“It faced–or seemed to face–the whole external world for an instant, and then concentrated on you with an irresistible prejudice in your favor.”
“One of the very strangest of sensations imaginable in life’s rich pageant can be wholly experienced boobing round the bedroom, with a pair of headphones, an audio system, another person, and Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now”, which is somewhere between the tenth and final track on their 1978 record, Jazz. Insert the disc into the stereo and, with maximum respect for the limitatons of your personal speaker system, play the song at a reasonably loud volume, all while keeping a pair of un-plugged-in headphones rocked on your ears. The loudness of the event is crucial to ensuring the communality of the sensation, the track choice in that it is remarkably impossible to process “Don’t Stop Me Now” without being forty-four phalanxes beyond full of fucking empowered. Play the track just long enough so you and your Queen-rearing compadre are rocking out of consciousness and banging away at keyboards that would never be placed at that unreasonably high height and apparently contain anywhere between twenty-four and one-hundred and twelve keys. Somewhere between “tiger” and “gravity” insert the headphones into the stereo. Freddie Mercury is now singing to you, and any “yeah!”s evident in the recording belong solely to your voice. You’re now clutching to unheard music like a life-saver, justifying fist-pumps and guitar windmills by what you alone hear, and you are looking are a person who cannot understand you and is phenomenally frustrated by the absence of what was just keeping them going. You’re half-crazy snug between fizzing earmuffs, and your compadre just had a door shut in their face. Somewhere in this experiment is the answer to the futility of communication, the limitations of rock music, and the importance of quality headphones.”
guinness and chocolate chips and sign me up for the home edition
If you can’t dance to ramrod, check yourself
