I Don't Know Anything About Music

  Like most sentient people in the world, I listen to a fair amount of music, and also like most sentient people in the world, I don’t know anything about it. I know that music is both incredibly complicated and also incredibly simple, I know that it’s an art of expression underlined by generations of science that determines what people find sonically appealing, I know of the existence of different keys and tempos and chord progressions but I Don’t know how to identify them or what they mean - it’s a completely foreign concept to me, and I don’t think that there’s anything else like that that we almost universally take part in.

Take food, for example. We all eat food, we all have opinions and preferences on different kinds of food, there are different ways to prepare food and iterate on established processes, but all of it is replicable. You can see a chef make food, tell you the ingredients and you can recreate it almost 1 to 1 - if someone told you every single thing that was done in the recording of Don’t Worry, Be Happy, an acapella song from the 1980’s, and almost everybody would be at a complete loss, and even if they managed to layer the sounds in the right order, it would likely come out sounding completely different than the original. It’s a fascinating mix of vibes and quantifiable work that I just have no idea how to begin to process.

Every now and then, I wonder what it is about the music that I listen to that is satisfying to me, like trying to find some kind of common element or throughline that connects the parts of songs that tickle my brain meat, and I’ve come up with a couple of things, but it’s very very loose. I know that I enjoy songs that sound full; things like choirs, layered vocals, passing singing back and forth. In rap music, I like strings and pianos and things that sound gospel-y, but I Want the vocals to be clear, alone and energetic. It’s very scattered, and nowhere has that been more clear than when I listened to the Beach Boys.

I’ve heard of the Beach Boys for ages, they’ve been a band for a trillion years and wrote all those silly surfing songs, but I’ve never really listened to them because ew yucky old people… then I finally sat down and listened to Pet Sounds, their 1966 music changing album, and I was taken aback because it was incredible; it was melodic, it was booming, it was dense and complex but there was an undercurrent of sadness in the otherwise very upbeat material. I could not have enjoyed it more, but I was left wondering what it was that resonated with me in contrast with other music I like. What I arrived at was Reruns by SUGR, one of my favorite songs; it could not be more different from everything on Pet Sounds - Reruns is synthy and borders on melody-less while everything from Pet Sounds is booming and layered and full of life with bouncy melodies that have endured for over 50 years, but hearing Reruns left me with the same feeling I had listening to something like Sloop John B or Wouldn’t It Be Nice, and it’s not as simple as “I enjoy these things”, it evokes the same emotion that i don’t get when i hear other songs I like. The conclusion I Came to is that I love booming drums and the fullness - layered vocals, a lot of reverb, very big drums, and those overshadow the other very obvious differences between the two. It lead me to thinking about solitary moments of music that I find particularly satisfying - parts of songs I like that resonate with me, and if you’ve never done this, I think that you should because it’s very funny, and you’ll probably realize you like some very small and silly things.

I’ll end this with a list of some of the bits in songs that I like - a collection of weird little things that make my brain happy.

- When the drums and (ESPECIALLY) the bass come in on “Killa Cam” by Cam’Ron
- When Cam’ron switches his flow a few lines into “Killa Cam” - “and bitches they want to neuter me, n*ggas they want to tutor me, the hooligan in houlihan’s, manuvering’s nothing new to me”
- The first verse of “Tell Me” by Corbin, but especially the line “Rolling like a demon” and “don’t want you to go, no, i’m not ready, thought we were going steady” - the drum and the vocals are stuck in my brain forever
- The reverb/layering on the vocals behind the middle of verse 1 on “Sayonara” by Aries - “is she archived, that casa, how you drown out, side water” specifically
- The two little drum hits between the chorus and verses of “Take Care” by Drake
- Near the end of Kanye’s part on “Pure Souls” - “It ain’t how it used to be, this the new me so get used to me”, but specifically the version he played at the first Donda live concert

- The harmony between Toby Keith and whoever the other voices are when he says "Go west young man, haven't you been told" on "I should've been a cowboy"
- During the chorus of “Kokomo” by the beach boys, during only the word “Bahamas”, there’s an extremely deep voice - i love that deep voice

There are definitely more, but those are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Thanks for reading this nothing post!