Song Snacks for Curious Brains

If you commit to the pursuit, every day can be new music Monday.

Janeen McCrae

Jul 19, 2021

Note: Don’t like reading? The Podcast audio is at the end of the story.🫡

Hello.

This is your brain speaking.

Feed me.

Sorry, that’s not very specific, and having known you for this long and suffered through all our shared idiocy, I know I need to be more direct. I want you to feed me music. But not just any music.

I want you to feed me new music.

Feed me.

Feed me with sounds and bands and instruments and styles and genres I’ve never heard before. Turn your shell-like ears toward the new and the fresh and the hot buttered and feed me the melodious din of glorious undiscovered musical countries. Because I’m not just hungry for it—I’m starving. Absolutely famished with salivating synapses and grumbling grey matter that rumbles and gurgles with the pain of it. You there! Fill those suck holes of sound on each side of our head with song and let’s digest and ruminate on it.

Or to put it another way just in case you’re not getting it: feed me.

Why? Well, not that I’m panicking, but I was just with you when our eyes read that we—that’s you the body, and me the brain (aka Grand Poohbah of the Head Cave)—stop discovering new music around the age of thirty-and-a-half. Like we just stop and think, “Nah, we’ve peaked at Lady Marmalade.” Thirty-point-five! That was forever ago for us. I don’t even want to think about it.

Our eyes also read that we’re most receptive to new music between the ages of 12 and 24 and that if we loved a song in our adolescence, it will likely stick with us to the very end of our dust-to-dust, ashes-to-ashes existence. Ça Plane Pour Moi. This is your brain speaking and we need to cut this king of the divan1 shit and all the careless whispers. These guilty, got no rhythm feelings have got to stop. It’s put on our hard hats and go time. Let’s work together to mine the universe with our musical pickaxes aimed at the glistening coal face of song!

Do I yearn to be blown out of the back of our skull with some Swedish death metal, or perhaps a little J-Pop, or modern-day math rock? Maybe. I don’t know, but let’s try it!

Gimme that new-new. Gimme musical stimulus that twangs on my Broca’s Area and makes me say “YES!” Gimme songs that don’t remain the same but contort my emotions out of this mess we’re in. Move me with orchestral maneuvers in the mosh pit of my fleshy grey space. There’s plenty of room in here. Just open the hatch and ram those notes in and if they don’t fit, we can always make more room. Just looking around in here and the first things to go will be the Klingon Language (of which you can really only remember nuqDaq 'oH puchpa''e'?2), and all your clarinet lessons because, let’s face it, Benny Goodman you ain’t.

Gimme the neuron nom-noms and give them to me now.

Light me up with the staff of quavers and semiquavers. Don’t let me rest unless the music says so. Take me down all the rabbit holes. Strap a chow-down bib around our neck and stuff great and heaping spoonfuls of notes and harmonies and blues and ethio-funk and jazz and syncopated rhythms right in our ear holes. I just wanna taste it in that big band bite way. Gimme all the explosive flavors of the audio dynamite and beat those eardrums like you’re in a marching band.

Feed me.

This music doesn’t have to be new, as in it came out this year, it just has to be new to me. That’s the best part of listening to music. There are plenty of things that passed us by, and just like a ten-year-old today can discover The Beatles or David Bowie for the very first time, we can discover our very own unknowns.

But I beg you.

This is your brain speaking, and hello and how are you and all that, but please please please can we listen to new stuff and trigger our emotions to stimulate the dead-inside wonder of us? My nucleus accumbens needs that hit. Bring on the dopamine of the wicked riff or the wtf lyric that spins me right round baby right round. My amygdala is fidgety for it. My entire cerebellum has its glow sticks up and at the ready.

I want to feast on bass notes of unusual size and get fat on fat beats that rumble the floorboards of living in the past reality. Let’s commit to the Active Pursuit of the New and continue on this, our audio odyssey of life.

Frontal gyrus says a-one and-a-two and-a-one, two, three, four…

Hit play. Let’s dance.

Yours in tiny thought,

Janeen

This week’s amends…

“The rest of America may be all right, & perhaps I can understand it, but that is the last monument there is to the insane desire for power that shoots its buildings up to the stars & roars its engines louder & faster than they have ever been roared before and makes everything cost the earth & where the imminence of death is reflected in every last power-stroke and grab of the great money bosses, the big shots, the multis, one never sees.”

- Dylan Thomas in a letter to his wife, describes his experience in the urban jungle of NYC on his first tour of America. Earlier in the letter, he referred to Manhattan as the “mad middle of the last mad Empire on earth.” Good stuff.

Via Letters of Note

What’s with all the Richie Rich’s getting space-raced?

This lady’s superpower is patience. In 2012, Russian artist Vladimir Umanets vandalized a corner of a Rothko painting called “Black on Maroon” at the Tate Modern. This 17-minute video shows the 18-month challenge of restoring it. The word painstaking was invented for this.