Music throwback: 1-800-273-8255 (Logic)

I feel like I’m out of my mind
It feel like my life ain’t mine

It was at the Grammys broadcast in January 2018 where I saw the guy dubbed Logic perform the song 1-800-273-8255. Those digits represent the phone number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. He talks about the creation of the message here, where he tries to assures his listeners “someone is there for them.”

The recording came out in late April 2017, the third single from Logic’s third studio album, Everybody. It eventually hit #3 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

What I somehow missed was that in August 2017, there was a seven-minute video. “The clip centers around a gay black teen (Coy Stewart, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) with a white boyfriend (Nolan Gould, Modern Family) coming to grips with his sexuality and his family’s reaction to it.”

Don Cheadle and Matthew Modine play the boys’ fathers, and Luis Guzman a coach at the teens’ school. Alessia Cara and Khalid, who are featured on the record, appear in the short film as well.

Where did I see this video? At church, of course. Since it was More Light Sunday, and the Albany Gay Men’s Chorus was providing the service music, I got a rare chance to attend the adult education class.

The conversation was about depression generally, then morphed into facts about suicide and the LGBT community. LGB youth contemplate suicide thrice as often, and attempt it five times as often as heterosexual youth. 40% of transgender adults reported having attempted suicide, the vast majority before the age of 25.

Watch 1-800-273-8255 here or here

A reaction to 1-800-273-8255

Lyrics to the song by Logic (Sir Robert Hall II), 6ix (Arjun Ivatury), Alessia Cara (Alessia Caracciolo), Khalid (Khalid Robinson), and Andrew Taggart [of the Chainsmokers]

I’ve been on the low
I been taking my time
I feel like I’m out of my mind
It feel like my life ain’t mine
Who can relate?

The logic of Lincoln

The “Union of the States” is perpetual, because no proper government ever had a provision for its own termination.

From Daniel Tammet’s book Thinking by Numbers, the chapter on Shapes of Speech:

“In the mid-nineteenth century, more than two millennia after Euclid, a copy of his Elements traveled in the carpetbag of a circuit lawyer from Illinois…

“The pages and their propositions made a deep impression on Lincoln’s mind, following him into his subsequent career in politics. In a speech given to an Ohio crowd in 1859 in opposition to a pro-slavery rival…

“‘Now if Judge [Stephen] Douglas will demonstrate somehow that this is popular sovereignty – the right to make a slave out of another, without any right of that other, or anyone else to object; demonstrate it as Euclid demonstrated propositions – there is no objection. But when he comes forward, seeking to carry a principle by bringing it to the authority of men who themselves utterly repudiate that principle, I ask that he shall not be permitted to do it.’

“Definitions and axioms would shape President Lincoln’s most famous addresses. His powers of rhetoric, persuasion, deduction and logic were all subjected to the severest tests.”

His defense of the Union, and the requirement to keep it together, was that based on universal law and the Constitution. The “Union of the States” is perpetual because no proper government ever had a provision for its own termination.

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