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Based on basic math, I listen to more music than is probably safe. Songs are like gas station sandwiches, they’re always scattered around space in copious amounts with a poor labelling system.

It’s normally impossible to distinguish their age and freshness before they’ve already been inserted in your head. The vast majority will leave you feeling nauseous, wishing you’d just stuck with being empty for that afternoon as opposed to getting slightly stuffed with so much old egg salad/derivative bullhockey.

However, every once in a while, you’ll find the sort of song peering from behind a pile of problems that will satisfy every need you never knew you had. Here are four such exceptions for you to download and hopefully save your day with.

n Murs ‘Dark Skinned White Girls’: Hip-hop has never been terribly subtle with its social commentary. In terms of keeping revolution subversive and under the radar of Freemason’s and the FCC, it was punk for black folks, kicking the idea that the proverbial man sucks around the world in spray paint spattered timberlands. This song, though, is far less hamfisted than normal. It’s honest about women, which is not terribly normal for hip-hop, which tends to either ignore the middle ground for exultation or excommunication depending on how many groupies called the MC’s halitosis into question that weekend. Beyond that, this song examines the social context surrounding the fluidity of racial identities as it relates to the feminine experience. Plus, the 9th Wonder supplied beat bangs like a sledgehammer wearing a hoodie.

n The Standing Line ‘Piano Song’: Put simply, this is the EMO Stairway to Heaven. It’s about two minutes too long, with three too many instruments, a couple more vocal harmonies than is usual for this genre. It’s also nearly too lovely for words that aren’t being sung by the backup singer on this record. The theme is about maintaining stability through love of self, some thin nerd or maybe even Jesus, depending on your interpretation of things. Whatever you get out of it, scooping the meaning loose by having to listen to the so-tiny-it’s-huge piano line will force you to call that ex-girlfriend for all the right reasons.

n Ghostface ‘Whip Me With A Strap’: Asides are what make stories, songs, people all the more interesting. Ghostface is possibly the most naturally talented rapper to be absolutely unable to stick to the immediate point, offering tiny indiscreet anecdotes every other bar that beef up the plot line by filling in the surrounding blanks of the basic idea. This song, from his to be released Fishscale full length, details how his mother used to beat him when he was a kid. We also are told about elderly women lighting up a cheap reefer to better enjoy a stylistics album, when and where to get great government cheese, and how difficult it can be to lace up a pair of pro-keds when affected by a contact high. Obviously, this joint is genius.

n Death Cab For Cutie ‘I Will Follow You Into The Dark’: Sometimes songs are based on an idea that will change how you consider things.

This is one of those songs. It emphasizes the absolutes that love can demand, at its most beautiful, at its most dangerous. Moving to Bangkok, committing mutual suicide, I will follow you into the dark, wherever it may lead. It’s horribly easy to play and listen to and obsess over.

If you’d like to hear any of these, hit me up at [email protected]. You won’t catch salmonella from these records, I promise.[[In-content Ad]]

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