What songs have gotten stuck in your head because you feel like they’re speaking directly to you? Read our article, “After Laughter,” Trauma, and Finding Comfort in an Earworm” and help us construct our collaborative playlist.
Earlier this week, we published a hybrid personal essay/observation on songs that get stuck in our heads. Are they stuck because of exquisite songcraft—some kind of realization of the musical formulae of success? Or could it be that there’s something else at play?
That something else, in the case of Wendy Rene’s “After Laughter (Comes Tears)” is pointed: The experience of vacillating between happy and sad…between life and death…between laughter and tears lives in a song by the Memphis teenager, whose writing excavates that universal terrain. Whether a metaphor for a relationship or a reality of life, this in-betweenness is one of the complex and sublime feelings music can help us navigate.
Black musics in particular often navigate this in-between feeling poignantly. Early hip-hop is both an art form birthed in struggling communities discussed in “The Message” and a celebration of making-do in these harsh conditions as articulated in Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day.” What if, these songs ask, there’s not an either/or shift between happy and sad? What if, instead, there’s a balance?
As a supplement to the piece, we’ve put together a Spotify Playlist on the official MusiQology Spotify Channel that takes you through some of the songs that we mentioned in the story and some alternate versions of “After Laughter” itself, which continues to haunt us in a strangely comforting way. Maybe a song’s been stuck in your head for similar reasons that you can’t quite put your finger on. Let us know!
Reply to our Facebook post, tweet at us, comment on Instagram and/or follow MusiQology on Spotify and help us continue to navigate these feelings together.
Share On Facebook
Tweet It
