playlist review: Deadbeat Summer
Not sure if you're aware of this or not but it's hot in Southern California in the summer. Allegedly it's hot here most of the time, but especially in the meat of July, and during an El Niño year to boot, temps are soaring. It's time to bother your husband to call Sears now about the air conditioning. (man, someone should remix that audio, put it over a pool-party house beat or something...it could be bigger in the club than the Home Depot song.)
We're borrowing a car from the people subletting to us this summer, and it doesn't have one of those screen things you stick in the windshield, and every time I get in the car, the backs of my thighs fry like over-easy eggs. You can almost hear a sssss sound. Of course, I love it. My ancestors are from places that are grey-skied and windy, I assume they are looking down on me from Catholic Heaven, thrilled about the amount of sun I am absorbing.
Music sounds better and more important during the summer, I think. With a greater focus on maximizing leisure, the right soundtrack is important. When I saw Jason Sloane's Deadbeat Summer playlist pop up via Twitter — a real playlist, with real .mp3s, downloadable via almighty .zip file — I got excited because a Deadbeat Summer is the summer that I'm having, kind of by accident and kind of on purpose. I am underemployed and have just moved to a town in the middle of a hot labor summer where everyone's on strike. My impulse at times like these is to scramble for work and for ways to productively fill my time. But the theme of the Deadbeat Summer playlist, as Jason writes, is to hearken back to a feeling of a time when you could "blow off obligations" and "let [your] brain and body fry with no repercussions." So I've been trying to do just that, and bumping this playlist in the car.
Playlist highlights for me include "Fuck Her Tears" by Times New Viking (when I was just a baby music blogger, I reviewed Dancer Equired for an extremely defunct publication called InYourSpeakers and I'm sure I sounded dumb as hell), "Should Have Taken Acid With You" by Neon Indian (chillwave is coming back...it's COMING BACK), and "SGL" by Now, Now (upset I had never heard this song until now? This song is absolutely screaming out to be used between the second and third acts of an indie rom com)...all of it is music that sounds great on sound systems of today but would probably sound just as good if it were on an iPod plugged into one of those insane cassette tape adapters in a 1990 Toyota Camry.
P.S. my most Deadbeat Summer drink of yore was one I could only muster a sip or two of: a friend's boyfriend brought a handle of Bacardi Zombie to a summer party once. Perhaps it was the same Northern European ancestors who whispered in my ear, "God does not want you to drink this" because my temperance let me avoid a blue-tinged fate that others weren't able to dodge that night. Bless this mess.
Download the playlist and subscribe to Jason's newsletter too.
