Et Musique Pour Tous

Take a quick ride with me today. Press play on this playlist and let it play all the way through. I’ll explain why.

“Cinnamon Apple” is the Brooklyn native, Fabolous‘ work, off of his latest album (released: Christmas 2014) The Young OG Project. Cinnamon Apple is about a 7th-grade fling that felt more like a lifetime together to Fab. It’s something that will probably continue to exist for eons to come in terms of a classic love-story scenario. It maybe represents the end of one relationship, which is something many people are doing in the New Year as well—starting fresh, starting new.

“You Made Us Change” is by Ephemerals, whose name randomly means: to last a very short time. Going from Fab’s ‘forever love” wishes to things that last only for very short moments, this song represents our last few cries of letting the past go, once and for all.

“Memories” by Waldeck is like the “wanting to stay high all the time” line by Tove Lo. It represents the jazziness of NYC along with the ways we sometimes drink to cope with memories long gone.

and then,

“Ryde or Die, B****” by L.O.X., Drag-On & Eve is life after you let those pasts go. Yes, pasts, as in plural because each love story is an individual past—like: books, per say. Let this year become your Ride or Die. Get what I mean?

“Anything” by Jay Z is a personal favorite of mine. Not only is my friend Duro the mix engineer on this, and if you are familiar with his work you know he also mixed “Hard Knock Life” for Hov, and won a grammy for it, but it reminds me of driving around NYC in the Winter.

Life behind a windshield can be pretty incredible in this town, but the perfect tunes can give so much music and life to scenes that would probably be mute anyway, since most likely your windows are up in the car and the heat is on. Anyhow, this song made many neighborhoods from Brooklyn to the boonies Upstate look like a music video to me when it dropped. The bottom end gives the road under your feet some life, and the hook brings out your inner child, who is incidentally the only person capable of painting vivid pictures in their minds, and the best of your imagination. At least it did for me, so if you happen to catch this on a drive then all the better.

“Jump Hi” by LION BABE & Childish Gambino is a simply another feel-good record that fits seamlessly into most of the cooler playlists today. It’s high-energy, awesome vocals, and has a great bounce to it so that we can all: feel it, embrace it, and dance.

Thanks for listening.

She pointed to the clock in our hotel room and yelled “11:11!, make a wish!”. Confused, I looked back at her, shut my eyes for two seconds, and made a wish. My wish? That she would last forever in my life, and that her kisses would never stop.

Some days pass by faster than I can even get to see them and others stay longer than they should. Somewhere, in between those days, I often catch 11:11 on a watch or a clock or my laptop time and I make a wish. Some wishes come true and others never happen, or, haven’t yet happened, but I never lose hope. I think that this song reminds me of that because it is the same exact thing.

“Two Birthdays” by Maybe The Moon is about: “unrequited love, and an undying obsession with a lost relationship. Year after year, the main character makes the same birthday wish, to reconnect with her ex-lover, yet each time, it never comes to fruition.” —Maybe The Moon. So you see, maybe I’m not the only one that still believes that somewhere out there true love really does exists.

Sometimes the timing to things is off and maybe we could often feel that we may have missed out on the love of our lives because of it. Sometimes, the timing is all too right, but then something happens that throws the fairytale off of its course, and then the happy ending turns into a sad one. Still, we have to believe that just because something did not happen the way we projected that it would, that it doesn’t mean that true love is not out there for us. I mean, who says that true loves have to last forever anyway?

My cousin’s ex girlfriend came back around the other day and it left him dazed and confused. See, he’s been dating this really awesome chick who he adores, and that ex girl of his that had left him broken in too many pieces to count was someone who he might still love, so there’s that struggle now within him— the one where he finds himself polling the pieces of him that have yet to fully heal: a.) new, awesome, sweetheart chick, or, b.) old flame that taught me that true love is real?

Which would you pick?

I told him that sometimes people come back around simply because you were on their mind and they missed you. That, when caught up in a solitary moment, or stunned by a beautiful sight, people will revert back to the hearts they have had in their lifetimes who would appreciate it the most. And so, we often come up in the minds of our exes because of our ways of extraordinarily having loved them, but it never means that they are right for us anymore, and it doesn’t mean that if we do choose option b.), they will be exactly who we fell in love with in the first place.

We constantly evolve and we constantly change in full progression on our paths to become who we have always wished to be, so maybe, just maybe, our birthday wishes, and the 11:11 ones, should be more about turning back the hands of time than getting something back that we will not recognize.

I’ve been sitting on this for days now ever since I caught it on Yaqui’s blog. I’ve passed it along to a few DJ friends and my closest buds only to receive nothing but positive feedback. You would think that all of these years later some of us would be tired of MIA by now, but as my friend/DJ from Switzerland put it: “this is interestingly delicious because I love MIA in general”. And quite honestly, who doesn’t?

Finding this, sharing it, and writing about it (MIA‘s “Paper Plane” [Eau Claire Remix]) here has made me realize that the world is a place meant for sharing. It’s a communal planet full of an endless amount of resources that we should be sharing rather than capitalizing on. I mean, what good is it to own everything when there are people out there suffering in the freezing cold because they can’t even purchase a winter coat, or literally dying of hunger because they can’t afford a meal? How can any of us see this as fair? How can we willingly keep our brains so diluted with the aroma of capitalism that we turn blind eyes, daily, to the problems that our fellow humankind face?

I know that some of us are taught better than others, and that many of you feel that the positions some of these people are in are positions that only they themselves are responsible for, but when do we look beyond that? At what point do we realize that the these theoretical systems that we are living in just don’t work? They haven’t worked.

Often some of our writers feel that we can’t change the world on a global scale the way it needs to in order for us to save ourselves from us just by writing. (‘we have no natural predators. so who do we hold accountable for destruction if not ourselves, right?’) But I think that writing and music are exactly the ways that we will be able to make a global change.

You may have or not have noticed, but gas prices have fallen tremendously. The reason for this is much more sinister and much more orchestrated than you are led to believe. Prices are down because there are no jobs or any money out there. Sure, those that have tons of it continue to pile it on up, but those that live paycheck to paycheck know this to be truer than anything else they are sold to believe. It’s simple: if you spend less on gas then you feel like you have more money left over, which you do, and so you are able to get out there and continue to consume. Basically, you don’t horde your cash but spend it instead, and in order for this society to keep going then you and I MUST continue to spend.

Anyway, it’s Friday, and we all want to escape into the night and into this weekend if we can, and what better way to do so than with music that can lift your spirits and make you forget your troubles. That’s what you will hear when you press play on this: something familiar, something different, but all just very good. Enjoy it, and maybe just go to your local liquor store today, buy a few bottles of wine, or whisky, or vodka, or whatever you poison is and stay in, listen to music all weekend, consume bits of content you haven’t watched before, and most importantly, share.

The New Year brings a shitload of resolutions that never get fulfilled, desires that become lost to fears, and top-of-the-year energy that winds down way before it should. It is for these reasons that I decided that we could all use a taste of something full of high-energy and a ton of spunk to blast this hump day off to because well, we need it, no?

Picture waking up in a body of crystal blue seawater, not knowing how you got there, but immediately ready to swim up to the surface, and that’s exactly how this crazy electropop remix by EigenARTig & Nicolas Haelg begins. As you begin to surface from that blue grotto, you recall that you just jumped off a yacht somewhere off the Amalfi coast near Capri, and that the hardcore partying you have been doing non-stop for a little over a week is the reason you momentarily passed out. But as you swim up to the ship the bass pounding of the sound system and the voices of your guests rev you back up and place you into full party animal mode once again: fist in the air, head down, shoulders swaying and knee-tapping/foot stomping movements all the way until you are back on board, champagne glass in one hand, and a petite waist in the other. This is what you get here with this rework of Dom Rosenfeld’s “Something About You”, an energy-inducing three minute and twenty-two second moment of electro dance bliss.

Whether you need a boost of energy today at the gym, just in general to get over the hump of midweek, for a brief escape like the one I just had above, or, simply because high energy is your sonic java—this, is, it.

Enjoy. Have a great week, and remember that resolutions are made to be broken, but discipline will never be.