If I could love her, could she forgive me for her bondage?

I don't remember any of them having any rhythm. Not a single one. 

They were just on display, vaguely keeping time to foreign music. They would have moved differently if there was something that sounded more like home blasting through the speakers.

But there they were, on stage for me to see. Young bodies of various shapes, clad in ill-fitting lingerie; young bodies heavily perfumed to mask their musk; young bodies smuggled, were now for rent. 

I try to imagine the conversations that led them that club. What lies were they told? Who sold them out? Was this arrangement what they expected it to be? Was this the price they were willing to pay for a chance to make it to the promised land?

The music in the club was for me; it was out of context, sometimes gangsta as fuck. That they tried to dance to it was absurd. 

I came from slaves, now I sat, an abettor of slavery. 

I was the distinguished gentlemen in the room, inspecting flesh for its fitness to the task. They moved; I judged and drank.

Could love emerge from such a dark place?

Love was her only hope. Breath-taking beauty with sad eyes, she tried to sell love in exchange for a fresh start. 

If I could love them...if I could love her, could she forgive me for her bondage? 

The scene felt like an alternate reality. The only thing that anchored the experience to earth was the music. 

As dark as the scene was there were authentic moments of shared joy. That's how I saw it at the time at least. But how could I know;  maybe hers was a sadness without reprieve.

Even if the girls...the girl, didn't know how to move to the music, sometimes it moved her. And that moved me. 

It was in the music that both enslaver and enslaved found, for the briefest of moments, escape and humanity. 

If you ever find yourself in a place this dark, I hope you recognize it for what it is and quickly reconnect with your humanity.

Today's playlist starts with a bounce reminiscent of the early 1990's. A reinterpretation plays gangsta lyrics against a Jodeci-esque R&B instrumental. The journey eventual shifts into a dark and strange place; a rebirth into parallel plane where you have to remind yourself that love still exists. 

The Work of Art

Inspiration is like a drug;  we can become addicted to it.

Under the influence of inspiration our aspirations are grand. Our vision expands and we can see ourselves achieving great and wonderful things.  We build cathedrals and monuments and grand art that we hope will inspire or strike awe in others. 

Awe is the most powerful form of inspiration you can breathe in. Awe is the aim of religious art and experience; it arrests you and imprints your psyche .

But what happens when the imprint of inspiration fades and you are stuck in your day-to-day where the actual work and the living happens?

Along with the tales of awe and wonder that fill religious stories are the stories of discipleship. Discipleship is about life in the middle; about living between the miracles. 

Discipleship is the work that happens when the light is dim and the inspiration has faded. When all of the energy and excitement has left the room. The spark has flamed out and you are left with the task of bringing something new into the world. 

It is in these moments that you have to grind. Keep doing the work of art. 

The work of art has little to do with inspiration,  more to do with discipline: the discipline to work out the problems that arise in inspiration's wake rather than sitting and waiting for the next dose of inspiration.

(Maybe you can get a tiny dose to hold you over through these sounds) 

The next inspired idea may be for a phase of work you are not prepared for (because you have been bull shitting) or it may be for a totally new thing. Inspiration follows engagement. If you are not engaged and invested in your work you end up with a life littered with incompletes. 

A life like mine;  a series of beautiful beginnings, of best intentions, of works in limbo all tugging away at my conscious. 

The work of art requires that you inhabit the present moment and attend to the task at hand;  to stop pretending you don't know what must be done simply because you don't feel like doing it. 

The work of art is more grit than glory and you have to fall in love with THAT part--the solitary part, when it's just you and your discipline. So that when inspiration returns it won't be wasted on yet another beautiful beginning. 

Naked Violence and Depravity

When I thought I needed time and maybe some practice, what I really needed was something more like an exorcism. 

I was possessed by a demon of wackness. I needed to violently expel it from my system. Wackness doesn't taste as good coming back up as it does going down. 

It tastes like candy going down.

Bubble gum.  

Even though wackness is floating in the air there is no reason to be overcome by it. We can prevent it from entering our system by being intentional about ingesting other stuff and by working deep.

Get beyond the point where you are just playing around and really get serious about mastering your craft.

The wackness comes in while we are zoned out. When we fiend for stimulation because we are addicted to it. We take in all sorts of wackness, then we sit down to make something wack as fuck. 

So what is wackness? Wackness is the artificial. It is the plastic universe. It is the sensational, the empty. It is naked violence and depravity. It is our rendition of somebody we try to be but never can.

It is our compromise.

I am bound to put out a playlist that is wack. Maybe I have already done it. But it is not this one. Even the shorter pieces work deep enough to get beyond any hints of wackness. Some express gorgeous sound design. 

I try to be careful what I take in, but it's hard. If I jump on Facebook to try to connect with distant friends I am going to come across some undeniable wackness and hate. 

But scrolling is addictive. The only way to work through is to try immerse yourself somewhere else. Go deep and fill your mind with a string a consecutive, connected thoughts. Step out of the stream of three second episodes on your timeline and cultivate the ability to concentrate.

Resist distraction with all your might. I mean...take a 30 minute break to check out this playlist of course, but when it is time to get to work, dive in. 

Beneath the surface of the wackness you might find something worthwhile.

Just Lost Enough to be Beautiful

Balance is the one of the most pervasive myths on the planet, at least the way that is understood by most people. 

While we might envision balance as stillness and poise, it is achieved through motion. Because everything is moving...the planet is zooming through the cosmos...you can only achieve balance through motion.

You feel out of balance when you are moving too far away from center, but center itself is not stationary. When you are close to center you have to adjust and move to stay near it. 

We are made to move. The only question is which direction. 

In this list we start with some strict groves. The drums drive in the way that you would expect and the rhythms and synths and samples dance around them nicely. 

Then we get lost for a minute. We have sound without apparent structure. Sound that dances freely. You might not fully understand what you are hearing. I hope you can appreciate it though. It's beautiful.

The most beautiful parts of art and life are the parts that move off the path...not so far as to be totally lost...just far enough to feel lost. Far enough to tamper with the illusion of safety. 

You are not safe. And that is ok. 

The Love Song I Never Made

I always used to put an eccentric twist on the lyrics of every so-called love song I pretended to write. 

The straight-forward story of two people discovering a mutual interest in one another, then pursuing that interest through a series of conversations and tactical maneuvers never seemed remarkable enough for me to recount it through song. 

I masked sexuality in metaphor, obscure innuendo and plausible deniability. Sexuality didn't exists in the light. The words of the songs that I pretended to write could mean any number of things. 

I was trying to hide. And hiding never makes for good art. You can never fully connect with an someone through a veil. 

Some writers and artists suffer because they lack the life experience to really make something that is powerful and moving. I didn't have that problem. 

When I was pretending to write about love and sex I was immersed in a world of sensuality and lust and infatuation. All of the stuff that makes for your perfect modern sex ballad.

I would not have to rely on my vivid imagination or my deepest fantasies to pull together the imagery for my songs. I was living the life. I could have simply made a song about what happened the night before and it would have worked. 

I couldn't do that. I didn't want to go on record as being the type of guy who would be doing the things that I was doing then. I could be the "poet" and hint at the act and experience of sex and tie to "universal energy"... or some other bullshit 

I was hung up. Maybe I still am. 

How hard is it to simply speak your truth through your work? To not be so full of shit all the time? To just tell her that you are just trying to fuck if that is, in fact, the case?

The "hang-up" plays out in creative work when we engage in approval seeking rather than allowing the work to become what it is trying to become. It is okay (and sometimes necessary) to make stuff to spec. You gotta eat.

But you also have to make stuff for self, for the sake of your truth, for the sake of your growth. Whatever you do...don't let lies creep into the work you do for you!

The way I experience love is too real to sing about. I had to try; the words didn't matter. I could have been saying anything. As long as I was allowing myself to feel the experiences authentically, the people could feel me. 

Since I fancy myself a writer, I put lot of weight on the value of my words. But when it comes to expressing stuff like love, the best any of us can do is to pretend.
 

The Storm and the Stagger

I felt the Stagger on the walk south on Patterson Park Ave. 

The Stagger: the first indication that I have pushed myself to the point of exhaustion. My mind racing, filled with ideas and obligations, my body unable to keep up. 

What does a racing brain sound like?  Like a collection of experiments that yielded unexpected outcomes. That's what this playlist is like.

Experiments don't fail because they give us results we don't expect. What we actually get can be so much better.

I ended up sitting out by the water, hoping to offset the blur in my brain with the calm ripples of the bay. 

I was not alone. The rats were there, and the lovers, and the smokers. It's a good idea to smoke weed by the water. 

I blacked out for a moment (two hours, actually). The first of the giant raindrops hitting my face woke me. 

I had enough time to get to a bus stop before the torrents fell. The storm was magnificent. I felt the spray as the wind whipped against the plexiglass shelter, but the rain did not fall on me. So I could stay there. 

The Stagger is relentless. Even if you are sitting it can get you. The world goes out of focus; you shake yourself, try to fix your gaze. My previous blackout was not enough to satisfy the Stagger. 

The storm had cleared the streets and provided me the shelter of solitude.

Fade out. 

Fade in. 

This Playlist is dedicated to regaining consciousness in an unfamiliar place and realizing that you are still ok. 

Checking Out of the Asylum

I wanted to dance when I was a little kid. Every little kid wants to dance. But I didn't really have a venue for it. (Unless you count church...and that is a different type of dancing and a different conversation.)

The idea of partying and clubbing was really off the radar for me for all practical purposes until I grew all the way up and left home. 

I went in the Army and I went to Germany. 

It didn't matter to me that the music was different than I imagined myself dancing to. I went out. I danced. You could find me in a club, stone sober at 4 AM in a sweat-drenched T-shirt, picking up whatever the DJ put down.  

As much as I had come to enjoy Hip Hop and all of its close cousins by this point, I was turned off by the madness that had emerged around it. The culture that surrounds Hip Hop sometimes is unsavory. As emotionally powerful as the music can be when it is at its best, it goes through phases when the dominant voices in the game spread ignorance and insanity. 

(Maybe it's always like that. Maybe the only way to dominate in a world gone mad is to be the maddest of them all.)

In the discotheques where I spent so many nights while I lived in Germany the only context for the music was the club itself. There was no message and agenda except to dance. There were no words that I could understand, just a driving beat and in invitation to come into the moment. 

Hip Hop would eventually catch my attention and creative energy again. I entered the mad house where materialism is disguised as aspiration; misogyny is disguised as sexual freedom, and violence is the only source of power. 

It's a mad house of made up stories and stories that make us up. 

It's sexy and seductive-- the madness usually is. Sometimes you have to check out of the asylum. 

These days I spend most of my time standing at the gates of the asylum. Not close enough to make out all the lyrics, but I can see the movement of the bodies. From a distance it looks like they are doing the Nay Nay. And I can feel the beat. That's enough. 

Most rappers need to shut the fuck up anyway. 

This playlist mirrors my journey from the dance club back to the edge of the asylum.