Whatever You Like

07/28/2022

Whatever You Like by T.I.

This song reminds me, violently, of when I was 11-13 years old. Ad nauseam, I would listen to it on repeat over many early morning subway rides to school, usually the 6, the N, or the R. It reminds me of many dark, cold nights on the bus to soccer practice on the depressingly bleak Randalls Island. Many Q train rides to Brooklyn and E, C, and A train rides to the Upper West Side. It was, along with some Jay Z, Kanye West, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Justin Timberlake, and Neil Young, one of the few songs downloaded to my iPod shuffle. I was always too lazy to change it, and the iPod shuffle was the only source of distraction I had on those infinite train rides back and forth from all the crap I had to go to I never really wanted to go to, all the stuff that one must attend in order to have a normally defined childhood. I would get nauseous reading or doing homework on the train, and looking around at all the homeless people, drug addicts, commuters, and businessmen got exhausting. It was better to just stare into space and listen to T.I. Besides, people on the subway in New York City don’t really like to be looked at (they’ll let you know).

This song is New York when I was very young and it was very cold, when I was just reaching the age of independence to go everywhere and do everything on my own, before, more or less, New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority took away whatever innocence I had left. It is, in my mind, a symbol of the most lonely and depressing moments of my youth. For some disgusting reason, I still enjoy this song, and that’s all I have to say about it.