Getting Closer to an Edge

On writing while watching the world burn

I wrote 100 Cops sometime last year. I don’t know which moment specifically brought it to be but I’d been thinking about where I live. I want to call it my city but I wasn’t born here. I get weird about a thing like that—does that ever happen to you?

But it’s been over a decade. Probably long enough to have earned the right.

The city is in the midst of an overdose crisis, a housing crisis, and cost-of-living crisis (issues all too familiar to everyone, everywhere, of course) and it feels like we’re getting closer to an edge.

If you walk about fifteen minutes, a neighbourhood or two over from mine, you can see how all of these issues manifest: smashed windows, vacant shops, shit in the streets, vulnerable people with nowhere to go; the city is being pushed to its limit—and then a supercar will drive by, brand-new off the supercar lot, windshield black, a McLaren or Maserati still wet from a wash. The World Cup will be here in five months. This doesn’t seem like a crisis mindset.

And the city’s condition has only gotten worse in the last ten years, even more so in the last five. I find it haunting. Most people move or take a different route, or ignore it altogether, busy trying to make their own ends meet.

During his campaign, our mayor promised to hire 100 cops (and 100 nurses) to fix his version of the problem. 100? Why not 1000? I know why but it’s the arbitrariness that feels insidious to me. No research pointing to 219 as the magic number? No chance our golden business boy of a mayor defers to the experts on this one? Are we rushing into this or have we waited way too long? The reality is, no single mayor will be able to solve the problems we’re faced with—but that thinking goes both ways; maybe future mayors shouldn’t pretend to have any kind of the power required to confront such issues, when they so clearly don’t. Perhaps citizens should be more aware or just ignore all that, too.

“100 cops” was always a campaign catch-phrase, not a serious policy. Last I checked, the number of police hired hasn’t kept up with the number that have left the job, and three years on, it still feels like my city is on fire.

While the process of making music and getting it into the world is often a lot quicker compared to the process of publishing (online writing aside), it still takes time. The band recorded in October; the song was finalized end of December (relatively quick). When we found out the song’s 7" probably wouldn’t arrive until the spring (normal turnaround times, by all accounts), I didn’t see the point in waiting for an equally arbitrary release date. I’d have put the song out last summer, when I wrote it, if I could have, and then again when we recorded in the fall.

But now the timing feels strange, like a risk, the air is charged. Tune into this evening’s episode of our shared reality and it’s as if there are more cops than ever before. Cops everywhere, dripping through the ceiling, like we’re drowning in them. I can’t tell if they’re the cause or the effect or a symptom of a far more sinister condition.

Put the song out, it’s the least of our worries, it will be the last thing on anyone’s mind. All the cops in the world won’t save us now.

100 cops, 100 cops, why not, why not, why not?

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A note about the above

First, any italicized text indicates a lyric from the song.

Second, you should know I am hesitant to send a newsletter about anything other than the usual things I write about and cautious when it comes to walking the line between my work and self-promotion. I felt there was enough merit in this piece to proudly share. Full disclosure: I won’t care if people don’t listen to the song. That’s the beautiful thing about all of this. I write and make things in order to scratch the itch, to get closer to the vision, hopefully without any, or very few, unforced errors along the way. But that doesn't mean I take the readers of A2P for granted, in fact, I’m honoured every time someone decides to take a chance on letting me infiltrate their inbox.

Third, I subscribed to DX Aminal’s Reverse Evolution last year. His project inspired some of this post. Among other things, it’s about the tension and conflict contained in music and artistry, which I tried my best to channel today. I’m grateful to this corny platform because without it I wouldn’t have found out about DX or his band Total Control whose record Typical System is perfect.

Finally, thank you Ethan from Human Pursuits for sharing the new song—check out Ethan’s newsletter for some pretty special interviews with all kinds of writers, musicians, and more.

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A note about the song

The song is available to stream, here is best, though. Or you can check out its very low-effort video, some screen caps from which you have already seen and scrolled by.

As for the song itself, the lyrics are simple enough, repeating ad nauseam. And the structure does the same—fast, slow, fast, slow, until it reaches the end. Musically, we challenged ourselves in two ways.

The band is at its fastest, heaviest, and most distorted (one of the streamers, probably using AI, classified the song as ‘metal’ which couldn’t be more incorrect) which is very much a result of content influencing form.

This is also our first song with synthesizer throughout (which could prove dicey live [not enough hands]). But the new frontier called for a different kind of ending; thus the electronic soundscape that follows the main part. For me, the dreamy outro balances out the harshness of everything before it and gives the song a chance to end on a hopeful, maybe even optimistic, note.

I feel like this song is a move in the right direction, a natural progression, one step closer to whatever it is the band so desperately wants to be.