Look What This World Did To Us

Chris Orrick is the Opposite of Easy Listening, the Poet of the Emergency Room

I was taking a walk in a public park and I passed a picnic shelter surrounded by motorcycles and a cloud of marijuana smoke. Red Pill’s “Gin and Tonic” started playing and I slowed down to listen. I don’t recall questioning whether walking up uninvited to find the name of the song was a good idea, but that’s what I did.

I like rap, but I’ve never really been into it. I grew up in an upper-middle-class, white, suburb in the 1980s. Rap was not the music of my childhood and always on the artistic periphery as an adult.

Chris Orrick changed that.