April 2020

It’s been a while. Here we are now in 2020, more specifically April 2020. With the ‘roni going on, I’ve gotten a few requests for another monthly jamm. Et le voilà!

I think this April has something for everyone. Some Lauv and Weeknd pop, some Stormzy grime, some new Green Day rock, some throwback Glen Campbell country.

For this month’s written blurb, I wanted to focus on this snippet from Blood Orange and Toro y Moi’s collab on Dark & Handsome: 

Don’t be actin’ dumb, cookie’s gonna crumble. Wipin’ up the crumbs, I do this shit casual.

I love this line. Basically, don’t pretend that shit isn’t going to hit the fan. Get used to cleaning it up and moving on. It seems to me that, pending a mostly happy childhood, people’s first major shits hit as they transition to adulthood and then tend to get more severe as age starts to sink its teeth in. Some kids come out of their adolescence with a bachelor’s in wipin’ up crumbs. But we’ve all wiped up crumbs; it’s an essential part of the human experience. In Blood Orange’s specific experience, he’s picking up the pieces after a couple friends’ suicides.

One of my favorite lines of thinking is this balance between eating delicious cookies and having to wipe up crumbs if and when they crumble. Call it yin and yang if you want. If cookies never crumbled, I don’t think we’d have cookies. You need both. For this same reason, I think it’s good to fall every once in a while. One, it makes you appreciate not falling. Two, adults don’t try enough fun stuff to fall. Kids are falling over all the time. The pain of the possibility of the fall is worth telling your friends you nailed that 180 ollie. Likewise, the joy of that 180 ollie wouldn’t exist without the pain of the falls.

If all we needed to achieve happiness was pop soma pills in Huxley’s Brave New World, would you call it happiness? Or does happiness come with some amount of struggle, of suffering? Are you happiest in acing an easy test or a hard one? Are you happier beating a terrible team or a great one? Are the happiest marriages happy every day?

But back to cookies since that’s really what this is all about. They’re going to crumble. For all of us to some extent, they’ve crumbled in front of us over the last couple of months. And we’re going to have to wipe up the crumbs. But then those cookies are going to come back to us. On and on, cyclically. And that’s life.

– theMonthlyJamm | April 11, 2020