Roll of thunder, hear my cry

I scoffed when Kanye West claimed bass-heavy music was mind control. Now I embrace his wisdom—and plan to follow his lead in influencing White House policy.

My family lives across the street from the N.E. Palace—the liveliest bar in northeast Minneapolis.

On weekends, a ritual unfolds at bar close: the cars that go boom. Their bass rattles souls as much as eardrums, shaking the night like rolling thunder.

We usually fall asleep long before closing time, and I’d assumed the thunder parade that woke us up came courtesy of Palace patrons finishing the night with one last roar. Turns out I was only half-right.

Last night, my wife and I went to a Gambian naming-day party, where African beats blasted through what I’m convinced was the loudest speaker in North America—parked right next to our table, where our hosts held us captive.

We dipped out early, but our systems were still so overstimulated we made the Talking Heads from Stop Making Sense look comatose by comparison. 

We tried sleeping anyway. Lying in bed, we heard the low rumble of slab cars approaching from blocks away, the thunder growing heavier with each beat. The first one hit as we hovered on the edge of sleep. By the third, my wife let out an audible cry, her body bracing for impact.

As the cars settled in, the Palace crowd spilled into the street. Already primed by alcohol, voices rose louder to compete with the bass, predictably escalating into arguments so loud they nearly drowned out the cars that go boom.

Giving up on sleep, we stepped out to our front stoop and lit a joint. As we took in the scene, it hit me why some drivers skip the bar altogether. Why bother with cover charges and watered-down drinks when you can pull up outside, crank the bass to infinity, and control the club from the curb?

I scoffed when Kanye West claimed that bass-heavy music was a form of nefarious mind control designed to keep people negative. But watching my block unravel, I couldn’t help but think Ye might be onto something.

Conscious or not, the drivers knew what they were doing. Their thunderous music agitated the crowd, dragging everyone into a low-vibrational state where the ego thrives. Chaos became contagious.

And the ego loves that. It feeds on chaos the way mosquitoes feed on blood.

It struck me that this same subterfuge—distracting us with low-vibrating noise while pushing a low-vibrating agenda—is the oldest trick in the book. Our leaders have been running this play since the dawn of time, and today’s authoritarian strongmen have perfected it.

I’ve learned that trying to engage with drunks while sober is pointless. Their frequency drops so low that the vibrational gap between us makes me nearly invisible. To connect at all, I’d have to lower the quality of my consciousness.

So when I politely pointed out the late hour to a group of rowdies a mini-golf putt away from our stoop, it landed with all the force of a butterfly’s sneeze—it didn’t even register. They looked straight through me.

What finally pierced their fog wasn’t my words, but our dog. When he padded out to the boulevard to relieve himself, one partier squinted and asked, “Is that a real dog?” as if spotting a dodo in the wild.

Once they accepted the dog’s existence—and, by extension, ours—they realized they were throwing a late-night block party on a block that wasn’t theirs. They turned the bass from infinity down to 11, quieted their voices from screaming to mere yelling, and called it a night.

It hit me that I should bring our dog to the White House. He might have more luck reaching Kanye’s low-vibrating friend in the Oval Office than the rest of us ever could.