Summer Mixtape: Small Pro

Mobb Deep, Busta Rhymes, Jay-Z, Elucid, M.E.D., Danny Brown, Tribe, and more!
By    July 13, 2015

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Small Pro stole Chris Traeger’s girl

As of late, my mind has been preoccupied with probability, with randomness. This all started 2 or 3 years ago when I picked up a book called “The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives,” in which author Leonard Mlodinow “vividly demonstrates how our lives are profoundly informed by chance … and how everything from wine ratings and corporate success to school grades and political polls are less reliable than we believe.” Last Tuesday, while the club was going up, I was at work when I realized that 4 of my 10 coworkers were all wearing the exact same shade of blue shirt. Sure, one guy wears the same shirt every single day, but what about the other three? I did the math and concluded that the chance of that occurring was 0.000729 (based on my interviews with estimates of said coworkers regarding their laundry cycles). 7.29 × 10-6. That’s a small ass number, dog. Fuck.

I know what you’re probably thinking … “give me some of what he’s drooping off,” but hear me out. In curating this summer mixtape, I came to appreciate DJ’s a whollle lot more. When you push the play button on any random mix, you are listening to something that is mindbogglingly rare and special. I’m not 100% sure why some of the songs I chose remind me of summer; some of them actually didn’t initially, but work perfectly in this new context. But here’s the thing: NOBODY else would have picked these 22 songs, let alone put them in the order that you are about to experience them. It’s like Dr. Manhattan says in The Watchmen: “thermodynamic miracles … events with odds against so astronomical they’re effectively impossible; and yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg … and of that union, it was you, only you that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold, that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.”

I guess what I’m trying to say is … even though you or I will probably never witness air turning into gold, we can still marvel and appreciate the might-as-well-be-miracles we DO witness all the time. Like yourself. Or multiple coworkers wearing the same color shirt on the same day. Or this mixtape.

Just my thoughts, man … right or wrong; just what I was feelin’ at the time.


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