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This fall, two relay teams of four Daily Arts staffers will train for and run the Probility Ann Arbor Marathon. But as writers, we can’t just run the race — we have to write about our past experiences with running, how we are preparing for the marathon, what we look forward to and what we are afraid of.
I’m not completely unathletic, I swear. I have done cardio training before — I was a swimmer in high school. But all that’s in the past. Realizing, with horror, that I’ve agreed to run a quarter marathon in one month instilled one clear message in my mind: I need a hero. For training, I am been completely self-directed, mostly choosing to go to North Campus and listen to music, while remaining generally bored and regretful. That is until I discovered an old relic in my playlists.
Enter “Gaucho 2022,” a concept playlist I created during a long boring day working behind a desk at Washtenaw Community College. The playlist consists of 25 hand-picked Steely Dan songs, alternating with 25 hand-picked Machine Girl songs. Woven together from my late-teen angst and my early college directionlessness, each song serves a purpose. Machine Girl is the raw energy, and Steely Dan is the clarity providing rest. Just as all workouts can be broken into rush and recovery, this perfect playlist embodies both.
Steely Dan almost exclusively writes extremely smooth songs about the seedy edges of American culture. Every one of their songs fade out at the end and most contain an all-time classic yacht rock solo. They’re suave, but they draw on contrast to create a clear image of the social decay of the ’70s: all beautiful instrumentation, with bafflingly uncomfortable lyrics about a weird old man screening pornos for the neighborhood kids.
Machine Girl write songs about having drums and synths louder than your vocal track. Their songs lead in with aggressive drums that wake every resting atom. Straddling breakcore and hardcore, they wear a lot of hats, but none of them are quiet. Some of their most famous songs are set apart by little three-second interludes of relaxed, nostalgic samples, before you’re thrown back into the shredder of breakbeat and industrial drums.
These two artists come together to create the maximum contrast possible in my playlist — all other elements of art be damned. It stands to reason that if you fall asleep, you’ll be unable to continue running. Therefore, I work with the most jumps in energy possible. The magic comes from the clash. I warm up to the smooth sounds of Steely Dan’s “Black Cow” and then get punched in the face with Machine Girl’s industrial drums on “Blood Magic.” Machine Girl gives two-minute sprints, Steely Dan gives six-minute relaxed jogs, and before I know it, I’ve passed six miles.
The contrast on its own is fun, but this is not a shuffled playlist. Each song’s place in the playlist was given careful consideration and a purpose. I connect themes, like Machine Girl’s use of porn audio samples on “C_MGRL” and the aforementioned Steely Dan creepy guy classic “Everyone’s Gone to the Movies.” The anticapitalist revolution described on “IT TAKES A NATION OF MILLENIALS TO DESTROY A NATION OF MILLIONS…” flows into the peaceful, lonely post-apocalypse of “King of the World.” There’s a narrative to the playlist and if there’s ever a time the order feels amiss, I painstakingly rework it while heaving on the North Campus treadmills.
Contrast is, in its own way, why I’m running in the first place. I’m fat, spend most of my time writing or playing games on my laptop and have no tremendous intent to change either of those things. But every once in a while, I want to get out! I want to shake the cage in a way that only wheezing and gasping for dear life could possibly do. To fuel my contrast, I need more contrast.
That aside, this is the kind of fun that just doesn’t get old to me. Hearing two dramatically contrasted songs flow into each other never loses its appeal. This is exactly the kind of kick I need to keep running. Steely Dan’s slow instrumental fadeouts give that contrasting adrenaline boost every time a “Dirty Work” fades into the wall of drums at the start of a “Full Metal Dipshit.” It’s stupid, it’s energizing and it’s still really funny to me. On Oct. 12, when I cross the finish line, you will see me shaking my head to “ATHOTH A GO!! GO!!!” as it fades into “Home At Last.”
Digital Culture Beat Editor Holly Tsch can be reached at htsch@umich.edu.
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