I'm sick and it sucks. It's not fun being sick alone, getting up on your own in the night to find something cold to lay on your swollen mucus-filled eyes, scrambling for extra tissues you haven't already soiled. But it is what it is, and presents a nice opportunity to be like, "hey, it's just you and me, what's going on?" with my body.
Anyway, my colleague at Muse, David Gianatasio, reminded me of that one time Redbone did a tribal dance ahead of its performance of "Come and Get Your Love" in 1974, and seeing them smile while singing is everything.
Once it ended, YouTube served me The Avalanche's "Because I'm Me," which has the cutest music video in the world. It also vibes super old-school, even though this came out in 2016.
By this point I'd taken an interest in what YouTube would serve up next: "Colors" by Black Pumas, which came out in 2019. And while this is firmly set in the present, it's got a soulfulness and an aesthetic that harks back to decades prior. Not to mention that tribal collar, which was like a blow-kiss back in the direction of Redbone and our country's indigenous roots...
These feel like warm gifts as I struggle to work, negotiate a move, and just generally get my shit together on a day when my entire face is clogged and my body feels mostly like a lump of clay, held aloft by energy alone. They started with a person, a connection, a memory ... and continued with what YouTube's algo knows about me, and the funny relationships these videos have to one another, and I am reminded that there are no closed systems, we are embraced.
Not even technology is exempt from that. It expresses this because it expresses us, even as, ever so gently, it develops its own egregore.
I love being alive together. I love the music we bring to each other and into the world. I love what it expresses—this vivid manifestation of our firing synapses, and the longing our atoms have to take shape, make new ones, interact across space. A kaleidoscopic coalescence.
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