Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 2 - #384
Shuffle Synchronicities: Volume 2 - #384
"Back on Road" by Gucci Mane, Drake - 11/08/22
"Back on Road" by Gucci Mane, Drake
The Shuffle Synchronicities Substack Sabbath is over.
We’re…
Back on road!
🥳
This song was no joke/no lie 😮 the one shuffled 🔀 to when looking for insight about whether or not to follow through on the decision to re-start this project.
Straight to Genius.com we went and found ✨
“Back on Road” is a celebratory anthem about getting back on the path of success—fitting, considering Gucci Mane was out of prison a mere 10 days after the release of this song.
This wasn’t an easy process getting the Shuffle back on road 🛣
Not just mentally/emotionally/spiritually.
In the sense that there was still reckoning to be done with the epiphany that a year-long daily music/memoir project with its ‘avant-garde’ policy of not-asking-for-consent from the other subjects in an autobiographic narrative was kinda 💩💩💩
Which, along with other things, led to quite a bit of a ‘manic’ episode LOL 🤪
But also quite literally the steps to re-start the Substack were a challenge 🧮
Because it had been ‘permanently’ deleted 😬
The platform’s engineers couldn’t recover it 😥
Get my jewelry out the safe cause I'm back on road
So, yes.
We were basically in jail 🚨
Like Gucci Mane.
Platform jail 📵
It's like I'm battling with myself
I done shook off all my demons
Now I'm back to myself
Other posts to come will get into some of the battles with demons 👹 from that time back then and since 💪
But after shuffling to this song and the spirits so triumphantly 🎺 advising I get
Back on road!
There was a sprint 🏃 of finding all the old emails the platform sent out and reconstituting them with a bit of aid from guest poster/friend, Leryl Joseph ;)
Can't eat, can't sleep, man I miss these streets
The last shuffled-to-song in the final full post, 383, was called “Don’t Rat Out Your Friends” 🐀 and included grappling with ethical stuff like:
Which had been a theme 🎶 throughout the shuffle like here and here.
I ain't got no rat for you
But we’re happy to report we’ve basically invented 💡 a new form of literature to ‘fix’ this problem 🧑🔧
Post-Memoir 🧼🗣 is the principled aesthetic of the extreme effacement of the personal identifiers and details of the other subjects in an autobiographical narrative.
So, yeah, all good here 👌 ;)
The new About section is worth checking out in full.
But we’ve pulled from it the following:
The new Shuffle is called Volume 2️⃣
It will focus on collaboration with others 🙏
After getting things up and running again 😅
The guest posts will always be for Free Subscribers 🤗
While new solo posts will perhaps become for the Paid Subscribers 🤷
Paid Subscribers 💃🏿🕺 will receive an exclusive Substack Thread™️ with advice on how to develop our own Shufflemancy practice 🔮🫵😚
Founding Subscribers 🦸♀️🦸🏿♂️ will have the opportunity to book sessions to practice 🔀 Shuffling for ✨ Synchronicities with me 🫂
And we’re also introducing Podcasts 🎙!
The first Shuffle Synchronicities Podcast 🎙 is available right now ❗️❗️❗️
It’s with Kiana Fitzgerald, who was one of our first and favorite guest posters.
Kiana’s a music journalist 🎶✍🏾 who has contributed to Rolling Stone, NPR, New York Magazine’s The Cut, The Fader, and much much more. She’s a champion of Black ✊🏾 Culture. And a mental health advocate 🧠 on TikTok.
She kindly and generously shouted out 🗣 the Shuffle on NPR as part of her regular appearances on their program Pop Culture Happy Hour 📻
We first connected over a piece Kiana wrote in Vibe in 2019 that was one of the first to analyze the effect of Kanye West’s Bipolar Disorder diagnosis on his music and life ❤️🩹
Ye’s come up on the Substack quite a bit, perhaps most notably here 3️⃣8️⃣1️⃣1️⃣
As well as in work “I” did in The New Yorker 🎩 and in This Book Is The Longest Sentence Ever Written And Then Published 📜 which Kiana also contributed to.
The Podcast 🎙 continues our exploration of our Bipolar experiences 🤕 in relation to his, discusses the intersection between Black and Jewish Culture 👩🏾🤝👨🏻 and also Kiana’s debut book 📖 Ode to Hip-Hop: 50 Albums That Define 50 Years of Trailblazing Music, coming in 2023!
It might, like one of my favorite schizogram follows, be a little controversial 🫢…
But overall we agree it was super informative and important.
And we hope our moments of vulnerability push folks to join the discussion.
Also, it has live shuffles, so, you know, you can at least see for yourself perhaps that the Shuffle 🔀 Synchronicities ✨ are no joke/no lie 😮
Here’s the link to the first episode of the Podcast!
Or click the button below…
Okay, that’s the first post of Volume 2 and the three hundred and eighty-fourth of Shuffle Synchronicities!