Doctor Beats
Dear Doctor Beats:
These days I'm sad, and I suffer under a greyish malaise that bears no name. It's not one thing, but a lot of little things, that conspire together to whisp an air of self-pity and discontent all around me. The guy I was casually seeing stopped returning my calls. The weather has taken a colder turn. And I have this thing on my leg near my "area," I hope it's just a fungus.
Signed,
Daughter of Darkness
Dear Daughter:
For reasons still unfathomed, man needs to constantly represent his own world back to himself. This becomes urgent when contingency becomes unbearable, and contingency only appears to you in this way when you don't get what you want. When this happens with enough intensity, it feels as if a great shadow of soul-draining ennui is slowly creeping around your floorboards. Fortunately for you, and for the race of human beings, New Orleans funk legend Allen Toussaint knows the musical counterpart to this feeling. It is a song called "Cruel Way to Go Down," and while it's explicitly about feeling lonely, it's really about every sad feeling ever, combined together in a beautiful dirge-y atmospheric jazz tune that makes you want to wear a trenchcoat and stroll aimlessly, watching a pretty girl pass by in a bus, staring at shop windows in the rain. It's better than Xanax. Because music, unlike prescription medication, never needs to be refilled.
After soulful catharsis has subsided, may I recommend as a segue-track back into the sunny world of smiles and lightness, this "Raw Boogie" number posted by Beat Electric, one of the best disco blogs that the internet has yet produced. It's a little Minneapolis-funk style private press number called, inexplicably, "Soul With Milk," performed by "Sumy," and it sounds like Prince but slightly more autistic. The chorus of synth bells and 'dip-a-dip dip dip" vocals is truly a joyful noise unto the lord.
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