Mush Acoustic Love Hits

[Olympia Brackin]

1Black Girls Make Beats, an organization that helps Black girls further their careers as music producers, DJs, and audio engineers.

2. Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.

In celebration of my book launch, I'll be in digital convo on dimensions of tenderness with Abdu Ali of as they lay & Kamra Hakim of Activation Residency, hosted by Mandy Harris Williams with the Feminist Center for Creative Work. Register below. Thursday December 9th, online at 7pm est. RSVP here.

Those moments when neither you nor the one you\u2019re listening with are speaking but presence with the music unfolds as its own conversation. When everything we hold unspoken is given a body through a song\u2019s notes. When you and a homie take the hand of a record and walk alongside it to the rhythm of its beat. When the song opens like a mouth with a question and beacons you onto the temporary porch it\u2019s made of its notes. When you can listen and just be, together. Listening to music together is one of my favorite acts of intimacy.

Music gives my spirit language for what was previously thought ineffable. So what a delight it is when someone else is portaling in that ineffable space alongside me! Sharing a song with another can feel so vulnerable. It\u2019s like my spirit\u2019s tiny way of saying, \u201Coh hey, here\u2019s a sonic capturing of what makes me, me.\u201D And listen, I say this with the gentle hands of detachment. I never hold an expectation to how someone should react to a song I share (I think back on the many times I\u2019ve queued up a track to meet the quizzical brow of a homie). But those moments when someone passes me the aux and the others around me vibe with it? Or vice versa, when I\u2019m grooving to a track a homie plays? When a loved one and I are both hearing a song for the first time and our spirits collectively respond: YES! When we turn to each other and say: Who is this? Acoustic miracle. Songs can be a compass to the cosmic mush of our consciousness. So it means something I think when you and another person\u2019s spirit find one another in a shared love of a song. Listening to music with someone you love is an unspoken: I see you! I\u2019m beside you! We\u2019re here together!

Moment of delight. When someone shows you a song they think you\u2019d like. Yes, a small window into what makes their soul leap/dance/cry/shimmer. Also, an offering of careful attention. \u201CI heard you in these notes.\u201D

If there is a space where joy lives for me, it\u2019s in a car listening to music with a loved one. Music just hits different over a car\u2019s speakers. The car becomes a tiny stadium on wheels, and we\u2019re the world\u2019s most eager audience. The car is taking me someplace and so is the track so together they gift me a drifting towards somewhere that sounds like free. I\u2019ve screamed the lyrics to Natasha Bedingfield\u2019s Unwritten with loved ones on country-wide road trips. Sobbed to Frank Ocean while my homie drove us to get McFlurry\u2019s when my high school boyfriend broke up with me. Fallen asleep to Stevie Wonder in car rides around my neighborhood as a baby cause my young overwhelmed parents figured out it was the only sure fire way to soothe me from crying. In the car music gets wings and you become its passenger, together gilded by acoustic reckoning.

For the record, I always advocate for sending crushes songs, alongside perhaps more direct measures (follow the mystery baby! give the daydream scenarios a runway to possible).

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Spotify Wrapped is out today. Ima be honest, I get really hype about this. Where I don\u2019t care much for the Grammy\u2019s, I\u2019m way more interested in learning about the music that makes up my friends' personalities. To the folks that say: Nobody cares about your Spotify Wrapped, I say: Bestie, I do. A day of people collectively talking about the music that got them through a hard ass year? Wholesome! Show me all the places you found yourself sonically.

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At the same time (because I think we always need the reminder that many things can be true at once) I think about how major music streaming services fail to support artists. How streaming services have been necessarily and repeatedly critiqued for years over their failure to pay artists fairly. How labels pay music streaming services for placement in playlists, so that these platforms become more of a digital space for algorithmic sonic ads than anything close to crate digging. Streaming services are just one leg to the larger structural table of the music industry where the vast majority of musicians cannot earn a living wage through music-related work. I\u2019m wary of methods where the action to mend systemic carelessness is placed on individual consumer responsibility rather than collective actions. And in that, I believe there are many ways that we can and should support causes that advocate for a more equitable and inclusive music industry. Support platforms like Bandcamp or Resonate that advocate for transparency with musicians. Learn about and share the work of organizations like Music Workers Alliance. Invest in spaces like Junior Hi LA, P0STBINARY, Future Music Industry, dweller or Discwoman that lift up marginalized artists. There are ample opportunities to show my love for music beyond consumption. We can hold the larger musical ecosystem more thoughtfully.

One of the most impactful talks I\u2019ve watched was a conversation between writers Hanif Abdurraqib and Harmony Holiday on the art of sampling in Black poetry and music. My homie Vanessa showed it to me on a friend date they\u2019d (spectacularly) curated for us. There was so much held in that conversation but one of the lessons I return again and again were their words on liner notes. Liner notes began as descriptions in the \u201Clining\u201D of the sleeves of records that listed the record\u2019s meaning or credits to who created it. A now dying art form within the digital age, liner notes offer lineage. They point to how memory is woven into citation and credit.

So what does it mean then if liner notes are disappearing?

Who are the hidden figures behind the song?

How are you holding the memory woven into the frequencies you\u2019re listening to?

A moment of applause. I want to extend the most abundant, shimmering, and full gratitude to Black women musicians for shaping the modern world (head nod to Daphne A. Brooks).

Thank you Mamie Smith, Big Mama Thorton, Josephine Baker, Missy Elliot, Ma Rainey, Patti LaBelle, Merry Clayton, The Blossoms, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Zora Neal Hurston, Loleatta Holloway, Nina Simone, LaVern Baker, Queen Latifah, Anne Brown, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Whitney Huston, Grace Jones, Lauryn Hill, Muriel Ringgold, Eartha Kitt, Betty Davis, Anna Mae Bullock, The Supremes, Poly Styrene, Beyonc\u00E9, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitgerald, and so so so many others for the culture, politics, and spirit you\u2019ve woven from your music.

(Reader - if you scanned over this list and met names you didn\u2019t recognize, I gently implore you to learn about the artist. They\u2019ve done more for music and culture than we can ever offer enough flowers).

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Shoutout to every car and bedroom floor and house party and random bar and street corner where I\u2019ve gotten lost to a song when standing beside a homie/lover/stranger and we both find our way to a fuller heart in the notes of the track.

Shoutout to everyone that\u2019s ever listened to a song with someone and participated in the telepathic collective applause at music\u2019s extraordinary, sonorous canvas.

1. In Praise of John Coltrane\u2019s Smile by Harmony Holiday

2. What Is \u201CEscape Room\u201D And Why Is It One Of My Top Genres On Spotify?

3. Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound by Daphne A. Brooks.

4. Creative Work: A Self Sufficiency Primer\u2019s Guide

1. The Flamingos Performing \u201CI Only Have Eyes for You\u201D live in 1959

2. Sonic Sunday School: Soulful Music of the Black Atlantic with Lynn\u00E9e Denise.

3. Underground and Black radio show with Detroit native Ash Lauryn.

1. Black Girls Make Beats, an organization that helps Black girls further their careers as music producers, DJs, and audio engineers.

2. Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and LGBTQ / gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized.

Thank you so much for being here.

This newsletter is free to make it accessible to those that can\u2019t monetarily support. But if you are able to afford it and find value in my work - I\u2019d love if you\u2019d consider becoming a paid subscriber for the price of a monthly latte or sending a tip through Paypal. If you are already a paid subscriber, thank you. \uD83D\uDC8C Your investment makes it possible for me to keep this newsletter free for marginalized folks, and allows me to keep writing.

15% of all monthly support is also donated to an organization I love and that y\u2019all should love up on too. This month\u2019s investment is going to Freedom Community Clinic.

Co-written with veteran dog sled racer, writer and lecturer, Karen Land, Trail Angels takes listeners on an album-length journey to the wild north to experience the lives of mushers, Alaskan huskies, bush pilots, and more.

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