Psychedelic Rhapsody

I remember the first time I listened to “Planet Caravan’ by Black Sabbath in a hotel room with green carpets. I forgot that music was temporal, something that existed in space and time. I forgave myself for holding on too strongly to my vicious vices. I found myself in what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a state that “makes life worth living”–a state of flow. 

I’d like to call this time-stopping, ego-dissolving, flow-inducing property of music “psychedelic”–derived from the Ancient Greek words psychē (ψυχή, “soul”) and dēloun (δηλοῦν, “to make visible” or “to reveal”), translating to “mind-manifesting” (Rosen & Weil, 1983 p. 93). From being used to describe the beatnik prose of Burroughs and Bukowski in the ‘40s to Hendrix’s spacey guitar licks in the ‘60s to Alex Gray’s larger-than-life mandala paintings in the ‘80s, psychedelic art has been around for a long minute. 

These artworks are usually described as a kind of noise to the common man, only revealing itself as music to the patient listener. 

Credits: Jan Pearson/Redferns-Rolling Stone

Which naturally got me thinking: What makes a book or record or painting psychedelic? 

The Johnny Appleseed of psychedelic science, Al Hubbard, believed that it’s not necessarily the contents of the substance but rather the set and setting that determine a psychedelic experience. Set refers to the prior mental state a person brings to the experience—the latent thoughts, general emotions, and overall mood. Setting, on the other hand, refers to the physical and social environment around them. 

Following the urge to arrange arguments into the age-old tradition of dualisms and dichotomies, I want to show you how a subtle balance between set and setting can ferment rotting noise into a full-bodied melody. How these concepts can catalyze a psychedelic listening experience out of practically any record. 

Jay Z - Decoded

Credits: Jamil Gs 1995, The Guardian

Take Jay-Z. 13 records across 30 years. 13 Platinums. Only the Beatles have more number-one-charting Billboard albums. The King of America, Jay-HOVA, might be both the church and state and everything in between, but I could never justify his rhymes. I couldn’t look past the misogyny, violence, or boasting. His song 99 Problems is a brilliant illustration. 

“If you having girl problems I feel bad for you son
I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one, hit me”

To be honest, I didn’t know how to separate the art of rap from the artlessness of such lyrical content. From its literal content. 

That’s what I learned from Decoded, a loosely structured autobiography written by Jay-Z. It reads like something between a scrapbook, a personal diary, and a manifesto. He breaks down his verses, using his rhymes to take you from where he used to sell crack on the benches of the Marcy projects in the late ‘80s to the project room where he stacked his first billion at Def-Jam records.

And that journey had 99 problems. Not a bitch, but the K-9 unit that pulled up on his Maxima while he was on his way to Trenton, NJ with a trunk full of crack. The K-9 unit was late, and the cops let him go just seconds before he passed by them on the other side of the highway. In gratitude, he wrote these rhymes after deciding to turn his life around. But obviously, that’s not how it literally reads. 

“At no point in the song am I talking about a girl… It almost makes my head hurt to think that people could hear that and twist its meaning the full 180 degrees.” (Jay-Z in Decoded)

But that’s exactly what it feels like to be a Black man misunderstood. 

This book gave me that context, recoloring my mindset, the mood, the emotions, and thoughts this track provoked. It also forced me into an exposition of Jay’s life in the setting of urban America, reminding me of how Black narratives have been misunderstood just like the Black voices narrating them. This newfound capital helped me re-understand “Coming of Age,” “Ignorant Shit,” and “This Can’t Be Life” as forthright, raw explorations of systematic racism, police brutality, and fragile masculinity. Teaching my ear to listen to Jay’s rhymes was both psychedelic and humbling, changing my opinions from shallow to cryptic, crass to poetic. Decoded taught me that the profundity of a life story cannot be dished out on liner notes or Genius annotations. It’s earned. Learned through mental and physical preparation, through set and setting. 

Tommy James and The Shondells - Breaking Bad

Tommy James, a soft rock and psych rock musician best known for his role as the lead singer of Tommy James and The Shondells, crooned these lines for the song “Crystal Blue Persuasion” (1968):

“Look over yonder

What do you see? 

The sun is a'rising

Most definitely

A new day is coming, ooh, ooh

People are changing

Ain't it beautiful, ooh, ooh

Crystal blue persuasion”

In an interview, James once said “crystal blue” was taken from the Bible. “The imagery was right out of Chapter 19 of the Book of Revelation, about the lake of crystal, and just what John sees. The imagery was just right there.” 

I did not know this. 

Because every summer for the past four years, every summer, I’ve rewatched Breaking Bad. In season 5, episode 8 of the show, there’s a montage that runs a little short of four minutes where we see our hardened meth cooks change clothes. Zipping up into toxic yellow hazmat suits, filling crystal into bright blue Ziploc bags exchanged for equally bright green stacks of dollar bills. As an airplane nose lifts off the runway into the horizon of a new dawn, dollar bills are placed inside cola crates. Worries are showered away, uncertainty is drunk away. A new day rolls around and they’re ready to cook again. A seemingly incoherent set of motion pictures is glued together by the same song, “Crystal Blue Persuasion.”

Listening to this 1968 rock classic single in Breaking Bad’s set and setting gives a new meaning to its lyrics. It feels like a decadent baptism, one you cannot forget. The dissonance of knowing what it meant and what you’re now taught to mean, coupled with the wavy riffs playing over the hyper-realistic visualizations of the literal lyrics, reveals a new meaning inside all the noise within the incoherent montage. This ironic reinterpretation feels extremely psychedelic in how it feels so wrong yet right, propelling me to imagine years of the storyline passing by in just five minutes. 

Khruangbin - NPR Tiny Desk

I remember the first time, pre-pandemic, when I listened to Con Todo el Mundo. A drummer friend of mine had recommended the record to me, and I played it during a Zoom class, one earplug in. The bass sounded flat, the drums tinny and the guitar sloppy. It sounded like the hundreds of tracks from before; samplers used to shelve away discographies full of artists. 

Despite this initial write-off, I came across Khruangbin’s Tiny Desk concert on YouTube. Tiny Desk Concerts are to live music performance what sliced bread is to peanut butter and jelly. Producer Bob Boilen’s team packs artists and their performances into a tiny office cubicle studi, and the interns at NPR huddle around the space Anderson Paak once called “a sauna.” From Brushy One String to Billie Eillish, there’s no real curatorial theme among the 800 or so performances recorded here. Some bands bant between tracks, play on cheap portable amps for the shits, and try out corny dance numbers. 

Tiny Desk videos don’t necessarily feel like a live performance, but they aren’t ordinary recordings. The videos focus on capturing a level of awkwardness in the soundscape, like the static hum in old jazz records or the cheap layers of distortion in early Hendrix recordings. These are markers of a refreshing probitas that usually goes missing in studio recordings. Audio engineer Josh Rogosin candidly captures these markers through the dub-inspired, dirty bassline from Laura Lee’s 200 dollar SX J-Style. Rogosin clinically places DJ’s atomically-tight drumming right on top of the baseline, as if recorded through a mic placed between the bass and drums. Finally, he weaves it all together with Mark Speers’ ethereal guitar licks that sound like Butsaya Rangsi’s ghost whispering through a yellow strat.

The soundscape NPR creates is a new set and setting. I can only imagine what it feels like for the 15 or so NPR interns who sit in on the live show. This set and setting, one that’s not live but quite alive, feels psychedelic in how it focuses on the subtle imperfections, out-of-place notes, and out-of-time beats. The recording feels raw and open, allowing the listener’s attention to manifest onto something new every time. Even when I go back to a more processed, tempered recording like a studio version, I see through elements of variety, further nurturing my state of flow and mind-dissolving listening. 

***

“A joyful life is an individual creation that cannot be copied from a recipe” (Csikszentmihalyi, 2009). I don’t think books about African-American musicology or TV shows or concert recordings can help get into psychedelic listening or flow. But they have been crucial ingredients in my recipes for cooking up the right set and setting to get there. I don’t expect you to copy it or try it out; rather, I hope I made a passionate case for why you should chase the high of psychedelic listening. In an age of hypercapitalism and heavily incentivized egocentrism, practicing psychedelic listening practices may grow into being a cure, escape, or retreat. It’s made me less of a consumer and more of a conscious listener, forcing me to think for myself, opening me up to unorthodox expressive styles and inspiring me to reinvent my own art.

References

Weil, Andrew, and Winifred Rosen (1983). Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2009). Flow: the Psychology of Optimal Experience.

Artwork by Fatema Al Fardan