See From Where You've Come

Pride is a fickle thing. It holds you to a standard where you can be happy in your decisions and in your tastes. It can also be easily affected by influences you grow up with, whether volatile and negative or encouraging and positive. I grew up as a black youth in a predominately white neighborhood among almost entirely white students from when I was in pre-school up until the time I graduated. I do not count this as a negative nor do I fault my parents in their decision for where they would decide to raise my sisters and I. I don’t blame the kids who called me names and treated me as something different, because I was innocent enough to the difference I brought and did not realize the way I was treated by my “friends” could be seen as mean. I made plenty of good friends who I still call my brothers and sisters to this day, I go to their weddings and I see them on a regular basis; Or I did before the virus hit. I don’t blame anyone for how my tastes change except for the pride I grew as I learned about the truths of the world and why people had this strange expectation of me, even though I grew up in the same place as them and was the same age. I was 12 years old, why was I expected to swear, do drugs, drink and party? Why does being black mean I have to act like the people in the songs, in the movies, in places far removed from who I was or how I was raised? As I learned what I was “supposed” to listen to, I did everything in my power to find something else. This took me on a musical adventure that mirrored my life’s rising, falling, stagnation and stability that has brought me to one of the happiest times of my life.

The first song on my playlist Revolution by Kirk Franklin introduces my most innocent self, a child being brought up in a christian household. I can’t remember who brought us this song first, but my sisters and I loved it. It had enough youthful edge that we could get into it, with beats and tunes that we could dance and go crazy to. I didn’t know what “being black” and “being religious” meant or how they might influence the world around me. I didn’t have a sense of my own likes or dislikes in music at that point because the only thing on my mind was finding the next fun thing to do. Going to church wasn’t fun, bible study wasn’t fun, but singing and dancing were two of my favorite things to do. We had just moved from our old house into a new one in a new neighborhood. My parents wanted to raise their children in a safe environment with good schools, just like any parent does. They would argue they felt more pressure in their decision given that they were raising three children of color who could easily “fit a profile”, “be a bad influence” or “fall in with the wrong crowd” if they weren’t careful. My father was and still is a hardworking mechanic for a government operation and my mother had just started her own business trying to teach workplaces about diversity and fight on the front lines of so much intolerance in the world.

Us children grew, and we ended up going to different schools. I unfortunately only really have my own perspective on life in a new school. I was at an age where there was a lot of change and new friends that needed to be made. I hadn’t fully listened to my own music up to this point, so I listened to what my sisters would listen to: Destiny’s Child, TLC, Ginuwine, different R & B and hip hop artists I can’t remember because they weren’t my own taste at the time. The phase where I listened along didn’t last very long though as we discovered worlds of our own away from each other. One sister is 6 years older than me and the other is about 2 years older.The older sister always had her own life, not wanting to play with us younger, uncool children. The younger of the two and I were inseparable up until that point, but eventually she made friends at the new school she went to. So that left me to make my own friends at my new school.

Something I find myself telling people a little too often is about my after school activities in those days. “I used to take tae kwon do, karate and gymnastics”. I used to love telling people this because I thought it made me interesting. The real memories I have from this time is driving to and from those places with my mom. We’d hop in the car, me in my Gi, and we’d listen to the radio on our way there or home. My mom is a very religious woman, who didn’t get caught up in modern (at the time) music that “The youths” were listening to. She unfortunately didn’t have current technology that would let her listen to the reggae she could never find on CD from her younger days either. So we would listen to the oldies station. The channel was 98.1 CHFI, a local Toronto radio station, that played classic songs from a bygone era. Most of the tunes I would tease my mom about, songs that my adolescent mind didn’t always pay attention to. There were a few that I secretly would enjoy, though, Papa Was A Rolling Stone by The Temptations comes to mind. Thoughts like those opened me to the possibilities of there being other kinds of music out there.

Around that time I started to come away from what I, at the time, thought to be “things that followed a stereotype”. No Rap, no R&B, no Hip Hop, nothing that could associate me with “that style of living” that I was constantly being made fun of or stereotyped for. I made it a point to never even try watermelon and avoided conversations about chicken as much as I could. I started pulling away from my peers outside of school encounters and instead found my fun with a new type of show I had found from japan: Anime. Dragon Ball Z Started my adventure and I found new reasons to stay inside. I got my first Playstation from my uncle and found more reasons to stay inside. My teenage years were coming and I was already well versed in programs like Limewire and finding new songs to listen to from questionable sources.

By Myself by Linkin Park has angst-y tones and modern DJ spins that still get me moving. The voice of the dearly missed Chester Bennington gave me something I could sing along to in the hopes of one day being as good as him. I didn’t really hear or understand the lyrics of the band’s songs but I couldn’t help but listen to them on repeat and sing along word by word without painting a complete picture of the pain of the lead singer. I didn’t know why their songs had resonated with me so well but looking back now I know that the pain I heard in those songs and the loneliness I didn’t understand was what I found in my own world and it was mostly self inflicted. These songs carried me through my years even to now as I sit at home at 1:45 in the morning without anywhere to be tomorrow because a disease threatens not just my safety, but the safety of my parents.

Through these years, my frustration built behind a closed door and I found another song which spoke to me in ways I didn’t understand. Aerials by System Of A Down starts with a slow violin describing its loneliness before being interrupted by a guitar arguing against it with strong tones that promise something more. The more is brought by drums that introduce the harshness of the guitar. The voice of Serj Tankian describes the state of life and goes on for the length of the song to pull at my mind and heart. The song dips, peaks and climaxes through a dark screen of pure sane noise trying to tell the listeners about themselves and the state of the world they’re part of. “Aerials, in the sky, when you lose small mind, you free your life”, the band has a message they want the world to know, and it’s that following blindly behind people that only want something from you will be society’s downfall.

Naturally this leads to the band which shook a generation. I found what gets my blood going with Killing In The Name Of by Rage Against The Machine. I sang, or screamed, out my rebellion from inside my room as loud as I could, damned if anyone else in the house could hear me. When the parts with swearing came up my rebellion took a pause as I quieted the music and didn’t repeat the words but let them play so I could hear them and feel the punch each time Zach says “F*** you, I won’t do what you tell me”.

But I wasn’t all bemoaning my loneliness or raging against the dying of the light. I had a light side that I brought to my family and the few friends that I kept close. I had a funky side that looked back at the rock music from the 60’s and said “I wish I could go back there, even for one concert.” Enter Jimi Hendrix, the black american guitarist who went from a broken home, to the military, to guitarist for Little Richard, to rock sensation in England then back to America before his unfortunate passing. His performance at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival is by and far my favorite live performance I have ever heard. You could hear his heart and soul go into every song he performed, even if he made mistakes along the way.

He closed out the show with his cover of Wild Thing, a famous performance where he starts out making love to his guitar, making sounds that people couldn’t understand before blasting out into that famous intro riff that so many knew and love, encouraging people to sing along with him. He brings the pure groovy free love which that generation was known for, playing his particularly unique style of guitar and enrapturing the audience. By the end, his youthful energy, or the drugs in his system, take over and in a live recording of the performance you can see that he can’t help but grind his guitar against a speaker with his hips, he vigorously humps the sound out of his guitar before taking it off, laying it on the ground and after one final lovemaking session he lights the instrument on fire. The poor guitar is still plugged in the entire time and it’s death throes capture its final moments as he picks it up and smashes it any way he can until he finally throws the remaining pieces into the audience and leaves the stage. If he hadn’t already by that point, he had just left his mark on history.

Finding myself in this place of classic rock, my internet explorations landed me at an album of The Top 500 Rock and Roll Songs Of All Time. The Animals, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton, The Beatles, I get hits that range from psychedelic with Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd to raucous self expression with My Generation by The Who, a band which would go about their way of smashing stages just like Jimi during the same time period.

I went on to find songs beyond guitars, drums and everything that went along with them. I somehow was introduced to something that was typically found in clubs and Raves: Techno. I found myself listening along to L’amour Toujours by Gigi D’agostino from a burned disk of songs my friend gave me titled “Top 100 Techno Songs, Vol. 1”. He gave me about 5 more volumes of the same.

Around the same time I find myself going down a Daft Punk rabbit hole with One More Time and a funny pixelated fan-made music video I found on newgrounds.com for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. The band interested me as I learned more about them. The fact that they never took off their helmets had me asking questions of how serious they were about it, I looked up videos of interviews with them and stills taken from their appearances at music ceremonies. These guys were serious. Along my exploration with them I found a fantastic film they made called “Interstella 5555” which is essentially a music video for their discovery album. It details the life of aliens from a planet full of happy people that make music and dance together, until their life is thrown into chaos when the band which brought their spectacular songs is kidnapped by a greedy music producer who brings them to earth to make a profit for himself. I won’t say more because I feel it is a film that needs to be viewed for its intelligent way of telling a story without any actual words spoken by characters in the movie aside from lyrics during song segments. It tells a tale of happiness, tragedy, regret and unrequited love.

On the cusp of graduating high school, after establishing who my real friends were and investing my time in the people I felt had a good impact on my life, I was finally starting to come out of my shell a little. I still wasn’t fully comfortable going to high school parties but I was able to speak to more people at least during my school hours. The odd time that I would leave the comfort and warmth of my little nest I would go to friends’ houses to hang out. One particular time, a friend introduced me to a band called Pendulum. A new musical adventure had begun. Hold Your Colour is a beautiful song that plays an oscillating piano-esque sound as an intro with a ghostly voice begging the listener to “Hold your colours against the wall, When they take everything away”. The song breaks into that quintessential drum ‘n’ bass sound that gets the heart pumping, the head bopping and in not so rare cases, the legs skanking. I followed the band through two more albums they released, In Silico and Immersion, before they eventually decide to go a new direction that unfortunately did not have my interest with them.

At this point I had entered university and things started out great. I was officially out of my shell, going out of my way to meet new people. Drink some beer, smoke some weed and get my youthful energy out through partying. The call of schoolwork and pressure from my parents to focus on getting through began to fade as I partied in residences, bars, clubs, streets; I found myself where the fun was. I found The Bloody Beetroots and Steve Aoki who brought bangers like Warp 1.9 which I could show to my friends and we could all dance along to. The music coursed through our blood and our minds got lost in the reverie of the moment which said that yes! We were alive, young and we could party like there’s no tomorrow!

My first year of university lead to my first experience with psychedelics. A friend who lived on my residence floor offered me a small amount of magic mushrooms since there wasn’t enough for her to get and effect. The timing was fantastic as it was late, I had a class to go to that I wanted to skip and I had just found the BBC Radio 1 essential mix. I had been tipped off about a band called Noisia from a remix of their song Machine Gun by a DJ called 16bit. After being walked through the basics of what to expect from a trip on shrooms with a friend, a brief encounter with a tye dye poster and an awkward attempt at conversation with another friend, I decided to take a night time walk. I put on my headphones, loaded up Noisia’s mix on the Essential Mix and left my room. To set the stage, I had just reached the peak of my trip and was walking through the halls to the exit with the intro from Pete Tong in my ears describing what I was about to experience for the first time. Pete played various sound bites from the band's songs, had a bit of an intro from them, then turned the tone down to an intense haunting bell sound. Pete described that the listener should “Strap themselves in” and that he should be “Issuing a government warning” about 2 hours of drum and bass about to assault the senses. The warning about language aside, the mix began. As soon as I open the door to the outside night time air the tone dropped and a creepy distorted voice of a man describing a need for alternative types of sound played. The tone shifted and the mix takes on a life of its own as the air and lights around me vibrated and twisted. What followed was an hour and a half of walking around a campus, encountering purple people with glowing necklaces(This actually happened, some engineers had painted themselves purple for a night time event), being directed by “an invisible hand” on where I should go next, and climaxed by me bawling my eyes out under a tree in a nearby park. They say that a person’s experience on mushrooms is heavily influenced by their emotions going in. I had been experiencing heartbreak and a confusion at life that came through the psychedelic haze. Eventually I found my way back to my room at an hour I couldn’t hope to remember, wrote a message to myself describing my desire to be a writer and promptly went to bed. The party would continue in the morning, as I thought.

The funny thing about partying like there’s no tomorrow is that for most people, tomorrow does in fact show up. It was around 2011, I was on thin ice with my school for under-performing. I didn’t know what I was doing. I was being asked to hang out less as my old habit of avoiding other people began kicking in again and I began buying my own weed. I’ve heard it said plenty of times that weed affects people differently. Some people can smoke it on the hour every day for years and be fine, other people smoke it only a couple of times and can’t handle the mental state that they enter. I found myself doing nothing for longer periods of time, my only solace in the warm embrace of blankets covering me in my chair as I sat and eased the racing thoughts of my mind by listening to quite possibly my favorite album of all time: Welcome Reality by Nero. The entire album is worth listening to from beginning to end with each song taking you through a mental adventure of hope and realization after the world has ended because of Doomsday. An inspired culmination of their album can be heard in a live performance they put together during a live broadcast with the BBC Philharmonic titled Symphony 2808. The song begins with pieces of a couple of their songs bleeding together, from the brief intro song, 2808, and a song on the deluxe version of the album, New Life. The symphony flows with beautiful violins into hard hitting drums and mixes with an electronic flavor that reminds the listener of the technological age that we live in. During times when I was feeling the most distraught about my situation and unaddressed issues, I would sit and listen to this album from beginning to end, or pieces at a time to try and put together some semblance of sense that I could grab.

Eventually, through the help of my friends and family, I went through the stages of accepting I had problems which needed serious fixing. I went to a professional who pieced me back together one shard at a time until I was functioning again. After getting to a semi comfortable place again, too many of my previously loved past times, like writing and playing guitar, took a sideline for fear that they were a sign of my mind slipping back into the fantasy realm it had built where everything was okay and my problems didn't exist. Because of this fear I was put in a very tough position. I had to decide where to go from there. I took back my job working for a large coffee company and was reunited with friends that I had tried to push away when I didn’t know what I was doing. My listening journey brought me back to the beginning of my mind. I started out with Linkin Park and System Of A down again, I put my old library on shuffle and used music to help me sort my thoughts once again, though through a different lens this time. I decided to go back to school. I needed something I could put my energy into that had a structure. Something that held me accountable and made me feel like I was doing something positive. I liked technology, I liked working with my hands, so I went to school for Electrical Engineering Technology. My library followed me with few additions being made. 2 years ago I graduated and began working for a company utilizing my new found skills. The job was monotonous and I needed something I could listen to in the background to keep me on point. I found a random playlist full of music that was from a genre of music called “Trip Hop” or any number of other names that could describe music that was low key and had potential for intense moments.

I came upon a number of songs in the playlist I liked but one that stands out was Mend(to Fix, to Repair) by Elsiane. The singing sounds weird with a drawl I can’t easily explain and though it’s played over traditional guitar, drums and bass, there’s something just slightly off about it. There’s a slight twist to the song in the form of what could be a violin or some other form of string instrument which cries in the background as the singer trips over certain words and the violin comes to the forefront able describe its happiness at being included in the production. The singer joins in with her unique way of expressing herself and the song lightly plays for what feels like too short of a time.

The idea of mending is important to me, and realizing one's own shortcomings is vital to that. I try to be aware of my own thoughts and emotions which can influence my words and how I treat people. I know I have changed as I compare myself to who I was years ago. A band which I feel speaks to this well is USS (Ubiquitous Synergy Seeker). Though the title sounds maudlin, Built To Break describes so effectively my feelings during my voluntary isolation during a time when it wasn’t necessary to do so. The singer describes a routine he knows is bad for him but which he constantly finds himself going through, trapped in a cage of self remorse. I love listening to this song because I can so easily remind myself of everything I’ve done to come away from that person I was.

These days I remain self assured and confident in my decisions. I left the job I gained after my previous graduation and am in school for even further education in Software Engineering that will take me into my next phase of life. Throughout isolation I’ve had time to think about how my time away from friends feels so different now compared to then. I can see the people around me for real this time and I’m not afraid to reach out to them when I’m feeling like I’m slipping into old habits or when I just need to vent and realize how silly some of my fears sound. I’m not afraid of my own skills or what they may imply about my mental state and I actively look for ways to sharpen them and share them with the world, something I was too afraid of even thinking about beforehand. The final band I want to highlight for my current state is UNKLE. Their song Safe In Mind (Please Get This Gun From Out Of My Face) is a perfect example of their unique style which mixes traditional guitar and drums with just enough electronic mixing to sound odd to some. The song speaks of things that are so close to what I felt during my most unsure times, “I see the moon, the moon sees, All that I do is twist in the unreal”, when my mind took what was supposed to be normal thoughts and made them something else. “Someone's found a way, To break into my mind”, my friends and family finding me at my lowest point and trying to save me from myself, a self that was convinced everything I was doing was the right way to live and act. “Life’s a gun that's always pointing, Life’s a gun that's pointing in my face” I never reached a point where something like this lyric happened but I came very, dangerously, close to something similar and was saved just in time. “I like, The street, the smells, The sense of the underworld, Sometimes you come face to face with yourself” The final confrontation I had with myself. You can have everyone in your life telling you something and trying to pull you from the edge, but sometimes you need to be the one to take the hands reaching out to you and accept what they’re trying to give you.

Isolation has proven to be a time for me to measure how far I’ve come since I didn’t want to be around anyone. It has been a chance for me to grow closer to my parents, to my sister and to my friends, since none of us have anywhere else to go. One of the few things we can still do is talk to each other and keep each other sane during times that would have us pulling our hair out or deep diving into our vices. I’m thankful for everyone who has come with me on my journey to this point and I am ready to face the challenges of what this new world will bring us, music pumping the entire time. Thank you for reading. Love to all.

Ethan Otholvin Brown