Originally appeared in Grist Journal Issue 6 (2013).
Top 25 Most Played
You discovered this odd option on iTunes a few years back when you still lived in Illinois. iTunes had a preset playlist of your top 25 most played songs. You clicked and expected Kristin Hersh, Throwing Muses, and The Pixies. You were in for a surprise. The list was dominated by Flight of the Conchords. Had you listened to that two man comedy duo that much? You pondered the list: the songs you wouldn’t have guessed, the fact that whatever you thought was your favorite music, your favorite songs, you were wrong.
Being a good human animal, you immediately produced justifications. For months, maybe years, you only listened to music in your car, on your ipod. iTunes is too dumb to take into account the hundreds of hours at the gym. You decided to forget that list. It was bullshit.
But now you feel compelled to confront the list. Examining its mysteries is preferable to working on your essay collection that you’ll never finish in time. You look and admit that in your home—by yourself or with your roommate Ben slamming his door, jamming earbuds in his ears, and cursing your existence—you are a person of loud obsession, a person with no embarrassment over hitting the looping arrow until the circled 1 pops up.
You click Top 25 Most Played. You brace yourself for incongruities. The list has changed, but the new list is similar to the old list in its ability to defy who you think you are and what you believe you do.
Your Top 25 Most Played:
#1 “Harmony” by Elton John: 227 plays
#2 “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele: 201 plays
#3 “Not Fair” by Lily Allen: 179 plays
#4 “Everything’s Just Wonderful” by Lily Allen: 146 plays
#5 “Swoon” by Tanya Donnelly: 145 plays
#6 “Heroin Girl” by Everclear: 143 plays
#7 “Test-tube Baby/Shoot’m Down” by Morphine: 130 plays
#8 “The Saddest Song” by Morphine: 120 plays
#9 “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend: 113 plays
#10 “Nan, You’re a Window Shopper” by Lily Allen: 112 plays
#11 “ATWA” by System of a Down: 107 plays
#12 “F*** You” by Lily Allen: 105 plays
#13 “Smile” by Lily Allen: 94 plays
#14 “Batmobile” by Liz Phair: 90 plays
#15 “Alfie” by Lily Allen: 87 plays
#16 “Easy” by Liz Phair: 83 plays
#17 “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction: 82 plays
#18 “The Fear” by Lily Allen: 75 plays
#19 “The Good that Won’t Come Out” by Rilo Kiley: 75
#20 “The Most Beautiful Girl in the Room” by Flight of the Conchords: 74 plays
#21 “Not Big” by Lily Allen: 73 plays
#22 “22” by Lily Allen: 73 plays
#23 “Liquid Diamonds” by Tori Amos: 68 plays
#24 “Everyone’s at It” by Lily Allen: 67 plays
#25 “Spain” by Kristin Hersh: 65 plays
Your Top 25 Most Played list overwhelms you. Zero songs by the Pixies. Zero Radiohead. Zero Veruca Salt. No jazz at all, not even the Duke. If someone asked you to list your favorite bands, you would, but then they’d look at your list and call you a big fat liar. They’d see obsessions so secret, they were hidden from you.
You notice your recent Soundgarden binge hasn’t registered. You look it up: “The Day I Tried to Live,” 37 plays. Ben would insist you listened to that song at least 500 times in one week, but you didn’t. #25 on the list has 65 plays. Soundgarden wasn’t even close. You imagine listening to the same song 65 times. What an odd thing to do.
#25 “Spain” by Kristin Hersh
65 plays
If you were crammed against a wall, forced to pick one musician for all eternity, your favorite artist would be Kristin Hersh. You assume your torturer wouldn’t distinguish between her solo work and her Throwing Muses albums while sadistically deleting the rest of your music, leaving you with only Kristin Hersh to listen to until you die, a choice you try to stand by with your box of Cheerios, the only cereal you’ll ever be able to eat again.
Kristin Hersh appears exactly once, coming in at #25, barely making the cut.
During that year you spent as an Intensive Reading Teacher at Zenith shitty Middle School, with fifteen-year-old eighth graders who read on third and fourth grade levels, you hated everything so hard, and you listened to Kristin Hersh and Throwing Muses. The hour commute to work and the hour commute back were spent singing along to Learn to Sing Like a Star and Sunny Border Blue. You spent hours at the gym, trying to hoist away despair, trying to jog out of the evil bureaucracy of the public school system, listening to those albums back to back, starting with “In Shock” and usually finishing around “White Suckers,” sometimes pushing yourself all the way to “Listerine” for a solid 90 minute workout.
Kristin Hersh was your only friend in Florida, and this is how you repay her, with #25, and not even your all-time favorite song by her.
Where the hell is “Speed and Sleep?”
You look: a measly 37 plays, the same as Chris Cornell’s “The Day I Tried to Live,” which is a fair bit more than your Throwing Muses average. Somehow, iTunes says you’ve never listened to Limbo on your computer. An impossibility. You assumed the list began with this computer, almost four years ago, but to imagine that you haven’t listened to Limbo even once in four years?
#2 “Rolling in the Deep” by Adele
201 plays
This song is not surprising in the list, but its rank and number of plays come as a bit of a shock. You haven’t had this song for a year. You don’t know which is more embarrassing: what the song says about you and an obsession that won’t die, or how the song came to your ears and eyes to begin with.
It was the season finale of Gossip Girl. You wanted Blair Waldorf back with Chuck Bass. You practically yelled at your computer that Blair had to be with Chuck. Blair + Chuck = the only reason you keep watching the show. Blair was going to fuck up and marry the Prince of Monaco, but she was spending the evening with Chuck first. You leaned into their beautiful montage: they were dancing, laughing, crashing a bat mitzvah. They so obviously belonged together, and this perfect song about how they could have had it all blared over the tumbling images.
You downloaded the song almost immediately. You listened to it, belted it out, thought of your own Chuck Bass. Sometimes, you cried. But you listened and listened and listened until Ben swore he would kill you. Until he declared it was the worst song ever. Until he begged you to play “Mother” by Danzig instead.
“Mother” is a joke, an earworm, a song you don’t even have on iTunes, but look up on YouTube to tease him now and then. It’s a song you can both 5-star on Guitar Hero, but with the consequence that it can pop into your head and refuse to leave at any moment.
You will not apologize for “Rolling in the Deep.” The music thumps and wails. Adele wails. She belts out her anger and sorrow. She belts it out in a way she never bothers on the rest of the album. She growls, The scars of your love remind me of us, they keep me thinking that we almost had it all. She screams, The scars of your love, they leave me breathless. I can’t help feeling, we could have had it all to the heavens, to your Chuck Bass, who has just finished having sex with a fat internet troll who has posters of Michael Jackson all over her walls, while you were at home waiting, having said goodbye to the prince.
#23 “Liquid Diamonds” by Tori Amos
68 plays
To find Tori on the list is surprising, and not. You’d basically stopped listening to Tori by the time you first got iTunes on that old 2GB hard drive desktop. There’s a sea secret in your relationship to Tori Amos. How many years did you not listen at all? Then, stupidly, carelessly, three weeks ago, you started again. It was somehow ok. You haven’t cut yourself. You listen and listen, mostly to From the Choirgirl Hotel, which came out a few months after your blanket friend died. It’s too bad, really—the whole album is about her, but she never got to hear it. You’d think 14 years would be long enough. You’d think you could write about Bethany now, and what happened to her, what happened to you. You’d think a lot of things.
#s 3, 4, 10, 12, 13, 15, 18, 21, 22, & 24 by Lily Allen
So Many Plays
Despite previous experience, you’d expected the list to be weighted toward your absolute, all-time favorite bands. It is not. Out of 25 songs, 10 are by Lily Allen. You’ve only known about Lily Allen for a little more than two years.
The first time you stumbled on the “Top 25 Most Played” list, you were surprised it was over half Flight of the Conchords. Now, it’s Lily Allen.
You like comedy. Comedians are the best people in the world. If you didn’t suck so much, you’d be a comedian. If you didn’t suck so much, you would track down Louis CK and have his bastard ginger baby.
But you do suck, so you’re just a regular old jackoff writer.
There is nothing like a jolt of funny, or a five hour loop of funny. Lily Allen might not be your favorite, but life would be less awesome without her.
You’re perplexed by why “Not Fair” is #3 and has 33 more plays than any other Lily Allen. You thought “Alfie” would top the Lily Allen chart for you. That was one of the first songs of hers you heard. Your brother linked you to “Everything’s Just Wonderful,” a satire, on YouTube. You were totally into it, then YouTube suggested “Alfie,” a song about a little brother who sits in his room smoking weed and not getting a job. The video uses Muppets, which works for a song whose music sounds like something you’d hear on a Disneyland ride.
“Alfie” is #15, “Everything’s Just Wonderful” is #4, and for some reason, “Not Fair” comes in at #3, which is impressive in the list as a whole and also interesting as the top of the Lily Allen mini-list.
It’s a mean song. One you sang while thinking about your Chuck Bass, that flaming asshole who you loved, despite everything. So you played this song whenever you wanted to think nasty thoughts about him and laugh about how he could never satisfy you sexually, even though it’s not true.
He was great in bed.
#5 “Swoon” by Tanya Donnelly
145 plays
Here’s another not surprising surprise. Not a bad showing for Tanya Donelly. Not fair to her half-sister, Kristin Hersh. Other fans always want you to choose which sister is better. You don’t want to compare, but will admit Kristin is more after your own heart. iTunes makes you look like a lying jackhole.
You’ve known “Swoon” a long, long time, and you’ve had more than one love interest who looked at you like s/he wanted to set you on fire. You’ve never gotten over the idea of a green door. You struggle in your life. You get stuck. You remind yourself: there’s always a green door, and green gets you out.
You tried to take a ceramics independent study during college so you could make a life-size green door out of clay. Tetsuyo wanted you to do too much other work for that half credit, so you dropped. And now there’s the novel you are supposedly writing: that wish-fulfillment story where your protagonist is an artist and has made a green door and it’s magic and she’s got her own perfect man, better than Chuck Bass could ever be.
Of course “Swoon” is #5.
#6 “Heroin Girl” by Everclear
143 plays
You immediately make it 144 plays. You resisted the others, but reading “Heroin Girl” compels you. You will not apologize. You are from the 90s. You are poor white trash. You may live in a three bedroom house with a giant yard that you rent with your fat fellowship money in Atlanta, but you are poor white trash who is friends with poor white trash with tattoo sleeves and dozens of piercings. You’ve done drugs with people who never “got out” and you know them, or knew them, and you know that world. You’ve never done heroin because you didn’t want to become addicted. Your brother snorted it once, passed out in a chair, and barfed all over himself.
You didn’t want to admit where you came from for the longest time. It was still PC to mock white trash when you were in high school. It’s still PC now, almost half a life later. It will probably always be PC to mock white trash, those rednecks, those backwoods freaks, those trailer trash bozos, those toothless hillbillies, those mysterious people who, though born conspicuously absent of melanin, can’t seem to make it in the white man’s world.
In college, you wore a White Trash badge across your chest. No, that was DD. But you, you would talk about it if people asked. You’d grow enraged when they smiled and beamed about you “getting out.” They expected you to go on Oprah with your bronzed boot straps. You could count the differences between your childhood and the kids raised beside you, but no one wants to hear that story. White Trash is only interesting as a joke or if they’ve “gotten out.”
During graduate school, the English Department Graduate Studies director nominated you for a fellowship for students facing economic hardships, typically those with children or health problems. You had no children and were in almost perfect health. You were no poorer than your peers, all of you scraping by on teaching stipends. Was he joking? You went to the women’s restroom, lifted your sweater and turned back and forth in front of the mirror to see if you had White Trash 4 Life tattooed somewhere on your midsection.
There is something about this song that connects you to your warped roots. That reminds you who you are and where you come from and who you are not, even if you buy suits, pull your hair into a bun, and slap on two hundred dollar shoes. There were so many times you almost stayed in your white trash hell. So many times you almost hung it all up and embraced the absurdity, quit striving. But here you are now. You cannot forget you come from somewhere else—no one will let you forget, even if your single tattoo comes from a Salvador Dali painting.
Part of you is still there. You know it’s true each time the po-lice man says, Just another overdose. You will not apologize.
#19 “The Good that Won’t Come Out” by Rilo Kiley
75 plays
You could never quite get into Rilo Kiley. You really liked “Glendora” because of how used and abused you felt by Chuck Bass and the way he talked about other women to you and sometimes suggested you should invite your friends to bed. You’d always cry and complain then come back for more, do it again. “Glendora” has 51 plays. You loved “Glendora” so you stole a few more songs and didn’t like much else.
Then somehow, “The Good that Won’t Come Out” crept into your subconscious and took root, despite the crappy sound quality and the way the song makes it sound like your speakers are going to blow at the end, the crispy rattle of paper vibrating itself apart.
You hit “play.” The music is weirdly soothing, with a simple guitar melody over a drum kit being tapped with metal wires. The disappearing ground, hands turning into dust, fear of doctors, going out and embarrassing yourself by getting drunk and falling down in the street. Yes, please. Just, yes.
Chuck Bass is in this song too. It was always such a big mistake, lying there in his warm embrace.
Eventually your mouth will turn to dust, and you’re ready for that when you close your eyes and listen. You could put this song on repeat and slip into a coma with a small smile on your disintegrating lips.
Cigarettes
about 45 smoked in twenty four hours
It’s cold, but when you go to smoke, you often leave the sliding door open a foot so you can hear whatever song you’re playing. You listen to “The Good that Won’t Come Out” and think about being a haunted person. You consider the fact that you play these songs on repeat repeat repeat for hours, days. Are you addressing the hauntings, stealing their power, or making them worse? You imagine Bethany, dressed in white, darting between trees in your yard. You’ve somewhat consciously created this image for yourself, which is very different from that green, slimy Bethany who used to crawl up your bunk bed in college, who chased you up and down the stairwells in your dorm, you flying into your suite, slamming the heavy metal door behind you, panting, ducking your head away from the small glass rectangle window while the girls with their biochem books cracked in their laps looked up, then looked away.
You suck your cigarette and survey your leaf-covered yard. You want to suck down another smoke and avoid committing anything to paper. Chuck Bass. You think you’re waiting for him to come back. You watch your shadow on the shed, the fox ear hat outlined perfectly. You know you’re not waiting for him to come back.
You’d rather pine for him and hate him and want him and love him than risk a new connection. You have enough ghosts. You inhale them into your lungs, blow them out where you can keep your eye on their filmy outlines.
#17 “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction
82 plays
You cannot explain this.
You remember once leaving iTunes playing, and it was on “repeat one” all day, and you didn’t even realize until you came home and apologized to your dog. That must be it. What else could explain this? It’s not even “Jane Says,” which would also baffle you, but not make you feel like the most bizarre wanker, a traitor to some of your favorite musicians who are not in this list at all. Not a single Veruca Salt song, but “Been Caught Stealing” is on here at #17.
This is the only song on the list you haven’t been remotely tempted to listen to again. It must be a glitch or accident. Or maybe you were having a white trash breakdown day. You did get caught stealing, after all, when you were 17. All those cigarettes and booze they wouldn’t sell you anyway that you stole and smoked and drank or sold to other kids.
#23 turned #17 “Liquid Diamonds” by Tori Amos
82 ½ plays
What makes perfect sense is that you logged the list as it was last night, and now, “Been Caught Stealing” is technically #18 because “Liquid Diamonds” stole the #17 slot with 82 ½ plays.
Sometimes, certain stories require certain songs. You keep beating your heart against those three different Bethany pieces, trying to finish one for the collection you need to postmark November 1, none of them working. You play “Liquid Diamonds” on repeat, or all of From the Choirgirl Hotel, while you struggle. Your eyes brim over every time Tori says, And if your friends don’t come back to you, and you know this is madness.
You tried to listen to Tori from the beginning to see if that’d help. You started with Little Earthquakes then Under the Pink then Boys for Pele then you went back to From the Choirgirl Hotel because that’s the last Tori you ever listened to and it’s the easiest to listen to now. You have Scarlet’s Walk, you have for years, but all tracks have 0 plays.
Keep it just between us.
#11 “ATWA” by System of a Down
107 plays
You are emo. You’ve been emo since you were twelve. You were emo before there was such a thing as emo. And angry. Don’t forget angry. Plus, you’ve got abandonment issues.
It’s not surprising. By the tender age of 19, you’d lost all of your friends. Your fault or not, that’s what happened.
So you get depressed and want to scream, You don’t care about how I feel. I don’t feel it anymore! over and over. So what?
According to iTunes, you haven’t done that since August. It’s the day before Halloween. Good for you. It’s been awhile.
#14 & #16 by Liz Phair
Batmobile: 90 plays
This one is almost easy. You listened to “Batmobile” on repeat while working on your Percival Everett essay. You’re not entirely sure why this song has something to do with finding Percival Everett’s novel Erasure in the “black section” of a bookstore, but you played it over and over anyway. It must have had something to do with the fact that you felt like somebody must be fucking with you, that you can’t take most people seriously, that you wanted to flee. There was something inherently scary in where you were trying to go, and you knew, you can’t get your money back, you can’t get your money back, you can’t pretend that isolation is the same as privilege.
Easy: 83 plays
Fucking Chuck Bass. You moved across the country to get away from him. You taught middle school reading to get away from him. You had the worst year of your life while he stayed in Illinois and got engaged to an undergrad. Later, you moved back, expecting him to leave for North Carolina with that girl he named “dark core” in his phone, but who you thought of as a half-full glass of flat soda.
You came back. He hadn’t moved with her. He wanted to be friends again. You tried, but no. He hadn’t gone to North Carolina because he wasn’t invited. Her parents had paid her off. Law School tuition or Chuck Bass? After she chose, he tried to choose sex with you again. You should have murdered him on the spot.
Instead, you said, no, Chuck. No. It’s not that easy.
#9 “Oxford Comma” by Vampire Weekend
113 plays
Vampire Weekend is one of the happiest bands you listen to. The music is light and carefree, with that little bite that’s necessary to keep your interest. You love this song. It’s titillating to sing: Who gives a fuck about an oxford comma?
You give a fuck. You give a very serious fuck. You give so much of a fuck, that sometimes you’re an asshole about oxford commas.
Wasn’t it just yesterday you were filling out that questionnaire? You were given “learning goals” for your courses and asked to answer questions.
Learning Goal 1: Upon completing the Continuing Writing (CWRT) General Education requirement, students will be able to construct a sophisticated thesis and support it in well-written prose that demonstrates competencies in grammar, coherence and content.
Q: Can you suggest a better alternative wording for this learning goal?
A: Sure, include a comma after “coherence” for proper grammar.
That’s why the song is so great. Nothing tastes quite as spicy-sweet as hypocritical blasphemy on the tongue.
#7 & #8 by Morphine 250 total plays
As hard as your list is to digest, it’s nice to find a few familiar faces you can recognize as you. It comes as no surprise that Morphine is in this list twice. Morphine has been one of your favorite bands since the early 90s. Maybe you should be surprised since most of your “favorite” bands aren’t on this list at all. You don’t have to try very hard to explain songs that make sense, though again, the two on top aren’t what you might have predicted. You would have guessed “I’m Free Now” and “Empty Box.” You might have guessed “The Saddest Song” if you’d thought about it.
Test-tube Baby/Shoot’m Down 130 plays
This song is about doing drugs. Lots of drugs. All sorts of drugs. A cornucopia of drugs. You probably listened to it on repeat while working on your cocaine essay.
The Saddest Song 120 plays
“The Saddest Song” is one of the saddest songs. You like sad songs. In this one, Mark Sandman’s biggest fear is that if he lets Chuck Bass go, he’ll come and get him in his sleep.
It’s true, Mark, that is exactly what will happen.
Leonard Cohen
0 Plays
Thinking about sad songs makes you realize there’s no Leonard Cohen on this list. iTunes says you’ve listened to “Bird on a Wire” the most, at 24 times, but “Suzanne” only once. Something is horribly whack with iTunes. There is absolutely, positively, no fucking way. You don’t even like “Bird on a Wire.”
Surely you’ve listened to “Suzanne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” and “So Long Marianne” dozens of times.
Uh oh.
You had assumed iTunes hadn’t kept track of you through all the years and different computers, but you somehow thought that iTunes was keeping track on this computer. That it was smarter than before and when you had to reinstall Windows, it kept your stats. After all, you didn’t have to bother reloading all your music.
You pause.
There was the weird case that after the reinstall, all your Duke Ellington was missing. You found his folder in the wrong place and moved it to Music. Maybe…
You’ve messed up the list since yesterday, but you check the dates. You listened to “Been Caught Stealing” on 7/15/2011. All of the other songs have been listened to since then. You had to reinstall Windows in July. It was a horrible affair right when school was starting, your new fellowship was starting, and your computer was dying. It had transformed into some sort of zombie bot after being infected by all the TV and music you pirate.
The lower back pain you’ve been ignoring spikes up through your shoulder blades. You reach for the bottle of Skelaxin. Your ghosts giggle and blow on the back of your neck.
These songs aren’t songs you’ve listened to over years. These are your top songs from three and a half months. You have done this. You have listened to these songs dozens of times in fourteen weeks.
Who are you?
#1 “Harmony” by Elton John
227 plays
To the casual observer, you’re an egomaniac. It’s there in white, black, and blue. You have listened to the song you were named after 227 times in a matter of months. Initially, you thought that at home, on this computer, in four years, you had listened to “Harmony” 227 times.
It made sense. It was more than ego, and you would have testified to that under oath. You wanted to understand, no, you needed to understand how this song could inform your name, inform your life, create the person you have become. If you listened to it a few hundred times, it was because this song was the key to an essay you’d struggled with for years. This song was the answer.
But that essay was published over four months ago. You struggled with it in Illinois. By the time you moved to Atlanta, it was out of your hands.
Explain it now.
You’ve always had an uncomfortable relationship with Elton John. It’s weird to be named after a song. It’s weird to be named after this song. It’s not a nice song. The music crescendos and dies, full of longing and loss. Harmony is a sad, lonely, clawing freak.
You are a sad, lonely, clawing freak.
The Repeat 1 Button
Why?
Now that you’re in your 30s, you’re almost ready to embrace the mystery of who you are and how you got here. You’re ready to puzzle it out, roll it around, mull it over and over and over. You’re not quite ready to say “I” about any of it.
You thought this list said something about you, but now you’re not sure what. You have suspicions. It has something to do with Tori Amos and your sea secret. It has something to do with leaving your white trash hell. It has something to do with your Freudian death wish. It has something to do with the comedy you can’t live without, but can’t fully inhabit either. It has too much to do with Chuck Bass.
During the two-day break you took from this essay, you watched the Dynamite Hack “Boyz N tha Hood” video something like thirty times. Your favorite part is when the guys in their sweaters wave at a cop and the cop waves back. Sometimes you watched, sometimes you hit reload and just listened. Thankfully, YouTube doesn’t keep track like iTunes, but you’re painfully aware that each time you watched or listened, you had to physically choose it with a click of the mouse.
You knew you liked that repeat 1 button. You knew you could listen to songs on repeat in a way that gives Ben the howling fantods. But now that you have to look at it, look at exactly what you’ve done, with some indication of how, you find yourself without a good reason why. Who listens to one song 227 times in 3½ months?
Some songs you know like your own name, your own secret thoughts. Others amuse you—you feel really good when you play them on repeat. Even if they aren’t what you would consciously think of as your favorite songs, something about them does it for you at that moment.
The impulse for some of these songs will fade and be taken up by others.
This is how there can be a preponderance of Lily Allen in your list, though little desire to revisit her songs at this moment. This is how Kristin Hersh is #25, and you’ve done nothing to alter that fact. You’ll come back to both of them when the feeling’s right, but you’re pretty sure that a month from now, you won’t give a shit about Dynamite Hack’s Eazy-E cover.
Your Soundgarden binge wasn’t your fault. You woke the same as any other day, except a voice was in your head. It said ‘seize the day, pull the trigger, and watch the rolling heads.’ You couldn’t not listen to it then. You’d had too many days where you should’ve stayed in bed. Then finally, it was done. You’d glutted yourself. You can listen to that song now and appreciate it, but you don’t get that jolt, that pleasure and release, that recognition of playing exactly the right song at exactly the right time. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
You’re obviously engaging in addicted behavior. You’ve recently read about the effect music has on your brain’s dopamine. You’re like a lab mouse pushing a lever to get a rush, except iTunes conveniently holds the lever down, allowing the dopamine to wash over you in waves. You abuse music the way an addict can’t put down his meth pipe. It’s just as well. Music, after all, is just music. It won’t hollow out your teeth or cause you to gouge your skin with your nails. It won’t launch you into an uncontrollable rage or depression. Instead, it alleviates the feelings you already have, let’s you revel in them and work them out of your system. Music lets you feel strongly, boost your brain, then get on with it.
You hit the reload arrow on YouTube. Birds chirp, white guys in sweaters play a gangsta rap song with acoustic guitars, they wave at a po-lice man. Dynamite Hack reassures you, Punk ass trippin, but it’s all right, Harmony’s scored a key, she’s gonna fly, punkass fly.
harmony is a witch 