today, i got up. out of bed, with a little help from my friend. his name is kai wesener, though he goes by bl4ckm4rketc4rt, and he was 17 years old when he passed away on october 30, 2023, a mere 66 days after the release of today i laid down, his debut album. today, over a year after he laid himself down, he helped me get out of my bed once more. a hand from outside, gently waving. they are echoes, ones that guide us.

everything's fine. bright lights and yellow walls, they help me out of bed. no food in the morning, even just the thought is a chore. you managed to make it to school, and i'm so proud of you. an unfinished song ends, on an unresolved chord. the rest of my life, an empty desk. miles, and miles into the wild pale yonder.

the graves of those who have died in hell can be never visited safely. how many websites have become digital graves?

i can't bear the thought of his mother listening to short sleeves, and reading what he wrote for her. enough time will never, never pass.

i always thought it could have happened to me instead. shit, i don't know if this sounds parasocial, but i think we could have even been friends in another life. kai was a bradtasteinmusic viewer at the same time as me, he was only two years younger than me, and we clearly had similar interests. i could never tell my mom, and perhaps it's for the best that i never got to make it into art. but i'm turning 20 soon, and he'll stay 17. alive, always.

alive, always. maybe that's what you tried to tell yourself. you can be sure that i do, now. it'll never be enough, and it may be the hardest thing i've ever done. and i just can't help myself. but alive, always.

so, yes. i hung a white flag above my door today, once again. i think you may be right, maybe it's okay. just for today. i'd like to thank you for following me. i'll always be here for you.

you know about revolver. chances are if you're reading this, you've already heard revolver. if you haven't, go listen to revolver? what are you doing?

what am i even supposed to say about revolver? so much has been said about this album there's a wikipedia page for every single song on it. even the ones i personally find to be just okay. so i'm going to say something not everybody has said about it, and it's that for the longest time, i found it, too, to be just okay. just in general, for the longest time i found that the beatles were a lot stronger in their singles than in the albums department. and i still do, but it feels as if that's slowly fading off me over time.

look, i don't know anything about the "technical aspect" of music making. is what i would have said about a year ago, the first time i listened to this, when i really didn't know jack shit about the technical aspect of making music. and i still don't, but now that i do know even as little as i know today, these guys really were just unbeatable. you know what the issue is with their singles, which are of course their most popular songs and thus the first impression i got from them as a kid?

they have EVERYTHING. pretty much every single one of them is one of the best songs ever made in the history of contemporary music.

• the songwriting,
• the hooks,
• the atmosphere,
• the aesthetic,
• the sound production,
• the mixing,
• the fucking MIXING for god's sake, half their songs sound better than music coming out TODAY, and they made it with fucking tape and a glorified calculator as big as a table.

george martin is the real goat of these motherfuckers. he was a bonafide genius, and i'm genuinely sorry for him that it was the shit ass 60s and he couldn't get cowriter on any of these songs because my god did he ever deserve it. but of course, not every song can be strawberry fields forever. so despite pretty much all of their songs being anywhere from great to unbelievable quality wise, not all of them can keep up, hook-wise. which means, i had to learn how to appreciate... pretty much anything besides the hooks before i could understand why people enjoy beatles albums as much as they do.

so anyway as i was saying, this album has been growing massively on me lately. and i think i jsut realized why. there's something weirdly OFF about it. i can't put my finger on it. half of these songs feel... unfinished. not unfinished as in unpolished mind you, these songs are beautifully recorded. just like, somebody was in a hurry to leave the studio as soon as they were done, or something. revolver feels.. haunted, in a way.

i think they might have just been pioneering the massively influential musical production technique of "recording high as fuck", but everything here feels drenched in a deep haze. just listen to the reversed guitars in i'm only sleeping, the weird unresolved ending of the otherwise happy-go-lucky good day sunshine (which, by the way, have you heard that bassline at the beginning? why is it so fucking ominous? proto-post-punk ass), the almost stream-of-consciousness nature of she said she said, or the easy-to-miss drowsy guitar line that drearily stumbles up and down the chorus of here, there and everywhere. the half-asleep way they sing (again, probably because they were high as balls) on the more psychedelic songs pretty much invents shoegaze/dream pop vocal delivery. i love the little, almost unintentional tinges of melancholy. i'm not one to prefer sad music, honestly, i've made a point to keep myself apart from the majority of rateyourmusic users in that regard, but that tonal dissonance between the cheery, the trippy, and the moody makes it stand out from other stuff from that time: this album was carefully orchestrated to feel like it's about to tumble over any second.

so i guess what i'm saying about revolver is. what the fuck is wrong with it? why is it like that? were they okay? no they were on 200 micrograms of lsd each. it's okay, you couldn't make tomorrow never knows otherwise. uh i still don't think it's like perfect, i still think doctor robert and i want to tell you are just kinda, there? they're just okay, at best. the best part about them is they're both inspired by drugs in some way, but so is the entire fucking rest of the album. you can only make the beatles cooler with drugs by so much. the rest, they have to cook up themselves. but yeah, this album still feels really cool because it's weird and fucked up, and i love weird fucked up music. the way people talk about revolver makes it seem like it's the second coming of christ, and yeah yeah yadda yadda they invented backmasking and adt and pda and cbt and whatnot which is great for them and all but there are better albums. to me, of course. but even despite that, and even almost sixty years later it's still a really cool album to just leave festering in your mind for months like a strange fungus or something. go check that shit out for certain