Combating Fall

The thing that I love most about Oregon (aside from our craft beers, eccentric facial hair, and borderline-oppressive foliage) is that we get to experience all four seasons. The ability to witness the shift of each season is a beautiful thing, but fall always seems to be a time of the year that’s laced with bittersweet melancholy.

Aside from the turning of the leaves, the vanishing sun, and the unrelenting torrent of rain, fall has always been a season of loss. It’s synonymous with the beginning of a new school year, and that’s a feeling that I’ve always dreaded. It’s not that I disliked school, but I’ve come to realize that the first week of classes represents something more than just “the start of a new school year,” it’s realizing how little you did with your summer, and how much you still wanted to do. It’s a sea change that is so closely tied to the season that I can’t help but feel a lingering sense of sadness through the month.

I’ve realized that my nostalgic tendencies are (in many cases) simply coping mechanisms to combat the inherent feelings of sadness that some seasons bring. I’ve also realized that for about a decade every fall has represented “the last year” of something in my mind. In middle school it was ‘holy shit, high school. This is the loss of all childhood innocence.’ Halfway through high school it was ‘holy shit, I’m taking classes and I need to get a job?’ Throughout college it was a constant stream of ‘holy shit, this term is gonna be even harder than the last?’ Last fall it was ‘holy shit, I need to finish school, work my job, and work an internship?’

I now realize that each fall before this I was concerned solely (and selfishly) with a loss of free time. Summer is nothing but free time, it’s the ultimate fuck-around season. Fall is the antithesis of summer, it’s a complete sea change in everything from the weather to my daily routine. Nostalgia is just finding things about the season you like and holding onto them for dear life. There’s something comforting about breaking out your jeans from last year, or listening to an album that you only listen to during this time of the year.

But up until very recently, my free time was what I valued above nearly everything else. Fall takes all that away because what used to be endless hours of summer fuck-around time is now dedicated to school. This past year I wrapped up my final term of college and an advertising internship, and all of my greatest fears were realized. The past 8 months I’ve had the least free time that I’ve ever had in my life, but something unexpected happened: I didn’t mind. I absolutely loved that internship and rarely ever longed to go back to the carefree “fuck around” summers of past. I was willingly trading in my free time for work because I finally found something that I loved doing.

Now I sit here as I’ve finished my final year of college and that internship feeling the same creeping dread as previous years, but for an entirely different reason. Now I just hope I find a job that I enjoy as much as that internship. I want to find something that I enjoy that much and would unwaveringly trade in my free time for.  

I recognize I’ve experienced this insane level of restlessness and uncertainty before and it’s turned out okay every other time. In fact, I’ve come out of each one of those experiences a better person… but this one feels different. This one feels final.   

I think what it comes down to is that if I enjoy what I’m doing, then that panic dissipates almost immediately. I just don’t know if I’ll enjoy it until I experience it, and up until that point, it’s just an unknown that my paranoid mind fills with only the worst possible outcome. I’m afraid of the unknown. I’m terrified of change, and fall is a season that always brings change. I just don’t know if it’s for better or worse until it actually happens.

At the time of writing, I’m terrified that I won’t find a job, or that my job will feel like work. And don’t get me wrong, I love work, and I’ll willingly ring myself dry if it’s going towards something that I find satisfying. But I’ve also experienced jobs that are immensely unsatisfying. I just want to write. If I can write I’ll be happy. And if you enjoy what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life (just look at pornstars, they never have any lasting psychological issues). I don’t know. I’m on the edge of an abyss and I’m about to be in control for the first time in my life. I’m just as scared as I am excited. I don’t want to make the wrong first move. I don’t want to fuck it up right out of the gates.

Every other change has been for the best, so I can only hope that this one will be too. I can feel the existential dread creeping in, but I’m too far along to turn back now. The biggest difference is, this time, I need to seek it out. This isn’t an impending school year that I’ll have to participate in regardless of whether I’m ready or not, this is something I need to undertake on my own. Change won’t come to me. A job won’t fall in my lap. This is one change that I need to charge into headfirst. I can’t wait for life.

Tims v Lays

I may not have many skills in life, but one thing I have honed over my 23 years of existence is a delicate palate for PB&J sandwiches. They’re one of the only things I know inside and out. One of the few things I truly understand. By proxy, I’ve also become dangerously knowledgeable about potato chips. I know the history, I know the facts, I can guess the nutritional information in a serving size down to 20 kcals. As a result, I can say with 100% certainty that Tim’s Cascade Style Potato Chips are objectively the pinnacle of the potato chip art form, and I will fight anyone that says otherwise. Reasons why they are good:

1. They salty as fuck

2. They crunchy as hell

3. They’re thick as shit

4. They taste really really good

You could put a bowl of Tim’s out at a motherfucking barbecue on the fourth of July and no one would bat an eye, that’s how good they are. And I know what you’re thinking in your whiny little voice “but Taylor, what about Kettle Brand Potato Chips?” To that, I say SHUT THE FUCK UP. Kettle Chips fell the fuck off. Aside from Sea Salt and Salt & Pepper they are the chip embodiment of trying too hard. Maple and Bacon? Gimmie a fucking break. They tried too hard to diversify and diluted their entire brand in the process. You know how many SKU’s Tims has? Fucking FOUR: Original, Sea Salt, Sour Cream, and Jalapeño. Stick with what you know guys, don’t try to put bacon in my potato chip.

As a quick aside, you may have noticed that I’m not talking about anything besides kettle chips, and that’s because I’m a chip racist. Everything besides kettle chips are less than. Lays are cheap, Pringles are a joke, and Cheetos are for children. So in case you’re wondering when I’ll bring up your “favorite chip” I won’t and you’re wrong.

Now onto the main event: within the last five years, big dog Lays had swung their weight around and elbowed their way into the Kettle game providing a much-needed shake-up to the industry. Since 2011 they’ve been doing surprisingly serviceable work, walking a fine line between just enough flavor variations and just the right quality. As a mega-corporation they obviously fall prey to many of the same pitfalls as Kettle, trying to diversify and even encouraging fans to think of wacky flavors but luckily their Kettle line has remained relatively pure. In 2014 Lays released a lattice cut variety within their Kettle Chip line and betrayed any bit of faith I had in them up until that point.

These chips are awful. There’s so much wasted potential: the lattice cut represents an ideal delivery system, allowing for salt and flavoring to sneak between the cracks and into the holes of the chip. It could have been perfect, but instead, we got an overly-crunchy and under-salted piece of absolute fuckshit. These chips are like eating sandpaper. Stiff sandpaper. It’s like having your mouth crammed full of tree bark and being told it’s birthday cake. They shred the inside of your mouth and don’t even reward you for your food-inflicted mutilation. It would almost be worth it if (after bearing through the horrific chewing experience) you were hit with a wave of salty goodness…or even flavor, but there is none to speak of. And sure, Tims are crunchy, but at least they don’t hurt to eat. These Lays commit the worst sin by being unpleasant to eat and unsatisfying to taste.

Lattice cut Lays are an abomination. They have slandered the good name of the kettle chip category and don’t even deserve to be called a snack food. These chips aren’t worth the recycled plastic they’re packaged in. They have no respect for the potato chip game. If Lays think that they can just waltz into this category and shit out whatever their team comes up with, THINK AGAIN. I won’t stand for this, and I won’t go down without a fight. Kettle chips are America’s pastime, and I won’t let you slander their good name. This is about more than chips, this is about freedom. About purity. Tim’s is fighting for wholesomeness, they stand for something. Stand for something, Lays. Make the world a better place. Don’t take the easy way out.

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.

VH1 and Sponginess

For all my talk about metal, hip-hop, and my punk counterculture mentality (make no mistake, I am a hipster shithead at heart) I also have an affection for a very specific era of pop music. At the risk of talking about the same year again, 2006 was an important period because I had nothing better to do than absorb everything around me. I was culturally-conscious for the first time in my life, and as a result, much of what I care about stems from this time.

Specifically, in 2006 I had nothing better to do than watch VH1 every morning. It’s a weird go-to thing for a thirteen year old to watch on a saturday morning, but I guess at the time it was an intoxicating mixture of titillation and maudlin pop tunes. As seems to be a recurring theme during this time period, I just didn’t know any better. I was a sponge, happy to absorb whatever random droplets of media rolled my way. 2006 was also early enough that I couldn’t really seek out anything on the internet, and I was far too young (and lazy) to actually go and discover things in a record store. As a result, I defaulted to watching VH1 for one to two hours every morning. Nothing weird about that. Just a 13 year old boy watching the top 20 adult contemporary music videos. Over and over and over again.

While I think it’s a hilarious image in retrospect, I actually have a profound appreciation for what is ultimately just another year of generic pop songs. There’s probably someone a year older than me who feels the same way about 2005, and there’s probably someone a year younger than me who feels the same way about 2007. But for me, I have a soft spot in my heart for The All-American Rejects, The Fray, KT Tunstall, and Shakira. Her hips didn’t lie to me.

This Spotify playlist is relatively comprehensive and reflective of the hits that year. Now let me stop you before you say anything else. There’s a lot of corny shit in there. A lot. I recognize that. “Bad Day” by Daniel Powter? Yeah you’re the reason I’m having a bad day, Daniel. “For You I Will” by Teddy Geiger? How bout you don’t, Teddy boy. “Waiting on the World To Change” by John Mayer? How ‘bout you make the first move, Mayer. Yeah this is basically sitting in a dentist’s office waiting to get your teeth drilled music. This is some cornball shit, and I fully admit that. Sometimes dragging your shame songs out into the light is healthy.

VH1 wasn’t all bad at this time, there was also some genuinely good stuff from this era that I’ll still listen to occasionally: “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, “Dani California” by the Chilli Peppers, and “Idlewild Blue” by OutKast are all songs I unabashedly and unironically love. I just find it weird that all these genuinely (and objectively) great songs occupy the same space in my mind as stuff like “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield.

God knows I’ll never put down an individual’s taste, but there’s no reason I can’t put down my own. I’m grateful that I moved out of this phase within a year and stopped relying on “the charts” for new music by the end of the year. I’m sad that this is the closest I’ll ever get to feeling like a member of the MTV generation. They got Nirvana, and I got Blue October. They got The Breeders, and I got P!nk. They got 90’s Madonna, and I got 2006 Madonna. It’s not all bad music, I’m just sad that these are the songs that I associate with my early teenage years. It could have been so much better. I could have been so much cooler. But hey, sometimes ya just gotta roll with the punches. Sometimes you can’t keep a 13 year old from obsessively watching Nelly Furtado. And now, for better or worse, 2006 pop is one of foundations of my musical pyramid. Such is life. Sometimes you can’t hide your inner teenager.

iPods, Iron Men, and Matchboxes

My first iPod was terrible. And I don’t mean the device itself, my little light blue iPod Mini was one of the greatest things I’d ever owned and one of my prized possessions throughout middle school. No, I mean the contents of my first iPod were absolutely, undeniably, testical-shatteringly horrible. The first CD that I ever burned to iTunes was Matchbox 20’s debut album Yourself or Someone Like You. Ugh. The second thing that I put onto my iPod was a burned CD of random Weird Al tracks given to me by a friend. Slightly less judgmental ugh. Now I don’t mean to shit on either of these two artists, they’re technically fine in the grand scheme of things, but these two were literally it. 40-some tracks consisting solely of Matchbox 20 and Weird Al. I cannot think of a more hellish combination. I’ve read about musical torture in which someone is forced to listen to the same songs at a deafening level for days on end… but my iPod in 2005 would have given those playlists a run for their money. My iTunes library would have been enough to make even the most steadfast soldier spill their guts. But I was happy. Mainly because I didn’t know better, but also because I was amazed I could listen to more than one CD at a time.

In 2005, the same friend who cursed me with the Matchbox 20 CD and the Weird Al mix gave me a new burned disc simply titled “Matt’s Mix.” I had to rely on him as my sole source of new music because he unabashedly used Limewire, and I was too scared of getting a virus or being arrested to use it myself. “This is pretty cool” he told me ahead of time “you’re gonna love it.” Because he hadn’t steered me wrong yet, I tossed the disc in my computer excited to see what it contained. This was a time before anyone knew (or had the ability) to label tracks on burned CDs, so within iTunes everything came up as “Track 01”, “Track 02”, “Track 03”, etc. Intrigued by the mystery (as well as Matt’s ringing endorsement of its contents, I loaded the unknown files into my iPod and hit play.

What I heard was the first destructive, resonant chord of AC/DC’s “TNT”. I didn’t know what to make of it. This didn’t sound like Rob Thomas at all. And the lyrics didn’t discuss Yoda, food, or the lifestyle of the Amish. It was like hearing music for the first time.

The tracks that followed were essentially a greatest hits of the Australian band’s first nine albums. From High Voltage to For Those About to Rock I had been turned onto something that I genuinely connected with. Because I was at the musical whim of my friend, I ended up listening to these tracks dozens of times, replaying them until I knew every word and every beat. Later that same year I realized that my Dad had thousands of CDs just sitting on a bookshelf in his office, and as it turns out, most of them were classic rock. Maybe he wasn’t as lame as I thought. Within the thousands of albums my dad owned were the first eight AC/DC albums, all of which I promptly ripped to my iPod and enjoyed endlessly.

When my dad noticed that I was listening to his music he asked me if I’d ever heard of Black Sabbath before and recommended that I listen to his copy of Paranoid. If I can point to a single moment that led me to love heavy metal it was that album.

Back in 2005 there was one moment late in a cold fall school night. My family had just finished eating dinner, my two brothers had retreated upstairs to their rooms and my parents were out on their nightly walk. I stayed in the living room and snuck that copy of Paranoid into my family’s stereo. I skipped directly to track 4 “Iron Man” and cranked the stereo up almost as loud as it could go. I put my head between the speakers and pressed play.

The sound seemed to reverberate through my body. I could feel it in my core. The ominous drum beat gave me goosebumps. The powerful fuzzed-out chords made my brain contort. Ozzy’s first distorted cry “I AM IRON MAN” made my hair stand on end. It put me in a trance-like state and it was the first time I had ever heard something so heavy so loud. I saw it all when I closed my eyes, I felt it shake the structure around me. It was beautiful. It was metal.

Most importantly, Paranoid paved the way for heavier music that I’d go onto enjoy for the rest of my life. They opened the gates to metal, stoner rock, psychedelic music, and so much more. I can trace it all back to that one night that I spent shaking with joy that something like this existed. The journey that I went on to arrive at that point was definitely a weird one, the jump from Matchbox 20 to AC/DC to Sabbath isn’t a progression I think many other people have made. It’s a cliché, but sometimes the journey really is more important than the destination. In this case it’s a journey without a destination. Music and personal taste has no end point, I’m always discovering new music, and my life wouldn’t be the same without it. I appreciate “the journey” in retrospect, but more than anything, I’m glad it went somewhere quickly. If it wasn’t for that terrible first collection of music I’d have nowhere to go to. Nothing to run from, and no reason to look for anything better. The blandness of Matchbox 20 sent me on a musical journey that’s still ongoing to this day. Thank you Rob Thomas.