*yr paranoid heartbreak beats

All around the world there are those of us who are united by beats. Repetitive, sampled, electronic, drum, beats. Beats you recognize and beats u don’t but somehow they are ALL familiar, as if pulsing in time with the blood in your veins. Something started in the 1970’s and criss-crossed the world several times over. Wherever you were—there was this music that was coming from the cities, it had this BEAT and if you listened closely you could hear your own future calling in the spaces between.

There was the murderous, thrilling boom, boom BIP of hip-hop in a jeep…

There was the frantic and deep ump- TEH, ump-TEH, ump-THE of house in a club…

Escapism: one rung came from black kids in the g and the other from queer kids in the disco but both led to the same spiral staircase of elevated possibilities. Then there was the homegrown ska and hardcore beats that I heard in the university town where I grew up and the mixed-up scene that surrounded it of black kids and white kids, jocks and skaters and freestylers and skinheads and straight-edge punk rockers with black magic marker “X”s drawn on the back of their hands. From a young age I believed in the power of a scene…and beyond that I believed in a dj culture encompassing everyone from the pet shop boys to a tribe called quest to white kids in the suburbs.

I admired the people who made this music. It managed to have relevance without lowering itself to the cheapened standards of the the low-quality, mass produced 80s. I might not have understood everything that was being rapped about but I got the vibe—there was the feeling of a huge space opening up in front of me, like a prairie rolling out for miles and miles after the mountains, and everything I’d ever been taught seemed to shrink against this new expansiveness, this new awareness…

It started out as something more than sex, drugs and rock n’ roll (or at least that’s how I’m spinning it now--)

When I was a little kid my heroes were putting on headphones and fighting the tv radiation that was ruling the nation.