On Chance the Rapper’s mixtape Acid Rap, the track “Pusha Man” is longer than you’d expect, 7 minutes and 24 seconds on a record where the next longest song clocks in at around 5 minutes. It’s an upbeat, high energy track interpolating Curtis Mayfield lyrics about living outside the law. The jaunty song seems to end around 2:18, and for the next 29 seconds, there’s silence. Not a single sound. And then, notes of a synth come in one by one, the beginning of an entirely different song: “Paranoia,” a slow-paced, somber tune in complete contrast to what preceded.
The silence in between is confusing: this isn’t how mixtapes work. Songs aren’t supposed to have long periods of nothing in them and each track is supposed to be its own song. When Acid Rap came out, most mixtapes had to be downloaded rather than streamed, and with each passing second, you wonder if there’s something wrong with your file. When “Paranoia” finally begins, the contrast is so dramatic that you feel it physically — a moment of relief and recognition of what’s going on, the beauty of the production, and a partial familiarity with the feeling of paranoia that Chance sings about in the hook. The pause is a fundamental part of the song, a truly special moment in the mixtape.
In 2019, six years after the release of Acid Rap, the mixtape was finally brought to streaming. “Pusha Man” and “Paranoia” are listed as separate tracks and the silence has gone, presumably to make it easier to add the songs to playlists or whatever else. But now the transition between the two songs feels jarring, like cold water when you expected a hot shower, a flick to the forward instead of a kiss.
Since I came back to San Francisco, I’ve been alone in my four-bedroom apartment, waiting for my roommates to return from their holiday travels. It seems so much bigger when empty, quieter in the loudest possible way. Raindrops reverberate through the roof noisily and softly, and the old building has its creaks and croaks that usually never bother me. Most days, there’s barely any sound until the Roomba turns on and decides to wage its war with every chair in the building and call it cleaning. When I first returned, the quietness was distressing, and to avoid it, I left the TV on or played music constantly to make the place feel less eerie.
After reading LM Sacasas’s interpretations of Max Picard’s work on silence, I’ve been pushing myself to try and reconsider:
“In the modern world language is far from both worlds of silence. It springs from noise and vanishes in noise. Silence is today no longer an autonomous world of its own; it is simply the place into which noise has not yet penetrated. It is a mere interruption of the continuity of noise, like a technical hitch in the noise-machine—that is what silence is today: the momentary breakdown of noise.”
By contrast, Picard believes, “one can hear silence sounding through speech. Real speech is in fact nothing but the resonance of silence.” What would it mean for us to so nourish our words with silence that they may be described as the resonance of silence.
I wondered what it meant for words to be the resonance of silence, so I started to look for more places with silence. I wandered to the park by my apartment without headphones in my search. The dull roars of cars filled the air more than anything else, but during red lights or in the areas further away from the road, I listened. I noticed the incessant caws of crows, only occasionally pausing to let the sounds of bird songs that I couldn’t identify. Cyclists rode by, their bikes making repetitive clicking noises. There were so many patterns of sounds and ones that broke the patterns like the small dog’s jingling collar. It wasn’t silent here, but being able to hear anything at all was revelatory — a stillness, an aural visibility.
Total silence is impossible — a sun without light, a wind without air. Even in anechoic chambers made specially to minimize all sounds, you can hear your bodily processes of blood moving, food digesting, heart beating. If we could silence all of those sounds, sensitive enough ears would still pick up the sounds of some sort of motion. Noiselessness isn’t what’s illuminating. No, it’s the space of non-being uncovered by quietness. It’s opening up your attention to bear witness to the world, a slowing, a pause.
There’s the moment at every concert when a musician finishes a song, but before the audience begins to applaud. A multi-headed creature, the crowd fills with uncertainty and anticipation. Is the song over? Can we start cheering? In this silence, I find myself swelling with emotion. In this silence, the full effects of the song sink in. It’s a release for the emotions building up in the song, the ecstasy of existing as a part of a wave of human bodies and the recipient of an artist expressing their life purpose.
Only on reflecting on silence do I realize how much my favorite art utilizes it. In After Yang, I found myself sobbing uncontrollably after a montage of memories from the title character played over a piano melody. The two to three second shots showed sunspots and loved ones, golden hour leaves and little dances. And then, the music cutting out to the next scene and the dialog. In the silence, there was space to breathe, room to feel, and to let it all out.
It’s always in the silence that I cry. Life often happens loudly and quickly, so upsettingly fast. And among all of that, I can move with the blustering winds, adapt to the storms of every day, move forward as I need to. But it’s the silence afterward that sharpens and allows what was holding emotion back to fall away.
I seek more silence, to feel more clearly, to see more clearly, to remember what the world feels like. And in that silence, I feel like I can find inspiration for what is worth saying at all. From a Victoria Chang essay:
Recently, during a reading, the poet Valzhyna Mort said, Lacking language is the beginning of a poem to me. This is what writing feels like to me too. In some ways we are coming out of silence to make a new language. This making comes out of a deep desire to understand something that is invisible and voiceless.
Let me open my ears to what I’ve been deaf to. Let me find that that is voiceless. Let me reach for the invisible.
We must do what we can to push back against the genocide in Gaza. Consider calling your US representatives to support de-escalation and a ceasefire, donating to Care for Gaza, a grassroots organization delivering food to Palestinians, or buying e-SIMs to keep folks connected to their families.
💧 Drops of the Week 💧
PLAYLIST - oontz oontz - WIP electronic playlist i’m working on
POEM - “Instructions on Not Giving Up” by Ada Limón - it’s the greening of the trees / that really gets to me