There is the sample/riff that's very commonly associated with mf doom and i cant find where it's from. Here is here is a link to a insta add that has the riff. It kinda goes: fahhhhhh fah fah-fah, fahhhhh fah fah-fah, fah fah fah fahhhhhh.🙏🙏🙏 side not just found the songs that's that. What a masterclass of rhyming.
Meir Kranz
Mr. Lannick
Giants of the East
11/20/2025
My experience with Tao:
I'd been listening to the song The Climb Back for a while before I really understood it. It wasn't until I listened to the Dissect podcast on the way to the airport that I saw the layers. The song is by the artist J. Cole from his sixth studio album, and my personal favorite, The Off-Season.
After the massive success of his third studio album, 2014 Forest Hills Drive, he'd done it all. The album, without any features, had gone triple platinum. He broke the Spotify record for most streams in a week, he was selling out venues across the world, and he'd been nominated for multiple Grammys. Despite the success, shortly after Cole arrived home from a tour, he began to notice a change. The top of the mountain he’d climbed was no longer a peak. It was becoming a plateau. At that point, amid the fame he had earned, the riches that kept piling on, and the respect from longtime idols, he found himself uninspired and unmotivated.
Over the next 4 years, he still released two critically acclaimed albums, but it felt like he was stuck at the level of skill he had showcased years before. Recognizing he was falling into a sinking pit of comfort, Cole decided to channel his entire self into leaving “no stone unturned creatively.” He built a recording studio in his basement and began working.
The song that shows this shift most clearly is The Climb Back. It is the tenth song on the album and is entirely self-produced. The song begins with a spoken quote that I initially just heard as a well-placed sample. Turns out, it's an excerpt from the book The Tao of Leadership by John Heider. The quote is read by Alan Watts. “Are you doing this work to facilitate growth or to become famous? Which is more important, getting or letting go?”
I'd heard the line countless times before it was explained to me, though I'd noted on many occasions that the voice saying the quote was quite pleasant. The Dissect podcast called the quote was a pocket intro to Taoism. An easy way to provide listeners with knowledge of the philosophy so they can connect it to the song and its circumstances.
Though I could be entirely wrong about this (and if I am, I'm so sorry, just give me the F), Taoism, as generally thought, is about acceptance and continuance. Letting go instead of latching on to things like ego and possessions. It teaches that the more you cling to status and belongings, the more stress you create for yourself, because you are constantly defending what you have. Letting go, or at least loosening your grip, is what enables you to actually move.
The entire album, The Off-Season, was an exemplification of that. Letting go of the dull, stale life full of material wealth to pursue a greater ideal. The album strips away much of the excess noise and focuses on writing, beats, and discipline. The Climb Back in particular is long, verse-heavy, and simple in structure. No giant hook, no features, just him talking about grief, doubt, and climbing back to the love of the work. That matches the Tao idea that the way forward is not more glitter, but simplicity.
After gaining a better understanding of the song, the initial quote stood out to me more. It led me to Alan Watts. I searched his name and found all kinds of things. Many of them are from a podcast his son put together, some are from unaffiliated accounts that handle his lectures, and some are just bits and scraps that exist as random files. I listened to him talk about philosophy (almost no religion, which is why I asked you about it in class), about letting go of control, and about acting without forcing everything. At the same time, I learned that Watts had struggled with depression and alcohol. To me, that made it more real. Obviously, I don't connect with him better, but it was striking that someone who spent his life speaking about how to live still faced normal human problems and was honest about them. Taoism did not save him from being human.
My subsequent encounter with the Tao came through C.S. Lewis's book The Abolition of Man. (I don't enjoy the book that much, but Lewis is interestingly progressive for the 40s, and the book is great diction practice.) Lewis uses the word Tao entirely differently. For him “Tao” is the universal moral right, the shared core of what is good that shows up in different cultures. He compares it to ideas like the Hindu Rta and the objective laws we have from Hashem in the Torah. To Lewis, the Tao is the only way to judge correctness and he spends the entire book attacking postmodernism and its denial of objective values.
In terms of how all this has affected me, the change is not dramatic, but it is there. When I feel anxious or overwhelmed, I use a Spotify track called “Listen” from the official Alan Watt account all the time to calm down, such as last night on my way to my wrestling match. And while I'm not lining up to follow in Watts's footsteps, I've heard plenty of how he changed people's lives. I think a lot about the ideas he presented and it influences my values. My next step is probably going to be the book where the original quote was from, The Tao of leadership, if I can ever finish Abolition of man.
hey. in the last month or so i started getting this message whenever i tried to use certain pars of the mobile app and its getting to a point that i have to call them for the most basic things. has anyone experienced/fixed this problem. I have no VPN,s suspicious apps, I've rest, updated my phone and the app, cleared the cache, restarted my phone and turned off developer options. i am using a Samsung S23