Friday Five: December 17, 2021
hello, it's me
Hi friends,
We made it through another week. Welcome to the Friday Five, your weekly roundup of things that will spark joy, give you comfort, or bring some relief. You’re going to get a longer than usual intro this time, on a topic I’m utterly consumed by. If you need to cut-to-the-joy immediately, you’ll find your usual programming below.
I love sampling in music. It brings me immense joy to learn where beats, verses, or even single lines come from and see the different ways an artist will integrate them in their work. I dream of hosting a podcast where we (me and my imaginary music-obsessed co-host) unpack samples in contemporary music, what the original work was about, how + why they were chosen, and so on. There’s probably a connection between listening to a lot of hip-hop, where sampling is a foundational tactic, and becoming sample-obsessed. What’s unclear to me is if this is just appealing to my musical mind or if others delight in this, too, so please slide into my DMs if you feel similarly.
Anyway, one amazing thing about sampling —and musical covers more generally — is that at a bare minimum, you’re learning two songs in one, and you might not even know it. If you’re lucky, you might have a magical moment where you hear the instrumentation or lyrics of a ‘new’ song, but you know some variation of it and it’s automatically familiar to you. For instance, Janet Jackson sampling “Ventura Highway’s” guitar riff in “Someone to Call My Lover” is so deliciously effective, it endears you to that original song, even though the two songs + artists couldn’t be more different.
I experienced this musical magic watching And Just Like That…, which I have a lot of big feelings about (honestly mostly cringe). When Todd Rundgren’s “Hello It’s Me” started playing, I immediately started singing along despite having never heard this song or of Todd Rundgren. Sorry, Todd! I knew the lines because the second half of Erykah Badu and Andre 3000’s “Hello” samples this song. “Hello” more closely follows the Isley Brothers’ cover, so this is a three-for-one song deal — the best kind of bargain. There are actually more covers and samples beyond this, but there are only so many rabbit holes I’m willing to take you down in one newsletter.
Just like The Rolling Stones’ “She’s a Rainbow” (wrote about it earlier this year), “Hello It’s Me” is another emotional song from a TV show that is unexpectedly helping me continue processing the loss of a dear friend. Grief is strange for many reasons, one of them being the direct relationship between time passing and unanswered questions — it’s been three months and I have more and more questions that I’ll never get closure on. Music and art are incredible for so many reasons, two of them being that you can impart your own emotions onto the work and derive meaning from that’s completely different than the work’s original intent. Ed Note: This is exactly how middle school Roya felt Usher’s Confessions album was written directly about her lived experience. This defies all conventional logic and that’s the power of good art!!
And just like that… a song about an ex-lover can turn into an ode to a beautiful friend. How special is that? “Hello It’s Me” is your song of the week. It feels like a warm blanket, like a Carole King song— I hope it comforts you or reminds you of someone you care(d) about.
Recipe: Eric Kim’s M&M Cookies are delightful and so easy to make, giving me happy nostalgia and reminding me of the intense hold M&Ms (it was the green M&M for me) had on American society in 90s + early 2000s. The recipe is a one-bowl wonder, and the tip of chopping the m&ms up gives you chocolate and/or candy coating in nearly every bite. I’ll probably make these again with two small changes: cut back on the vanilla and sprinkle them with flaky sea salt right after baking.
Newsletter: My brilliant friend and sister in social impact (she coined this term!) Teni Odunsi has a beautiful newsletter called At Least We Tried where she shares her inspiration and musings (on motherhood, on nostalgia, on all the important things!), and where she runs a regular advice column. I would trust Teni with my life and any curveball thrown at me, so she’s more than good for it. Subscribe here.
Poem: This week’s poem is actually Leonard Cohen lyrics that read like a dazzling poem, and channel the Rumi quote, “'The wound is the place where the Light enters you.” This feels like a much needed reminder as we wind down another weirdly unprecedented year.
Joyful Internet Content:
Bonus: If you’re looking to make an impact this holiday season, check out Transanta, a mutual aid campaign that connects santas everywhere with trans youth in need. Through anonymous and safe gift-giving, trans and queer youth who are houseless, in foster care, or otherwise without vital support receive the gifts they want and the affirmation they deserve from people all over the world! This page has all of their IG posts + requests with clickable links to shopping lists.
Lead me out on the moonlit floor,
Roya
The thought of 7th grade Roya singing, "mannn I'm throwed and I don't know what to do..." is just too much.