I know I’ve only made it through the first week of classes, but I am already exhausted. Every day by about three o’clock, I am ready to take a nap. For those of you well-acquainted with the all-important ritual of napping, you know that it is a very serious practice, and its success hinges on any number of variables like blanket choice, general atmosphere, and, of course, music.

There have to be a million songs written about sleep (after all, don’t we spend about a third of our life doing this? Can someone please give me an update on this statistic?). In the last week I’ve been rediscovering The Smiths’ song “Asleep.”

I can remember first stumbling on this song in middle school, those formative years of anxiety and woe, characterized by many of us through the mix tapes we listened to, the basements we smoked in, the beat literature we read. But unlike the rest of the nonsense that littered my middle school experience, The Smiths’ still retains its uncanny sadness.

Morrissey himself has a knack for melancholy — even in his most up-tempo, danceable tracks, there is a pervasive gloom about the condition of being alive. The effects of this can be disastrous.

My friend Jen is least immune to Morrissey’s angst and has been known, on more than several occasions, to break down in the middle of doing anything and weep to the croon of Moz’s voice.

Hell, sometimes she would just break down at the thought of him old and sweaty, playing the Celebrity Showcase in Reno, Nev., changing his soggy T-shirts every 30 minutes and riding long black limousines for 200-foot stretches, realizing that no one would ever put up with that kind of shit from her.

No one would put up with that shit from me, either, which might make listening to The Smiths after a laborious first week of class even worse. There seems to be a sort of unfairness at play, but if poor Moz wasn’t always famous, at least he was always sad.

So if you’re feeling a bit worn and torn after a rough first week, I suggest you take comfort, curl up, revisit your old sad songs, and hope that you too will find great success in your wallowing.

-M. Callen

Tonight, I spun the clickwheel of my iPod until “Ride Around Shining” by Clipse came up. Upon its release, the song and the album that housed it sparked a debate among the Internet cognoscenti about its ethics, or lack thereof.

Was Hell Hath No Fury a nuanced treatment of the drug trade’s moral complexities or a raw glorification of crack and the cash that came of it?

I never really took a side in that argument — the ruthlessness of the production transfixed me more than the cold-hearted consumerism of the lyrics.

Returning to the song, nearly two years later, it seems unsettlingly prescient. It’s as if Clipse knew, in the summer of ’07, that the housing bubble was overdue for bursting, and that the economy, a year and a half down the road, would be stumbling and desperate, like a crack addict caught in Virginia Beach traffic (of two kinds). “All I wanna do is ride around shinin’ while I can afford it” — did they know?

Listening to the song today, it’s hard to say if the cloud of detuned piano that hovers over the minimal beat presages collapses or confirms it.

Is that miasma of notes the tremor that says “earthquake,” or the dust of crushed concrete settling after disaster has already come? Are Clipse a pair of fortunetellers or funeral directors?

The song, like its creators, seems caught between violent scenes. Virginia Beach rappers aren’t dirty South and they aren’t New York. They’re coastal, smooth, but never as glib as Snoop and Dre.

They wouldn’t fit in Los Angeles. They rap in suspension, with the devil-may-care edge of a parolee speeding past the police station in a stolen convertible.

A decade that started with a hyped crisis that never materialized (Y2K) is ending with an economic crisis borne of over-hyped material (toxic securities).

For this author, “Ride Around Shining” is the anthem that captures the spirit of those two endpoints, as it cruises on a vaporous chassis, grille gleaming, right between them.

-Split Foster

Dear Arthur Russell,

Let’s pretend it didn’t happen. That it just… didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, it was a good documentary and all. I enjoyed the whole thing — the flannel, the fluorescence, the frustration. Your parents and boyfriend are adorable and the clips of you playing guitar in that puffy winter jacket — black and white bliss, my man. But I’d rather wipe the mnemonic slate clean.

Let’s pretend that I’ve never known anything about you, that my first and last encounters with you are Another Thought spinning humbly in the dark. That I know nothing of your beatnik exodus from Iowa, nothing of your camaraderie with Allen Ginsburg, nothing of your disco prowess, nothing of AIDS, nothing of nothing. That all I know, not just of you, but of the whole world, is this supine posture — lying face up — is this cello echoing and squealing into the shadows, is your voice lilting and reverberant, sure as soft cotton on bleeding skin.

Let’s pretend that there is a city even Italo Calvino, the famous writer, hasn’t conjured, one where your lyrics are law, where your melodies are weather, where your atmospheres are public housing policy, where your four-track is the key to the courthouse. Let’s pretend I’m bedding down in the tenement of your sadness and hope. Let’s pretend the headline of the “Russell Daily Register” says “Lucky cloud in your sky, Brother.”

Let’s pretend I still listen to music more than I catalog it. “The birth of the moment is never ending.” Let’s pretend I believe that because it’s you saying it, singing it in loops of noise. Voltaire said that the only things too stupid to be said are sung. I want to be stupid with you.

Let’s pretend it’s the ghosts who have to believe in us for us to be real. Let’s pretend it’s you listening to me. Let’s pretend it’s you reading this letter, you smoothing the creases of this with your palms, you smearing newsprint into the whorls on your fingertips.

This is how we walk on the moon.

-Split Foster