Invest In Yourself
Thirteen Songs for Your Musical 401k
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re staying on schedule, with another installment of the wildly popular greatest playlist series in the solar system of my very own mind.
First, I’d like to welcome new subscribers, while also thanking all that have entrusted in me the power to electronically deliver to you my little ones and zeros what make words (and sounds). Coming upon FIVE(!) years to the day that I sent out the first one of these, I’m glad to still have your support—our musical journey hasn’t been the easiest, and the world has somehow gotten even more insane.
This was never intended as a newsletter or as a blog, and has always been more of an experiment that morphs with my personal energy—not just the frequency of the writing, but also the character of it: whether each post is about a song, about the world, about my inconsequential life stories, or about an existential conundrum dealing with T-Mobile tech support. I flirted with paid subscriptions once, but quickly felt that I wasn’t doing anything worth your charity, and couldn’t determine a way to offer you enough to actually make your contribution worth it, so we’ve remained in what is an honorous exchange: I share my music taste with you and you inflate my self-worth as a gentleman of taste.
Before I move on to today’s post, I advise anyone—especially anyone who has stumbled upon this from another newsletter’s recommendation, or stranger, somehow found this via Substack’s mystifying explore engine—go through the archive; there is a lot of good music there to discover and I’ll try to update some of the dead links soon.
SERMONS! is reader-supported. If you’re wishing to support our work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Otherwise, we’ll all probably forget about this thing.
Now, children of the stars, gather ‘round. I have many sounds to play you.
Sermons! is not an old head music blog / newsletter / gripe station. I listen to everything I can. It just happens that a lot of new music I hear feels disposable and so I don’t bother with it. I’ve written elsewhere before about the superfluous qualities of contemporary art in the Instagram age, and I save a bit of the same gasface for music. I don’t like so-called indie music and I find pop music boring and predictable, even from a critical academic standpoint. I just crave hearing something that excites me, that tickles my big dumb human brain. And there’s a ton of music newly uncovered from the past that does that for me, because for the past twenty years we’ve mostly been in a lock groove, reworking and refining sounds that came before. My analytical brain hears old songs then tries to imagine, historically, the environment where these musical boundaries were being pulled apart. As a former DJ1 I have loads of records that were exciting in the moment and didn’t carry enough weight to stay that way, twenty years later. So, I’m less than interested in music that won’t carry itself forward. I do think punk / hardcore and heavy metal are in very thrilling moments in time though, so a huge amount of space in my new music mental hard drive gets devoted to that.
Anyway, with that disclaimer out of the way, here are a bunch of old songs. Thirteen of them, one for very bit of bad luck the number implies, except these are all chaotic good and so they’re here to rebelliously liberate your fortunes from any rigid despair you may have endured so far in this blistering early summer of suckdom. Thirteen songs that have been in rotation the past few weeks at the headquarters of the Sermons! Vault of Extraordinary Achievements in Sight and Sound From Planet Earth and Beyond™, aka my couch or car.
Tell everyone: music is here and music rules and its the entire best thing in Wreckless Eric’s whole wide world.
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Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
Now I’m just a deejay, aka a selector, aka I just play music I like ( but not Tusk), in it’s entirety, the way the artist intended.