People who know me well know that few things infuriate me more than any talk of authenticity - philosophically or otherwise. My reasons for this regarding philosophy are complex and I have written about them extensively elsewhere - see: The Tyranny of Authenticity: Rebellion & the Question of Right Life published in the Journal for Speculative Philosophy a few years back - yet with regards to issues of making music and DJing my opinions on the matter are utterly baffling. By which I mean, I have no idea what I think. I constantly contradict myself, find myself holding paradoxical beliefs with great frequency about the matter, threatening the very axiomatic integrity of the Principle of Non-Contradiction and so on and so forth. Basically, I find myself waffling back and forth between thinking that it is inevitable that people will be influenced by others, hijacking styles, sounds, mixes, progressions whether intentionally or unintentionally and I ought to let it go - and experiencing a burning desire to freak out and scream Swizz Beatz at people:
What exactly this has to do with the three recent remixes I’m about to post may seem a bit oblique at first, but I hope it will become clear as I proceed. It is unquestionably the case that much modern electronic dance music is built and structured around older dance classics, whether we’re talking Nadastrom’s usage of Horny by Cajmere to make Save Us, or Duck Sauce’s usage of Gotta Go Home by Boney M. to make Barbra Streisand as two direct examples - disco and older dance classics have served as the sample source and foundation for tons of modern day hits. For posterity:
To be 100% clear - I am in no way shape or form pointing these usages out as failings. In both instances, the originals off of which these tracks were based were relatively well known at least within the dance music community. And in neither case were the artists pressed would they have disavowed the ‘roots’ of their tracks - in fact I’m sure they would have gladly shared them. I think too many of us, tracks such as these are a manner of paying homage. Moreover, given my upbringing as a hip-hop fan categorically hating on someone for sampling would be completely hypocritical. Nevertheless - my concern with burying originals as sample sources stems from hopefully a different site than my concern with being authentic or creative or original. Rather it comes from the fact that, more often than not, when an artist chooses to sample or edit or re-structure a track to construct something of their own - it is in part because they love the original track. There is something about the original song which speaks to them, which prompted them to want to do something novel and innovative.
My question then becomes - insofar as we live in a world where VERY few music consumers are delusional enough to not know anything about sampling and sourcing why NOT share these original tracks with others. As cliché as it sounds, I like making music and sharing it with others because I like the way the music I love makes me feel - regardless of where that feeling falls on the spectrum of human emotions - and I hope to inspire such emotional responses in others. If I can manipulate a track a love into something new and exciting, I’m going to pass it along. And insofar as doing so doesn’t get me into any sort of legal trouble, I’d like to pass on the original as well. We no longer live in a world of crate-diggers where I have to cover my labels so the next man cannot track down what I have to insure my crates are deeper. Anything I’ve found, anyone else can find it too. Why not just pass it along and share the inspiration? If it comes down to DJing, I’m just going to make sure I think I’m good enough that regardless of who has the track, I can play it better. And hopefully by passing on the origina track, older artists, obscure artists, forgotten artists can be discovered by a new audience or rediscovered and recontextualized for old fans.
To this end - I present you with three new remixes of mine. All three of which I had contemplated chopping beyond recognition to make into “Original” productions, instead I decided to leave them with a certain degree of their integrity and present them to you with my own spin on them in a variety of ways. I’m perpetually stealing ideas from other DJs, from musicians that inspire me, from songs I love. I feel like the best way for me to be original in this case is to present these songs to you in this manner.
So here you have a remix of Symarip’s Skinhead Moonstomp - which was originally posted in conjunction with an extensive interview and overview on Generation Bass: The Moombahtonista. Second is a remix of Trouble Funk’s Pump Me Up which was posted in conjunction with another interview and overview on Cool-Breezy. The third is brand new as of today and is a remix of Charles A. Chepkwony Kolu Band’s Yach Busurek. Enjoy the originals and the remixes below.
I grew up in Michigan. Not in Detroit. Shit, for the most part not anywhere near Detroit. At all. My youth and the bulk of my teenage years were spent in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Minneapolis and Chicago were both actually closer excursions by car than was Detroit (Michigan is pretty gigantic state, it is nearly a 600 mile drive to the D from Dollar Bay). Nevertheless - perhaps it was the forced Michigan history in 8th Grade - I always had some sense, some pride of place, that connected me to the music that came out of my home state. At 14-15 years old I was busy listening to The Stooges, The MC5, Negative Approach, a lot of Motown records (somewhat on the low) and was just starting to get really heavy into hip-hop.
While I grew up with a youthful obsession with watching Yo! MTV Raps in the late 80s and early 90s and was a fan of a broad swath of what I heard there - like a lot of white kids in the early-mid 90s I was mostly interested in tracks coming from the Native Tongue camp and groups such as The Pharcyde. A whole ethnographic study could probably be done about that, but I digress for the moment. De La Soul, in particular was always my favorite rap group during that era. And when Stakes Is High came out, my brain got scrambled. There was something different about that record to my ears that I couldn’t quite explain. And as I was want to do at the time I got busy reading the liner notes to see if I could discover what it was. A name kept recurring. Jay Dee. I had seen that name somewhere before. Based on some fleeting memory, I ran and grabbed my copy of The Pharcyde’s Labcabincalifornia and lo and behold he had produced Runnin’ and Drop - which were unquestionably my two favorite records on that joint. As a bit of an early internet wiener (I had a ‘website’ in 1994, if I remember correctly - lord knows what the fuck I posted on that shit. HTML IN TEXTEDIT, WHUTUPDOE?!?), I went and did some research and discovered that this man, Jay Dee, was from Detroit. That sense, that pride of place returned. And his name stayed in my brain from that day forward.
In 1998, I moved to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan. Detroit and Ann Arbor are quite close geographically, though worlds apart in most other ways from one another. Nevertheless for the first time in my life I had easy access to this city whose musical legacy had been with me since my early youth. I began attending hardcore punk shows and hip-hop shows in Ann Arbor and Detroit with great frequency. Within my first few months at the University, I had met a couple of DJs that lived in the same dorm as me (that’d be East Quad, if you’re curious) right as I myself was trying to find my way into that craft. One of these cats, whose name I have completely forgotten, dubbed a copy of Fan-Tas-Tic Vol. 1 for me on cassette. We had been talking about producers we liked and I had mentioned Jay Dee - and he was insistent that I put my ears to what was available from Slum Village at the time. I freaked out. That tape made almost no sense to me in so many ways. The beats were insane, of course, but the way the emcees rapped on the tracks was like nothing I had ever heard before. In a lot of ways, it defied all the logic that my Pharoahe Monch-obsessed brain had come to use to analyze the quality of rapping. Yet it was somehow perfect for the tracks in question. The jazzy musicality of the production, the off-kilter swing, was matched perfectly by structures and patterns of vocalization used on this recording. And I was even more blown away by the fact that I was likely to have an opportunity to see this group perform sometime soon. And I did.
I saw Slum Village perform a handful of times, I couldn’t say how many. 6 or 7, probably. A few times in Detroit, once or twice in Ann Arbor (at the Michigan League, if memory serves me correctly). And I was always amazed by their performances. Their energy was unparalleled. And man, did they have fun on stage from everything I could see. SV’s performances were so energetic and broke so many rules - and the punk rock kid in me felt a certain sort of kinship with this fact. It really seemed like they didn’t give a fuck, in the best way possible. And loved every second of it. The last time I saw them perform, Dilla wasn’t there. I had no idea why until many years later.
During this era I had the good fortune to work with and get to know so many obscenely talented musicians and DJs. Looking back at who I would attend house parties with in 2001 in Ann Arbor sometimes hurts my brain. Tadd Mullinix, a.k.a., Dabrye, Matthew Dear, Disco D, Osborn, and many other folks from the early days of Ghostly International would be present alongside the good folks from Athletic Mic League (from whence we now have the A Side World Wide camp containing Buff1, 14KT, and of course, Mayer Hawthorne), and often times a slew of other folks who have gone on to talk over their respective niches within the music industry. More often than not I would be a fly on the wall for a lot of these guys conversations. Believe it or not, I was relatively quiet in social settings during that era. And Dilla would come up as a major source of inspiration all the time. I would sit back and listen to what these exceptionally talented artists had learned from his production work, from his style of rapping. Go back and listen to Dabrye’s One/Three today and have your brain hurt thinking on when it was produced and released, if you need confirmation.
And this leads me to my larger point, beyond simply paying homage. I am not trying to pull a “I was on this shit before a lot of you cats” card out here at all. I guess I am writing this to explain how I feel that my relationship with Dilla’s music is somewhat different from a lot of what I experience in Portland and other cities I visit. Most of my friends in and around Detroit who are long time fans of hip-hop have a different relationship with Dilla’s music. There is a similar reverence to what I see from a lot of cats around the world today, that is without question. But I’d like to think that I took away something somewhat different from it than what I see a lot of people doing with his music now. I think the homie Waajeed said it best in a recent discussion of Dilla samples on Ego Trip.
“I think that’s kinda what differs our cloth of producers, or maybe even Detroit producers, from New York producers. Just comin’ out here [to New York] and noticing how cats are sort of on labels and brands and records that are super rare. And if your shit ain’t rare then your collection ain’t shit. That type of thing. That’s totally not what was goin’ on in the D. I think [a philosophy] that we kind of inspired with each other in our own crew was there are no wack records, there’s only wack producers. You consider every record almost to be a keyboard and in that way it’s like a palette for you to create something fresh. It’s not in the record it’s in your ear. That’s more or less where all that came from.” - Waajeed
I think the insight Waajeed provides here says something about the ethos of people from the Upper Midwest in a lot of ways. A lot of us who were making music - be it hip-hop, electronic music, punk rock, or whatever - didn’t necessarily have access to all sorts of crazy tools. We had to make due with what we had and be as creative with it as possible. And for me, that has always been the legacy that Dilla ought to inspire. Be creative, take risks, work with what you have, and do you. I completely understand that Dilla’s production aesthetic was beautiful, banging, and innovative - but if you want to pay homage, I think that best way to do that is follow his lead, the lead that Waajeed so aptly describes in this quote and in so much of his recent content on the newly relaunched Bling 47. Don’t repeat, don’t replicate, don’t copy. Be inspired and create. I am no hip-hop producer, by any stretch of the imagination. But I’d like to think that all of my musical forays - and I’m sure this is excessively self-aggrandizing and hyperbolic - since I started playing bass in my first punk rock band in 1995 have aspired to manifest what I wanted to do. Is there going to be influence present in my music? Obviously. Do I love hearing elements of what Dilla brought to the table in current hip-hop production? Absolutely. But what made Dilla great, what made The MC5 great, what made The Stooges great, what made Negative Approach great, what made Juan Atkins great, what makes so much music from Detroit so fucking great, is that the people had to do it for themselves. And fuck it, if you have to do it for yourself, you may as well do it how you want. Right?
For those of you who don’t know, Red Bull has been throwing annual DJ battles for the past few years in select cities around the world. This year, Portland has been thrown into the mix and I have been fortunate enough to be invited as a competitor. The criteria are quite straightforward - 15 minutes, a minimum of 3 genres of music, smash that shit technically, demonstrate some showmanship, and get the crowd moving. The winner of this battle will be sent to San Francisco to compete in the West Coast regional with an opportunity to advance to the U.S. Final, and from there the World.
I’m honored to be competing against a slew of the best DJs from Portland, a handful of whom happen to be some of my closest friends. Even better, one of my favorite DJs in the world - and a fellow Wolfpack member - DJ Excel from the Skratch Makaniks is the special guest headliner. Do not miss this, especially if you want to see events like this in the city in the future!
Saturday, January 21st at the Fez Ballroom (316 Southwest 11th Avenue)
Free with RSVP - Text “3STYLEPDX” to 72855 - otherwise it’s $10 at the door.
In my estimation, any DJ that doesn’t love playing opening sets is a total sucker. As a rule of thumb, I have the most fun - musically speaking - during the first hour of the night. I can get away with all sorts of weird shit and play a ton of my favorite music that otherwise I never get to rock in a club setting on a legitimate soundsystem. To that end - here is about an hour of a live set from Couture from this past weeks Industry Wednesday. I went deep into the crates for this one. Other than the obligatory rocking doubles of Cam’ron & Vado’s Put A Bird On It - and one or two relatively obvious jams during my EDM set. Peep that shit here:
Perspects - They Keep Dancing Pirates of the Caribbean - Rumba Ramadanman and Midland - Your Words Matter Donaeo - I’m Fly Solo - Midgets In Bricklane Groove Armada - Oscillator One Egyptian Lover - Egypt, Egypt Donna Summer - I Feel Love Mlle Caro and Frank Garcia - Dead Souls (Radio Slave Long Distance Mix) In Flagranti - Business Acumen (Holy Ghost! Cover Version) Cubic Zirconia - Black & Blue Inner City - Big Fun (Doc Adam Edit) Gyptian - Hold Yuh (Major Lazer Remix) Azari and III - Manic (Maceo Plex Remix) Pet Shop Boys - West End Girls (Grum Remix Dub) Roman Flügel - Geht’s Noch? Holy Ghost! - I Will Come Back (Classix Acapulco Nights Version) Alan Parsons Project - I Wouldn’t Want To Be Like You (The Twelves Remix) Hercules and Love Affair - Blind Sébastien Tellier - Kilometer (A-Trak Remix) Punches - Feeling Right (Treasure Fingers Remix) Big Boi - I Like The Way You Move Alexandra Stan - Mr. Saxobeat Round Table Knights and Duchamp - Calypso Aloe Blacc - I Need A Dollar (JayCeeOh Bootleg) Quintin - Fuck It (Doc Adam Edit) Fake Blood - Mars 50 Cent - I Get Money (Risk One Transition) Audio Two - Top Billin’ Latyrx - Lady Don’t Tek No Cam’ron and Vado - Put A Bird Up
This past Friday I was lucky enough to head to Philly to rock So Special with DJ Manik and Bo Bliz of Crossfaded Bacon at the legendary Silk City Diner. It was an epic 24 hours, commencing with a pick up by Manik and DJ Ultraviolet that led us through hours of ridiculousness and trying to figure out what else we had been meaning to do other than fuck you in the garden.
So much love and respect for my Philly family. Also pictured: the GOD DJ Jay Ski rocking late night at Whisper. Getting to see such a legend in Philly running doubles of Freeway & Beanie Sigel’s Roc The Mic at 3 AM was surreal to say the least. You will also see a photo of Manik, Bo Bliz, & DJ Romes showing how the Money Spending Fun Boys get down.
This past weekend I had the good fortune to head up to my home turf - the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, the Keweenaw to be exact - and rock at a new club opened up by some homies called The Continental Fire Co. Houghton, MI isn’t exactly a large town - the Upper Peninsula is one of the last inhibited swaths of land in the lower 48 - but this club is on par with anything I have seen in any major city in the US. The crowds were enormous - well over 500 people each night - and they wild out. In conjunction with this trip, I made a ton of new edits. I’m presenting both packs of these here along with a 90 minute chunk of my set from Saturday night. It is probably one of my favorite live sets in recent memory on some straight-up club shit.
Here is the second pack of edits for the month of March. This is a comparably disparate group as the last one, though with a few obvious thematic clusters. Paying homage to some of my favorite jams and favorite artists edited, re-drummed, reworked, and in some cases essentially remixed. I’ve also included two tracks I also through out as individual .mp3s last week into this .zip, in case you missed them.
March Edits Vol 2 Dead Kennedys - Pull My Strings (Doc Adam Edit) Dio - Holy Diver (Doc Adam Edit/Re-Drum) Enigma - Return To Innocence (Doc Adam Edit) Enigma - Return To Innocence (Doc Adam Moombahton Edit) Gap Band - Outstanding (Doc Adam Edit) Gino Soccio - Take Me To the Top (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Guess Who - These Eyes (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Mtume - Juicy Fruit (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Mtume/Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (Fruit) (Doc Adam Blend/Re-Drum) Notorious B.I.G. - Juicy (Doc Adam Intro Edit) Phil Collins - Take Me Home (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Psychedelic Furs - Love My Way (Doc Adam Re-Drum)
Bill Withers - Lovely Day (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Earth, Wind & Fire - Brazilian Rhyme (Danny Krivit x Doc Adam Edit) Fleetwood Mac - Everywhere (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Florence & The Machine - Dog Days Are Over (Doc Adam Edit) Genesis - Tonight x 3 (Doc Adam Re-Drum) Genesis - Tonight x 3 (Doc Adam Re-Drum QH) Jaylib - McNasty Filth (Doc Adam Edit) Junkyard Band - Sardines (Doc Adam Edit) Shirley Ellis - Clapping Song (Doc Adam Edit) The Stooges - Search & Destroy (Doc Adam Edit) Traffic - Dear Mr. Fantasy (Doc Adam Edit) UB40 - Red Red Wine (Doc Adam Re-Drum)
About an hour and a half from my four hour set at the Continental Fire Co in Houghton, MI on March 24th, 2012. This was a surreal gig for me for a variety of reasons, but primarily because I was DJing in an actual club in my hometown. I never expected to rock in front of 800 people in the Upper Peninsula of MIchigan. But I did. And it was crazy. Big shouts out to all my homies who got this place up and running. It is seriously one of the dopest clubs I’ve ever seen, amazing build out, fantastic sound system, and some of my favorite people in the world.
FINALLY. I made this mix over the summer and a few fits and starts of attempted exclusive blog releases I have given up (no hard feelings to any of the unnamed folks in question) and decided to release this on my own before it gets too old. This was my attempt to put together a primarily Tropical and Disco inspired mix, with a chunk of original production and an obscene amount of heavy editing along the way. Most folks that I know who have gotten their hands on it are big fans. Hopefully you will be too.
OFFICIAL NARCISSISTIC RELEASE NOTES
Doc Adam has been an extremely busy man over the course of the last year. With the release of a mammoth list of Moombahton edits, DJ edits and remixes of nearly every genre of music imaginable, multiple mixtapes, the La Reconquista EP, and DJing all over the U.S. as well as in his home base of Portland, OR - Doc has stayed true to his trademark lack of concern for genre and traditionally codified domains of music. With school back in session - Doc is still a working Philosophy Professor - he has decided to release a new mixtape to tide you over until he can get time away from his office hours to make more music. Here is, Doc Adam Is Getting Incredible. This mix reflects his love for Moombahton, Tropical Bass, Disco and more.
In the near future, you can expect an EP of original Moombahton tracks - a few of which are featured on this mix - along with a few commissioned remixes for major label artists. Doc is keeping his nose to the grindstone trying to finish a book about club culture written from his perspective as a specialist in Post-Kantian Continental Philosophy while continuing to churn out dancefloor friendly, forward thinking jams, and keep his weight down for up coming Brazilian Jiu Jitsu tournaments.
Tracklist
8Ball and MJG – Just Like Candy Vybz Kartel – Fresh Jamie Woon – Lady Luck (Hudson Mohawke Remix) Steve Winwood – Higher Love Craze and Heartbreak – Summer Riddim Emynd – Lambadaton Doc Adam – Weigh Up Heartbreak – Blaze Up Schlactofbronx – Chambacu (Smutlee Remix) Pickster and Melo – El Bumper Doc Adam – Bombs Over Burnside Diplo and Douster – On (NEKI Edit + Original Mix) Dr. Gonzo and Savage Skulls – Bust ‘Em Up DJEDJOTRONIC – Bugle Boy 8-Bit – Fire Extinguisher The Count and Sinden – Future (Canblaster Remix) Jamie XX – Far Nearer (Emynd Remix Dub) DJ Ayres – Flashing Lights (Grandtheft Remix) Fred Falke – Look Into Your Eyes Bingo Players – Cry (Just A Little) Lykke Li – I Follow Rivers (Magician Remix) Treasure Fingers – Lift Me Steve Angello – Flonko (Doc Adam Edit) Nadastrom and Heartbreak – Church Doc Adam – Es Gibt Kein Melo – Es Dificil Sazon Booya - Mujeres
And a million thanks to my brother Ronin Roc - @RoninRoc on Tweeter and RoninRoc.com - for the artwork.
Every First Saturday of the month, the crew of Ante Up - DJ Nature, Ronin Roc and I - have a pretty hip-hop centric party at The Crown Room. This is a live set from relatively early in the night at this months event. I went pretty HAM on the Detroit hip-hop, as usual. Listen and critique how sloppy my triple-click flare is these days.
P.P.P. Ft. Jay Dee - Act Like You Know (GOAT Remix) Royce Da 5’9” - Boom Black Milk - Sound The Alarm The Lox - Money, Power & Respect Gravediggaz - Deathtrap Mos Def - The Universal Magnetic Pharoahe Monch - Queens Masta Ace - Sittin’ On Chrome (Pitkin Ave. Mix) M.O.P. - How About Some Hardcore? Big Punisher - Beware Big L - Put It On Mad Skillz - The Nod Factor Jaylib - The Red Nas - One Love Non-Phixion - Refuse To Love Black Moon - Powaful Impack Notorious B.I.G. - Machine Gun Funk Souls Of Mischief - What A Way To Go Out Random Axe - Random Call Guilty Simpson - Get Bitches Dudley Perkins - Funky Dudley A Tribe Called Quest - Buggin’ Out A Tribe Called Quest - Award Tour De La Soul - Ego Trippin’ (Pt. 2) Slum Village - Hold Tight DJ Quik - So Many Wayz Jay-Z - Can’t Knock The Hustle (Fools Paradise Remix) Gang Starr - Mass Appeal Diamond District - Streets Won’t Let Me Chill Q-Tip - Breathe And Stop Common - Funky For You Notorious B.I.G. - Party And Bullshit Slick Rick - Teacher, Teacher The Beatnuts Ft. Big Punisher - Off The Books Erick Sermon - React Jay-Z - Money Ain’t A Thang Jadakiss Ft. Kanye West - Gettin’ It In Nine - Whatcha Want Wu-Tang Clan - Shame On A Nigga
Being a philosophy professor makes my relationship towards great thinkers somewhat odd. Take, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche. I’ve read every word of Nietzsche that has ever been published so many times that while he still has the capacity to shake me from my dogmatic slumbers with a violent fury, more often than not I encounter his texts through my accumulated teacher filter. What I mean by this is that I have developed, unfortunately, a relatively systematic manner in which I provide an account of what makes Nietzsche the thinker that he is to my students. More often than not, when I read texts of his, this systematic account, this filter filled with intellectual sediment causes me to be incapable of encountering the texts with fresh eyes. Rather than encountering the text anew every time, I find what I expect to find. This is the plight of the human insofar as we are beings of habituation and unconscious acts of interpretation.
What holds for Nietzsche, holds even more so with Marx for me. Marx, as an author, isn’t exactly fun to read. I mean, fuck, anyone who has either read or even tried to read Capital knows that after enough talk of yards of linen and bushels of corn, your eyes slowly start to roll back in your head. Accordingly, when teaching Marx - which I have been doing for some ten years at this point - I often reduce him to bullet points; which, while perhaps a functional pedagogical maneuver, is a really shitty way to read such a momentous and complex thinker.
At present, I’m running a reading group on 20th century Marxian thought - focusing on Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School. As a prelude, we decided to read an the introduction to Marx’s Grundrisse. And, holy shit, seeing this stuff with fresh eyes made my brain start hurting. I’m not sure how my interpretive filter fell away, but Karl came out and kicked me in the throat yesterday.
“Production not only supplies the material for the need, but it also supplies a need for the material. As soon as consumption emerges from its initial stage of natural crudity and immediacy - and, if it remained at that stage, this would be because production itself had been arrested there - it becomes itself mediated as a drive by the object. The need which consumption feels for the object is created by the perception of it. The object of art - like every other product - creates a public which is sensitive to art and enjoys beauty. Production thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object. Thus production produces consumption by creating the material for it; by determining the manner of consumption; and by creating the products, initially posited by it as objects, in the form of a need felt by the consumer. It thus produces the object of consumption, the manner of consumption and the motive of consumption. Consumption likewise produces the producers inclination by beckoning to him as an aim-determining need.”
Let me start with the parenthetical and work my way back to the actual assertion itself. I have a lot of regrets. A lot of them. I have done a lot of stupid shit in my life. A LOT. I do a lot of extremely regrettable shit every single day. I mean, just now, I went to the gas station to buy cigarettes and I was feeling too lazy to walk to an actual coffeeshop to buy a cup, so I purchased gas station coffee. I live in PORTLAND. PORTLAND. This is one of the world’s greatest cities for quality coffee - and I’m buying the shit at the Chevron. REGRET #1 of the day. I could keep a tally, but it would get quite excessive.
Seriously now, folks. I understand that when people say they have no regrets this usually leads me to believe they lack the capacity to experience guilt. If you actually lack that ability you are a sociopath, probably lighting cats on fire in your spare time and the like. Given that legitimate sociopaths are a rarity and that most people experience the crushing weight of guilt on their shoulders with great frequency (restraining myself from talking about Immanuel Kant) - I simply don’t believe people when they tell me they have no regrets. Our lives are lived far too intersubjectively, the experience of how others perceive us and gauge our behavior is a central element to our identity. Given that fact, most of us feel pretty regular that we are letting others down and probably regret that fact. NOW - we may learn from it, thereby transforming the regret into positive ethical moment from which one attempts to springboard oneself into a happier existence, but does that mean the regret was not experienced? No. So shut the fuck up.
And here comes the judgment issue. You can judge me all the time. I warrant being judged. If I’m not being judged by others, I will never get better at being a friend, a brother, a teacher, a DJ, a human in general. Part of the enhancement of our Gattungswesen depends on my ability to be judged and to adjudicate and adjust my own behavior accordingly. If you quite literally think that the divine ledger book is the only site of judgment in the cosmos, 1) you are a moron, 2) you are lying to yourself. Do you own a mirror? Do you check and see what you look like before you leave the house? If you do, you’re anticipating the judgment of others every time you prepare to step out of the house. A world without anticipated and experienced judgment is a world without mirrors. It’s a world in which you don’t ever wonder or worry how others are going to respond to your appearance, your actions, your speech. Someone who were to live in this way is probably hanging out with Mr. No Regrets smoking sherm and pie facing Kindergartners at a pancake breakfast somewhere.
Not to mention, most people who say shit like this are usually doing so as an extremely defensive reaction to a judgment being made about their character that they are uncomfortable with. Even a six-year old can see through how simplistic of an ego-defense mechanism this is. ‘I’m experiencing judgment that I don’t like, it’s making me feel bad. I don’t like this feeling, let me act like it doesn’t bother me.’ C’mon. Really? I’ve had pet goldfish smarter than that. The experience of judgment and the experience of regret are integral elements towards growing as a person into someone that you might actually be proud of becoming.
