As I power through the daily grind of being alive, every once in a while I find myself in a place that can only be described as an emotional lull. Waking up, getting ready for work, and dealing with crowded buses that are always late, I feel my life wasted at a job that barely covers the bills. Then, I commute back home to prepare for the next day, repeating the cycle. Throughout these periods of emotional drought, I have found that music becomes background noise—just something that fills the gaps between conversations at work. I forget the reason I enjoy it or was drawn into these subcultures and alternative scenes in the first place. In a way, this may be by design, as it is significantly easier to maintain the high levels of unrealistic hyper-efficiency that fuel a capitalist syst...