by Scott Samuelson

I had a long drive ahead of me. Sick of podcasts that all blur together, news programs with their predictable slants, and algorithm-controlled radio stations, I dug around in a pile of old CDs and found a mixtape labeled “Songs for Sisyphus,” compiled for me by my friend Jane Drexler (who also happens to be one of the world’s great teachers of philosophy).

The origin of this CD goes back to a conversation between me and Jane about Albert Camus’s famous essay “The Myth of Sisyphus,” which symbolizes the human condition with the image of the legendary Greek figure who’s on an endless loop of pushing a boulder up a mountain only to have it roll down again. The idea is that we inevitably project ideals only to have the universe make a mockery of them. Existence is just a series of rinse-and-repeat cycles of beauties and tragedies, desires and boredoms, endeavors and failures, rises and falls, ups and downs, lives and deaths, with no final end to redeem our labors—at least none that lasts longer than it takes for Sisyphus’s boulder to teeter atop the mountain.

Jane asked me what might be added to Sisyphus’s fate to make it bearable. “The first thing I’d want is some music,” I blurted out. Then we got into a discussion about what kind of music we’d play if we were in Sisyphus’s shoes.

Jane pointed out how the roots of all great American music are in something disturbingly like Sisyphus’s fate: the singing of Black Americans being forced into hard labor only to have the fruits of their labor brutally snatched from them. We talked about the sorrow songs. We talked about the hard and joyful wisdom of the blues. We wondered if the otherworldly hope of Sunday morning’s gospel music was a necessary complement to the this-worldly affirmations of Saturday night’s boogaloo. We marveled at the aptness of the name “rock and roll.”

A week later, we were trading mixtapes called “Songs for Sisyphus.” Read more »