Stoics Make Mixtapes Too
You can listen to the full mixtape here and you can listen to a preview here …
Tomorrow’s events:
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 8:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
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May 6th, 2021
Hannah Robbins, who edits these journals (and who helps my ass not get cancelled here), often sends me good music to listen to, so I asked if she could create a playlist to help me escape my Spotify algos.
For whatever reason, Spotify is suggesting lame songs now, or old songs I am not vibing to anymore. I need new music, because it is like discovering a new slice of reality when a song makes me go “hold up, what dis?”
An existential opening emerges when that happens, and I like existential openings. It should be obvious by now, but I am a simple man, and simple men only need a few spiritual ingredients.
Mine: music, espresso, daemon.
I used to make “mixtapes” all the time when I was younger, and I used to make them for girls I was crushing on, for my guy friends I was bro crushing on, and of course, for Camille. After listening to the playlist Hannah made, the following thought emerged:
Hmmm, perhaps I’ll create a mixtape for this proto-embodied tribe/egregore/SOCI/whatever you want to call the energy associated with this thing called The Stoa.
So yeah, I made you a mixtape.
The daemon bestowed the following nickname to me the day I went totes cray: DJ Delicious. Maybe I am indeed a DJ of deliciousness. Stoans often ask me for the songs played at The Stoa, and I do put a lot of daemonic consideration into what songs to play.
The songs often seem to land well, like in yesterday’s Doomsday Optimism session. I chose Cosmo Sheldrake's lovely ‘Cuckoo Song’, and as somebody tweeted after the session: I have been listening to it on repeat since. It's magical and entirely unexpected (to me at least).
Magical and entirely unexpected, eh? Delicious.
The songs on the mixtape are all songs that have been played at The Stoa at least once, and they are songs I've listened to when journaling here. The mixtape starts with ‘Come Online’ from Kid Francescoli, because it is a hot song, and I am kind of in that horny romantic mode right now.
Then boom, the theme song for thumos anthropomorphized himself comes, followed by ‘Manifest’ from Andrew Bird and Erika Wennerstrom, which is the song that foreshadowed my spiritual crisis last year.
I was listening to ‘Heaven’ by Tropical Fuck Storm when I was getting hated on by Unstoans after blowing up The Stoa’s Discord server, and the Bright Eyes cover of ‘Flirted With You All My Life’ was the song I was playing when I was a bad friend.
‘Sober to Death’ from Car Seat Headrest, a personal fav of mine, resides in the middle of the mixtape. The lyrics that repeat at the end of that song are a spiritual battlecry for communitas ...
Don’t worry, you and me won’t be alone no more.
The epic song ‘Truth’ from my new bro crush Alex Ebert drops, then That Cuckoo Song from Cosmo Sheldrake. The second last song is pretty special. It was the song that was playing near the end of the Maybe the End of The Stoa Party, where we had a good collective cry.
The mixtape ends with some existential hope. It is another song called ‘Heaven’, this time from The Blaze. This was the intro song when our boy Daniel Schmachtenberger came to The Stoa for his hype sensemaker in residence series.
All of these songs might seem like a simple thing, but I do not think we would be here without these simple things. The lifework that is The Stoa, including these journals, are not only fueled on espresso, and the daemon, but they are fueled by good music as well.
Sure, there is a narcissistic component to mixtaping. There is that “check out these dope songs you probably have not heard of before” thing going on, but there is a tender side as well. You usually want to seduce in some way when you create a mixtape, and there is an innocence to this seduction.
Just like that scene on making mixtapes from High Fidelity suggests, making a mixtape is making art from other people’s art, and this art needs to be done with care. Giving a mixtape should be a surprise, and the songs you choose cannot be expected, nor the order you choose them in.
You want to put at least a few songs in there that the person has not heard of before, so those songs will be forever associated with you, or better said, they will forever be associated with the both of you. You are relationship crafting here, and that is serious business, because relationships are the heartbeat of life.
It is a screening tool as well, because if they do not like the music you like, then you're probably not meant to dance together. Maybe we are not meant to dance together, because you might not like this mixtape I created for you. There is a sheepishness here, because there is something on the line here.
Communitas feels close, but not close enough. This Stoic will be dancing alone in the meantime, to some pretentious indie music, with too many espressos, as a rebellion against our existential loneliness.
Delicious.
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