Fellow armchair warriors, musical comrades, any and all in need of screaming relief:
Having spent the past two weeks devoted to very personal playlist pursuits — my admiration of the late producer (and covid victim) Hal Willner, followed by a subjective 5th-anniversary reconstruction of the Coachella at which Jessica and I met — I have amassed a stockpile of two highly volatile things: my fury over (parts of) our government’s stupefyingly inept response to this ongoing nightmare, and songs that express it.
Thus, I have put a soundtrack called Chaos & Disorder to that Charlie Brown version of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” a T-shirt parody I once identified with enough to make my Facebook profile when I (mostly) abandoned that platform a presidential cycle ago.
Unsurprisingly, if you know me at all, I have once again concocted this bonanza on an unnecessarily massive scale, sequencing together not one, not two but FOUR (really SIX) volumes of this pent-up angry shit.
Bet your ass it felt good to compile. Oddly enough, I’ve been happier these past few days ranting my brain loose from its cocoon of oozing outrage than I was during the thick of the Willner phase, when rainclouds proved inescapable. Guess there’s nothing quite like a blended blast of raw rock, rap, punk, funk, indies, oldies, metal, emo and whatever else is lying about to leaf-blow my rage away. At least for today.
In the spirit of Nine Inch Nails’ Ghosts I-IV (and then V-VI), this cathartically aggressive opus has been similarly arranged: four volumes as one monstrously sustained experience, with a two-volume follow-up as a separate experience. In the case of Chaos & Disorder, that instant sequel, while not as outwardly angry overall, is nonetheless dedicated with utmost anger to one specific, particularly imbecilic individual and his pathetic inability to be honest. (I’m also quite fond of the cover collage atop the playlist.)
With that, I give you …
LCKDWN20: Chaos & Disorder Vols. 1-4
LCKDWN20: Chaos & Disorder Vols. 5-6 (FU45)
BUT WAIT!THERE’S MORE!
Unbeknownst to me, my great friend Mila was also busy cobbling together her own playlists, also centered on a similar theme and constructed in a title-focused fashion similar to what I was coincidentally concocting for my FU45 coda. I’m overdue to circulate other playlists that several of you have sent my way, but considering the overlapping outlooks, I’d like to share what she sent me the other day:
Some of us thrive in chaos, but most of us do not. As somebody who has long accepted that life, and the entire world, are comprised of chaos – random events that we don’t ultimately have control over, I’ve discovered that my brain isn’t having as much trouble with the uncertainty of our current situation as much as most people I talk to. It’s not that I can’t empathize, of course, and have found that my fairly unique mindset has worked as a sounding board and a source of stabilization for a few who find themselves reeling.
My inspiration for these two playlists is chaos. It was supposed to be only one, but much like B. has encountered, the songs that I found began to divide themselves into two distinct feelings.
The first one, Embrace the, is an insane mixture of various sounds and emotions, truly begging one to accept the world as it is. Not all the lyrics line up with the idea I had, but there’s something in each song beyond the title that I felt belonged. And hopefully they’ve been arranged in such a way that it’s not too jarring while still embracing the oddness of the selections. I hope to show that despite things being very different, there can still be a sense of flow, a way to see order despite it all.
The second playlist, The Beauty of, is what my original thought was, before I began recalling other songs and finding still more: A savage melodic journey through the ups and downs and sideways-es of chaos. A way for the brains of others to perhaps see in all of this what mine does. Maybe in certain ways, none of it makes any sense, and the world seems to be in pieces, but if you can take a moment and look at the strangeness directly, you might see the perfection in all of it, the ease in which it all flows. There’s definitely harshness, but does that have to be bad? Is it not all a learning experience?
There are moments when something will happen, usually something small, and the bizarre situation hits me all at once, a flicker of how abnormal it all is, but it’s been surprisingly simple to twist it into … maybe not an absolute positive, but something useful.