Quickies

🎯 The more obscure the TV show they're bingeing, the worse the marriage. If they're on season 5 of some drama on Tubi, the divorce is coming soon.

🎯 Have you noticed how much social media has resulted in prison gang thinking? The more we're surrounded by chaos, the more we revert to a primitivist, tribal mindset.

🎯 There will be only two jobs in the future: hawking supplements or being a life coach.

🎯 "If you disagree with me, unfollow me" people are the problem, actually.

🎯 Overheard: "He married a Russian gal. Mail order bride, probably." That’s so disrespectful to Russians. It's like, c'mon, mail order!? Uh, they have the internet in Russia.

🎯 Pain is a signal to stop doing something. But instead of paying attention to that underlying cause, we consistently seek ways to numb the pain instead. If your brain is telling you to stop grabbing a hot pan, the solution isn't to take a pill to lessen the pain. The solution is to stop grabbing the pan.

🎯 Outside, everything is fine. (Well, it was. Then we did climate change and ruined even that.)

🎯 The genius thing about egg freezing is it monetizes women thinking men are trash. Cha ching! Unfortunately, it ignores that men will only become even less desirable as time goes on. Once ChatGPT s3x r0bots arrive, dudes might not even leave the house.

🎯 Crazy that a bunch of white people tried to make Latin people start saying "LatinX" against their will. Basically, it was people who say they hate colonization tryna colonize another people's language.

🎯 Confession: "Bear market or bull market" confuses me. I just pretend it's a gay thing and chime in, "Actually, it's a twink market!" And then I laugh until the money bros talk about crypto or fantasy football instead.

🎯 The first thing that came to my mind when I heard "some insane vet brought a gun into a bowling alley" was Walter Sobchak…

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So this is another Israel/Palestine-free Rubesletter. (The topic’s a bit overwhelming so nice to have a break.) But will put more thoughts about it in a “paid subscribers only” newsletter soon. Sign up to get that (and other bonus content) in your inbox. It’s how I justify spending so much time on this newsletter so I truly appreciate it.

If you can’t afford it but want those words, shoot me an email and I’ll comp ya.

Now here’s a bunch of cool music stuff…

Music to your ears

🥁 The secret ingredient for any rock trio: The drummer better be amazing. He's gotta fill the space of two instruments. See: Ginger Baker, Dave Grohl, Mitch Mitchell, etc.

🥁 Look up “cooking” in the dictionary and you’ll find this video of Herbie Hancock and his band on Danish TV in 1976. Wah wah’ed chicken grease jazz funk grooviness.

🥁 True story: Taking a Lyft. Driver is listening to music. Maybe it’s good, right?

Me: Can you turn the volume up?
Him: [Turns it up. It’s Christian music with trés Jesus lyrics.]
Me: Oh, you can turn it down.
Him: [Locks doors.]
Me: [Puts in headphones and plays “Personal Jesus.”]

🥁 “Take It Easy”:

🥁 It's funny to me that Elton John was so iffy at writing lyrics that he hired someone else to do it for him and what that guy came up with was “Crocodile Rocking is something shocking” and then Elton was like, “This is brilliant!”

🥁 Prime needs the fur too:

🥁 Tom Petty: “You can’t say I didn’t try really hard because I’m trying really hard to be good.”

🥁 The 80’s: 🎶 It's raining men! Hallelujah. It's raining men! Amen. 🎶

Imagine if that song came out now! It’d be more like….

🎶 It's raining men! Most toxic rain ever. It's raining men! Time's up, bastards! No one asked for your patriarchal downpour!!! 🎶

🥁 “Slipknot” = picked for me? At least this proves AI ain’t all the way there yet…

🥁 "How Soon Is Now?" by the Smiths:

🎶 I am the son and the heir
Of a shyness that was criminally vulgar
I am the son and heir
Of nothing in particular🎶

News to me: The last part is believed to have been adapted from the novel Middlemarch by British author George Eliot, from the line “inevitable heir to nothing in particular.”

🥁 The Beach Boys predicted climate change 50 years ago...

🥁 Brian Wilson alone at a piano doing a version of Good Vibrations:

🥁 ABBA shoulda recorded a song with an A-B-B-A song structure just to mess with people.

🥁 I could listen to Leonard talk all day long:

🥁 A Crash Course in the Elephant 6 Recording Co. A new documentary explores the lo-fi psychedelic music made by bands including Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel.

“The Elephant 6 Recording Co.” is a vivid time capsule of musical community before the internet, before tape trading became a thing of the past and before indie rock became such a marketable commodity…Get ready to lose yourself in a utopia of psychedelic pop-rock, layered and collagelike production, and the intoxicating ambition of a bunch of musicians trying to craft their own “Pet Sounds” with whatever they had on hand.

🥁 Fascinating doc on William Onyeabor, reclusive Nigerian electro-funk pioneer:

🥁 ”Robbie Robertson absolutely faded, grabbing the aux cord and playing tupelo honey for his ol pal marty (scorcese).”

🥁 Don Was:

If you listen to “Up on Cripple Creek” I believe Garth was the first guy to use a clavinet as a funk rhythm tune…it was before [Stevie Wonder recorded] “Superstition.” I mean listen to it, I always thought it was a Jew’s harp but you listen to it and [Garth’s] playing a funky wah-wah clavinet.

🥁 Song Exploder: New Order - Blue Monday. Neat to hear all the layers isolated.

🥁 John and his drugzzzz:

thebeatles.zone

A post shared by @thebeatles.zone

🥁 Damon Albarn reveals one of Gorillaz’ top songs was an Omnichord loop preset:

🥁 Brian Eno on surrender and control:

On one side of Eno’s scale diagram, he writes “control”; on the other “surrender”. “We’ve tended to dignify the controlling end of the spectrum,” he says. “We have Nobel prizes for that end.” His idea is that control is what we generally believe the greats – Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein, Wagner – were about. Such people, the argument goes, controlled their chosen fields, working in isolation, never needing any creative input from others. As for surrender, that idea has become debased: it’s come to mean what the rest of us do when confronted by a work of genius. “We’ve tended to think of the surrender end as a luxury, a nice thing you add to your life when you’ve done the serious work of getting a job, getting your pension sorted out. I’m saying that’s all wrong.”

Comedy

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🃏 Check out my other newsletter that’s all about standup: Funny How: Letters to a Young Comedian.

🃏 Listen to my podcast:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 31 episodes

New ep coming this week with a good back-and-forth all about Israel, Gaza, etc. Subscribe now to get notified.

That’s it. Thanks for reading.

-Matt