenile, and it totally is, but to a mostly young and countercultural audience (myself included), it was really powerful. What helped is that the song itself was one of the most pumped of the night, ending with Watsky crowd-surfing across the floor to the balcony, climbing up to the balcony and finishing the song then literally walking across the crowd back to the stage. It was absolutely nuts, and it was about to get a lot better.
The final part that struck me was the almost 10-minute long encore. After finishing IDGAF, Watsky kind of pulled the same trick he did before again, but was much less extreme about it. They started into the encore, which was just song after song after song. He has a lot of shorter tunes that he threw in here, as well as samples from longer ones. The whole band and Watsky barely paused for a breath as they barreled through all of the tracks, constantly building the whole time. Watsky started inviting people up on stage with him and the whole crowd was just totally bonkers. While I used to hate large crowds because I always felt my individuality was lost in them, here I allowed myself to completely meld into the screaming, jumping, dancing crowd. I was completely lost in the moment and it felt amazing.

I also got an incredibly dope t-shirt, so I'd call it ultimately an amazing night. 

Visual Literacy Blog

When Mr. Tallman told us that we had to do a visual literacy blog for homework, I knew immediately what I was going to do, and it's kind of cheating.
The show I'm currently working on is entitled "Red" by John Logan and it's about Mark Rothko. More specifically, it's about Rothko and his assistant Ken, but I digress. Mark Rothko is a rather controversial painter from the mid to late 20th century. While usually described as an abstract expressionist, he resisted any sort of classification of his work with vehemence. The painting you see below is one that exemplifies the style he came to be known for: large rectangular blocks of color. What's important to note is that these blocks are not solid, singular colors. The red shifts hue, with the black sometimes creating a darker shade than the area around it. Rothko's methodology involved painting massive amounts of layers, constantly creating slight adjustments in the shade until he thought it was right.

I chose this painting because of a theme in Rothko's words in the play. He finds life, emotion, and hurt (he was a bit masochistic) in the color red and the exact opposite in the color black. His big concern in the play, literally and metaphorically, was that the red would swallow the black. In this painting, you can pretty clearly see this happening. Not only does the black surround the red, as I mentioned above the black is also working its way into the red. It is stealing its vibrancy and its life and sucking it out.
The key to feeling the emotion in these paintings is to stare. To sit and to look at it for hours on end, with no other distractions, watching the red and the black combat each other. These colors are, in a strange way, not static. They move, they morph, and they fight each other.
Ultimately, the black wins though as Rothko killed himself in 1970 by slitting his wrists. In a final act of defiance, he tried to fight the black with his own blood, but it was too late.

An Interesting Trend

I've always been an avid reader. From when I learned to read all the way through to today, reading has always been a leisure activity that I put plenty of time into. Recently though, I have noticed something peculiar about my reading trends.
Through most of my childhood, I was a strong advocate of fiction. The ability to lose myself in another world fascinated me, and I consumed stories as fast as I could. The only significant non-fiction book I remember reading as a kid was a book about Shackleton, and that is such a fantastic story as to practically be fiction. On top of that, I always had a bit of a competitive attitude in that I would try to read the longest book I could. Not that I would go out of my way to complete a story I didn't like for the sake of bragging rights, but it always felt extra special if the book I had just finished was particularly long.
Neither of those statements hold true anymore. Recently, I haven't read a fiction book in years, and most of the reading I do day-to-day is very brief. For the most part, I've been reading blogs and journalism. My main source for this is actually my Twitter feed, where I follow organizations like Forbes Magazine, and people like Erik Kain or John Walker. Most of what I read on these sites involves happenings in the world, whether that's a political event, a new piece of tech, or a new video game and people's personal reactions to these happenings. I am fascinated now less by immersing myself in another world than I am by understanding this world and how people react to it. My interest in Psychology has replaced my interest in fantasy.
In fact, I recently picked up a fiction book I just bought from More Than Words bookstore in Boston during a sale they had where every book was a dollar, and I found that I simply could not read it. The book is "The Blind Assassin" by Margaret Atwood. Within several pages, there was intrigue, personal conflict, and mystery and I thought to myself "I don't need this". As a 17 year old trying to figure out how my own world and my own personal relationships work, the idea of immersing myself in someone else's problems is just not at all appealing.

Perhaps That Was A Controversial Claim

In a previous post, about Senioritis, I mentioned that I would rather be listening to music than doing homework. Not a particularly outspoken claim. What I think is perhaps a bit outspoken is what I said next: that I find listening to music to be an intellectual activity.
I'd like to come from three angles at prove this claim. First is a basic straightforward argument that music makes you smarter. The second argument is a very Stephen Johnson-esque argument, about how it helps me from a cognitive standpoint. The third focuses much more on the idea of emotional intelligence.
This first argument might be the hardest to sell. To help it go down easier, I'd like to emphasize the idea that different types of intelligence result from different types of music. For this argument, I'd like to focus specifically on the genre of rap. And not Kanye West or even Eminem style rap, but mostly underground, indie rap. Rap like Billy Words' "History Will Absolve Me" or Aesop Rock's "Skelethon",  both albums I've been very into recently. The intellectualism of both of these albums fall mostly in the interpretation of their lyrics, which are very often littered with literary references. Take for example, "The Man Who Would Be King" by Billy Woods. The chorus of the song is the third stanza from White Man's Burden by Rudyard Kipling, the title is a reference to a short story by Rudyard Kipling, and the whole song is filled to the brim with references to the Bible, Edgar Allen Poe, and Rudyard's life and other works. As someone who is very interests in that album,  I find it worthwhile to look into these references, which included reading White Man's Burden. Undoubtedly, this exploration of his references has made me a smarter person, both sociologically and in terms of my knowledge of literature. Another great example of this is "Zero Dark Thirty" by Aesop Rock. While not quite as full of literary references, the Rap Genius of the song reads like a research paper. One lyrics generated an explanation that took up more than the screen. He also makes lots of references to culture around the world. Not only do I find myself becoming more aware of the world around me, I am forced to try to understand and interpret the meaning they're trying to put in the lyrics.
Which brings me to my second argument. While we tend to think of listening to music as a time for relaxation, our minds are never really relaxing. As I think Stephen Johnson proved pretty well,  our minds are working hard even when we have no conscious idea that it is. While listening to music, you are not only analyzing and attempting to understand lyrics, you are identifying and predicting patterns,  as well as noticing breaks to patterns that had been previously established. While these mental workouts manifest themselves as an experience of pleasure, they are nonetheless mental workouts, and they're even more pronounced for someone like me who listens to music avidly and is always trying to expose myself to new genres, artists, and songs.
Finally, we get to what is perhaps the most obvious intellectual benefit of music: the strengthening of emotional intelligence. Music, at least for me, has a power emotionally that very few mediums have. While I've watched my fair share of emotional movies or shows and played my share of emotional video games, there really isn't anything that can touch me like a song can. And when music does touch me significantly, it's not an effect that lasts only as long as the song or album. The music forces me to be more reflective of myself, and often helps me to become more aware of myself emotionally. This self-awareness is an intelligence that I think our culture heavily de-emphasizes. The idea that emotions are weak and that the biggest demons in one's life are always going to be real-life obstacles. I have never subscribed to either of those ideas, and music has helped me explore the strengths of my emotions as well as overcome the obstacles my own mind puts up.

Anthony Fantano, Everyone

I mentioned him briefly in my last blog, but I'd like to introduce everyone (especially Matt Luongo and Keving Counterman, fellow music aficionados) to one of my favorite people on the Internet, Anthony Fantano (alternatively, go here). He is my personal top authority on music, not to mention he's just incredibly adorable. Now, that's not to say I view his word as Gospel and change my opinion to fit his, but I generally find his opinions to be incredibly well-informed and his explanations of those opinions to be very eloquent.
I linked this one before, but I just want to embed my personal favorite video of his right here:

Hopefully after watching this, you'll understand why I enjoy this man's opinions so much. He's eloquent, incredibly intelligent, and amazingly open-minded. If you scroll through his reviews, he reviews and enjoys every genre of music from death metal to rap to soft rock. He's also adorable and incredibly funny. You don't see it here, but in many of his other videos his alter-ego Cal Chuchesta makes an appearance in what is always a good time.
If you're at all interested in music, I would highly recommend looking into him in greater depth. Some of my favorite albums of all time from "History Will Absolve Me" by Billy Woods, a hard-core, underground rapper to "BBNG2" by BADBADNOTGOOD, an intense jazz-rock band. I'm currently making my way through his top 50 albums of 2012, and I have yet to find one I don't enjoy.

Working On Something Different

Hello, followers (if you still exist), I have a request. As hopefully most of you know by now, I've been writing poetry for my senior project. However, most of it has been short, very in-the-moment stuff that I'm not really willing to edit because I feel like editing it would destroy any attempt to capture the frame of mind I was in when i wrote it. However, recently I wrote a much longer piece that's much more spoken word than anything else I've written, and I'd like you to take a look at it. Let me know what you think!

it's as if

my mind as an emotional and psychological entity is a giant puzzle sitting on a table in the middle of a room

and when I'm ecstatic, I throw pieces in the puzzle without much regard for whether they're correct, just knowing that it feels good to put pieces down

and when i'm upset, one of two things happens

rarely, someone has already come along and knocked some of the pieces off

more often I stop putting pieces on

and I stop and I look at the pieces I've placed and a little bit of doubt wiggles its way into my mind

perhaps that last piece I placed was not quite right, I think, and before I know what i'm doing, I have pulled that piece out

but the doubt doesn't stop there and I start pulling out pieces left and right, starting from the peripherals and moving my way inwards in a vicious cycle that ends with me flipping the table, retreating to the corner and pretending to be dead

pretending not to feel

pretending that I didn't need that goddamn puzzle to survive, to exist

the longer I sit, the more I realize the absurdity of that idea

as I resign myself to the necessity of finishing the puzzle, I pick myself up and walk over to the table

as I pick it back up I notice something

although I tore through the outside edges of my puzzle, the center never got touched

the center has a picture of me, surrounded by my family, surrounded by my friends

in the background is my beautiful house situated right next to my wonderful school

and while there might be a hole where my heart is, underneath that is a picture of me, standing on the shoulders of my closest friends reaching for something that I know I will find eventually

and while there might be a hole where my future is, in this case the emptiness doesn't indicate the lack of something, instead it indicates the lack of nothing

as I feel the power of that center filling me, I begin placing pieces of the puzzle

not with the frenetic randomness of before but with a calm, cool confidence

not confidence that I will never pull pieces off again; that would be naive

I put pieces down with a confidence that the next time this cycle repeats itself, there will be more pieces at the end than there are now

If you're interested in what I'm working on, I've been throwing my favorites up on this blog.

I'm Running Into Some Trouble

I've been having issues with my senior project recently. As I mentioned in a previous post, I've been writing poetry for my senior project.
The issue is, I can't seem to find the inspiration to keep writing. Part of it is just falling out of the habit, especially after a period of sickness that lasted WAY too long very recently. But part of it is a lot deeper, and it's concerning me. Just like my recent dearth of blogs, I'm finding that I'm very rarely putting stuff down for poetry, especially compared to the rate that I've put them down in the past.
Ultimately, it's coming down to a problem that I think a lot of us seniors face: the so-called disease of Senioritis.
What I think is interesting about how Senioritis has manifested itself in me is that I haven't stopped doing my work. Actually, my latest report card was pretty damn great. It's less about doing the work than the attitude in which it is done for me. Rather than attacking work with the curiosity and intellectual passion that I usually do, I'm finding myself unwilling and unmotivated to complete the work. I do it, eventually but I find that I'd much rather be watching Anthony Fantano, listening to new music or talking to friends. The big problem is that I can't convince myself anymore that those activities are a waste of time. Music is something I really enjoy, and it's going to be a big part of my life for the rest of my life. On top of that, I genuinely consider listening to music to be an intellectual activity. I'm a big believer in the Triangle of Health, so I can't convince myself that bonding with them and creating memories and experiences is a waste of time.
What I am having an easier and easier time convincing myself of is that my classes are a waste of time. Now, don't think that this is just a kid complaining about doing work. I have, for most of my life, been very much aware of the incredible value of education. I've always been curious, and I've always enjoyed class and felt that it was well worth my time. I'm serious, I promise. But recently I feel like most of my classes are just not worth it. Certain classes, like Lang and Java, still interest me and are definitely teaching skills and ways of thinking that I will use for years, but others classes don't feel like they're teaching me anything worthwhile, directly or indirectly. Usually, I'm able to justify a class that I know I'm not going to use later in life with the idea of collateral learning, but recently I don't really seem to be picking up any skills that would be useful from many of my classes.
I'm pretty much just really ready for college, I guess.

Thinking About Swearing

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about swears and how they are used effectively. What got me thinking about the topic was this song by local band Vundabar.  At one point in the song, lead singer Brandon Hagen drops the F-bomb, and I think he does it very effectively. Not only have I never heard him swear on any of his songs before, I don't even think I've ever heard him swear before.

That's the first lesson here: scarcity is the key to swears maintaining their power. It sounds obvious, but I think it's a lesson worth repeating. Too often, I think, you hear a song (as much as I hate to single out certain genres, this really happens more with rap) or hear someone on the street trying to sound tough and they use more swears in their sentence than they do regular words. That doesn't make you sound tough or edgy, it just makes you hard to understand (as is probably rather obvious, this sort of behavior sort of aggravates me). On top of that, it sounds really immature, like you've just discovered the word and are overusing it out of novelty.

The other important part of making your swearing effective is for it to sound authentic. A bit less scientific than just counting how often you swear, this is more about context. The swear should fall at the height of your speech/song/writing, not at the bottom. If you keep the number of swears down, the amount that each swear sticks out increases. It marks the section that it falls in as important or somehow different from every other section, and if the section isn't somehow different or important, the swear would sound way out of place. Another way to indicate this is a change in the surroundings of the swear. This is demonstrated really well in the song I linked above, where the swear is accompanied by a snare hit and a moment of silence from the guitar. This helps the swear stick out and land that much harder.

Really, using a swear is just the same as using anything else of any power: moderation is best, and pay attention to the context.  

"Graduation" Rhetorical Essay

Hey followers (if there are any left...), I just finished up my Rhetorical Analysis essay for "Graduation" by Maya Angelou, but I'm really not feeling what I've written. Any suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated.

There is no doubt that Maya Angelou is a fantastic writer. But even by her standards, “Graduation” is a fantastic piece of writing. Part of what makes it great is her command of rhetorical strategies. From her beautiful imagery to the building in the final paragraphs, this essay’s appeals and language really get you caught up in it.

                The essay starts off very informative and impersonal. Introducing you to the broad situation without revealing her part in it, Maya builds one’s interest and emotional involvement in the whole situation by introducing very accessible emotions. Anticipation, excitement, excessive pride are all emotions she references. On top of that, the situation (graduation) is one that almost every single person is familiar with, even further building the connection of the reader. The shift in paragraph six is significant as it introduces her specific role, as well as her specific emotions. As a primary source, her ethos goes through the roof. She also focuses much more on her internal feelings than the events going on around her. By referencing the future often, (“I was going to be lovely”), she builds the anticipation for the even that is coming, drawing the reader in even more. She draws out this section of preparation in order to build that anticipation even more.

                Ultimately though, her best use of rhetoric comes in the last several pages, from the beginning of Mr. Edward Donleavy’s speech through to the end. Her word choice during Mr. Donleavy’s speech becomes especially vitriolic: “I willed the offender to immediate death” or “The man’s dead words fell like bricks around the auditorium and too many settled in my belly.” In this section, she absolutely rips this man apart, describing with vivid detail how all of the energy, anticipation and excitement that had been building up throughout the beginning just got sucked out of the auditorium. After that is the build that is Henry Reed’s valedictorian speech. Relying on a song packed with pathos, the “Negro national anthem”, Reed manages to push all of the lost energy back into the ceremony, effectively rescuing the graduation. What is particularly effective is the extreme dichotomy between Maya’s language before and after his speech. Before his speech, she borders on the nihilistic. “It was all for nothing”, she says. After though, her language swings all the way back around the pendulum to extreme positivity: “We were on top again.”

                By leading you by the hand through her emotional journey during her graduation, Maya ultimately manages to get across the point that she has tried her best to convince the reader of: no matter what is done to try and keep them down, the people of Stamps will not be held down by a condescending, pretentious white man. They are made of stronger stuff, and the emotion poured out by Maya in this essay drive that point home.