Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #143
Guest Post by Kiana Fitzgerald + "NCAA" by 2 Chainz - 05/25/21
I’m honored to have a guest post today from one of my favorite music journalists, Kiana Fitzgerald!
Kiana specializes in analyzing the art form as a journalist, podcaster, and on-air commentator. Additionally, she’s a critic of pop culture and proponent of Black culture. She also moonlights as a personal essayist and DJ.
Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, NPR, Vibe Magazine, Paper Magazine, The Cut, Texas Monthly, Billboard, NYLON Magazine, Okayplayer, REVOLT, The FADER, Bitch Media, Brooklyn Magazine, Saint Heron, Uproxx, and other digital and print publications. You can read much of it here. You can also subscribe to her Patreon, where she writes exclusive content.
Kiana and I connected when I was writing the long sentence book about my dad because I read her piece on Kanye’s bipolar disorder and his religiosity called Kanye West, Jesus is King and the Unspoken Bipolarism In Between. In it, she’s open and honest about her own experience with mental illness, and perceptive and incisive in connecting it to Kanye’s behavior since his disclosure of his diagnosis. The piece was cited throughout the music world in late 2019, as perhaps the best work on that period in Kanye’s career.
Because we both had such similar perspectives on music synchronicities, bipolar disorder, spirituality, and Kanye, I asked her to write a segment in the book, which she graciously did, and now she’s contributing to the Shuffle Synchronicities project as well, which I am so happy about. Welcome, Kiana!
“Car Confessions” by Young M.A
Hey y’all! Let’s get right to it.
I love Young M.A. I don’t listen to her as much as I’d like to, so having this single from 2018 pop up was a pleasant surprise.
Let’s start with the title of the song: “Car Confessions.” This immediately struck a chord with me because I have such an interesting relationship with cars. Growing up, my mother (who passed in 2009) would drive my older brother, sister and me through the country outskirts of our small hometown in Texas. As she drove, she would play us the music that she loved. It was mostly hip-hop and R&B, but it spanned across every region and every sound. She and my brother have directly impacted my musical taste today. They’re the reason why I’m a music journalist.
Anywho, I say all that to say, I have a lot of car memories that I hold near and dear. Hearing this song made me reflect quite a bit.
My brother's keeper, I'm loyal, it's all in my demeanor
When I was a teenager, my brother was diagnosed as schizoaffective, or schizophrenic and bipolar. I didn’t understand what it meant at the time—I just knew it meant he lived life in a different way. Years later, in 2016 to be specific, I would end up being diagnosed as bipolar type 1, myself. My diagnosis helps me better understand my brother in many ways. I call him at least once a week, just to ask him how he’s maintaining. I now understand the intricacies of mental conditions, and I’ll be my brother’s rock for as long as we’re both breathing, and even after that.
It was smooth on the surface, but underneath it was broken
Being told by multiple psychiatrists and therapists that there’s something “off” with me, some kind of chemical imbalance, has been a lot to digest over the past five years. For so long, I felt broken. I'm finally starting to accept the cracks and fissures that come with being who I am.
She say I’m always moving, Ma I just can’t sit around
When my mom was alive, she gave me a hard time when it came to the distance I wanted to put between myself and my childhood—old friends, old memories, and pervasive struggles I was eager to let go of. She wanted me to go to college in our hometown, and I told her it was out of the question. I wound up going to school half an hour away, and even that seemed far to her. After she passed, I told myself that I would try to create new experiences in new places, in her honor. I wound up moving from Texas to D.C. to New York, two separate times. I know she would be proud that I made it out alive, and back home to my family with countless stories and a group of incredible new friends.
God watching over me, the devil probably spy on me
Being bipolar type 1 means feeling the highest highs and the lowest lows. For me, that means feeling like I’ve been in God’s presence, and chased down by the devil. When I’m stable, I don’t feel the extreme ends of the spectrum, but those perceptions are always in the back of my mind.
I'm here to inspire, I admire that you admire me
I been in the dark, but I promise you'll see a brighter me
For the past year or so, I’ve been hiding from the world AKA avoiding social platforms. I just felt like I wasn’t doing well enough, or making big enough moves. I hid in the shadows, waiting for someone else to bring me back to the light. But I finally realized I had to do it myself. I’m so honored and grateful to say that in less than two months, I’ve connected with 14,000+ supporters on TikTok. There, I talk a LOT about my life experiences with bipolar disorder. I get many messages and comments of support from so many different people: from those who live with the condition themselves, to people who have a loved one or friend with it, to people who know nothing at all about bipolar disorder. At the end of the day, my goal is to educate folks and help build a community.
This shit forever, man
I mean that
Fuck 'em
Ahh, the life of a manic depressive. There’s no cure for it, which means I’ll be managing my moods with meds and therapy for the rest of my life. And there’s not an ounce of shame in me because of it.
What a wonderful post! Thank you so much, Kiana!
There are so many great lines in this Young M.A. song that make me think of Kiana even beyond what she already shared.
To all my supporters man
I love y'all
I just wanna say thank you
This line made me think that you all really do need to check out her TikTok posts about mental health if you like that app. She is truly building a community of supporters and followers that is making an impact for the next generation and more.
A true believer, I believe when they didn't believe her
That's why I don't let opinions affect me
I do what I wanna do, if they do or they don't accept me
Another thing I love about Kiana is that she just tells her truth and tells it like she sees it. Her podcast with Chris Cole shows how charismatic her opinions can be.
It makes me want to share the segment she wrote in the long sentence book. Here it is:
Dave Cowen, writer of the longest sentence ever written and then published, reached out to me because of an article I wrote about Kanye West; I’m guessing either immediately before or after this insertion, Dave will tell you more about it, anywho, I’m writing pretty freely because I know Dave is going to take out the periods after I send this anyway, I hope I’m doing this right, let’s talk about the book, when I first started reading this book, I was highly anxious, I kept looking for an end, an end, WHERE IS THE END, or the period, the favorite word of Florida rappers the City Girls but eventually I got into the rhythm of things, and I began to see slivers of Dave peeking through: honesty and wit interwoven, side note, I just used a period and had to backtrack and delete, I don’t know how you pulled this off, Dave, end side note, this book is an undulating, never-conforming vacillation between broken-open vulnerability and smart-alecky humor: the moments in which Dave literally asks his readers if we love him, if we love his book, transition seamlessly into raw emotions about his father, and then they veer into the territory of he-who-must-not-be-named, and his friend Kanye West, who brought Dave and me together in the first place, I have to take a moment here to acknowledge that Dave dug into every element of Kanye that I’ve been thinking about on my own, but in particular the bipolar diagnosis we share and the things that characterize it, like being so manic — so energetically heightened — that you feel motivated enough to write the longest sentence ever published, or, dare I admit, motivated enough to write the piece inspired by Kanye that brought Dave and me together, I’m not saying I was manic, but I was getting there, and it’s moments like that that make me wonder why bipolar is seen as such a bad thing, I’m getting distracted, back to the book, well actually, to stay on topic, it felt reassuring to read in someone else’s words the things I’ve been thinking about for years, but with such specificity that it gives me hope that one day many of us bipolar people will assemble our voices and be loud enough to be heard by all; that’s the gist of how I feel about Dave’s book, it’s cerebral at times and nutty at others, self-aware at times and comically self-aggrandizing at others — but altogether, it explores the gamut of things that won’t leave my brain: Jung’s teachings, and Life Path Numbers (I’m a 22, like his dad) and spiritual breakthroughs and connectivity and God and Kanye freakin’ West, subjects that I furiously research and attempt to explain on my own, then it turns around and deals with the death of a parent who had mental health issues, which I myself am dealing with and have been for 10 years now, it’s powerful to read the real-time reverberations of such a significant loss, to feel someone parse through the end of that life and the beginning of a life with absence, I’ve written too much (literally, I’ve gone over the word count Dave recommended) so I’ll try to wrap this up: this book is equal parts remembrance, exploration, and explication; it grapples with the notions of success and pain, and the crux of those points is the idea that we’re mortals, capable of being deeply affected by just about everything life throws at us — how could you not relate to that,
What you give is what you're given
This line made me think about how Kiana wrote this shuffle synchronicities guest post piece for way way way less than she normally makes. Yet she gave it her best.
Which made me think of my own shuffled song today.
Which was:
"NCAA" by 2 Chainz
It’s a rap song in part about how NCAA athletes don’t get paid even though their product makes so much money for the universities.
And how not everyone can get to the pros, so most will never see money from the sport.
NCAA, yeah, we the young and dangerous, yeah
We be ballin' hard, yeah, I just want some paper, yeah
NCAA, yeah, set the record straight (Set it)
I am an amateur as a music writer. While Kiana is a pro. And yet music writing is not what it used to be. Financially.
Wait a minute, let me follow this
You think because I got a scholarship
That I don't need dollars just to parlay with? What? (What?)
Manziel had the highest sellin' jersey
It does seem like Substack and Patreon are a major new way to sustain music writing that is not just the most generic short news posts that you get at some of the major places still left like Rolling Stone.
So please do consider checking out Kiana’s Patreon.
And, yes, consider subscribing to this newsletter’s paid options as well.
Thanks!
Okay, that’s the one hundred and forty-third Shuffle Synchronicities.