Wanzology

  Eyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyaaayyyyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaeyyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaaayyaah How's that space between your ears? How is it? Mmmm? You doin good? You alright? Yeah i'm ok. Had a bunch of technical difficulties which turned out as usual to be something simple, but it takes me a little while to figure out the simplest things. That's just the nature of being me. Welcome you, wanna welcome you to another edition of WANZOLOGY, thank you!! Happy Wednesday. Uh, today I did a little counting and calculating and thinking and found that this is the second to the last chapter in #THEBOOKOFWANZ and what's going to happen next, I don't know, but I'll let you know. I'll tell you what, if you really want to find out what's going to happen next, I suggest that you subscribe to my newsletter, thewanz.com, T H E W A N Z dot com thewanz.com, sign up for the newsletter and I'm going to try to like get something out of what's going to happen next with this podcast. Hopefully it will be something that you'll want to be a part of, okay? Groovy!!

So today the lesson is: A LESSON IN HUMILITY, I SHOULD NEVER TAKE FOR GRANTED ANOTHER PERSON'S PASSION. The first time I went to Australia I was new at Twitter and social media I encountered a young man who was so anxious, so thirsty to see Macklemore, he told me via Twitter that he was gonna sleep at the airport all night and wait for him to arrive. I told him, “That's crazy!”, and he got pissed!! Told me that was no way to treat a fan, and that I wasn't as nice as I portrayed myself to be. It took me a few hours, but I got to a place where I understood where he was coming from. He was passionate about waiting to see his favorite artist. Who was I to judge him? Hell, I used to be him. There were times I would have camped out to see Earth Wind and Fire, or the Commodores, or to meet Quincy Jones.

I was lucky to meet up with that young man, to shake his hand, and apologize. I realized I was privileged, not only to be on tour, but to also be visiting his country.
Thanks to him and millions like him who embraced the music, I was lucky enough to be a part of making. Mind you, there are lines between passion and crazy. But for each person, the lines are different, and I shouldn't judge what's brave or crazy for someone else. Nor should they do that to me. Moral of the story, be careful what you think of someone. And if you do think something of someone, don’t let it out. Because they will do exactly the same thing to you. And what you think of someone may not be nice. Sure, it may be honest, but man, who am I to judge the passion of a teenage boy? I mean, it's been a long time since I was a teenage boy. Sometimes I forget, I forget what it's like to really be caught up in something and love it, squeeze it, hold it, live it, breathe it, all that stuff. I forget what it's like to be a fan sometimes, and this was one of those times. I felt really bad, I felt really bad that I'd come out on this dude and judged him as crazy. When all that he was, was passionate.

He loved his artist. I just happened to be rolling with his artist. And once I got around to seeing his perspective, it reminded me of what I used to be like, and I used to be just like him. I just didn't have the opportunity. I didn't have the opportunity to go hang out and wait for Earth, Wind, and Fire to show up at a venue, I just didn't have that kind of freedom, nor that kind of knowledge. I didn't know how to do that. But man, I'll tell you what, I was blessed to be able to meet this guy in person and once I realized who I was dealing with, I humbled myself because I was wrong. I was dead ass wrong. I have no legit cause to judge someone else's passion.

I mean, case and point, pretty simple stuff right here. I'm a mutant. I consider myself a mutant because of one thing. I don't really like chocolate. Let me repeat that, I really don't like chocolate that much. Okay, now you can stop laughing. I don't know why that is. I think it had something to do with when I was a kid, Mom used to bake, and when she baked that one thing, the, uh, the German chocolate cake, it had coconut in it. I don't like coconut either. If you wanted a treat to stay around the house when I was a kid, just make it out of chocolate, put coconut in it, or on it. I won't touch it. She used to buy Neapolitan ice cream, but then would get mad because I'd scoop out the strawberry and the vanilla and wouldn't touch the chocolate. I like candy bars. I like buying the big ass Snickers bar, but I'll, I'll just nibble, I'll just nibble the chocolate off the sides and the top so that I'm left with the nugat, the peanuts and the caramel ‘cause that's the last taste I want in my mouth. Then nugat, get the peanut and the caramel ‘SCRUMPDILLYUPTIOUS’!! ‘SCRUMPDILLYUPTIOUS’!! But the method by which I get to the ‘SCRUMPDILLYUPTIOUS’ part, people think that's kind of nuts, crazy. “HA!”!! And I look at them and I say, “HA!! Whatever, dude”!! I'm not real crazy about chocolate. I'll eat a Snickers bar, Mars bar, Three Musketeers bar, Baby Ruth. Whatchamacallit, but I won't eat a Hershey bar. I'm not very fond of Hershey's Kisses. Chocolate ice cream, chocolate chip cookie, I don't know what it is.

My dad had fun with me with that. My dad had a really good time trying to convince me that the sauce on pizza was the same as the sauce In spaghetti and was also the same as the sauce for Spanish rice all made out of tomatoes I didn't believe him. I mean, especially the whole pizza spaghetti part because you know spaghetti is spaghetti and pizza is not like spaghetti, they don't look the same. So to me, they didn't taste the same but that's before I learned ingredients and how you put them together to make the final product. Chocolate's kind of the same thing. Passion is kind of the same thing.

Inside each and every one of us, we make our own little recipe of what we like and don't like, why we like or don't like it and it's ours. Nobody else's. Now there are people who share that same opinion, perspective, whatever you want to call it, but they're not the same as you or me. They're close, but no cigar.

So this kid taught me one of the coolest lessons ever, it is not for me to judge the depth, the quality, the reasoning behind someone else's passion.

Here's another example. I mean, I love music. Pretty much all kinds of music. I love all kinds of music. I make music, I record music, I listen to music, all that, right? But I'm not a big fan of country, especially today's country. I can listen to some classic country stuff for a little while, but once you start getting into late 80s early 90s country, and especially today's country, which to me sounds a lot like Americana rock and not really country, you lose me. I think, for the most part, in a general way, today’s country has been bastardized. I think it's lost a lot of its, it’s lost a lot of its basics. Country music came from the blues and blues came from black people working in the fields That is a fact!! And I'm not a real big fan of country celebrating the lifted truck and you know windows rolled down and having one of the things that the ceremonial twang of ‘on a Saturday night, we're just gonna get some beers and raise some hell’! That's not country to me. What's country to me is, “me and my girl, we love each other. I love her more than I love my dog. And you know how I love my dog”. I, I know, I know. It's probably weird that I say it like that, but I’m, I’m just not…there’s so much flair and, uh, pomp and circumstance around country artists now.

I think the coolest exposure to country artists that I had was to go see Brandi Carlile perform with three other women, called themselves the Highway Women and my God, the harmonies, the song structure, the stories, that was real country. Not taking someone out to Applebee's or whatever that song's about. Fancy Like, mm-mm, mm-mm. To me, fancy like is the same as Gangnam Style and to some, in some respects, the same as Thrift Shop. Kind of a novelty song that, that people can relate to, but it's not the real deal. I love Thrift Shop, don't get me wrong, but Thrift Shop is not hip hop. Thrift Shop is not hip hop to me. Now there are other Macklemore songs that are hip hop to me, but not Thrift Shop. Thrift Shop is…Thrift Shop is kind of what they call a crossover. It's a song that has hip hop underpinnings but is definitely pop in its sensibilities.

Today's country, today’s country has country underpinnings, but it's more pop. And the reason that artists do this is really simple, they're trying to expand their audience. And there is so nothing wrong with that. If you are a singer/songwriter, you want as many people as possible to hear what you create, it's that simple. So who am I to judge Keith Urban or Rascal Flats or any of the newer country artists, but I do know about those two guys. Those two acts, to me, they can sound country, just like I can do a To: Nate Dogg to sound West Coast hip hop, but that's not really what I do. And that's not really what they do. I mean, if you go to Spotify and you look up Wanz, you look up W A N Z, you find Wanz, right, and then look at all the people they think I sound like, and not one of them is pop. All of them are rap and hip hop. But man, I love jazz, I love classical music, I'm a fool for some freaking Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, Aaron Copland, and my favorite, Karl Orff, Carmina Burana. Everybody hears that, but nobody really knows what it is. Next time you're like watching television, and a commercial comes on and in the background you'll hear ‘na na na na Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun Dun DuuuuuUN’!! That's Karl Orf. Carmina Burana; had my first exposure to it in eighth grade, and I've been hooked on it ever since. Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky. Love me some classical music. Love me some jazz: Dizzy Gillespie, Count Basie, Art Blakey, Lee Morgan. Or the newer jazz: David Sanborn, Marcus Miller, Yellow Jackets, Weather Report, Manhattan Transfer. Yeah, I go all over the place, man. I figured out in college there's 11 half steps in an octave and then it starts all over again. They call them semitones and there's 12 of them, technically. You start on 1, you go to 11, and then it starts over again. Half steps, semitones, same thing. Now those haven't changed in thousands of years. You think in thousands of years, someone thought of a new way of putting those semitones and the spaces in between them, skipping notes to make intervals, you think somebody's like, found a new way to do that? Not really. But, as times and technology has changed, it went from the piano forte to the harpsichord, to the piano, and from the lute to guitars, then electric guitars, synthesizers, there are new ways to make all these old things sound depending on where you live. Of course, there's cultural influences. In hip hop, Dirty South does not sound like Midwest, Midwest does not sound like Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and none of those sound like South Central, LBC, Santa Monica, Sacramento, or Seattle, but it's all put together different. The same, the same basics, just put together different. And who am I to say which is better than the other? I'm not. But that's a lesson that I had to learn.

Now I told you all that stuff for this one reason, we as human beings judge each other all the damn time. And the next time you look at a heavyset woman wearing tight shorts and you can see that there's little indentations because of cellulite. I used to make fun of it and say, “Wow, looks like somebody put a scoop of cottage cheese in a square of plastic wrap and then just took up all the corners and squeezed it”. I thought it was funny. Until I started thinking about what it's like to be that person. And I stopped doing it, because I have no idea what it's like to be that person. But I can only imagine what it would be like to be that person and hear somebody talk about them in that way. I can only imagine what it's like being a heavyset man or woman, and you don't want to be, but you just are. All the advertisements, people on television, all the examples of being a normal human being don't look anything like you.

When I was like 5, 6, 7 years old, putting black people on television was brand new. Not like today. Brand new. There were never black people in commercials. There were never mixed-race couples. Never. I used to watch a show called I Spy with Bill Cosby and Robert Culp. Bill Cosby played a professional tennis player, Robert Culp played his manager, but they were both spies solving whodunits.

And after that, there were a couple of shows, Room 222 and Mod Squad. I think Mod Squad was first. Mod Squad was revolutionary! Why? Because you had a black dude, a white guy, and a white girl and they were, they were partners. Better than that, they were friends and they were under the thumb of a police sergeant, lieutenant, sorry. And that lieutenant was a middle-aged white guy. The whole premise of the show was having the police be able to quote unquote infiltrate young people's organizations and things and without people who looked the part, cops couldn't do it, hence, the Mod Squad.

I'm telling you, man, it is not up to us to judge what each other likes, dislikes, and the reasons thereof. Everybody has the opportunity, the power, and the privilege to see things differently. Differently than you vice versa as well. You get to be different from them. Which, you know some days is the greatest blessing in the world! There are a lot of days that I wake up and I'm really happy I'm me instead of someone else because I see that someone else and never want to be like that person, ever.

We get to be who we are and we should respect who other people are as much as we respect who we are, because I'm telling you one species of human on the planet, there's not a lot of difference between us. Everybody's doing the same thing, sort of the same way all over the world and to me, that's amazing. I mean, it's not like the zebras in one part of Africa behave like the zebras in another part of Africa. Or the leopards in one part of the continent behaving like leopards in another part of the continent. Think about it. There are lots of species of primates. Right? And they have general characteristics that are similar, but they're not the same. There are different species of birds and generally all birds do some of the same things. Humans? There's only one. Only one species of human, but we all do different things.

So next time you see somebody and you think that they're nuts because they have decals and flags all over their yard and their truck and their house, be nice to them, that's what they like. That doesn't mean that they're crazy, it just means that they're crazy about something and luckily, you don't have to be them, and they don't have to be you. That's the bottom line.

We're here to take care of each other, and we need lots of practice at it. Because a lot of us are just not that good at taking care of each other. Hopefully, hopefully, I'm helping with some of that because that's what I'm trying to do. I really appreciate you for sticking with me and hanging around and I hope that you go off and have yourself a wonderful, wonderful day.

Peace.