O Tannenbaum (Lofi Edit) - Akira the Don
Here’s a relaxing blend of Christmas piano, tape hiss, and chill beats, in case you need some lofi hip hop radio to buy/wrap presents to. Akira the Don occupies a strange corner of lofi hip hop, itself already a somewhat curious youtube-gestated genre. He mostly produces in a subgenre he calls “meaningwave”, which pairs chill beats with snippets from inspiring speeches given by men like Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, Alan Watts, Noam Chomsky, Carl Sagan, and Richard Feynman.
I am almost, but not quite, the target audience for a lot of that meaning-seeking. I like parts of this song sampling Jordan Peterson, where he recommends cleaning your room to learn how to create a small bit of beauty in your life, which you can then expand out into the world… but then it jumps to how “that’s an invitation to the divine”. That’s a touch too mystical for my taste, and other parts of the genre feel too grounded in traditionalist backwards-dreaming or in an ambition that cares about humanity in the abstract rather than people specifically.
Maybe meaningwave would have been more to my taste in the past. It’s been weird rereading Feynman stories as an adult. At fourteen, that merry prankster scientist―whose hobbies included painting, picking up random library books, and learning languages―was a personal hero. In Feynman stories, science seemed like an outlet for playful, creative curiosity about the world, not a procedural tedium that I’d have to force myself to work through if I wanted to be useful. (At the time, I wanted to become a doctor with Médecins Sans Frontières.)
Nowadays, though, I can’t get over how inconsiderate he seems. One story that grates on me is a prank that Feynman plays on a waitress at a local restaurant. He puts her tip under an inverted full glass of water, which spills everywhere when she collects the coins. He shows her how she could have avoided the spill by slipping a sheet of paper under the glass and carefully sliding it to the edge of the table. The next time he goes to the restaurant, he inverts an empty glass, and is amused to watch the waitress very carefully and slowly slip paper underneath. I don't find this funny, especially since he describes how busy and rushed the waitress was, but he clearly did.
One of my least favourite fictional character archetypes is the inconsiderate genius, who is given permission to be awful to everyone around them because they’re so essential. I feel more conflicted about real people that match this archetype, since I try to privilege utilitarian benefits over personal distastes in my evaluations of the world. If I ever have a teenage child, I’d probably recommend they read Feynman?