Summertime Blues
Sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do
But there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues
Cancer season is coming to an end, which means that my birthday has definitely passed and I will have to wait over 11 months to party again and be the centre of attention. Which is not that bad, I’m just glad I had the time to appreciate the gorgeous carrot cake I got from the bakery next door before I had to go on this diet shit (as told here).
This year was a special birthday.
I had to celebrate my 31st loop on the universe with a low-key picnic at the Vanilla City Seafront Lawns, a cheesy pizza from my favourite pizzeria in town, a Portuguese beer that tasted like family gatherings and laughters with my partner. It was good and appropriate for the times but last year, I went to see Converge with my best friend and my partner in London and hung out with some more friends during the day.
The previous year, I treated myself with seeing Dead Cross (a punk-fuelled hardcore super-group featuring my favourite drummer, Dave Lombardo and my favourite singer of all time, Mike Patton) in fucking Amsterdam. I travelled nearly 13 hours by coach to see these guys and did the same back with sparkles in my eyes and some more from the Prince exhibition I did at the same time.
The year before that, my ex and I went to Paris and we went to a gig, set up by longtime friends of mine and I didn’t have to pay for a single drink because my Parisian mates were just happy to see me around. In a nutshell, all my birthdays have been related to a concert from a band I grew up and loved. Whether it was Iron Maiden two days before I got my Baccalauréat or Nick Oliveri, formerly of Queens of the Stone Age/Kyuss Lives, giving me a massive hug at the Eurockéennes de Belfort or receiving a birthday wish from my favourite band members after seeing them in Hyde Park. My life is deeply attached to music, especially if the said music is loud, heavy and tripping. Which is probably the reason why summer is the perfect season for me to listen to sad songs. Sad songs in summer are the perfect way to ground you.
Because none of my thirty one summers on Earth were about puppy love, carelessness and having a good time. It involved single-day trips to Normandy with the help of charities involved in community activities, seeing all my friends going back to their parents’ homeland for the next six weeks, having to ask my cousins to bring me Cape Verdean jewellery but mostly, being alone and looking for climatisation in public libraries. My summers were mostly about me being on my own or me working from Bastille Day till the 1st of September to gain extra money for trips I want to make on my Winter breaks or records and books I’ve been dying to delve myself in. Summer means solitude to me. It means dreaming of lying down in a wooden venture on a lake, before jumping off to the shallow lake and letting my body float but knowing that the closest you will get from this fantasy is a crowded water park close from the périphérique (the Paris dual-carriageway ring road). Summer means reinventing myself into the person that will finally be popular in September.
But mostly, Summer means having fun making playlists. Call me old school or weirdo, but those playlists have been crafted exquisitely with a specific movie in my head that would accompany this playlist. I could tell you a story about any song the way I see it in my head and guess what, it would all make sense to your heads too. I can be hard to understand sometimes as a weird kid who felt ostracised her whole life for destroying all the moulds strangers and relatives have tried to fit me into. I don’t go into moulds, I fucking hate moulds, I prefer the safety of a tupperware filled with indulgent mum food or the fanciness of a ramekin where you see me chill in a custard pool like the fierce floating island that I am. I’m a tin who loves death metal and Beyoncé. I’m a tupperware of grunge knowledge. A glass jar of hip-hop classic. A china dish who will teach you everything you need to know about Tame Impala, Cesária Évora and Orville Peck.
My music tastes are as wide as you can imagine (the only exceptions being every thing that came out of EDM, ska and reggae — I refuse to expose my precious ears into such atrocities, I mean, can we all agree once and for all that EDM bros are so bad and so disgusting that it makes us all regret the jolly old times we could all “toot toot”and “beep beep” and “bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce, bounce” onto Ignition (Remix) like there was no tomorrows in sight?). That comes from the fact that I come from a generation of kids who had musical channels (like MTV Europe and M6 back in the Motherland) who used to broadcast a lot of music from a lot of musical genres at the same time. If you add young parents who had you before they turned 30 and growing up during a dope time for cultural regeneration and you end up with music junkies who listen to sad songs in the summer and happy bops in the rain.
This summer will mainly be me, waiting to go back to the office and try to perfect a little bit more my playlists. Like this one…
