Why Are You My Clarity?
with BARTYDARTY 🎺
Hope everyone’s summer is off to a beautiful start. I’ve been lounging on the rooftop, eating stone fruit, reading too many books at once, scoping out all of the indie bookstores and parks within a 30-minute radius, and buying myself Trader Joe’s flowers, deeply discounted platform sandals, and of course, The Pasta Bag™️ 🍝
🍒 This Week on Nicstalgia
BARTYDARTY is featured on this week's episode of Nicstalgia. We talk about Adam’s journey to becoming a DJ and producer: going on MySpace at the ripe age of 12, blogging in 5th grade, being influenced by Detroit's electronic and house music, and getting his brother’s hand-me-down trumpet. We touch on the EDM explosion of the end of the 2000s to 2010s, listening to “Clarity” on the prom party bus, the dichotomy between Avicii’s struggle with fame and Steve Aoki’s “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” ethos, and the inescapable “Closer” by The Chainsmokers.
Adam shares about how not having health insurance inspired his first album, his rebrand to BARTYDARTY and the values behind it, staying in touch with your inner child, doing what your younger self would be proud of, embracing a sense of play while also accepting responsibility, and finding other people who share your values.
We explore establishing and integrating IRL and URL identities to reflect who you want to be and remember: you are never too old to make your mark on the world.
Watch/listen: YouTube • Spotify • Apple Podcasts
I’m Just a Simple Girl in a High-Tech Digital World 📲
My fav [AI] things from the internet rn:
My favorite genre of music right now is AI-generated covers lolol. Basically how it works is that songs are fed into a system. So you say, “Here are tracks of Britney Spears’s vocals.” Then, the system is trained to know what Britney’s voice sounds like and uses artificial intelligence technology to apply that model to another song.
AI has so many implications on identity, art, privacy, data security, and so much more. Like all emerging technology, it will do really cool shit and there will also absolutely be unintended consequences. (More on that later.) The quality of these songs are not perfect – sometimes they’re not even good at all – but tbh, I just think these are fun to listen to. Here are some of my favorites:
“Believe” by Rick Astley (originally Cher)
“Viva Forever” by Miley Cyrus & Lana Del Rey (originally Spice Girls)
“Welcome to The Black Parade” by Freddie Mercury (originally My Chemical Romance)
“I Will Always Love You” by Freddie Mercury (originally Whitney Houston)
“I Wanna Know What Love Is” by Freddie Mercury (originally Foreigner)
“No Scrubs” by Britney Spears (originally TLC)
“Timebomb” by Britney Spears (originally Kylie Minogue)
“Everytime” by Amy Lee (of Evanescence, originally Britney Spears)
“Creep” by Billie Eilish (originally Radiohead)
“The Edge of Glory” by P!nk (originally Lady Gaga)
As Freddie Mercury once allegedly said, “Do whatever you want with my music, just don't make it boring.”
💿 Hey Mr. DJ, put a [playlist] on
Playlist of the week:
College. What a time. This is where you can find every song that matters from the turn-of-the-decade EDM explosion. Regardless of whether you were in college at this time, this playlist serves as a lovely time capsule for 2008-2012 and is filled with questionable songs that have probably not aged well.
I have specific memories tied to basically every one of these songs, which is pretty impressive for a time when everyone’s Facebook albums were called “Nights I’ll Never Remember With Friends I’ll Never Forget”. For the record, my Facebook album in 2010 was called “All They Wanna Talk About is Partying and Fashion”, quoting Drake’s verse from Young Money’s “EveryGirl in The World” 🤭 No further comment.
🧨 Spice Up Your Life
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