¡ATENCION! ACHTUNG! ВНИМАНИЕ! ATTENTION!
TO: All Rebels, Disunited States of AmuriKKKa, Planet Inferno
FROM: Dix Winstanley, Counterintelligence Division
SECURITY LEVEL: 9 – Deep Classification
CODE: Mauve
Comrades,
We regret to inform you of the apparent disappearance of Benjamin Venercour.
Fellow Still-Sheltering Observers of the Ever-Raging Inferno Known as 2020: How ya been? Ah. Alive. Good. Me? Same.
Yes, you’re right: It has been a scalding hot minute since I last laid a playlist on you. I’d like to say this was my plan all along, and that the previous mondo mix — Emergency on Planet Earth, and hey, thanks, I too think it’s the best of the bunch so far — was designed to provide enough fodder to keep your boomboxes blasting through Independence Day.
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.