35mm diaries: Summer Madness
Kool & The Gang, Synthesizers, Sonder, and Sadness.
Few feelings are more disconcerting than being sad on a sunny summer day. The sunshine that typically provides warmth, energy, and positive emotions instead feels snide and scornful. The overpowering light of the sun amid internal darkness chastises me. I look toward the sun with cried-out undilated pupils. The sun peers down on me and scoffs, “How dare you be offended by my benevolence?”. I plod down overcrowded streets filled with giddy tourists and city dwellers with vibrant wardrobes accentuating their vibrant social lives. I envy these people and their ability to match their moods with the season. Though, sometimes I wonder how many of them are hiding tears and thousand-yard stares underneath their sunglasses, like me. Occasionally, I spot an artist I admire unconcerned with being recognized or perceived— like Renell Medrano grabbing a bite to eat with friends at a restaurant in my neighborhood I’ve been wanting to try for years but haven’t been to or Christopher Nolan, casually crossing an intersection in the Lower East Side. Who knows what led them to these places, how their day began, how it ended, what it took to get there, or why the universe decided it was time for me, a casual fan who aspires to take up space in the same ways that they have, to cross their paths? In moments like this, the experience of sonder becomes more pronounced. Each day, as I walk the streets of New York City with malaise permeating my body and mind, countless humans are living lives just as complex as mine. Yet, this fact doesn’t change how alone I feel in my despondency.
Fortunately, music always has a way of speaking to my most complex emotions, even when there are no lyrics. At the start of summer, I shared a playlist of songs that remind me of summer. One of the songs featured was “Summer Madness” by Kool & The Gang. This song has been sampled countless times, notably on another classic summer track, “Summertime” by The Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff. Unlike the latter track, the original instrumental is not a straightforward celebration of summer.
The song starts off with an easy tempo, led by a keyboard and a guitar riff. The drums slowly kick in, then the bass, and as the rest of the instruments fill out the song, the sound of a synthesizer rising four octaves takes center stage. If the sound of the drums, keyboards, and bass were the steady rhythm of my surroundings, my internal world is this synthesizer. The ascending synthesizer is an instrumental refrain that starts around the :40 mark of the song and returns toward the end around 4:02. Though it is not played consistently throughout the entire song, it is the most prominent and defining sound on the track, which is evident when you consider how often the songs that sample it utilize the parts with the ascending synthesizer. Throughout the song, we hear the synthesizer take different shapes. From 2:22-3:10, it plays around, trying to find its rhythm amid the more steady background instruments. At 3:30, it gets chaotic and a little all over the place. Some days I’m at 2:22, others 3:30 but mostly I find myself oscillating between :40 and 4:02; I’m either beginning or ending a disconsolate feedback loop. Simply put, the synthesizer puts the madness in “Summer Madness.”
The specific synthesizer used in this song was an ARP 2600 discussed in the book Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking by Arnie Cox: