What Means the World to You: 2015 in Musical Memories
December: Jeremih — “Paradise”
“I knew life would be alright / But who could’ve known it’d be this good?”
Anyone who has read my work throughout 2015 knows it was one of the worst years of my life. I continually struggled with what felt like a never-ending heartbreak, the loss of an entire social circle, coming to terms with the disruption, dissolution, and hopeful reconstruction of my family unit, and the weird, wide world of perceived professional slights and other mundane discomforts, like being too broke to make rent. I examined and grappled with all of these things through the albums and songs that cascaded through my life, probably a greater and more diverse number than every before thanks to the brilliant minds who help power the site I worked for at the time, but no matter what I listened to, all I heard was pain. It helped to hear it refracted back, an endless prism of sonic sadness that revealed how small my own was in comparison, but it also didn’t help. When would I get better? Would I ever heal?
When it finally began to happen, I almost didn’t notice.
Slowly, new friendships began to trickle in, and even new romances. I began a new job, here, in a position that allowed me to speak more freely than I ever have before. I experienced what it was like to have a female editor, who when I told her about an ex’s professional and personal slight, could not only empathize with my pain and speak to my experience, but encouraged me to tackle the implications it had for my industry. That piece has become one of my most successful to date. And then, it kept getting better. I wasn’t rich, but I had enough — the qualitative difference is astonishing. My sister moved to New York, and then into my apartment. Good news and uplifting moments began to seem more prevalent than bad ones. I noticed happiness moving into the forefront, sadness to the back.
By the time I heard Jeremih’s heart-altering acoustic jam, and its dramatically ominous Phantom Of The Opera preface, I believed in what he was singing about again. “Paradise” is one of the finest songs of the year because he uses all the topics of his real life to construct heaven. It’s not a song about life being perfect, it’s a song about deep appreciation for the gifts that abound right in front of our faces. “It’s amazing that we made it / We’re gonna take this past the sky,” he sings toward the end, tacit acknowledgement of how unlikely joy is, and a determination to keep striving toward it no matter what. “Paradise” implies the rock bottom of the past, and how knowledge of its existence reveals our own resilience. Once you’ve been at your lowest, and begun to crawl back, you realize the sky is still there, waiting for you to fight your way back up to the big blue. But you have to fight, and you can hear how much Jeremih has fought against in the way he appreciates a simple crazy night with his friends.
Right now, I am completely at peace with my life. I am happy. Not because I think the current calm will last forever, in fact, the only thing I know for sure is that it won’t. I’m at peace because I know that every gruesome, gnarly wound from 2015 healed into a glorious scar. It really did! And I learned that my wounds will continue to scar, no matter how deep the gash. “Paradise” is a gorgeous meditation on this because it doesn’t live in unblemished skin, it lives inside the fact that our skin has the ability to heal itself. He’s singing about getting high as fuck, and that’s where he finds eternal beauty! That’s an awesome, subversive way to twist the toxic, strict religious view of heaven we’ve all been taught. He’s articulating his own religion and his own set of values; heaven is having the freedom to do this. After the party, after the struggle, after the hook up and the hangover, life keeps getting better, because we teach ourselves that true paradise is living how we want to, outside world be damned. We teach ourselves how to live in our damaged skin. We teach ourselves how to heal. The more we’re able to do that, the better it gets. That’s when every single day feels like paradise.
—Caitlin White