Taylor Swift, Musical Expectations, and Pre-workout Traditions

I’m a fucking weirdo. This blog (for better or worse) is a place for me to dissect my taste and the bizarre associations that my mind has created over 23 years. This particular post covers a quirk so weird that I can just say it straight-faced and it will be hilarious: I listen to Taylor Swift before I hit the gym. Yup.

As previously discussed, I am a creature of habit, and now Taylor Swift is as seasonal as pumpkin pie. What initially started as a morbidly ironic interest slowly morphed into genuine love which has now mutated into a nostalgic tradition that I’m as embarrassed by as I am perplexed. A second recurring theme I’m discovering through writing here is me thinking that I’m too cool or hardcore for whatever is currently popular. I first heard of Taylor Swift in 2009 as “Love Story” was capturing the hearts and minds of teenage girls and emotionally-stunned women across the nation. I dismissed the song as pop trash, shook my head and went back to whatever inaccessible metal I was listening to at the time.

Aside from my unwavering dismissal of all pop music during this period, I also disliked the fact that this particular song lived in such a gray area between pop and country. It was a milquetoast bastardization of two genres that I actively hated. Why I wasted so much mental energy on this type of negativity is beyond me, but I’ll retroactively chalk it up to aimless teenage frustration. What I didn’t know in 2012 was that Taylor Swift’s Red represented her first direct movement towards pure pop music and away from her country(ish) roots.

I, like the rest of the general populace, was first exposed to Swift’s “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” in the fall of 2012 as the song rapidly reached saturation point. I first heard the track through the hilarious Who Charted Podcast in which two comedians discuss the most popular music and movies of the past week. As the hosts ramped up to throw to the song my skin started to crawl. I knew what was coming, and I knew I wasn’t going to like it. I braced myself for the worst… then the song started. I loved it. I went in with my cochlear-guard up and ended up being disarmed by the song almost immediately.

At the end of the day, Taylor Swift is just pop music. Her job is to make something catchy that’s inoffensive and immediately appealing. So why did I like this when I was so against her music before? I think it all came down to expectations. Time and time again I’ve been disappointed by albums that I’ve mentally hyped up for months. I’ve also ended up absolutely adoring releases that I’ve gone into expecting way less after seeing negative reactions online. It just goes to show how much preconceived ideas, negativity, and the Internet in general can infect art. On one hand, it’s hard to not have expectations about something you’re looking forward to, but on the other hand, if your bar is too low or too high you risk being way off base and coming out disappointed.

At any rate, I went into this Taylor Swift song expecting a shiny plate of pop dog shit but ended up becoming absolutely hooked. The crisp opening note made me perk up. The half-reversed guitar riff made me listen even harder. Then Swift entered delivering a saccharine (but biting) line in a half-sung valley girl voice. Behind all this, a steady drum beat was carrying the song forward with an unstoppable momentum. A bouncy bass enters just before Swift sings the pre-chorus, and then the beat explodes as the song’s soaring chorus begins. After the second sarcasm-laden verse about her indie music elitist ex-boyfriend, the second chorus starts, and everything comes together instrumentally as Swift belts the title of the song out at the top of her lungs. By the third chorus, a subtle banjo enters the mix and Swift’s double tracked vocals begin interacting with each other while still echoing the same sentiment. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” is a near-perfect shining example of the euphoric highs that pop music can achieve. Beyond that, it’s also a middle finger pointed directly at shitty exes, hopeless relationships, and pointless fights. It’s cathartic.

Later on in the same year, Swift released “I Knew You Were Trouble” as a follow-up single, and (it’s embarrassing to say, but) that song completely dismantled any other remaining reservations I had about Swift and pop music in general. It’s a very “2012 song” in that it’s loosely dubstep influenced with a wavy electronic sound and a beat drop near the end of the chorus. But this is the song that made me realize pop didn’t have to be (and couldn’t be) placed in the box that I’d previously created in my head. I’ve already discussed my love for 2006 pop music, but Taylor Swift (combined with the frank pop music discussion on Who Charted) gave me a newfound appreciation for the genre. Up until this point, pop music had never been something I’d actively searched out, but Swift single-handedly changed that.

I’m not quite sure how it first started, but one day I just happened to be listening to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” on the way to the gym and discovered that I had subconsciously memorized every word. Whoops. The only time I felt comfortable flexing this embarrassingly extensive knowledge was in the privacy of my car. I could sing. I could sing as loud as I wanted and let muscle memory carry me and my car towards the gym. Immediately after, I followed that song up with Weezer’s “El Scorcho” presumably to check that my previous musical taste remained intact.

From there I simply reinforced my own tradition. I listened to “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” chased with “El Scorcho” for weeks upon weeks. Aside from knowing all the words to both songs, something about the (not-so-subtle) middle finger Swift was pointing towards her ex in that song drove me. The song was bouncy and light enough to pump me up, but still bitter and resentful enough to motivate me.

I’d start to interchange “Back Together” with “Trouble” after a few months, but I ended up burning myself out on both songs sometime around the beginning of 2013. I moved onto other songs because I realized it was actually helpful to make a song or two my pre-gym soundtrack since it got me into an irreversible mindset that could only be satiated by hours of cardio.

But from that point on I paid attention to Swift. Her fifth album and full-pop crossover 1989, her collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, Ryan Adam’s unironic cover of 1989, and Father John Misty’s (wholly ironic) Lou Reed covers all made their way onto a dark (but happy) pop corner of my phone. Swift has since gone on to reveal herself as the pop-music equivalent of the popular girl who acts nice in person then talks shit behind your back. This recent feud with Kanye West and camp Kardashian combined with her breadcrumb trail of exes and her feuds with other pop artists all seem to confirm the hypothesis that Swift is a snake and a liar who is likely playing the “America’s Sweetheart” card for album sales… but sometimes you have to separate an artist from their art.

I’m a fan of Swift because she’s made some incredibly catchy and well-produced pop songs. When you say “pop music” in 2016, it’s likely that 9/10 people would say “Taylor Swift” and I think that is motherfucking impressive. The two songs that sparked this, (like many others) are irrevocably tied to the fall/winter season and now serve as massive heaps of nostalgia fuel for me. I’ll still bust out that old pre-workout playlist to get me pumped up every fall, and Swift has become another in a long list of fucking weird bizarre traditions I’ve created for myself that make zero sense on their own. Whether a thirteen-year-old boy obsessively watching VH1, or a 20-something singing Taylor Swift to his steering wheel on the way to the gym, I’m a fucking weirdo. But hey, Taylor Swift: thanks for all the burned calories.

Art and the Freedom to be Weird

I’m pretty lenient when it comes to art. I’ve always hated the debate over art “is” because I truly believe there’s beauty in everything, and trying to constitute what is and isn’t art just leads to shitty semantic debates. Even some low-effort installation created in irony to make you question “is this art?” still has a point to it. Art is made by people that need to get something out of themselves. Sometimes it’s music, sometimes it’s a 20-foot sculpture. It’s not always pretty, but it’s a way for us to speak a different language and express the inexpressible.

Aside from music, writing, and the occasional video game, my free time is mostly spent mindlessly scrolling through reddit. A few weeks ago I stumbled across a link to an AV Club article that brought back a flood of nostalgic emotions. The article in question breaks down this specific kernel of nostalgia far better than I ever could, and as much as I’d love to talk about this book, I wouldn’t be able to add much on to what’s already written here. This article stirred something in me that made me question my taste in regards to art. Not music, not movies, not the written word, but Art with a capital ‘A’

I don’t often talk about visual art on here because I feel like I don’t have the vocabulary for it. I know what I like, but I never really questioned why I like it. When I say that I’m “lenient” in regards to art I mean that I’m not picky, and that’s another reason why I don’t talk about art; I kinda like it all. I don’t have a very discerning taste because I feel like I can (almost) always find the beauty in art. What I’ve come to realize is that while I enjoy all art passively, what I actively enjoy is fucked up.

The reason this article struck a chord with me is because it connected some dots in my mind and brought back a flood of memories that helped me remember a string of bizarre things I was exposed to as a child. It brought me back to a formative time in my childhood and helped me remember a series of massively impactful experiences that changed my artistic taste and lingered with me for the rest of my life.

1 - Lane Smith

The inspiration for this post was also, fittingly, one of my first memorable exposures to a unique art style. Again, the write-up above does a more articulate job of analytically breaking down Smith’s style, but more importantly, it served as the catalyst which helped me realize that two of my favorite books in elementary school were illustrated by the same person: Lane Smith. As a child, I read The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, andThe True Story of the Three Little Pigs ad nauseum. Both of these books are categorized as “postmodern children’s books” which skew and satirize traditional children’s fairy tales. If you have any doubt about where my overbearing skepticism and incessant irreverence come from, make no mistake the seeds were first planted here. Smith’s dadaist take on these stories is absolutely incredible. Filled with abnormally long tounges, contorted caricatures, and general fuckedupedness, these books helped me look at the world differently.

Seeing something as simple as a cow drawn in such a foreign style made me realize how different other people’s perspectives and interpretations could be. To see so many concepts that I was already familiar with (both visually and storywise) made me realize that not only were these bizarre interpretations valid, but they still worked. I still recognized this duck as a duck even though it didn’t take a “traditional” form that I was familiar with. These unique illustrations combined with the meta post-modern writing style were a door-opening combination for an elementary school-aged Taylor. There was no turning back.

2 - Stephen Gammell

Jesus Christ. If there was any indication that I had a fucked up start, it was first evident here. While I certainly loved Stinky Cheese Man, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, later on in elementary school I was forced to read more “substantive” books (i.e. smaller text) so I looked for something with a cool cover (how else are you supposed to pick reading material at seven?) As I sifted through the contents of my Elementary school’s shelves like a shitty, snot-nosed seven-year-old record collector I stumbled across something that stopped me in my tracks and made my hair stand on end: Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Illustrated by  Stephen Gammell, these books were (and still are) absolutely chilling. The short stories ranged from rewritten classics to modern urban legends, and while the written contents of the book were amazing, the real draw for me at the time was the art. A simple google image search returns a myriad of illustrations that I can only describe as unsafe for children. I don’t know how or why this book was allowed in an elementary school library, but I have a feeling that’s something that wouldn’t be allowed in 2016.

This was my first time realizing that art could be weird. Not that I’d had massive exposure to high art as a seven-year-old, but it felt like the first time I was looking at something completely unique. It was like viewing the world through a whole new (disturbed) lense. It scared me, but in a good way. It looked cool. It looked otherworldly. I wanted more.

3 - Gerald Scarfe

In 1998 my family bought a beach house in Manzanita, Oregon. That log cabin was a magical place and it contains some of the happiest memories of my childhood. My family took a trip down to the beach nearly every weekend. It became an escape. One particular weekend I went alone, just me and my dad. My mother stayed home with my younger brother, so it was a father/son weekend… which probably would have meant more to me if I wasn’t still in elementary school. On this trip my dad let me watch Pink Floyd’s The Wall, a movie that I was apparently just on the verge of being able to handle. While I’m sure he meant well (he just wanted to share his music with me) The Wall fucking scarred me. It was R-rated, sure but I think (aside from wanting to show me my first R-rated movie) my dad forgot how dark the movie was. Everything from the masked schoolchildren, graphic violence, and obtuse depiction of sex scared the absolute shit out of me. Now that I think about it, this movie is probably the reason I’m so freaked out by gas masks. Just take a look at the IMDB Parents Guide to this thing… I was a kid who was too scared to watch this scene from Winnie the Pooh a few years earlier.

Aside from the minor emotional scarring, my biggest takeaway from The Wall were the film’s animated sequences. The movie covers a double album it switches between live action and animated for many of the songs. Probably because of my age, I paid more attention to the animated sequences thinking “hey it’s like a cartoon, cartoons can’t be scary!’ The animated segments of the movie drawn by Gerald Scarfe were in retrospect more surreal and depraved than the film’s live action counterparts. Most notably the film’s dark and horrifying depiction of war (in reaction to WWII) was seared into my mind. Similar to the above entries, Scarfe’s distinct style granted me a new perspective, in this case, it was a twisted perspective of morphing objects, violence, and sexual intimacy, but it was a new perspective nonetheless.

4 - Jonathan Gourley & Ralph Steadman

On a more positive note, as I grew and developed into an adult with an only slightly-fucked up artistic taste I tended to lean towards abstract and disturbing artwork (who woulda thought?) In high school I discovered both rock band Portugal. The Man and writer Hunter S. Thompson both artists who utilize surrealist imagery to enhance their respective creations. Portugal. The Man uses lead singer John Gourley’s watercolored artwork as the cover and liner artwork to most of their records. Meanwhile, Hunter S. Thompson famously used Ralph Steadman’s artwork as a visual component to his books Fear and Loathing in Las Vegasand Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72. These artists combined with things I’d find around the same time like Wednesday Wolf all represented a further development of the style I was drawn to as a child.

Personal history obviously plays a major role in my taste, but emotion aside, I can’t really explain the psychological reason why I’m drawn to such a distorted art style. Maybe seeing the “scary” view of something makes the real world that much brighter. Maybe it’s just seeing these everyday concepts twisted and distorted to such a degree that they’re almost unrecognizable. Maybe I just like art that resembles drug use. I have no idea. But in looking back at all this, one thing is clear:

I have a fucked up taste. I’m lucky.

I don’t want to end this on a note of me masturbating to how great my own taste is, but I genuinely feel fortunate that I had the freedom and access to take this path. Being able to have a fucked up taste, or an off-kilter personality is a luxury that can only be afforded by growing up unafraid. If I had grown up in a harsher environment, I wouldn’t have had the freedom to explore “weird” stuff because I’d be too preoccupied with fending for myself and trying to be cool. I never had to deal with bullying, racism, discrimination, poverty, or violence, so I was able to flourish and be whoever I wanted to be. I’m grateful in that sense, but I’m also hopeful. I’m hopeful that I can culture the same environment for my children one day, and I’m hopeful that this path will keep me open. I don’t want to be one of those people that shits on art, or is “scared” by art… and not scared in the same way that I was when watching The Wall, but scared in the way Christians were afraid of heavy metal in the 80’s. I don’t want to be scared of the next thing, I want to embrace it. Even if it’s weird or confusing, I want to at least have some grip on art and pop culture as I grow older… but I know that’s impossible. You can only be “cool” for so long, but I think this “open” mentality can be eternal.

Remaining open to new experiences and weird fucked up shit can only open your mind. Sometimes you’re not ready for it. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense, and that’s fine, but sometimes it can click with you in a way you couldn’t even conceive of before. The times when you see something, or read something, or hear something and say “fuck, why didn’t I think of that?” or “shit, this exact sound is exactly what I needed to hear right now.” The times when you’re tapped into something greater than yourself, when you’re experiencing something on a spiritual level, when you feel connected to another creator. That’s what art is about. That’s what life is about.

On Lyrics

I don’t think lyrics matter.

Well they do, but that statement was the only attention-grabbing way I could think to start this. What I mean is that I don’t think lyrics should be the main focal point of music. It took a bizarre combination of music genres for me to arrive at this conclusion, but let me see If I can walk you through my reasoning.

In my junior year of high school I discovered the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. The albums Ágætis Byrjun and ( ) specifically worked their way into near-daily rotation on my iPod. At the same time I also began to fall deeply into metalcore as I frustratedly grappled with my first real breakup. Metal’s harsh screaming vocals, pounding cannon drums, and abrasive guitar seemed to be a perfect reflection of how I felt internally most of the time. Any time I needed a break from that aggressive stuff, I’d go straight to Sigur Ros and use them as an escape. It was like mixing uppers and downers: I used these two genres to accentuate whatever I was feeling at the time. In jumping back and forth between two (seemingly) different types of music so frequently I started to notice some odd similarities. The primary connection I noticed was the way they both approached lyrics. As much as I loved the hardcore scene at the time, I almost never understood the lyrics. The typical criticism of “how can you even tell what they’re saying?” was completely valid. At that time I never had an answer to that criticism, but now I realize it was because I didn’t care about the lyrics; I cared about the music.

Lyrics are great. I’m a writer, I’m obligated to love the written word. Within the context of a piece of music however, I feel that lyrics shouldn’t be viewed as the most vital element. Even in hip-hop, a genre where the voice is the primary focus, there are still interesting ways to create music without focusing on the words explicitly… but I’ll come back to that in a second.

The connection between Sigur Ros and my newfound escape of metalcore was lyrics. Not the content, or the delivery, but the approach. Unless you spoke Icelandic, you had no idea what Sigur Ros songs are saying. Furthermore, some of their songs are written entirely in “hopelandic” a nonsensical language invented by the band which has no meaning. As the band describes hopelandic as “a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music and acts as another instrument.” While that’s an interesting and novel approach, to an average listener (especially an American high schooler) the whole thing was unintelligible to me. As was metal. I began to realize that both genres were approaching vocals in the exact same way. Obviously you can make out the occasional lyric in a metalcore song, but to me the vocals simply became a part of the larger musical texture. I understood the emotion that was being conveyed without understanding exactly what was being said. I began to view the voice as an instrument.

While both of the genres were using vocals to the same end, they both had very different applications for me. Metalcore became the devil on my shoulder that screamed unknowable words in anger, and Sigur Ros became the angel who gently sang me into a lullaby-like trance. There was suddenly a duality to nearly all of the music I was listening to, it simply became a matter of asking myself what I was in the mood for.

As time wore on I got over that relationship and moved away from metalcore. I wasn’t that mad all the time, and I didn’t want to be. I transitioned into a more positive pop-punk phase which centered heavily around The Wonder Years. While their vocals are far cleaner than what I was used to, the ever-present nasally punk style was still difficult to decipher at times. After listening to The Wonder Years for some time I sat down one of their albums album and a lyric sheet in front of me and ended up discovering an entirely layer to the songs. Not only did I understand what was being said, I suddenly saw a deeper level that the music was operating on. There was something interesting about listening to an album dozens of times and only fully-deciphering it when you sit down with that as your intent. Listening to an album with unclear vocals makes a record replayable and allows the listener to fill in the gaps with their own meaning. Lyrics can add an additional layer to something that’s already enjoyable.

Which brings me back to hip-hop. One of my favorite hip-hop artists Young Thug started out as a very divisive figure within the rap scene. This article by the New York Post does an excellent job of articulately explaining why Young Thug’s music is fascinating. I often use that write-up as a primer when trying to get friends into Thug and while I think the whole article is a great read, it is long. I’ll post an excerpt here that’s relevant:

“genius.com is the watering hole around which today’s rap enthusiasts gather to parse lyrics and ponder the meaning of life. Young Thug has pages upon pages of lyrics posted on Genius. Many are riddled with debates not over what his words might be trying to convey, but what’s actually being said in the first place.

The refrain of “Lifestyle” crescendos with Young Thug’s syllables piling up like rush-hour wreckage. The crowdsourced consensus at Genius states that the rapper is “livin’ life like a beginner and this is only the beginning,” – but “beginner” sounds a lot like “volcano,” and the garbled ambiguity of the whole thing elicits a distinct pleasure.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped conservative rap fans from turning Young Thug’s inscrutability into a punch line. Less-than-imaginative listeners simply hear it as a stylish quirk. But it’s really a mode of being. Instead of skipping off into the hyper-communicative valleys of the Internet, Young Thug conceals things. He mangles his words in mumbles, swallows them in yawns, annihilates them in growls. He’s not concerned with being understood. So we listen a little closer.”

Within the past year there have been a whole crop of new artists in the hip-hop field taking after Young Thug. Up-and-comers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Desiigner have all sparked online debates over what “hip-hop” is and where lyricism fits within that.

My two cents (as you can probably guess) is that it doesn’t matter. Music is music. In fact, two of the artists mentioned above don’t even consider themselves rappers. So what does this mean? Are we headed for a Idiocracy-like future where all music is mumbled nonsense? I don’t think so. All I think this means is that the tides are changing. There will always be lyrical music, and people who need to get something out that can’t be communicated through sound alone. The difference is it’s just becoming more acceptable for this alternative non-verbal approach to be viable.

I love this type of music because I can project whatever I want onto it. That’s why I started to love it in high school. I could listen to the abrasive angry stuff and get my emotions out in a safe, harmless way. I could listen to Sigur Ros and reflect, or use it to bounce back from a spiral caused by too much of the other stuff. It all became a mirror of my own thoughts and emotions.

I still look at music the same to this day. Sometimes I listen to an album so much that I’ll memorize the lyrics, but my first listen is always dedicated to taking the piece in as a whole. Trying to decode what’s being said can end up taking away from the overall experience, so I don’t make it my sole focus.

Lyrics are just one piece of the music. You could pay just as much attention to the guitar, or the drums, or the beat, but lyrics are an easy thing to focus on because they’re decipherable. The lyrics are often at the forefront of the music (there’s a reason people call singers as a frontman), they give listeners a common point of reference and something concrete to focus on.

Furthermore, lyrics can add onto a song, but they can also detract massively. In the case of The Wonder Years, The Upsides was an album that I already loved before I knew every single word. Sitting down with the lyric sheet simply added an additional layer and gave me a deeper appreciation for something that I already loved. On the flip side, lyrics can be flawed, and it’s easier to notice flawed lyrics than flawed music. There are only so many words at the end of the day, but there’s an infinite number of sounds. A bad lyric can stick out like a sore thumb, just look at the mania surrounding a single lyric on Drake’s most recent album. Or listen to Ab-Soul’s verse on Chance the Rapper’s “Smoke Again” and tell me his plea for ass-to-mouth isn’t off-putting. Kanye’s magnum opus “Runaway” is a track I love but one that still contains a handful of lines and deliveries I don’t really dig. The song’s verses are followed up by a four minute outro which contains no words, but a garbled vocalization from Kanye. As discussed in this video those four minutes are a prime example of what vocals (not necessarily words) can do in a song.

I believe (at least within hip-hop) the lack of emphasis on lyrics can be traced back to Kanye whose early work represented a shift not necessarily away from lyrics, but towards a greater emphasis on sound as a whole. This was movement was capitalized by people like Lil Wayne who have decent rhymes, but were carried by swag and personality more than anything else. The current crop of “non-rappers” (Yachty, Uzi, etc.) are simply the next evolution of that.

Ultimately everything falls into a spectrum: on one side you’ve got extremely lyrical artists like Kendrick Lamar or The Mountain Goats, and on the other end you’ve got the complete absence of lyrics in groups like Sigur Ros or Explosions in the Sky. Don’t get me wrong, I love it all, and I’m definitely not “anti-lyric” I just believe taking a song as a whole is more powerful than taking it at “face value” and only paying attention to the lyrics. Every piece within the music is vital, lyrics are simply one component. Lyrics are as important or unimportant as you want them to be, but I think focusing too much attention on them turns music into a narrow art form. Emotion can be conveyed without words, and songs can tell a story through sound, we just need to listen to the whole thing.

Hip-Hop and Musical Adventurousness

I never thought I’d be a hip-hop guy. I first became musically-conscious in my early teens and pledged allegiance to “rock” early on which, in my mind, meant swearing off everything that I perceived as mainstream. The classic rock that was so revelatory in middle school expanded my horizons and led me to grunge, metal, and stoner rock phases throughout my late teens. By the time I entered college I’d never genuinely been a fan of a single hip-hop artist apart from the now-defunct comedic hip-hop duo Das Racist… I suppose I did like Eminem, but being a white suburban teen, that was more out of obligation than undying fandom. I was still aware enough to realize I was missing out on something, but the juvenile punk rock mentality I had developed kept me from “giving in” to what I perceived as a lesser form of music.

It wasn’t until I saw a reddit thread announcing the premature release of Kanye West’s Yeezus that I realized I was missing out on something. The excitement was palpable, and the title (“So uh… Yeezus leaked.”) was intriguing enough to lead me to search the album out. I was so out of the hip-hop loop that I didn’t even realize this was a Kanye West album until I Googled it. I figured what did I have to lose? I downloaded the album, listened to it twice and didn’t get it. I knew Kanye was one of the biggest artists in the game (especially after his monumental 2010 album), but Yeezus on its own didn’t reveal to me to see what others saw in him.

Ironically, that same summer I had also gone down the rabbit hole that is Ween and discovered the beautiful insanity that is John Frusciante. Perhaps through those two artists I’d built up a tolerance to “dissonant” music because I ended up revisiting Yeezus during a vacation later that summer and fell in love with the record. The song “Bound 2” specifically hooked me early on and ended up being replayed constantly over the course of the trip. Everything from the sample, to the delivery, to the punchlines, to the way that Kanye twisted his words over the beat was amazing to me… and it was something that only that song did. Everything else on my iPod was rock, Yeezus was the only album within those 120 gigs that sounded anything like that. That same trip I heard “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” and took it as a cosmic sign I needed to give Kanye a chance and check out the rest of his discography. I downloaded the rest of Kanye’s studio albums and figured that would be that. He was the only good hip-hop.

A year and a half later at the beginning of 2015 I found myself balls-deep in college, chipping away at a handful of remaining courses as I entered one of my last years of school. While I’d enjoyed my trip through Kanye’s discography, that journey didn’t lead me any deeper down the rabbit hole of hip-hop, instead I’d thrown myself deeper into rock and the genre was beginning to lose its luster as I found myself listening to more and more podcasts. Ironically, inspired by two separate reddit posts: one for Lil Wayne’s mixtape Sorry 4 the Wait 2, and a second (now deleted thread) for Drake’s surprise album If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late both inspired me to give those releases a listen. Once again the excitement and experiences of complete strangers led me to albums I never thought I’d be listening to. Both Lil Wayne and Drake were artists which I had previously written off as musical fast food, yet they were both single-handedly inspiring hype and excitement the likes of which I had rarely seen online.

Between the epic history of Wayne’s Tha Carter V and the thinly-veiled shots both he and Drake seemingly took at Birdman on these releases, I realized I was missing out on something. That’s not to mention all the excitement, hype, and inside jokes that comes with the territory of hip-hop. These two releases opened the floodgates.

Based on how pumped Sorry 4 the Wait 2 got me in the gym, I was led to Young Thug, one of many rappers heavily-inspired by Lil Wayne. I’ll never be able to articulate why I love Young Thug as well as some of the articles written by professionals and music journalists, but things like this Instagram and this website speak for themselves. Young Thug is a creative force who has dismantled the previous boundaries established by the genre of hip-hop and created a sound rooted in upending the listener’s expectations. He’s a gangster who wears dresses. He’s a cold-blooded killer who calls his best friends “bae.” He’s a man who has written absurd lyrics like “I'mma ride in that pussy like a stroller” and made it sound so fucking natural.

If Lil Wayne and Drake opened my personal floodgates to hip-hop, then Young Thug removed the hinges and turned me into the type of hip-hop head that there is no coming back from. A month later, Kendrick Lamar dropped To Pimp a Butterfly, an album widely-considered one of the best since Kanye’s MBDTF. On the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum Travis Scott released Rodeo which quickly became one of my favorite “less lyrically substantive” releases of the year. Both of these releases showed me that hip-hop can’t be placed in a single box, it’s more than drugs and women (though they are still discussed often). That summer Vince Staples released Summertime ‘06 and Future released DS2. These releases ended up serving as a perfect “sample platter” of what the genre could do. These albums along with the infamous Drake/Meek Mill Beef made me feel like I was a part of something not only bigger than myself, but more exciting than any other genre I’d ever been a fan of.

2015 represented a sea change in my musical perspective. Hip-hop is now my primary genre and I visit boards like /r/hiphopheads every day. It’s a scene that’s ever-changing in the most exciting ways. I’m just glad my eyes were opened when they were and that I’m now no longer missing out on an entire world I didn’t even know existed. It was childish to withhold an entire genre of music from myself, and I’ll never make that mistake again. As much as I wanted to pretend that I was musically-diverse, you’re still only as adventurous as you want to be, and if a lack of adventurousness means missing out, then you’re doing music wrong. Music should be fun, enjoy what you enjoy, but don’t ever close yourself off to something, because it just might be your next obsession. That’s a lesson I’ll carry forward for the rest of my life, and I owe that all to a guy who compared his teeth to toilet paper. Sometimes brilliance can come from the most unexpected places.