brkfstfordinner

[brkfstfordinner]

words by Fred

[Au] 

In its most refined form, in function and currency, music is no less valuable gold. 

Growing up, I had pals but my best friends all either held mics and played instruments, or could be completely wiped from existence with a pencil eraser. I wasn’t their friend but they were certainly mine. Blink 182, Pepper Ann, Em, System of a Down, Missy Elliot, Doug, Nas, the Recess gang. And later along the way Kid Cudi, BoJack Horseman, Morty, Lincoln Park, Frank, Mac, Chano, Ye, Tyler, Gene and Louise Belcher. These guys all seemed to ‘get it’ more than most people I actually interacted with every day. They were with me in my room for hours starring at the ceiling after moms would hit the light switch, they were waiting for me every day when I got back home from school and they even occasionally provided a wide range of advice on how to approach not dying a virgin.    

The mic holders, in particular, I think speak to us all in two main ways. When a song is relatable, it means listening to Bryson Tiller’s ‘Don’t Get Too High’ after a breakup and ugly-crying because your estranged girlfriend of 5 years is now a Veuve Clicquot savant and stores every nuance of the French champagne in the part of her brain where she used to house the memories you made together. This is the kind of music you don’t just listen to, you hear it. The songwriting, composition and delivery feel like the artist twisted the lid off your head open, reached into your brain, and used your thoughts to decorate their lyrics.

A song can also be aspirational. This means when Jay-Z boasts, “I have cars I haven’t seen in months… Niggas thought Hova was over, such dummies/ Even if I fell I’d land on a bunch of money,” you can’t quite relate because that isn’t your reality… But, you’re empowered because it makes you feel like it could be. It’s a transfer of energy that makes the dream of wealth, of beauty, of notoriety and abundance, depending on what you’re listening to, feel tangible, even if that feeling is only momentary. It keeps the hope of better days alive.  

There is a third, less cerebral, more visceral level that music connects. You don’t just listen or hear it, you feel it; like a painting or photograph you see and are completely enamoured with but can’t explain why. When it hits, it feels something like Mr. T punching you repeatedly in the stomach, with all his finger-rings on and all of his might. It hurts sometimes but when it gets going, you don’t want it to stop. You can’t explain why you are compelled by it – it’s not always the subject matter, may not quite be the lyrics (if there are any at all), not specifically the melody – you just are. It is its own, almost spiritual language, manifesting itself through any sonic means you are willing to receive it; able to penetrate through all the barriers that separate us from one another. It consoles the inconsolable, it comforts the comfortless.

I happen to believe that the force that makes these fourth-dimension connections possible through art, exists as a raw element floating in the universe, almost in the same way a precious metal occurs in nature. Sure, it’s valuable and has the potential to spark a revolution but it is too unassuming in its natural state to reach most of us. It often needs a vessel that will translate its value before it can be consumed. In the case of a valuable metal like gold, that vessel is a process called extraction; while in the case of music, I believe, it is the sonically inclined who are connected to the universe, that become that vessel.

Bar Macedelic, which is sentimental to me for many reasons, Mac Miller’s Faces mixtape is my favourite of all his projects. From the beginning of his career, Mac always had drug references sprinkled across his music, in the “causal” way we’d known suburban white kids to dabble in the forbidden fruits. This might sound weird but it never occurred to me that he had a real problem until he was on his GO:OD AM media run over a year after the release of Faces and he spoke openly about his mental and physical condition during its recording, and eventually overdosing. Probably because even when Mac candidly and very specifically rapped things like “I've been to hell and back trying to get attached to my better half/ Never that, the smile’s so gone, so bring the coke on”, the delivery and attention to detail that carried these words were always so masterful that it didn’t seem consistent with the image you have in your head of an addict. Also, you never ever got the sense that Mac was glorifying the use of the stuff. It was always more like he was speaking openly about himself in the sometimes quirky, sometimes dark candour that he always did and drugs just happened to be a part of that reality. Insomnia, nostalgia, melancholy, space, Bill Murray, and euphoria were also parts of that microcosm. The bluntness never shocked me. If anything, it was consoling that here was this guy who was at the top of the world with access to everything and anything he could possibly fathom and yet, the degree of separation between us and him seemed minimal. He had the same questions about life than I did. But, he was processing all of it and fashioning it into something beautiful.

Here he was, essentially taking the universe’s proverbial ore and through the painstaking, emotionally and mentally exhausting process of creating (not unlike gold extraction), turning pain, love, uncertainty and all the raw materials he was interacting with in the universe into pure gold. For him, quite literally because it made him a fortune, but for me (and others) it was gold because it felt at times like it was necessary for my sanity. More than something nice to hear or look at, the product of this alchemy became a tool.

There is a high cost to those who allow themselves to be vessels for this kind of transcendent communication though. As human beings, we each have the profound capacity to feel intensely; love, regret, ecstasy, shame, sorrow. These emotions are often reactions to our experiences and need to be felt in order to emerge from them into a place of relative peace. In practice, many of us don’t exhaust our capacity to be present in our feelings because the cost is too high. It’s why we stop ourselves from loving as hard as we could. It’s why we’d rather front than confront that we’ve deeply hurt or been hurt by someone. It’s why we’d rather get dumb-wasted than deal with personal traits that make us feel shitty about ourselves. Being completely vulnerable is not only painfully crippling but also actively requires a lot of work.  

Music that accesses this dimension is almost always the result of an artist aggressively exploring their full capacity to feel. They give themselves completely to their emotions, often at a personal expense, and let the results of that process bleed onto pieces of paper, through instrumentation and into microphones. It’s harrowing and traumatic and exhilarating and once the piece of art is complete, we are ecstatic to receive it and that’s where it ends for us (the consumer). Except, that’s not actually where it ends. Because after the lengthy, complex process that is the extraction of gold from rock ore, there is an industrial vessel that is left filled with all the impurities and by-products of the process. The muck and dirt that had to be gathered somewhere so that this timeless, valuable metal that literally builds (and destroys) economies and will be used for fashioning jewelry and shaping the electronic and aerospace industries, can exist. Whose job is it to attend to that vessel? To make sure that the wear and tear of the strenuous process is not causing it to corrode internally with each cycle? Who makes the call to maintenance to find out if the vessel has been serviced after the gold has been dispatched to buyers and we’ve moved on to focusing on the Pateks and satellites it’s been for? Or, as Kendrick so poignantly put it on ‘Feel’:

“I feel like the whole world wants me to pray for ‘em

But who the fuck praying for me?”

There isn’t much I could have personally done to help Mac. Even though one day he got on the piano and played a beautiful ballad for me in my living that got me to call mother when I was being a shitty son, or that he talked me into reminding myself who the fuck I was one afternoon when I almost abandoned a project I was passionate about, the reality is I didn’t know him. And he certainly had no idea who I was. But there are people around me who I can call or go see. There are people who I interact with every other day who are vessels for gold. And we should all make it our collective responsibility to not just admire shiny stuff but also really try to take care of each other holistically. Put a call in. Get a hug in. Be kinder to one another. Listen more.

Because we rob the world and ourselves of our gold when we don’t take care of each other.  

Rest in Peace, Mac. Rest in Peace,   Pro.  Rest in Peace ,Sharpa.  Rest in Peace, Sammy. Forever with us.