Welcome to Adrie’s beats of the week, a weekly column dedicated to remarking upon the intricacies of modern music. To submit any songs for entry, please contact [email protected], with the subject line, ‘beats of the week.’

This week, masks are being labeled as optional, and with them goes the last marking (besides the free school lunches, you will all feel the tremor of my breakdown when they take those away) of abnormality at school. Of course it will feel incredibly abnormal, and I’m not sure that things will ever return to the way they were in the mystical ‘before,’ but I think it’s the biggest move so far in that direction. 

It is mind boggling to me, and I know many others, that I have people in my life whose faces I have never seen before. I have teachers, and not to mention friends, that I have met this year or the last, and I have never seen the bottom half of their face. This feels like something right out of some sort of utopia novel, and yet it’s not. 

Listening to Ashe’s “In Disguise”, I was struck by a lyric, “You better find out who your friends are in disguise,” because it feels like that’s what we’ve all been doing. In fact, I think a lot of people, myself included sometimes, enjoy wearing masks because they disguise you a little bit. 

I adore this song, and the song itself is really all about self-respect, and finding people who you can trust. I think a lot of the reactions of the next few weeks will be based on people’s self-respect; people making the decisions that they feel are best for them, regardless of what other people think or say. 

The lyrics of the song reflect that, saying “I rather be diggin’ out my own grave/Than listen to the words that they say,” and “I’d rather be hated for who I am/Than waste it all giving a damn.”

I think that message is an incredibly important one, especially in a situation with equal pull on each side, and really especially so in the high school realm. To me self-respect is above even self-love, and to have it in the way that Ashe sings about is the ultimate goal. 

The song isn’t really happy exactly, but I think it is fairly upbeat. I love the backing vocals, and I feel like all Ashe’s music has a really beautifully unique sound that made her stand out in the industry. She isn’t afraid to sing about difficult things, and I think the messages overall of all her songs are really cool. 

So I will be listening to this song in the upcoming weeks to try and remember my own self-respect, and it’s an idea that I wanted to share. We can’t be sure what will happen, hence March 2020, but my hope is that this big thing that has been the same for every student so far, will not divide us. I hope that, in respecting the decisions that we want to make for ourselves, we can also respect other people for whatever decisions they want to make. 

And if things go South, and we end up with some sort of all school civil war on our hands, I think the song is worth listening to anyways.