How Opium healed me
Written for the Daily Trojan’s Jam Journal, a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. Julia Ho is a chief copy editor at the Daily Trojan.
Confessions from (probably) one of the most normal Yeat fans.
I too, for lack of better phrasing, was a victim of the Opium epidemic that afflicts many Gen Zers today. I was swept away in 2019 when Playboi Carti started his Opium record label and subsequently released his 2020 album “Whole Lotta Red,” a highly experimental project that popularized the up-and-coming genre as we know it today.
It’s hard to describe why this Opium genre of dark rage rap has appealed to so many, but for me, listening to this music during the COVID-19 pandemic helped me develop my music taste and direct my emotions as I struggled with school, isolation and mental health. Music from the likes of Ken Carson and Destroy Lonely, both signed to Opium, as well as Yeat — my personal favorite, but not Opium, just sonically similar — were my lifeline during this tumultuous time.
“Yeat has unironically saved me during some of my darkest times. Some of you guys should try that instead of wallowing to Sufjan Stevens and Mitski constantly,” read a March Instagram Reel by @twentyonepilots_andyeat_fan7. This reel, though posted just last month, encapsulates why my music taste’s progression is the way it is, from 2021 to now.
Yeat and his rage rap is my go-to music for when I’m in the trenches. In 2021, at the peak of my depression, my playlists were chock-full of artists like Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Adrianne Lenker, FKA twigs and Weyes Blood, until I eventually came to the conclusion that listening to melancholic music was only going to add to my sadness. I mean, why listen to sad, relatable music when you can listen to bass-heavy brainrot music that exacerbates your brain fog?
Since I couldn’t pick out any unique, discernible lyrics from Yeat’s music, I finally felt emotionally stable — stable in the sense that this perceived control of one aspect of my life gave me respite from the fears and anxieties overrunning my poor Leuchtturm1917 journals.
There was something so freeing about not relating to lyrics: The juxtaposition of “I always wanted to die clean and pretty / But I’d be too busy on working days / So I am relieved that the turbulence wasn’t forecasted / I couldn’t have changed anyways” in Mitski’s “Last Words of a Shooting Star” to the absurdity of “We not books to read, we not Cat in the Hat, no Sam-I-Am / I cook that lil’ shit up, ‘Green Eggs and Ham’” in “Gët Busy” never fails to make me laugh. Oh, the beauty of Yeat’s lyricism and use of allusion.
As weird as it sounds, the craziness of Yeat’s music, from the out-of-pocket lyricism to his heavily layered, severely Auto-Tuned and synthesized production, and just his overall vibe, was the only thing that could get me to maintain my academic motivation during my junior and senior year.
It’s hard to cry about it (it being literally anything worthwhile or significant affecting my life) when the sound of police sirens, church bells, synths, and confusing, made-up and/or strangely umlauted, misspelled words (i.e. twizzy, tonka, lyfë) drown out any and all negative thoughts.
When I finally emerged from my blanket of depression, I found myself lost within my own Spotify. The person who is writing for this column right now is not the same person who had Yeat as her top artist on her 2022 and 2023 Spotify Wrapped. Looking past Yeat’s presence in my playlists, there was a gaping abyss devoid of personality: I had unassumingly turned myself into a bot.
I started building new playlists gradually, at first by listening to rap with slightly more substance — I had always enjoyed 21 Savage’s trap with R&B influences, Metro Boomin’s production, Kendrick Lamar’s play on words and Future’s ever-so-toxic verses. As my disillusionment waned and the color began to return to my life, I started enjoying the small complexities of artists’ music, from hip-hop producers’ tags to whatever soul or R&B song had been sampled to being able to catch Jack Antonoff’s production in the wild.
I began shamelessly ripping catchy songs off of TikTok to listen to, where I would then consume these artists’ entire discographies on repeat for at least a month before moving on to my next target.
And today? Life is whimsical (well, much more than it used to be), so it’s only fitting that I’ve supplemented my playlists with a healthy dose of Addison Rae (yeah, I was on that EP “AR” before “Diet Pepsi” came out), of course, some trap and finally, all the sad indie pop/rock that I deprived myself of in 2021. Though I don’t listen to Yeat as much these days, the entirety of “Lyfë” will always have a place in my Spotify Liked Songs, in case of a rainy day.