Category: real life

WHY DRAKE SEEMS SO SAD: SYRUP, PLEASURE AND HAPPINESS

drake smoking in front of planes, looking sad


  Marvin’s Room (Shlohmo’s thru tha floor remix) – Drake by shlohmoA question I hear frequently asked about Toronto based Hiphop/RnB rapper/singer/child actor Drake in the press is why his new music is so depressing sounding and what does he have to be unhappy about? He’s young, rich and famous! He’s got a seemingly endless supply of adoring fans, pretty women, drugs, alcohol, money and a venue for his artistic expression to talk about his feelings. Hot97 is his psychotherapy couch.

When he sings:
‘Cups of the XO
Bitches in my old phone
I should call one and go home
I’ve been in this club too long
The woman that I would try
Is happy with a good guy

But I’ve been drinking so much
That I’ma call her anyway and say
“F-ck that nigga that you love so bad
I know you still think about the times we had”
I say “f-ck that nigga that you think you found
And since you picked up I know he’s not around”

(Are you drunk right now?)

I’m just sayin’, you could do better
Tell me have you heard that lately?
I’m just sayin’ you could do better
And I’ll start hatin’, only if you make me’

Drake strikes me as being honest here. Even though he has all of the above material and ego-enhancing things that many of us want, he is still not happy.  When artists are honest and speak about what’s really happening with them instead of repeating tropes that seem like the ‘industry standard’ (I’m balling! I’m awesome! I’m getting money!) it adds a richness of meaning, the texture of personal reality.  The current vogue for sipping XO (aka sizzurp, purple drank, or cough syrup made with promethazine and codeine) popularized by many rap/rnb artists including recently Drake and The Weeknd seems to support this pretty well. Codeine is an opiate, the same active ingredient found in heroin. It’s a central nervous system depressant that makes you sleepy and dulls pain when used when you’re sick. If consumed when you’re healthy it pushes pleasure buttons in your brain and feels great.   Taking codeine also kills you.  If you slow your central nervous system down enough you’ll just stop breathing. RIP DJ Screw and Pimp C. My question is: how much must you be suffering to make this glamourous lifestyle choice? Scientific research has pointed to links between the way we experience physical and psychic pain, like the pain of depression, including the fact that depression sufferers seem to have more acute physical pain.  As far as I can tell people who are happy and fulfilled don’t need to constantly take large amounts of central nervous system depressants like codeine and alcohol.

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Comfort Is The Enemy


Image and quote from akhilak.com (and actually it’s a pretty good post about a similar subject, conquering fear)
“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. ~ Nelson Mandela”

The title of this post is more of a challenge for myself since I feel I’ve been slipping in this department.  In the years when I moved to Europe, became active in the Grime scene and was solely dependent on performance income I think I lived this a lot more. I remember being constantly stressed, at some points severely so, but also excited and exhilarated. Somehow I was constantly taking action which brought me closer to the things I wanted and my goals. I remember realizing during that time that this stressed, excited feeling was the feeling of being outside my comfort zone. Think about it: if you’re outside of your comfort zone you’re doing something challenging, something where you’re risking failure. You’re stretching yourself and growing as a person. When you’re in your comfort zone things feel familiar, easy, you feel confident and sure of yourself. Comfortable. These seem like good feelings right? Except what’s happening to you is you’re stagnating. You’re sitting still. You’re like the kid who will never take the training wheels off the bike. It’s fun riding a bike with training wheels, you won’t fall and hurt yourself and it’s not frightening because you’re confident you can do it. But the feeling that you get when you pull them off, wipe out a few times but THEN get it and take off, is incredible. It feels like flying.

I feel in my life lately I’ve been regressing, embracing things I know I can do and failing to challenge myself. I’ve got lots of excuses for that but fundamentally I know what I’m guilty of. My new challenge to myself is to try harder, demand more of myself and take some risks. Just typing that makes me feel anxious, which is how I can tell that I’m aiming in the right direction.

Games, Fallow Periods, Spirals

Between a head cold rampaging through my family and a whole lot of other real life stuff I’ve been feeling pretty uninspired to create music lately. After some early experiments with trying to make a track every day one summer in college I’ve learned that trying to squeeze the sponge when I’m not feeling it will only result in frustration and not-fun-ness. There’s a fine line between the discipline of showing up and making stuff and forcing yourself to make stuff when you’re not feeling it. Usually during these musically slow periods I tend to turn my attention to other stuff and try to teach myself new things. Lately it’s been learning marketing and studying the art of making computer games. I think the whole computer game / interactive art space is under-served by a lot of the aesethetically crappy stuff that gets done with some pretty cool technology. I see a lot of artistic potential there that remains untapped.

YouTube Preview Image

Listen to Photek – The Third Sequence

One game that made a big impact on me was the original WipeOut for Playstation. Not only was it a great and fun game but they took a few extra steps aesthetically in licensing a great soundtrack of known dance music artists, including the Photek track above, which I still love, and also hiring top-notch design firm The Designer’s Republic to design all the menus, iconography and in game advertisements. Admittedly the stuff looks a bit dated now but in 1995 this was some futuristic shit. TDR was also the in-house designer for Warp records who I later became a huge fan of and even later was proud to release a record with (Burnerism by Team Shadetek).

Wipeout Icons by The Designer's Republic


Logos for imaginary corporations featured in the game designed by The Designer’s Republic

The revelation at the time for me was that it was possible to combine interesting visual and sound aesthetics with a cool game experience. I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot lately. I’ve been researching the game technology that’s out there that could enable you to do interesting stuff with sound. There are a few interesting things, including unity3d which I’ve been studying a bit. It includes supprt for .MOD files, the tracker format which is pretty interesting. I used to spend a lot of time thinking about generative sound and music and taught myself Max/MSP to do it, which I haven’t used in a while but the idea of creating generative musical environments is something which still appeals to me a lot. I find myself circling through these areas in my life: music, film making, programming, games, stories and each time I return to an area and learn more I see new possibilities. This has lead me to think that rather than purely making circles from one topic to another that I’m spiraling in on some big project that will eventually use all these ideas and skills that I’ve been learning. I’ll let you know how that goes.

How about you? I know the readership of the blog is mostly music people. Anyone else interested in games or interactive sound art?

Creativity: How To Turn Lack Of Time & Resources Into An Asset

Banksy Smiley Face Grim Reaper

“creativity was the ability to bring to life an image or idea regardless of resources”

- Chief Boima, Interviewed by Eddie Stats

Eddie Stats has a great interview with Dutty Artz familia Chief Boima and Vamanos from Ghetto Bassquake over at his blog Ghetto Palms for the Fader (linked below). In it came the above quote which Boima mentions in the context of film theory.

I love this idea and it brings me back to a concept that I try to bash my friends and students over the head with all the time.

Creativity is what happens IN SPITE of things like equipment, time and resources. A lot of people I know cling to the idea that as soon as they get this next plug-in, keyboard, piece of software, money, time or whatever it is that they don’t currently have that they’ll be able to accomplish their creative goals.

I am sorry to report that this is absolutely not the case.

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Random Beautiful: Human Pylons

human pylons in iceland

My lady K sent me over this today and it really resonated with me. This is a great pre-emptive strike against NIMBYism ( = Not In My Back Yard ism) where every one needs power lines and the electricity that comes from them (unless you live off the grid I guess) but doesn’t want big ugly powerline towers in their back yard, which I totally get. Turning them into beautiful and mysterious giant skeletons is a really imaginative and fun solution. The figures were designed by Choi + Shine and are positionable so that they can be posed to appear to respond to their environment or situation.

The pylon-figures can be configured to respond to their environment with appropriate gestures. As the carried electrical lines ascend a hill, the pylon-figures change posture, imitating a climbing person. Over long spans, the pylon-figure stretches to gain increased height, crouches for increased strength or strains under the weight of the wires.

- from the the Choi + Shine site.

There is the whole school of thought that functional objects can be beautiful, things like Calatrava’s bridges:

But what about making things that are functional beautiful? I love the idea of this approach too. Function doesn’t have to be the final determinant of form. People are smart and certainly by issuing the challenge to make boring, ugly utilitarian objects that fill our man-made landscapes look cool we could find ways to build them for as cheaply but make them fun and interesting. I would love to see more of this going on in the world, in both urban and non-urban environments. I think you’d see people’s attitudes and behaviors towards these things shift as well.

Haters: Learn To Love Them

Haters. Got some? Good! To paraphrase the great and funny Katt Williams: If you don’t have haters, you’re doing it wrong. Having haters means that people are noticing you, engaging with your work and having an emotional response. If that response is to get on the internet and call you a racist or a no-talent, well… First let’s look at some tactics for just processing all that acid that someone just spat at you. Timothy Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week which I reviewed below, wrote a great post about this on his blog. In that, there’s a video, check it out:

He talks about Seneca, bad reviews and crazy people leaving you voice mail. He’s clearly very happy with himself and that can grate a little, HOWEVER, he’s dropping MAD SCIENCE. Absorb it.

The next is an interesting post I found at AudibleHype.com. This one is quite relevant to us as musicians who are on the internet a lot. In the post he interviews many underground hip-hop musicians and talks to them about their approach in dealing with criticism and negative feedback. This is especially interesting because if you know the internet hip-hop scene it is an INCREDIBLY toxic, testosterone soaked, hater packed environment. I personally would rather hang out in that water filled trash compactor room from Star Wars. For whatever reason some of the braggadocio that is in the genes of hip-hop has mutated into an incredibly ugly set of behaviors on the internet that you can see on YouTube comments, various forums, basically any web 2.0 space dealing with hip-hop. This may also be that your average hip-hop listener and internet user is young, male and filled with vague feelings that they are being ‘slept-on’.

He starts with some nice and simple bullet points:

1. This is a business, not a talent show. That’s real simple but 90% of rappers will still complain about their skills getting slept on. There are seven billion human beings on this planet and every single one of us is going to die. Getting over yourself is the best business investment you can make…and it’s not easy.

2. Life is not fair because there are no rules. The main test of character you face in life is what you decide to do after you finally realize that. Is that an opportunity or a tragedy? Your call. Nobody is there to referee the game. You will have triumphs, you will have setbacks, but the game itself is never over.

3. If you really thought you were the shit, you wouldn’t need to prove it. Arrogance is actually not confidence, it’s insecurity.

Check out his article here: Love Thy Hater: How to Learn and Profit from “Bad” Feedback.j

The 4 Hour Workweek (A Short Review)

I’ve just finished reading a non-fiction book called The Four Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. In it he outlines a methodology which he calls Lifestyle Design. He advocates a radical re-structuring of your life in which you outsource your job, start a business which generates automated income and go travel the world. Obviously this may not be for everyone but there are a many components to it and as you read it certainly one or the other will jump out at you as relevant to your life and goals.

A concept which he outlined which I found very helpful was Wilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule is the idea that very often 80% of the desired outcomes in a situation come from 20% of the input. In his case he’s applying to personal productivity and business so for example 80% of your business comes from 20% of your customers. I’ve found this in for example promoting records. There are a few journalists who will always talk about a record I send them and then there are a million others who will do so very infrequently or never. But still every time I go to do a promo mailing I dash off those few high return emails and then spend a bunch of time trying to chase down all the people who almost never cover the stuff I send. This makes the process take way longer than it could. What he advises from this is that you should focus on and maximize that 20% that performs and de-emphasize the rest.

Another concept which I liked from him is that difficult goals make more sense to aim for. There are a few reasons for this. While many of us will think of a difficult goal and then imagine the millions of people we believe are also competing for it. We then imagine that many of them are more prepared than us and think: why bother trying? What he points out is that almost everyone feels this way and that most people quit the competition before it begins. Therefore there is smaller competition for impossible or difficult goals, making them easier to achieve than we think. Additionally the energy we get from reaching for and getting closer to big goals is so much more than from a moderate goal that it keeps us motivated and focused. I find this to be true. I have a hard time getting excited about small or moderate goals whereas if I am aiming for something big I get more enthusiastic.

He spends some time talking about geo-arbitrage, the practice of living in places where it’s cheap and earning in higher income areas. Having done this as a DJ living in Berlin I know this works and it’s good advice. If you can detach your income from where you live there is a lot of potential. Making money from the internet is even better since then you can really disconnect these two. He did this in Berlin in Prenzlauer-Berg, a neighborhood I also lived in at one point, and in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

The last piece I liked is his idea of streamlining your work time. One of the big things he talks about is eliminating interruption in your work sessions. I am very susceptible to this so this was great for me. In order to give yourself focused blocks of time in which to concentrate he suggests cutting your email use back to twice a day and further if you can manage it. Instead of constantly checking email he suggest checking it twice, once after lunch around 12PM and once around 4PM as people are wrapping up their workdays. That way you can avoid that compulsive email checking that many of us do and therefore minimize the constant interruptions every time something comes in asking for your attention. You check your email and just power through, responding to everything that has accumulated.

There are a great many further points in here which are worth talking about but since this is a blog post and not a book itself I will leave it at that. Ferriss also runs a great blog over at fourhourblog.com where he continues the discussion about many of these ideas.

The biggest idea I enjoyed from the book was the idea that reality is negotiable and we don’t all need to lead our lives the same way. What do you think?

If you’d like to get a copy of Four Hour Work Week and would like to support this blog you can get it by buying it through my Amazon store here.