A Soundtrack for Every Level of Stupid
Could have gone exotic with this. Cat piss. Toad licking. Getting the pilot test explained by your idiot ten-year-old brother. Instead: the mainstream version—a level-by-level accounting of how to pair music with whatever money just bought on the wrong side of a park.
Level one is beer and wine at someone’s place, friends gathered for what nobody officially calls a drug night but definitely is. The substances aren’t the point yet—the room is, the company, the feeling that time might be moving differently if only you let it. The real addiction is never the molecule anyway; it’s the good time the molecule attaches itself to. For this the music should be warm and undemanding, actually melodic. Solar Bears’ She Was Coloured In. Thievery Corporation’s The Richest Man in Babylon. Jon Hopkins’ Insides. Music that makes the kitchen feel three rooms larger than it is.
Next: somebody rolls something. Weed does what weed does—slows the clock, softens the edges, makes the lamplight interesting. Quality matters here; the stuff recycled through Berlin parks carries ambient sadness and a headache in the morning. The clichés of reggae and loose hip-hop exist for a reason. Nightmares on Wax’s Carboot Soul remains the correct answer. Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information is even more correct. And for the genuinely, undefendably sincere option: Bob Marley & The Wailers’ Legend is indestructible, no matter how many times it has played in a room exactly like this one.
Then there’s the white phase. MDMA, coke, speed—chemistry’s argument that the night isn’t finished when the night very clearly should be finished. It arrives before you’ve left the apartment or directly behind the closed doors of certain clubs, and suddenly the most boring person in the room is doing something with their hands and saying something that sounds genuinely profound. It’s all party, party, party, then sex, in whatever order. The music should match: beats accelerating past beats, bass making structural decisions. Deadmau5’s 4×4=12. Röyksopp’s Junior. Steve Aoki’s Pillowface and His Airplane Chronicles. The jaw does what the jaw does.
Hallucinogens warrant their own category. Steve Jobs reportedly counted LSD among the most important experiences of his life, which explains a lot about Apple—in both directions. Whether tablets, mushrooms, or whatever the guy with the backpack handed over: the neon interior of the skull becomes navigable with music already heading somewhere strange. Empire of the Sun’s Walking on a Dream. Ellie Goulding’s Bright Lights. Ikimono Gakari’s "Sakura Saku Machi Monogatari." The more joyful the playlist, the lower the probability of ending up in the corner convinced that your hands aren’t yours. Simple math.
And then the final level, the one most of us have only read about from a respectful distance. Make your will first. The only honest soundtrack for that particular cave is ambient—station announcements, water running somewhere down the hall, someone else’s whisper. But for those who still want music at that point: Burial. Salem. The darker reaches of Massive Attack. Sleep well, my prince. Life accomplished.