It is Week 4, still sitting on my desk, in front of my computer writing yet another blog. Behind me, I am spinning the newest addition to my vinyl collection, rapper billy woods and producer Kenny Segal’s 2019 masterpiece: Hiding Places. I can not stress the importance this album holds on my musical palate enough. I am so happy it got a repress this year and I was able to finally get my hands on what I consider to be one of the best albums ever. I even waited until I got to write this blog to spin it for the first time.
I am not the only one to believe that Hiding Places is an incredible album, far from it. Through the internet, I have been able to find people who also love this album, love woods’ music and similar artists as well. In fact, it has gotten to a point in which I forget that billy woods is a rather small artist. So much that I sometimes fail to realize that most people have never heard of him. This got me thinking how we all exist between different realities. I am both existing in a reality in which people all share my love for my favorite music, and in a world in which I am not a lot of people do. I believe this applies to everyone. We all got particular interests that most people either share or don’t. It is often times in the internet where we can connect to those who are similar to us, while in the rest of our lives, finding those who share the same interests as you might be harder.
This to me is an interesting contradiction, it allows for two worlds, maybe even more, to exist at the same time. What does this mean for the individual however? I believe this allows for us to exist as different people, each persona existing within a given reality.
A follow up question would be where do we chose to find people like us? This is a broad question. First of all, who do we consider to be like “us”? In the age of the internet, someone like “us” is usually someone who shares an aspect of our constructed “identities”. Whether we ourselves constructed our identities, or whether they were assigned to us by a series of societal phenomena is not important. What is important is that our identities are constructed, and that just like a building, they have parts that make them up.
The most important parts of our identities vary from person to person. Depending on who you are, the most important part of you might be your nationality, you political leanings, your sexuality, your personal interests, etc. The internet has many spaces reserved for us to explore a reality in which our identity is accepted. A space in which we are not so strange, after all, @theballooneater45yomama has the same experience as you. You are heard, you are understood, you are accepted. Perhaps it is why the internet is a perfect place for us to express ourselves as it is also a space where one can be themselves.
Now, of course this comes with its set of problems, after all, nothing is perfect. Just like you might want to connect with fellow fans of your favorite book, others might wish to connect with those with dangerous ideas. And of course, I might have talked about the internet as a seperate reality, but at the end of the day it is still part of the greater world in which we all share our realities. It is still human, it can still hurt just as much as it can make us smile.
Of course another issue would be the fact that we tend to close ourselves within our selves. We tend to only want to be with those who are like us. We often forget that just like we are humans, the one opposite to you is as well. When we restrain ourselves to a certain group of people, we forget to humanize others, it all becomes abstract figures within a giant cloud of existence instead of a person. Instead of someone who hugged their mom, who went to school, who cried when they tripped while running away from the stray dogs.
I think it is nice that we can find people like us on the internet. But I also find it beautiful that we can find those who aren’t too. I hope that we can start to balance out our existence with those like us with our existence with those that aren’t. I believe that in difference, in understanding lies growth. And within growth, lies true love. We all wish to find people like us the second we see them, the second we decided who we are. But perhaps those like us are the ones that grow with us. And for that, we are gonna have to accept some differences.
Song Rec of the Week:
Like I have said, Hiding Places is one of the best albums I have ever heard. Kenny Segal’s production is grimey, it is ethereal. With a slight touch of rock infused lo-fi jazz beats, Segal is the perfect vehicle for woods’s rhymes. What can I say about billy woods, he is one of the best lyricists ever. His storytelling capability is unmatched, each verse sounding like a broken puzzle that you must put back together in order to get a dense manifesto. It is very hard to recomend a single song out of this LP as I would recomed all of them. Still, I will recomend one of the most iconic tracks out of the album.
Song: Red Dust by billy woods and Kenny Segal
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