I learned a lesson many years ago; my opinion isn't fact. I was working in a field when a colleague of mine and I shared our half secrets; we were both rappers. If rap is a spectrum, we were on opposite sides with him being more about partying and drug centred melodic rap while my imperial lyrical spiritual style, could be coined as 'conscious'. 'Outspoken' as I was, I questioned my new friend. "Don't you feel a sense of responsibility?" We have a chance to move the world toward a bright future and you just wanna talk about partying and girls all the time? You're selling out!" He patiently heard me out and then told me plainly. "Listen bro, back home my buddy got killed outside a liquor store for a six pack of beer. His life! For a six pack! I'm just out here tryna party and live it up like every day is my last, feel me?"
Damn.
Turns out truth is different for everyone. My method of moving the culture forward was creating a rhyming textbook full of references to great historic and modern minds like Ed Bernays, Noam Chomsky and Mallence Bart-Williams. My friend wanted to move out from a place of fear and create music that could give him temporary respite from the darkness in his life. And there I was, early twenties, thinking I knew everything.
Since then I've found myself to be more curious in my curation of music. This story comes in handy when conducting workshops with the youth.
At Songcraft Academy, when a class writes lyrics all together, we brainstorm as a unit. What's the number one rule of a brainstorm you ask? No bad ideas! With 30 minds in the room, at least one ends up being brave and says what every one is thinking; nothing too lewd or explicit, no, instead they cross into meme territory. It's September 11th 2024, at the time of writing the memes du jour are skibity toilet, rizz, sigma, beta, alpha, bros, with hints of roblox, among us and your hyper masculine, anti-feminist talking heads rounding off the group.
Imagine a teacher, who's spent a lifetime cultivating a talent for songwriting. They feel their feelings and have endeavoured to learn how to synthesize them into lyric form. They've found out how to match the mood of the instruments and the keys and the tonal feel to the words and the songs' message. They've made a lot of songs and thrown out far more than they've published. Now, having used these tools to spread their chosen vibe and having cultivated a life of meaning, they aim to share these skills with the youth so they too can learn how to allow feelings to pass through them.
And then the lyric the kids want to write is 'them skibbity toilets tryna eat my toes'.
It's me, I'm the teacher and, similarly to my early 20s self, found myself judging these young ones.
Thankfully I was able to zoom out.
Who cares? If this is what it takes to get them to learn a new skill then lets roll with it. I used to wince at the claims of youngins pretending to be sigma and laugh at two boys demonstrating rizz, but in the end, we made a song. We expressed something. And honestly, the meme cycle moves so quickly that they didn't yet have a song about this meme set. Imagine that for a second. You're a teenager and one of your favourite things has no original music attached to it. Imagine a skate video with no tracks to set the vibe, a movie with no score, an old show with no theme song, these guys were creating something that represented them uniquely! They didn't know that many other groups made songs about the same thing, and when I told them they weren't so unique, they didn't care! This was their skibbity imposter rizz banger, nobody else's.
I think it's a fitting introduction. They have an electric connection to a song they made. They learned how to use royalty free loops and assemble them on bandlab. They practiced object writing and learned timeless priceless philosophies on art from some of humanity's most articulate minds. If they want that power to use Sigma tier rizz on their bros, who am I to stop them?
Best,
Powys
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