Right now, stop and ask yourself this question: "what kind of world do I want to live in?" We are writing tomorrow's history right now, all of us, together.
I want to live in a world where every damn time I turn on a tv or a radio, there's not someone coming at me with a message that tries to manipulate me by showing me some cleverly conceived way of rationalizing hate for others into love of myself and my family.
I want to live in a world that values education so much that it is freely available to everyone uniformly.
I want to live in a world that simply doesn't give a damn about anyone's personal life, because doing so would just be rude.
I want to live in a world where we can stop trying so hard to take advantage of each other (or kill each other for that matter).
I want to live in a world where I can believe tomorrow will be better than today.
For better or worse, we are all stuck down here at the bottom of this gravity well together. Every last human that ever was ... and the craziest thing about it is that there is nothing standing between us and that world. Nothing but ourselves.
I started this beat back when I was in the hospital recovering from some "serious biznizz". That was almost 3 years ago, now. It's hard to believe it's been that long; the whole episode has cast such a long shadow.
I'd brought my laptop and a tiny little midi controller and I was doodling around trying to keep my mind off the "biznizz" at hand.
I was on some industrial strength pain medication.
Several, actually, but eventually the one that worked the best settled out of the mix and that was "Toradol". When they came in with a syringe of that, I was headed down to la-la land for sure. It was down there in that deep medicated fog that I came up with the little sinusodial arp line. That was about all I was capable of at the time, but I did remember to hit record. Of course, that's where the beat got it's name.
We live within a bottomless ocean of loops. Repeating patterns echoing through our history; ebbs and surges, crashing against the beach of the present like waves originating from the dawn of time. The end is the beginning is the end of the next beginning. We can look outside ourselves, and we can perceive the shape and form of our reality, but in so many ways, we're helpless to even perceive the immensity of the system we're inside, let alone effect changes.
It's been one hell of a week, and one hell of a long weekend.
"Drama", I suppose is the word the kids use these days to describe it. I'm tryin' to hold onto my sanity, and I suppose in some small way, seeing things from this point of view helps to make peace with the brokenness of the whole situation.
No new original tunes this week, but I did shake the rust off my recording chops, and haul half my studio over to the shed to get our usual Wednesday night jam session on "tape".
Not literal tape of course, because that would require that I spend a fortune on a tape machine, and also haul the 300 lb beast into the shed. Two items that are impossible, and far too sweaty, respectively.
What you are listening to is a one minute and forty second excerpt of my band, The Thumbless Hitchhikers jamming on selected riffs from "Fearless" by Pink Floyd, and "Loving Cup" by The Rolling Stones.
The whole thing is like 45 minutes long. This is the downside of being so cheap as to have resolved to run this website for $0. Were I a spending man, I'd have to cough up some serious dough to post more than two or three of our jam-fusion-odysseys. Soundcloud is really cool and all, but they are clearly biased against jam bands, because they charge by the minute (beyond your free allocation of minutes as a "guest" user). Man, sometimes it takes us 15 minutes just to figure out what song we're playing, LOL :-)
I'm not gonna lie though ... that 45 minutes had a few mistakes here and there, though on the whole it was amazing. This is definitely the best minute forty of the whole night. It was one of those moments where I'm mixing it and just kinda listening and casually riding the faders, then I'm like "whoa ... what was THAT?", and then I back it up and play it like 10 more times.
Sound Magic the third. Sometimes you don't even know how great it was until you listen to it the next day.
I don't think I can even caption this effectively.
As I noted a few weeks ago, it has been repeatedly necessary for me to visit the local upscale outdoor shopping mall in town. For one thing, they have the only Apple store within at least 100 miles. For another thing, this community is far too small to support three shopping malls, and so most of the good stores have abandoned the other two in favor of this newfangled hotness.
And I do mean "hotness" literally, because the mental giants who designed this place gave it zero shade ... not even a breeze. With the summer we had, it was essentially: Death Valley with shops. Getting to the point ... the picture above, is of a compromise the mall's designers put in. It's like ... basically some sprinklers that you can bring your kids to, and they can run through them while one parental unit looks on, and the other goes to the shops.
So there's this kid, and ... God bless him, 'cause I'd have done this exact thing at his age. He has discovered that if he straddles it just right, he can use the deflective power of his booty to create a right angle spray pattern ... thereby hosing down his counterparts and unsuspecting passers by. Of course he's also washing out his butthole in the process ... which is pretty damn gross, and does not go unnoticed, by what I presume to probably be his sister ... who (though you can't really tell it from my crappy cell phone picture ... is making the funniest face of disgust I have ever seen.
Anyhow ... on a completely unrelated note, I decided to do a ccmixter remix, which I haven't done in about 3 or 4 years now. Not really dubstep ... just like ... heavy dub I guess. It's sloppy, but fun, and ... yeah crank dat bass, yo! I like to think this is a good "get down" soundtrack for that kid butt-blastin' everyone at the fountain in the mall, y'know?
I think it's safe to say that the Crystal Palace was essentially the original prototype upon which virtually every shopping mall in the world has been based.
Well I mean I think it's safe to say that. I'm not a student of architecture and I'm certainly not a historian. This is based entirely on a picture I remember seeing in my 8th grade world history text book. hold on, let me google this ...aah yes, here it is:
1851, y'all. For realz.
My eighth grade self said something along the lines of "dayum, that has to be the world's first shopping mall!", and from that point on I just basically have assumed that my eighth grade self was right.
That is until the recent trend of upscale outdoor shopping malls. This trend is inexplicable, and frankly intolerable. ATTN: RETAIL DEVELOPMENT PEEPS: this is the deep south, not northern California; the heat of our summers will rob you of your will to live.
Take me for instance, a dad who wants to lose his kids for an hour or two in a safe, climate controlled retail environment, whilst reading a magazine and perhaps consuming an oversized pretzel or domestic light beer. Such a person as myself would undoubtedly prefer to engage in this activity not getting sunburned and losing half a pound of body mass entirely to crotch-sweat. But hey, that's just me.
Like the most interesting man in the world: I don't always go to the mall, but when I do, it has air conditioning. As such, on this rainy Sunday afternoon, I loaded up the Canyonero and unleashed my teen girl squad upon the better of the two indoor shopping malls in town.
Malls ain't what they used to be, man. Malls used to have stores that sold things other than girls clothes or food. I mean both of those things are great, I s'pose but ... I distinctly remember there also being arcades and book stores, hobby shops, pet shops and electronics stores (not cell phone booths), when I was a kid. I mean damn! If you don't wanna buy a dress, a new crock pot, some sheets or a slice of pizza, you're pretty much out of luck these days. Used to be I could wander a mall for hours and always find something to spark the imagination.
These days it's just a wasteland. Commerce death row; a gilded hall of throwbacks patiently awaiting the inevitable fate of all retailers not named Wal-Mart or Amazon. It's the unstoppable march of progress, and for the most part I don't have a huge problem with it. Come Christmastime, hell no ... I'm not going within a half mile of anything other than a grocery store.
We did lose something along the way though. When I was a kid, shopping malls were our starships, dude.
Music: some other thing I was working on that I chopped up and put into a sampler, did dj style cuts n' scratches on, then put some other things on it, processing data at about 58 miles per hour through the fluvium interocitor, yielding the retro-futuristic thing you hear here.
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