I woke up at 5:00 a.m. today in blur. Not because I was hopeful for any changes in the seemingly inevitable results from last night’s election, but to attend to my babbling kid, who has developed an impressive early morning vocabulary of sounds to get us to go and pick him up.
In the middle of the night I deleted Twitter, all my news apps, and anything that might give me an alert about the news; the feeling of preemptive exhaustion was so familiar to eight years ago, when it felt like daily we had to just witness horrors unfold as rights were clawed back. It was honestly a relief to have an extra layer of sience, hanging out with Felix as he threw books at me to read to him, singing little nonsense songs and asking for more crackers.
Relatedly, not a lot of music feels like it fits the moment right now, so I'm taking a break from this newsletter for a few weeks. As much as the this email was an important forum to get excited for the present and future one song at a time, I feel like my ears need a break as much as my eyes, and nothing culturally quite makes sense right now – there’s a Zynternet v. Pop Girly thinkpiece somewhere out there in the ether – so I’ll be back in a bit!
I like what Matthew Schnipper had to say in Deep Voices yesterday and I kept finding myself thinking of this Ekko Astral interview where they talk about how culture is upstream from politics:
I think music has this way of affecting people that no other activity that humanity does really has. You can write a song in Spanish and it can be an international hit. You can write a song about a particular subject and it can resonate with people, even if they don't agree with the views of the song. Think about the song "Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen. I think about a song, as...if we're going to use their shorthands of a "culture war," I think our music is kind of like the weaponry. You can actually be a culture warrior in a way that's not railing against societal progress, but actually trying to fight for it and make people aware of the world around it.
It makes me hopeful at least that the music I find, whenever I come back here, will point towards a brighter future than the ballot box.
