“Best Friend” - ♥ GOJII ♥
Sweet like sugar like milk. Capable of joy, actual joy, fun, actual fun. Bubbling, sticking, moving about the tongue. So little rises to the occasion. I started this newsletter with a certain inertia provided by the sheer propulsion of H.O.T.’s “Happiness,” a song that harkened a smile every time I heard it for an entire week. Now and since, the title I’ve inherited seems to carry some level of irony: even if music is almost always a happy space for me (no matter the tone of the music itself), it is admittedly hard to hold to the happy banner in full sincerity while detailing episodes of crying or late-period reflections or more episodes of crying. And now, here, somehow, this is bringing me to joy and reflection, joy that links back, remembering “popping one of my playstation discs into my walkman and dancing around my room to the beat.” And although, until now, I didn’t really know PlayStation discs could work that way, I remember it too. I remember also being hopeful that this space of writing could be low stress, that it wouldn’t balloon outwards and that I could maintain it once a week as a semi-private journal. Of course, it’s not quite there and it’s ballooning (I do get ambitious in my own way), but it’s getting better and a song like this brings me to center. Simple joy, simple pleasure, takes so fewer words, it’s self-evident and that’s why it’s harder to write about it. It escapes, and often, as such, it falls free of our canons. Joy is harder to notate. Here… Rebecca, a best friend certainly, sent me ♥ GOJII ♥’s song in an email and I think they had it right:
Subject line:
Weeeeeee
Body:
https://gojii.bandcamp.com/track/best-friend-2
--
Rebecca Jones
Yes, I think that’s right.