#music

Shira had been inside the fair for four minutes when she realized, with some irritation, that she was having a good time.

This was unacceptable.

The building had once been a furniture warehouse and still looked faintly prepared to resume that function at any moment. High windows ran along one brick wall. Steel beams crossed the ceiling. Folding tables had been arranged in long rows beneath hanging signs marked VINYL, AUDIO, CAMERAS, GAMES, and, for reasons no one had explained, MISC. FORMAT.

The air smelled like coffee, old cardboard, warm electronics, and the particular dusty sweetness of record sleeves that had spent several decades in basements.

From somewhere near the entrance, a stereo was playing New Order.

From somewhere else, somebody was testing a cassette deck with what sounded like Steely Dan.

A third booth was playing ska at a volume that suggested a personal grievance.

Shira adjusted the strap of her bag and kept walking.

“This is amazing,” Sumi said.

Shira looked at her.

“You've been here three minutes.”

“I know.”

Sumi was standing in front of a table containing portable radios, alarm clocks, a translucent purple telephone, and several appliances whose purposes had apparently been forgotten by history.

She picked up a squat orange object with a cord.

“What is this?”

Freya glanced over.

“Fondue pot.”

Sumi stared at it.

“You can have a machine just for fondue?”

“You can have a machine for almost anything.”

There are songs that become substantially more inappropriate when you sing them correctly.

Not musically correctly.

Diction correctly.

This was something I somehow managed not to notice for years.

Take “679” by Fetty Wap.

It is, unmistakably, a party song. Put it on a Bluetooth speaker during a Saturday morning volunteer event and probably nobody is diving across the room to turn it off. People are carrying boxes. Somebody is organizing canned vegetables. Somebody else is trying to figure out where the folding tables are supposed to go.

Meanwhile, the song is describing a nightclub, alcohol, attraction, and, among other things, looking at women’s asses.

Nobody seems particularly troubled by this.

But try singing those same ideas yourself with immaculate diction.

Suddenly you are no longer providing music for the food pantry. You are a man standing beside a pallet of kidney beans making a series of extremely specific observations about the female anatomy.

The problem, I eventually realized, was not necessarily the song.

It was how I was treating every word as if it needed to be understood perfectly.

I was enunciating.

The voice does not have to choose between words and music

When people learn songs, it is natural to think of the lyrics as information that needs to be transmitted accurately.

There are words. Your job is to sing the words.

But listen closely to many original recordings and that is not quite what the singer is doing.

Out of curiosity, I typed musician.org into my browser, expecting perhaps an old directory, a parked domain, or nothing interesting at all. Instead, it redirected me to a Spotify link for “Crush,” a punk-styled pop song by D’Arcy.

The song itself is enjoyable, though not exactly a famous internet landmark. D’Arcy has a modest Spotify following, which makes the redirect feel even stranger. Why would such a clean, broad domain name point to one particular track by a relatively small artist? Is it promotion? A joke? An old experiment? A forgotten configuration? Some private logic buried in DNS dust?

Whatever the reason, I liked the feeling it gave me. It reminded me of the early 2000s web, when typing a random domain into a browser could feel like opening an unmarked door. You might find a fan site, a strange personal page, a half-broken business, a directory, a poem, a scam, a guestbook, or something that seemed to exist for no reason except that someone, somewhere, had put it there.

The modern internet often feels more centralized. We do not so much “surf” as circulate through a handful of giant platforms, each with its own rails and recommendation engines. But every once in a while, a plain old domain name still behaves like a loose floorboard. You step on it, and suddenly you’re somewhere oddly specific.

That little surprise is probably the real story here. Not the song, exactly. Not even the domain. Just the reminder that the web still has corners.

The closest personal connection I have to the epidemic of gun violence in the United States is not through a statistic, or a headline, or a political argument.

It is through a teacher.

His name was Steve Wolf, and from 2010 to 2011, he was my AP Environmental Science teacher at Millbrook High School in Raleigh, North Carolina. At the time, I knew him as a young, energetic, slightly eccentric teacher who made science feel connected to real life. He was serious about the subject, but not in a way that drained the room. His class had a pulse.

He was also a runner.

That mattered to me. I was a runner too, and I remember being impressed that he would go for runs during his lunch break. There was something quietly heroic about that to me as a teenager: an adult with a job, a classroom, responsibilities, and still, in the middle of the day, he made time to go outside and run. It made running seem less like a school sport and more like a lifelong form of freedom.

He also introduced me, indirectly, to Dean Karnazes.

Mr. Wolf had read Ultramarathon Man, and he told us stories from the book: Dean Karnazes turning thirty and transforming his life through running, pushing himself through absurd distances, ordering a pizza during a long run and folding it into a kind of burrito while still moving down the road. Those stories lodged somewhere in me. They had that teenage magic of being ridiculous and inspiring at the same time. They suggested that the human body was not just a machine for getting through the day, but a strange instrument capable of endurance, comedy, pain, and joy.

In 2013, an evening spent watching "Quasi at the Quackadero" and "The Big Snit" on the big screen at an animation event with my dad, alongside revisiting Kanye West's music videos, marked a pivotal moment in my creative journey. This experience wasn't just memorable; it served as a profound lesson in the symbiotic relationship between animation, music, and personal creativity. Each work, with its unique narrative approach and visual style, illustrated the vast potential of storytelling through animation, reshaping my perception of creative expression.

The Impact of "Quasi at the Quackadero"

Sally Cruikshank's 1975 film, "Quasi at the Quackadero," is a masterclass in the freedom of animated storytelling. Its vibrant landscapes and eccentric characters, unbound by reality's constraints, showcased animation's capacity to bring the furthest reaches of imagination to life. This realization—that animation could so vividly articulate the abstract—inspired me to view creativity as a boundless field, where the only limits are those we impose on ourselves.

The Emotional Resonance of "The Big Snit"

Richard Condie's "The Big Snit," juxtaposing the mundanity of domestic life with the specter of global apocalypse, struck a deep chord. Its ability to weave humor, love, and existential dread into a coherent narrative highlighted the power of animation to explore complex emotional landscapes. This film, with its poignant ending and whimsical artistry, emphasized the importance of finding beauty and meaning in the ordinary, a lesson that profoundly affected my outlook on storytelling.