There Is Still Some Good in the World

Screengrab of "You Don't Have to Be Alone" via YouTube

I wake up most mornings clenching almost every muscle in my body, fairly certain that whatever lies before me in my waking hours will, in some way, confound me and frustrate me and ask more from me than I am able to give. For someone who has as smooth a life as I do, I am terrible at handling stress. I am excellent at making myself feel isolated and overwhelmed and too put-upon to appreciate when things are going well. It's one of my great talents: I wish I could say, at the very least, that it was some sort of writerly mystique thing, that I did it because I harbored a deep wisdom about the world and was wearied by its shortcomings (or at least had gotten good at pretending to be that way) and had cultivated a thousand-yard stare as a result. But the truth is, mostly, that I instead have a deep suspicion that I am bad at life. Who's with me!

So, would it be easy to cynically dismiss some music videos as just some more music videos on the internet? Absolutely. Sometimes I do exactly that. But is it also possible that DJ Spinn and DJ Rashad and Danny Brown stumbled across some magic restorative? That the duo DJ Dodger Stadium found a way to take cynicism and make it evaporate? Yes. It is. That's exactly what happened to me this afternoon, as first I watched video of Chicago's streets sliding by and then I watched video of a bunch of dogs congregating in a field. The videos for "Dubby" (the DJ Spinn et al. one) and "You Don't Have to Be Alone" (the DJ Dodger Stadium one), respectively, are like pats on the back, a reassurance that there are a few people here on the home team, keeping us in the game, offering up some goodness in the world, pushing aside its more daunting propositions. Here's a dog saying that you don't have to be alone! Here's Teklife jazzily, quietly footworking along and reminding us how their hood works! Here's some consolation that things are OK, at least in this instant, that maybe you're not so terrible at life or perhaps there's someone out there to give you a pat on the back. Plus, look at those dogs! Everything's gonna be all right. These videos are great. You should watch them.

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