Does medicating with cannabis impact your music listening experience? I decided to find out by listening to the album “Surf” by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment once while sober & then another time after medicating with cannabis!
Sober
I first listened to this album when it was first released in 2015. I wasn’t consuming as much cannabis at that time as I am now. When I first heard this album it didn’t capture my attention. It wasn’t memorable whatsoever to me at that time. It felt as if there were too many instrumental parts and not enough lyrics. The unorthodox nature of the “jam session” style of play that would occasionally happen throughout the album was something I wasn’t originally a fan of either.
Medicated
This album is AMAZING! As I started getting back into video editing and consuming more cannabis my appreciation for good music has grown. The album starts with the song ‘Miracle’. It begins with a gradual build up of vocals, strings and horns. Just when it sounds like the song is over…Chance The Rapper comes in with a unique spoken word style of rapping. Overall, this song is very uplifting and is a great setup to what the rest of the album has to offer. This album also has some incredible features. Busta Rhymes on ‘Slip Slide’, a song about standing up for what you believe in, is a great addition to this marching band style song. The mellow spoken word poetry on ‘Warm Enough’ flows perfectly into Chance The Rapper’s more upbeat verse. Add in J. Cole’s lyrical metaphors right before the end of the song and you have musical bliss. Right after ‘Warm Enough’ Donnie Trumpet comes in on ‘Nothing Came to Me’ and puts you into a whole different world with his incredible trumpet solo of a song. It was almost like an extended intro to ‘Wanna Be Cool’, which features Big Sean.
One thing that I noticed is that when I’m medicated, I enjoy the times when there’s very subtle sound in the background or even the soundless space sporadically throughout. I also really liked the unorthodox nature of each song. You never really know when a song starts and when a song ends, they just seem to flow together as one cohesively. The main difference I noticed when comparing the two listening experiences is that when I was medicated, I could hear each individual sound. The chimes. The saxophone. All of the different drums that were used. I think that is what enhanced the experience.
So next time an album isn’t really doing it for you, try medicating & see if cannabis can help you hear something in it that you didn’t before!
Want to listen to “Surf” by Donnie Trumpet & The Social Experiment? Check it out on SoundCloud!
