1of12: A Jan. 2017 Playlist

I can't shake the "Victory" outro. Puff, back when he was only Puff, shouting: "It's all fucked up, now...What the fuck I'mma do now?" In the video, Puff winds up cornered on a building roof top as the outro plays, and I remember watching it on TRL at 10 years old, maybe 11, the song one of the very first to push me towards rap.

Puffy can't escape his dark reality, a dystopian future has him on the ropes.  It feels today as if the world is burning, our leaders, our neighbors, tossing on the logs themselves. What to think, feel or do has never seemed more important, and I see dear friends and close ones vigilant, active and eager. 

Music and writing about it has always been a release for me, and as I ask what I'm going to do now, the answer has to be more. This little website, this paragraph, isn't meant to take place of protest, donating or volunteerism. People have been stunning in their organization in that regard. But I want to think more and write more and listen more and share more in addition.

I had decided to make a playlist a month of strictly new music as part of this new site, and certainly the landscape I launch this series into has changed since. There are two rules I gave myself: songs must be released in the given month, that is, they must be new. And no one album or project may be represented twice. I share the first here with some small hope that a song on it will stick with someone or be a momentary distraction. These are the songs I connected with most this month. The turbulence, the search for a moment of ease perhaps indirectly captured.

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