Offline Vibes

Friday, October 4, 2024

Offline vibes influence vol. 12

Gucci mane. Does much more need to be said?

I first started listening to gucci in 2016 though actually, so i was really late to the party...but his genius showed through immediately. when he got out of prison in 2016, people were rly hyped, and i got addicted to "everybody looking". nowadays i dont know if it's held up as a beloved project, but at the time it was a pretty triumphant comeback for someone who'd had everything thrown at him. he came back leaner, stronger, and still with fire beats and rhymes.

i ended up going relatively deep on his discography and continuing to follow him, but i think my favorite gucci songs are honestly the ones buried in freestyles ... esp the hood affair mixtapes series. some of my favorites:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23ot1kDLTsY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dye-T2EsZoU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIgwuEUvlc (the iconic ending speech in this was later was sampled by metro)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tthu77cAOdE (prob the most famous of this era...admittedly prob my fav/ the one i most often go back to as well)

Monday, September 30, 2024

Offline vibes influence vol. 11

Top 10 projects all time. Maybe top 5. The instrumental parts are so amazing, the vocals are perfect, the atmosphere....ugh

https://kitty.bandcamp.com/album/frostbite

Literally every track is great. Can't even pick favorites. Listening is always such a boost.

Friday, September 13, 2024

Perpetual bloom

When i was younger, i used to really believe that there was a point I’d reach in life where the baseline emotion i felt was happiness, or at least some sort of contentedness. That a goal for me to aim for was this state where moments pass by largely pleasant and anxiety, discomfort, worry, and pain were fleeting.

It’s easy to look back in time and think of memories of old times this way, actually, after they’ve happened. It amazes me how quickly painful stretches of time spent agonizing over the future, bogging myself in work or worry, what felt like eons of misery, all very quickly are erased and coalesce into the briefer moment of happiness or enlightenment or intellectual interest that most immediately followed it. We as humans tend to thrive when we’re able to learn from our mistakes. it seems to me that this might inextricably link to a tendency to frame memories around the lesson rather than the pain which lead to it: the latter is not forgotten altogether, but simply positioned as rising action and climax to a moral attached perfunctorily at the end. So this expectation that one can live through the present in the same way we live through the past is one that is maybe naïve and romantic but ultimately and more importantly simply in vain; were that to be the case, we’d never learn in the first place.

I suppose what frustrates me more these days is not that we have to go through struggle in order to learn and grow but that it seems possible that my ability to learn and grow fluctuates over time and at least currently i don’t feel as capable of “solving” the problems in my life i currently face as i did when i was younger. Maybe the problems are harder. maybe im worse equipped. Who knows.