‘Steady Mobbin‬’ by ‪Lil Wayne featuring Gucci Mane.

Every time someone complains to me about how pop music today is bullshit and meaningless I like to bring up my friend Matty. He’s 21 years old, which is seven years my junior. Sort of a mini-generational gap. Unlike me, he can’t remember the days before the internet. Unlike me, Skins was the iconoclastic television show of his teen days (that he’s barely left.) And unlike me, he is still really on top of popular music.

And Matty just Skyped me the above video with the words, “love it”. In fact he’s regularly pointing me to music videos he loves - usually from mainstream hip hop and RNB stars or sometimes big name electronic music DJs. When we lived in the same building I used to hang out with him and he’d play these videos, saying stuff like, “man that’s fucking cool,” or “that’s nice, right? He’s just killing it.” And he and his other guy friends will get up and be bouncing along and grinning because they love it so much.

Which is why it gives me the shits that other people want to take that obvious feeling they get from these songs away from them.

I mean I watch the above video - and despite the violent, misogynistic lyrics - I get it. The feeling is Everyone can go fuck themselves, because I am the Greatest. That’s a prizefighter’s strut. That’s a diva hair flick. That’s someone - a CEO, a scientist, a political leader, a writer, an athlete, a surgeon - whoever - at the top of their game and feeling good that after all the hard work and shit they had to go through, they can now puff out their chest.

That’s what this song says, and other songs he sends me says other things. The point is, is that this music - as all good music does - reaches into us and expresses feelings we otherwise have trouble expressing, or accessing. (For me it’s Adele. To quote Lauren Hill, “she was strumming my pain with her singers, singing her song with my words”.)