False Starts

I have to address the irony that occurred as I began writing this post. As you can see, the title is "False Starts." On my first go I tried to upload the image and everything froze up. So I had to start over again. 

I am writing this on a Monday morning, which many people consider to be the start of the week. 

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I took about a 30 minute break; dodging work (false start).  I fired up my snapchat (geradforte) and one of my daily contacts sent a picture of herself, fake on the verge of tears with the caption, Monday...Back to work.

I felt a little sad that she regards the activity occupies a huge chunk of her time, attention, and energy with such dread. Even sadder as I realized this it the reality for most people. We need cycles and rhythms in our lives so to help us make sense of things.  But this "false" start of the week on Monday is clearly a broken concept.

I have opted out of it personally (though not in a particularly healthy way...I generally work everyday). But as a result of my always on schedule, here is another false start for you...I need a nap before I can finish this. 

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It's like seven hours later as I am wrapping this post. I swear it was not my intent to have this thing be so choppy. I didn't set out to make a concept piece about false starts but that is what this has become so...let's just roll with it. 

The idea that I was struggling to uncover was something about the artificial way that we chop up time and the anxiety we invite as a result. Like how the dread of Monday robs us of joy on Sunday night or has us getting obliterated on Saturday.

I honestly can't imagine living for the weekend. I can't imagine spending well over half of my waking hours emotionally checked out from the work that I am doing. 

When you are watching the clock you are not fully engaged in work. All those artificial concepts that we build around time disappear when we become one with the task. You become unaware of how long something takes or the amount of effort or energy required to achieve results. 

You just go.

When you are creating in the zone someone may have to pull you away from your work, kicking and screaming, to get you to stop. You can't always get in that zone, but when you get there, try to ride it out as long as you can. 

I don't know the stories behind the tracks on this list, but I am familiar with the ridiculous hours spent in studio sessions, most of them fruitless. And then...a special moment happens and everything comes together almost like magic. 

The ideas just spill out of you. 

There are equivalent experiences in almost any type of work you can imagine. You get lost and time disappears. 

You just go. 

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So if I happen to spend 18 straight hours on a project, don't feel sorry for me. If I happen to work through the weekend, don't worry about me. Chances are I'm floating; my struggle, consistency and earned skill has earned me a magic carpet ride. I am dancing with the muse.

What appears to be suffering is actually pure bliss. If I invest this rare energy wisely something truly special can come of it. 

Don't let the clock rob you of your chance to take that ride. You can't wait to start when inspiration strikes. You have to show up anyway. But when it does strike, even if it is "quitting time" on Friday night...

You better work.

If she is with you now (your inspiration, your muse) let this playlist serve as serenade.

The Downtime Dilemma

We get spoiled by how easy it is to get work done with the aide of technology. 

I have a variety of different projects going on and there is no way I could manage without the software tools and services that I rely upon. This morning, one of the tools was down for maybe an hour. 

Soundcloud. 

I check Soundcloud even before I check email. It is a central part of my daily work (obviously). If it is not working what do I do?

As a creative person, the degree to which I rely upon an external tool to do my work, I make myself vulnerable to the reliability and availability of that tool. 

The tools that have the biggest impact on our productivity are sometimes the most fragile. And because these tools are so powerful we become increasingly dependent upon them. 

The primary tools of a creative person exist in her own body. The hand, the ear, the eye, the mind. Everything starts there. External tools are secondary and can sometimes interfere with deep learning and mastery if they enable you to skip too many steps in a process. They can also remove the need for the repetition required to drive skills into the body.

Once you own a skill you can and should leverage every tool available to multiply your effort. But if you wake up tomorrow with the bare minimum required to exercise your craft, could you do it?

Are you so committed to the nitty-gritty elements of your craft that you will do it "free-hand" if necessary?

Can you be taken out of the game by a glitch?

If you are a musician, you need an instrument to produce your work. But what if you had to downgrade? Or you had to make do with a "less than optimal" version of your instrument? What if you had to bang on a table instead of a drum machine?

As you ease into this playlist try to imagine the technology aided elements of the songs stripped away. Listen to the underlying musical principles, the richness of the rhythm composition, the chord progressions. Can you sense the spirit and energy that went into track? 

People who question the artistic merit of electronically produced music miss the point.

True; if the artists featured here didn't have the tools available that they used to make these tracks, the tracks would not sound same. But they still would express the creative intent and earned skill of the artist behind it. 

If all the systems went down, we would be listening to these same artists make music out whatever happen to be lying around.

Love Lust and Connection in the Age of the Complicated Status

What does it mean if you have don't know where you stand, or if you can't really describe it and you have to describe your relationship status as "Complicated". 

Maybe it just means that you are a human. The realities of your life don't fit neatly in a box. It is hard enough to figure our own shit out. Then you bring another human being into the mix and it can get pretty messy. 

Are you cool with the mess?

Despite our best attempts to present a clean and polished version of ourselves to the world, complete with mood lighting, filters, high angles, duck faces, best-life-ever social streams...deep down we are full of shit. 

Don't worry, everybody else is too. So relax and don't worry about trying to compare yourself. 

The gig is to figure what kind of masterpiece you can assemble out of the messy stream of experiences and circumstances of you call LIFE. 

How much of it are you willing to own?

HINT: The more of it you are willing to own, the greater your chances of making an authentic connection through the work that you do, the service your render, the art you make, and in the relationships you are trying to build. 

So this playlist has some songs (starting about halfway in) that address a variety of different relationship concerns. Maybe the artists were processing feelings through the work. And maybe you can use the music to process yours. 

Maybe not...

But at least you get to experience a view of love, lust, and connection in the era of the complicated status. 

Starting With a Sketch

Abandoned potential.

Maybe the artist didn't have the guts to see it through. Maybe she lost the vision for the work. Maybe he forgot what he was trying to say. Maybe the work was never supposed to be finished. 

Some work is just a part of a discovery process. You work on something to learn. The seeds of your next idea are born in your incomplete works, drafts and sketches. 

The false starts, incompletes drafts and demos are a valuable part of the process as long as they don't become the entire process.  Sometimes it is cool to share the drafts...they may inspire someone else to pick up on the work. 

The problem is when you draft and never complete. And you cop out with some bullshit story about a creative choice to leave the work where it is. Don't kid yourself. What really happened is the work presented a problem that you weren't ready to work through. And you abandoned it. 

So this playlist contains a few rough cuts, drafts, and ideas that are not completely realized as well as a few polished pieces.  In any case, I am familiar with most of the artists, I know they can finish work. 

Finishing is a habit and a skill I have to continue to work on.

It is easy to hide behind a work in progress and derive pleasure from imagining what can become of it. It is easy to get lulled into a sense of satisfaction by potential. 

The sense of the possible in your work can fuel your motivation, but it can also be a seductive distraction that keeps you away from the hard work of bringing the work to the world. The emotional payoff of envision something as done is remarkably similar to actually getting it done. 

The spark of excitement that comes when an idea first hits the page, the screen, the canvas is only a clue that you might be on to something.

Congratulations. Now let's see what you can do with it. 

Sandwiches

The sandwich is one of my favorite inventions in the history of time. 

It's portable and almost always appropriate. But what makes a sandwich? The bread? The stuff in the middle?

The heart of this playlist...the meat of the sandwich is, classic, boom-bapish Hip-Hop. I almost said "pure" but to call it that would be to throw shade on the rest of the list. (I am feeling all of the joints, else why would I collect them)

When you hear it you will see what I mean. 

So on the edges, the bread of the list if you will, I touch on some joints that are a bit more progressive, or a bit more pop, or futuristic. How ever you want to call it. 

Makes a tasty lunch in my opinion.  

It is worth while to experiment with different flavor combinations. If not in the same track, maybe during the same sitting. You will begin to see some connections and hear how one style enhances the other. And perhaps deepen your appreciation for the possibilities that spring from a single source. 

Hip Hop.

Pete Rock Dropped Today and Why I Care

I'm clearly old af.

Because I wrecked my mom's whip and Pete Rock and CL Smooth were on the radio, "Reminiscing" and shit. 

And it wasn't on a Throwback Thursday. And it wasn't on a classic Hip Hop channel on satellite. The joint was fresh out and I was almost a grown-ass man. 

I had not been listening to Hip-Hop regularly for long at the point. I was one of those pretentious teenage jazz-snobs. The music was not "sophisticated" enough for me in the earlier phases of the game. 

But I was getting into it. And I played saxophone, so I appreciated the saxophone sample in the iconic T.R.OY. 

T.R.O.Y. was playing when that chick backed out of her driveway onto Wayne Memorial Drive outside Goldsboro. I clipped the back corner of her car and hit the ditch. The impact was just enough to deploy the air-bags on my mom's Dodge Shadow. Airbags were sorta new-fangled back then; they smacked me in the face pretty hard. The fumes from the propellant stung my nose.

Because Pete Rock's sound is endemic of the Hip Hop that dominated the Golden Era, I experience the violence and energy of the music in a different way. The intensity and heat of a certain flavor of Hip Hop slows down time for me--pulls me into the moment. 

The thump-bounce explodes through my psychology like post-trauma. So when someone says..."Yo son I feel that shit". In my mind, I'm like--"No, nigga...I feel that shit." 

Has the game passed Rock by? Who knows. I don't expect to hear anything like this on the radio or anything. But there will always be a place for it.

This post was written under the influence of Petestrumentals 2

Bags of Bags

I was up in Aberdeen a couple weeks ago at the train station. A Vietnam Vet came and sat beside me on the bench out by the tracks. He wasn't going anywhere. He was among the crowd that tended to hang around there. An odd collection of day-drunks and so-called derelicts. 

My people.

He was carrying a beat up Nike duffle inside a reusable burlap-ish grocery bag. He said he was delivering the bag to Melvin on behalf of his mother, who was either ancient or only existed in his damaged mind. 

I asked him "Who's Melvin?

He replied, "You don't know him."

The bags were props that allowed him to sit, unquestioned at the station and drink his beer from an aluminum water bottle (another prop). The bottle had the name of some drug brand or health-care system on it.  

His conversation let me know he was not what most people would describe as "well", but he had assembled all the props that he could muster to obscure his unwellness. He was aware enough to try blend in but maybe not quite "well" enough to pull it off. 

Made me think about all the props that we carry around; all the things that only serve to manage the impressions that other people have of us.