Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 1 - #336

Guest Post by Jackson Bliss (Mixtape) + "Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) by Wyclef Jean, Akon, Lil Wayne, Niia - 12/27/21

As Chance the Rapper raps in “All We Got”…

And we back, and we back, and we back, and we back, and we back, and we, and we back, and we back

But unlike Chance who raps…

This ain't no intro, this the entree

This indeed is an intro for a very special guest post entree from writer Jackson Bliss!

Jackson and I met when I attended one of the first post-covid in-person readings at our local bookstore, Skylight, here in Los Feliz, where he read from his newly published novel: Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments.

I was blown away by Jackson’s literary style and authorial voice and took the chance afterward to email him beseeching him to guest post on the Shuffle not just because he’s a brilliant writer, but also because the excerpts he shared had so many great references to music.

Synchronistically enough, Jackson replied that indeed he is slated to publish a book in 2022, Dream Pop Origami, in part about his relationship with music.

To learn more check out his website or buy Counterfactual at our local Skylight bookstore or from his publisher, Noemi.

Here’s a more formal bio!

Jackson Bliss is the winner of the 2020 Noemi Press Award in Prose and the mixed-race/hapa author of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), Amnesia of June Bugs (7.13 Books, 2022), Dream Pop Origami (Unsolicited Press, 2022), and the speculative fiction hypertext, Dukkha, My Love (2017).  His short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Ploughshares, Guernica, Antioch Review, ZYZZYVA, Longreads, TriQuarterly, Columbia Journal, Kenyon Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Witness, Fiction, Santa Monica Review, Boston Review, Juked, Quarterly West, Arts & Letters, Joyland, Huffington Post UK, and Multiethnic Literature in the US, among others.  He is the Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University and lives in LA with his wife and their two fashionably dressed dogs.  Follow him on Twitter and IG: @jacksonbliss.

Okay, take it away, Jackson!

---

KEEPING ME COMPANY

1.

My debut short story collection, Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments (Noemi Press, 2021), hit the ground running in October, so I decided to create a book playlist from every artist, song, and/or album referenced in the book. Yeah, as it turned out, this was a terrible fucking idea. The playlist quickly became unruly. Maybe, the problem is the rules I made for this playlist (I’ve included them as a reference point at the end).

After my playlist was complete (a thousand songs later), I hit the random button. The first song I got was “Pull the Pin” from RTJ4.

“pulling the pin” by Run The Jewels

This song brought me back to the summer of 2021, which feels so long ago even though it was only six months. I’d just returned to LA after flirting with a tenure track job in Ann Arbor for two years. LA—despite, and also because, of its myriad flaws—was a sight for sore eyes. I lit cried during my first hike in Griffith Park because it felt so good. This past summer, the pandemic felt vincible for the first time with mass immunization and a dethroned xenophobic baron yelling at the clouds. As I started listening to this album, it felt like LA was finding its voice again after its shut-down highways and disappearing restaurants. 

“Pull the Pin” reminds me of the long drives I’d take from Hollywood to DTLA to visit old haunts in the Historic Core, see friends in the Arts District, and take pictures of murals for my IG account. This song reminds me of the attitude and the speed and beauty and the obscene wealth and the inequality of the city. It reminds me of the artificial (but necessary) bubble of safety you feel inside your car in such a fast and dirty city like LA. It reminds me of that powerful and unique feeling of continuous fluidity when you’re driving, high on hip-hop, and then you pass from a closed lane with a double-parked car to an open one where the street appears infinite. It’s just a tiny window between being stuck in time and freeflowing to another stop light, a metaphor I don’t even need to mine for it to sparkle properly. As long as you’re driving in LA, the dream feels alive somehow and RTJ4 was part of my summer soundtrack.

2.

I hit the random button again on my Counterfactual Love Story & Other Experiments playlist. I get Zamfir’s “The Lonely Shephard” from the Kill Bill Vol. 1 soundtrack.

“The Lonely Shephard” by Gheorghe Zamfir

A song I barely remember and have little or no emotional connection to. Such is life. Even so, as I listen to the pan flute warble in my AirPods, I’m reminded of two feuding things: the first is my wife who is mixed-race, half indigenous and half Latina. It’s impossible for me to hear folklore music on the pan flute and not think of traditional Peruvian music, which is a straight shot to her since she’s Peruvian American. This track is incredibly sentimental, even cheesy, but it’s also beautiful in a way that hacks my cynicism. It’s possible that after being married for eleven years, I’ve cultivated a special appreciation for beautiful cheese, whether it’s in a maudlin love ballad in Spanish or an over-the-top instrumental song with an obscene narrative arc that evokes soaring eagles and mythical firebirds that Stravinsky would have salivated over if he’d been South American.

This song also reminds me of my adolescence. Even though I look like I’m in my 30s (in mixed-race communities, we say “beige doesn’t age”), I’m a staunch Gen X-er, which means I remember a time not too long ago when baby boomers completely traded in their ‘60s radicalism for suburban pre-assembled homes, gas-guzzling SUVs, synth pop songs, and big moussed-up hair. Somewhere in that explosion of vapid ‘80s materialism, boomers became obsessed—and I mean obsessed-with “New Age” music. This genre involved a lot of synthesizers, dramatic drums, and instrumental tracks, but it also had a huge world music vibe, so pan flutes were the shit back then. I can’t hear a song with a pan flute and not think of the many hours I spent as teenager in this New Age bookstore in Traverse City, Michigan, called Full Moon Records, the sound of Kitaro synth leads, taiko drums, and the unmistakable scent of sandalwood incense suffocating me. It’s heady shit, but then again, so is the fragmentation of memory.

3.

The third and final song I get is “Spies” by Coldplay.

“Spies” by Coldplay

I know that Coldplay has become sort of a standing joke for music afficionados who’d moved on a long time ago. One minute, Coldplay was the darling of indie music lovers everywhere in the early 2000s and then the next thing you knew, Chris Martin was hiding in the shadows of Beyoncé and Bruno Mars during an ensemble halftime performance at Superbowl 50, fighting for attention from the cameraman. But in between those two plot points, Coldplay had a damn good run and Parachutes, in my immodest opinion, is a fantastic debut album that stands the test of time. And few songs remind me of my former life in the Pacific Northwest and my volunteer service in West Africa quite like “Spies.” I must have listened to this song at least a hundred times in my life, often on repeat. The first time I heard it was in Bobo-Dioulasso, a city in the southwestern part of Burkina Faso where I was training for the Peace Corps, splayed on a plastic natte, trying to stay cool in 100º weather as I sipped hot sweet tea. Even though it was the first time I’d heard that song, I became nostalgic. I missed running water, first-world luxuries, and running in the Seattle rain. But this song was the perfect balance of sadness, uplift, paranoia, and melody I craved back then. 

Eight months later, I listened to this song again in my barebones studio in Portlandia. I had nothing but a futon, a chair for my stereo, some used novels and short story collections I’d bought at Powell’s, and a geriatric, hand-me-down IBM ThinkPad that my mom’s boyfriend had talked me into trading for my Macintosh laptop. Dude swindled me and I fucking hated him for it. I lived below the poverty line for several years, my studio both spacious and mostly empty. To fend off starvation, I took out student loans and enrolled in a bunch of classes because yolo. The great thing about living in the PNW, though, was that you often forgot how poor you were because of the natural beauty and the communities there willing to help you, even when you didn’t deserve it. But music you could play over and over again without guilt, apology, or explanation, so I played the fuck out of my CDs until they skipped. 

Despite my pathetic living conditions, I was strangely happy at that time. I spent my days taking baths, writing short stories, watching movies at discount theaters, and binging on CDs like Parachutes, Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See, Nathalie Merchant’s Ophelia, Talvin Singh’s Ok, the Buddha Bar volumes 5-7, Nawal El Zoghbi’s “El Layali,” Thievery Corporation’s Mirror Conspiracy, and Natacha Atlas’ Something Dangerous. I listened to Parachutes until it was scratched to hell. “Spies” was one of those songs that helped me survive every rainy day in Portland, every sudden break-up, and every famished night.

My time in Portland felt eventful and part of that was having a soundtrack. Parachutes, and later, A Rush of Blood to the Head helped me understand my emotional reality. I was taking graduate courses in French, which connected my life then as a post-bac student to my former life as an English Teacher in West Africa. I also took my first fiction workshop in Portland, which fundamentally changed my life. The first story I submitted to workshop is now part of Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, which obviously this playlist is based on (it’s called “Sola’s Asterisk” if you’re curious). Full circle moment I guess. 

I played “Spies” again and again in my Portland studio, often thinking about my Burkinabé students’ voices that echoed in my head and the smell of fresh rain in the dirt of my compound and the taste of a stale sugar cookie after the sky turned dark and the exquisite sunsets I used to bike to on my way back home. Other times, I thought about all the books I wanted to write, all the readings I hoped to give someday as an author promoting his work. Even now, every time I hear this song, I think about that time in my life when I was both completely free, completely broke, and completely alone. Both in Africa and Portlandia. I miss the slowness, of course, but not the isolation. I’m grateful that music has always kept me company when I needed it the most.

---

Thank you so much, Jackson!

I’ve put the reference section with the rules and methodology of your playlist in this footnote.¹

I’ll be honest, I found it difficult to restart writing the Shuffle.

This is why I was so happy to receive your guest post this weekend!

Which meant I’d be able to feature your polished work instead of coming up with a whole bunch of my own LOL.

I also have to be honest and say I found it difficult to put on my editorial cap this weekend in order to review and write back to you about your wonderful post.

But today as the rain pours on Monday during Instagram-proclaimed ‘dead week’ here in LA and I put on your shuffled-to-songs to enjoy while reading your words, I see what loveliness the combination of music and writing can be.

I urge you, readers, to try something.

Many of you don’t click on the songs.

Which is fine!

I often focus on the lyrics over the sounds and quote them.

Jackson, however, focuses on the sounds over the lyrics.

So if you can click on the songs and listen while reading, you’ll be extra ordinarily satisfied to see how his prose heightens the sounds and vice versa.

Try:

While reading the paragraph:

It reminds me of that powerful and unique feeling of continuous fluidity when you’re driving, high on hip-hop, and then you pass from a closed lane with a double-parked car to an open one where the street appears infinite. It’s just a tiny window between being stuck in time and freeflowing to another stop light, a metaphor I don’t even need to mine for it to sparkle properly. As long as you’re driving in LA, the dream feels alive somehow and RTJ4 was part of my summer soundtrack.

Or:

While reading the paragraph:

Even so, as I listen to the pan flute warble in my AirPods, I’m reminded of two feuding things: the first is my wife who is mixed-race, half indigenous and half Latina. It’s impossible for me to hear folklore music on the pan flute and not think of traditional Peruvian music, which is a straight shot to her since she’s Peruvian American. This track is incredibly sentimental, even cheesy, but it’s also beautiful in a way that hacks my cynicism. It’s possible that after being married for eleven years, I’ve cultivated a special appreciation for beautiful cheese…

Or:

While reading the final paragraph:

Even now, every time I hear this song, I think about that time in my life when I was both completely free, completely broke, and completely alone. Both in Africa and Portlandia. I miss the slowness, of course, but not the isolation. I’m grateful that music has always kept me company when I needed it the most.

For my own song today, I got:

“Sweetest Girl (Dollar Bill) by Wyclef Jean, Akon, Lil Wayne, Niia

It was shuffled-to as I drove to a brick-and-mortar Bank of America to deposit a check so large it couldn’t be deposited via mobile.

Some live for the bill
Some kill for the bill
She wined for the bill
Grind for the bill
(And she used to be the sweetest girl)
Some steal for the bill, if they got to pay they bill
(And she used to be the sweetest girl)

When I got to the bank, the teller informed me that I wouldn’t be able to deposit the check because it had the name ‘Dave Cowen’ on it instead of ‘David Cowen'.

LOL.

Cause I'm a tell you like you told me
Cash rules everything around me

I texted the person who sent it.

Asking them to re-send a new check or deposit it electronically.

But then when I got home I tried to mobile deposit it in a different checking account which didn’t have such a small deposit limit.

And it seems to have worked.

Or at least it’s processing.

Or as Wyclef sings:

Where my money at?

And yet, yesterday, Sunday, I did my first shuffle after the week-long pause, thinking I was going to post yesterday, instead of remembering I was unpausing today.

And I got a song that came up from the time of my life when I discovered, for myself at least, the synchronistic relationship between Spotify Shuffle and our lives, during the writing of the This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written And Then Published book about my dad in which was:

“Spirits Rejoice” by Albert Ayler

Which is an eleven-minute avant-garde free jazz epic about the relationship between heaven and earth by the nearly-forgotten spiritualist saxophonist who suicided in the 1970s.

Suggesting to me that the ‘spirits still rejoice’ in the Shuffle.

Thank you for returning to read ;)

More to come this week, perhaps about my adventures with my mother, sister and her husband and also in Feng Shui.

But for now, I leave you with some visual bliss from our guest poster, Jackson Bliss…

Okay, that’s the three hundred and thirty-sixth Shuffle Synchronicities.

1

Reference

Here are the rules of this particular playlist & the discography involved:

A. Methodology:

1. If a specific album or song was mentioned in Counterfactual Love Stories & Other Experiments, I included that in the playlist.

2. If a generic reference was made to a particular artist in the book, then I included an essential playlist of that artist UNLESS they had created their own “best of/essential” album.

3. One of the obvious flaws of this methodology is that fleeting references to an artist or a TV show (e.g., Glee) sometimes led to a hundred-song album that took control of this playlist even though the show itself played little to no role in my book.

4. Because of #3, I had to create arbitrary rules to fend off insanity. Otherwise, there would have been a thousand songs from the Buddha Bar collection alone. Instead, I opted to include the “Best of the Buddha Bar” anthology as a representative list.

5. Once I start writing about a particular song, I ignore whatever tracks play afterwards until I’m done writing. Once I’m done riffing on that particular, then whatever track plays next is the next piece I’ll write about.

B. CLS&OE Music:

1. Euphoria soundtrack

2. Best of Michael Jackson

3. Kill Bill Soundtrack

4. Pulp Fiction Soundtrack

5. The Smiths by The Smiths

6. Best of Otis Reading

7. RTJ4

8. Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”

9. Best of Black Pink

10. “Love Me Tender” Elvis

11. Best of Brahms

12. Best of Leonard Cohen

13. “Miserere Mei” by various artists 

14. Best of Gershwin & Rachmaninoff

15. “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want,” by The Smiths

16. Best of Vivaldi

17. Best of Detroit house music

19. Best of Radiohead

20. Moon Safari by AIR

21. Alanis Morrisette’s “Ironic”

22. “Radio Killed the Movie Star” by the Bugles

23. Best of The Cure

24. “Jesus” by Wilco

25. Best of Sasha & Digweed

26. Best of Utah Saints, Loops and Tings, Digweed, Oakie, Gigi D’Agostino, Vienna House, and Juno Reactor

27. Buddha Bar compilations

28. Hed Kandi compilations

29. Best of Coldplay

30. Best of Nine Inch Nails

31. Best of Yeah Yeah Yeahs

32. Best of Madonna

33. Best of Q-Tip

34. Best of Beyoncé

35. Best of Cole Porter

36. Luka by Suzanne Vega

37. “Redemption Song” by Bob Marley

38. Glee soundtrack

39. Les Mis soundtrack

40. Best of Erik Satie

41. Best of Mazzie Star

42. Best of Dream Pop

43. Best of J-Pop

44. Best of Taylor Swift

45. Best of Common

46. Empire soundtrack

47. Best of Wilco