Wiggly Giggle /

Those “field notes” gathered at the strip clubs and night spots helped inspire a seminal paper of 1953, “Becoming a Marihuana User,” in the American Journal of Sociology. (Asked if he knew so much because he was smoking weed himself, he says, “Yeah. Obviously.” And does he still smoke it? “Yeah. Obviously.”) Becker insists that his accomplishment in the paper was no more than the elimination of a single needless syllable: “Instead of talking about drug abuse, I talked about drug use.” “Deviance” had long been a preoccupation of sociology and its mother field, anthropology. Most “deviance theory” took it for granted that if you did weird things you were a weird person. Normal people made rules—we’ll crap over here, worship over here, have sex like so—which a few deviants in every society couldn’t keep. They clung together in small bands of misbehavior. Becker’s work set out to show that out-groups weren’t made up of people who couldn’t keep the rules; they were made up of people who kept other kinds of rules. Marijuana smoking, too, was a set of crips, a learned activity and a social game. At a time when the general assumption was that drug use was private and compulsive, Becker argued that you had to learn how to get high. Smoking weed, he showed, was most often strange or unpleasant at first. One of his informants (a fellow band member) reported, “I walked around the room, walking around the room trying to get off, you know; it just scared me at first, you know. I wasn’t used to that kind of feeling.” Another musician explained, “You have to just talk them out of being afraid. Keep talking to them, reassuring, telling them it’s all right. And come on with your own story, you know: ‘The same thing happened to me. You’ll get to like that after a while.’ ” In the sociologese that Becker had not yet entirely discarded, he wrote, “Given these typically frightening and unpleasant first experiences, the beginner will not continue use unless he learns to redefine the sensations as pleasurable.” He went on, “This redefinition occurs, typically, in interaction with more experienced users, who, in a number of ways, teach the novice to find pleasure in this experience, which is at first so frightening.” What looked like a deviant act by an escape-seeking individual was simply a communal practice shaped by a common enterprise: it takes a strip club to smoke a reefer.

close but not quite lol! tho all parties concerned played they shit at a glacial-ass pace, codeine placed a far greater emphasis on abrasiveness & distortion than either low or bluetile lounge. codeines chief technique was they minimal use traditional melody in favor of heavyass, mad sharp/powerful (& sumtimes quite dissonant!) chords & severe drum sounds mixed w/ dat nigga immerwahrs terse, distinctly semi-spoken word, slint-esque vocal delivery. by contrast, bluetile lounge is much more open, meandering, traditionally melodic, & also typically more dynamic! this ain to say dat codeine wasn/couldn be dynamic, its jus dat oftentimes they only used dynamics in very limited, purposeful amounts, instead usually employing a somewat static degree of volume or intensity, whereas virtually ery bluetile lounge song utilizes extreme, albeit gradual, dynamic progression/crescendo & decrescendo to a greater or lesser degree. furthermore, bluetile lounge don put anywere nearly as much importance on either a. distortion/abrasiveness, b. they drums (not een remotely as hard or prominent as codeines), or c. they vocals; lol tbh u cant even fuckin undastand like 90% of wat this nigga sangin & shit, but it sound aigh cuz he keep it melodious, so een if it unintelligible it still adds alot to each song namsayin? now, beside tha whole slow/sadcore label, low might as well be a completely fuckin different universe from either codeine or bluetile lounge lmao; unlike both, they fundamental hook/asset/technique or watev u wanna call it is tha relationship between alan sparhawk & mimi parker, specifically how its xpressed via a. they use of xtremely prominent vocal harmonies & b. his guitar melodies & her minimalist drumming. like yo dat shit, they marriage or relationship or watev fuckin IS low lol u know? additionally, they shit differs dramatically from codeine in dat 1. they employ a significantly different type of drumming, closer to hiphop drumming if anything, in dat it relies on a steady stream of 16th note hihat hits pretending to be 8th notes & regular doubletime snare drum beats, both of which are almost always performed wit wire brushes, infusing they percussion wit like this almost jazzy aesthetic, & 2. heavy dissonance & abrasiveness are two of tha least used techniques in they whole catalog lmao. likewise, low mad different from bluetile lounge in dat by & large they songs is far more restricted/bound & less.. idk, freeform maybe? ery bluetile lounge song is like ravel's bolero lmao, they jus keep adding shit on top of an unchanging, basic melody & makin minor variations, whereas low is far more pop-oriented, in dat they dominant song form is often a loose, primitive/rudimentary sorta verse-chorus-verse-chorus type structure u know? u ought to learn how to dissect dis shit, it git alot more fun that way xD