Swing Low Sweet Chariot

The idea that some people actually get paid to do something that they enjoy still baffles me. If you count temp work and part time gigs, I've had about 25 jobs in my lifetime. I'd probably venture to say that only two of them were things I actually enjoyed. Growing up, the focus was always on finishing school and getting a good job. No one ever really sat me down and asked me what I actually enjoyed doing. By the time I got to college I didn't have the slightest clue. It didn't help that I went to a poor HBCU where the budget kept getting slashed so departments were disappearing left and right. I started out as a communications major and when that was scrapped they put me in the theater department.  (WTF?)

Five years and six majors later I still didn't have a clue what I wanted to do, but I had bills that needed paying so I dropped out and took the first job I could find. When you work a job that you're not emotionally invested in, you'd be surprised just how little of a motivator your paycheck is. At first you're ecstatic to get the check that's gonna keep the padlock and orange sticker off your front door, but eventually you start spazzing out and that's where music comes in. The glory of the iPod was that I could make a playlist to keep me gainfully employed. It looked a little something like this:

 

[caption id="attachment_1708" align="aligncenter" width="524" caption="Not exactly negro spirituals, but they made tilling the fields easier"][/caption]

Working a monotonous job requires precise song placement. If you notice, the first song is Slap because often anger is what caused me to turn on the playlist in the first place. Then it moves into DMX who is basically the mascot for cocaine which makes him the perfect choice for putting into words all of the crazy things that might pop into your head (but you'd never actually do). Pre-jail Tupac comes in to calm you back down and then we get to Jay-Z who has so much money that his songs make you forget that you don't. Then of course we come to Broke Phi Broke which is why we're all at work in the first place.

Usually I'd go to break and come back refreshed just to have a coworker or manager or piece of office equipment kick my frustration right back up to 10. So we go to 99 Problems, Everyday Struggle, Crazy and I start to feel better. That's what a lot of people don't get about rap music. A normal, non-psychotic person can listen to songs like these and actually calm down. It's like you hear someone vocalizing what you feel inside, even though the cause of your anger is totally different than theirs. DMX is mad because he's crazy, I'm mad because the payroll office screwed up my direct deposit. Two totally different lifestyles there, so no, I don't want to really kill anyone. I like not being in jail. I'm just mad and listening to a smooth jazz song isn't gonna do it for me. I need to hear someone else curse because I'm at work and I can't.

Eventually the songs work their magic and I feel better, hence the interspersed random songs like Feel Like Going On from The Five Heartbeats. I always close out my work playlists with Beanie Sigel's Remember Them Days, because that song was my life as a kid and the whole point of the job was so that I never had to go back to it.

It's all good now, we out the hood now.