¡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 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.
My fellow future victims: As some of you may recall, many moons in the past, as long ago as a teenage lifetime, I used to write a column called Pop Life for the OC Register. This was back in those halcyon days before I tried transitioning away from strictly being a critic so I could instead play editor to a roster of colleagues and freelancers, an shift that only half-succeeded. I started filling my predecessor’s keystrokes in spring ’97, filing weekly blather and bemusements, but by the time of overhyped Y2K madness I was already getting bored with the format — yet still had gobs of space to fill in each Friday’s edition.
Thus “10 Songs” was born. I’d still write a(n) (im)proper column first: sometimes mere musings, sometimes revelations within a musical context, other times just another interview squished into a first-person retelling of it. But at the end of each Pop Life appeared “10 Songs,” which was exactly as described: a list of 10 songs, new and old, each pertinent in some regard, whether personal or political, attention-grabbing or absurd. All of them were annotated, briefly. Well, mostly briefly. Occasionally the damn thing threatened to take over the entire column.
If some show was about to happen and I didn’t have time or space to devote deserved publicity to it, I’d slip a pick into “10 Songs” and remind people it was coming up. If President Dubya did something stupid — oh, how I long to have a commander-in-chief as basic as him once again — I could sneak in snarky remarks via titles and hardly have to comment, knowing a few of my 17 faithful readers would get what I was telegraphing. Ditto family and friends and people foolish enough to marry me, who often found me working through selfish issues selection by selection.
That process, coupled with a desperate need to emerge from the Great 9/11 Entertainment Hangover of 2001 (when it took a while to smile again), eventually spawned a yearly box set, Poor Millicent’s Annual, which I gave as Christmastime gifts for a few years. The goal: to intertwine an overview of a given year’s music scene with songs that reflected my own cluttered state of mind — or were just lifelong favorites. Whatever the choices, they all had to date from a disc released within that calendar year, no cheating, and to my way of thinking they also needed to Say Something. What, exactly, I’m still not sure. Didn’t stop me from trying to express it anyway.
Which brings us to our current crazed times, and this unprecedented lockdown-of-sorts out of an abundance of caution. The moment this contagion hit our shores I was suddenly motivated to deep-dive into dusty catalogs and dredge up all manner of tunes that could vocalize the range of emotions I (and I daresay we) have all been feeling: frustration, confusion, anger, worry, just to get a list started. Songs to express the fear of illness. Tunes to help me laugh at the helplessness of it all. Tracks to touch on the infuriating madness of our government’s lack of urgency and President Apprentice & Co.’s idiotically slapdash approach to mitigating the crisis.
Music as soundtrack to a never-ending catharsis — which is what music always is. For me anyway.
So I thought I’d share. Not so intentionally out of narcissism (“hey, kids, look at all the songs I know!”) but as a means of getting us ALL sharing. Perhaps it can be another potentially amusing distraction to help pass the time while playing cards (a regular feature at Chez Bessica) or fill the void when our collective binge-watching reaches unforeseen levels of streaming fatigue.
In so doing, I have devised a challenge. I’ve dubbed it LCKDWN20.
Naturally, I rapidly amassed more material in one giant playlist than I’d ever inflict upon anyone’s ears beyond my son’s and now-wife’s. Parameters became necessary. They are as follows: