My perspective on The Rising Compass.
The First Realization
Tha Carter III is my favorite rap album of all time. It is a masterpiece, and I believe Lil Wayne's best work. But you better believe that Tha Carter III is full of all kinds of derogatory, explicit material like misogyny, materialism, and violence. I'm not pinning this on Wayne. I absolutely admire and respect Lil Wayne as a visionary artist. He, in fact, was a pillar reference when I began my own artist journey.
A few years ago, about 15 years after its peak and as I was actively evolving my perspective of popular music as a complex, I recalled and heard Lil Wayne's Lollipop in a startlingly different context. I found myself appalled that I was blasting this record through my 12” MTX subwoofer, blunt-cruising my way around the Philly suburbs, thinking I was exceptionally cool. It was during this recall that I realized what I was perpetuating in the world; I was perpetuating toxic cultural norms through lyrics that glorify misogyny and sexual exploitation. I was also programming myself for a long period of dysfunctional core beliefs about sex.
That feeling and awareness instantly cascaded into the realization of how many other millions of people were listening to this song; consuming and amplifying its message. I then further realized that millions more have consumed it since, and are still listening to this day, as if nothing has happened to them except a catchy record has kept the pleasure signals firing for a few minutes at a time.
During the time between Lollipop’s release and my cascading realization, I had gained a deep understanding of metaphysics and how sound (music) translates from biology (inner ear) to psychology (beliefs/thoughts/feelings), and how psychology shapes one’s actions, and, in turn, how those actions or inactions affect the quality of life one experiences.
As I was comprehending the gravity, I was also realizing that so much damage had already been done. Millions and millions of people have attached their identity to and derive pleasure from that song and thousands of other songs like it, not knowing just what they are actually deriving, consuming or how that consumption is affecting themselves individually or society as a whole.
“Real” Status
The modern world tends to deem “real” only that which can be seen or felt physically. Like holding a pencil or witnessing a football game. That is why we call “virtual reality” virtual, and not actual, because it is not reality, it is almost reality. We’ve adopted a firm differentiation between a world a computer generates and the world we are born into. But there are outliers to this physical, material-only ruling.
We also have a system called law. We deem real and valid that which can be proven in a court of law. The judicial system is an intangible system that rules over shared, human experience to define what is right and wrong; which actions are unacceptable and which are not. But those rulings are not pencils or football games. They are invisible entities that exist in the mind.
Law can say, because science can prove, that a human striking another human causes damage to the victim’s body, and law recognizes emotional harm from direct acts against a specific victim via emotional distress, defamation, etc. Science and law have not yet agreed to confirm that diffuse, ambient harm of media content on a population affects with the same severity as physical harm; that the images we absorb visually and the words we absorb audibly can affect the human experience as much as a knife slicing flesh or a lock being broken.
Our governing bodies (and the industries that profit) have every incentive to dismiss the idea that entertainment can affect the human psyche as physical violence affects the body, the way theft or other crimes alter the victim’s experience of life. Even non-crimes like arguments surrounding divorce, abortion, decisions about war and decisions about food are all decisions that affect humanity and humans, so we have agreed that they need to be within a certain range of acceptability for a healthy human life.
When those decisions or actions fall out of acceptable range, we have a canon to discuss and have discourse around what those ranges are or should be, but we do not have a range to discuss the metaphysical world like we do the physical, even though we already admit in passing and in casual, non-academic and non-legal settings that entertainment; music, movies and television and video games (visual and audible information) affect us, simply by the shared experience of joy or discomfort from consuming them. We admit that they alter the mood (brain chemistry) to the point that we viscerally feel something. That's why we keep coming back to (or avoiding) certain information packages we call entertainment. This leads me to how entertainment has sequestered and barricaded itself in a way that its effects cannot be poked at the way that politics, human rights, or law can be poked at because entertainment is deemed art, no matter how creative it may or may not be.
Society has been conditioned that what entertainment does to us may not be contested in the way that politics, war and food supply may be debated. I say that the messages contained in lyrics of music are as real as the food that we eat, the homes we live in and the crimes we commit and put on trial. That's what I set out to do with The Rising Compass; to make the vibe visible in a way that promotes the idea that lyrical messages are as real as all of the laws that have been put in place to prevent/allow access to healthcare, access to food, access to housing, access to human needs, and whether that's good or bad is not what this is about. I am simply trying to create the arena to discuss it; to discuss, calibrate and apply a canon of thought and discourse to that which is intangible.
Intangible Precedence
I’ve said that the intangible is typically not deemed as real as a house, or a can of corn, or a baby's first breath, but there’s already a monolithic exception to that rule. The entire idea of justice is an intangible reality that we have all agreed upon and accepted as true and real.
(Again, this article is not designed to argue the morality within any arena, just the fact that there should be an arena to discuss intangibility like messages in song lyrics and what those messages do to the listener and society.)
The justice system, law, litigation, and tangentially, politics, are all non-physical complexes that we deliberate on, have opinions of and comprehend. We collectively believe and validate that laws should exist to protect our lives and comforts, which is why we are so passionate about how we want these systems to treat us and our communities. Not only do we continually validate that a selection of physical actions in the real world fall under something that we deem unacceptable to the point that we created a word for it, (crime,) but we also created an entire school of thought, an entire industry, and an entire academic and professional segment of society dedicated to the invisible judgment and classification of these actions.
We also do this with money. Money represents something, it is an avatar. Money isn't the thing. Money represents a trade; a value exchange translated into parameters of our economic system.
We also do this with borders and nations. The Earth does not have nations. It does not have borders. Humans decided to create these invisible lines that give tangibility to something intangible. The idea of a nation doesn’t actually require borders, a nation is a state of mind, a “state” is the same thing, a shared state of mind, but humans took these from the metaphysical into the physical with borders, both on a map and as physical structures.
The intangible already runs the world, but we won't allow the intangible to be made tangible when it comes to music. We won’t allow the vibe to become visible in the club, the concert, the radio, the headphones, or the subwoofer. The Rising Compass aims to make that vibe visible in every one of those instances.
Instrumental Lineage
The Rising Compass, while digital, follows a lineage of other instruments that made an intangibility tangible; an invisibility visible; an immeasurability measurable.
Before the thermometer, there was no way to rank the range of the temperatures between hot and cold, but everyone agreed that there was a spectrum between blistering heat and frigid cold. Still, there was no tangible, anchored measurement to discuss and label the range between heat that feels good and heat that cooks flesh.
Before the clock, time was “a while,” “a moon,” “three sleeps,” but we ended up building the most precise instrument humanity has for what we perceive as time, and then reorganized all of civilization around that invisible measurement.
The same thing goes for weight. Before any kind of scale, there was only the shared knowing that objects were heavy as a boulder or light as a feather. There was no way to discuss, point to or measure spectrums of everyday life that we all agreed existed.
Each of these tools turns an intangible knowing into a measured fact. But notice there are two steps. The thermometer doesn't decide whether 105 degrees is good or bad, it just reads the number, and nobody votes on that number. What took us hundreds of years to agree on was that 105 degrees of sun works against survival. The measure is discovered; the meaning is agreed. The book of law is the clearest case of both at once: the act is established, and the severity is something we ratify together.
Now, agreeing upon that balance of crime committed vs. punishment issued is not what this is about, but the fact that the sentence is separate from the verdict is much like the Rising Compass; it delivers a verdict by degree, but does not sentence any parties involved. Not the listener and not the artist. It's not “this song should be played” or “this song should not be played.” The Rising Compass is the jury that reaches a verdict by degree, not a sentence.
The Existing Media Ratings Tools
It is important to note that a tiered rating instrument already exists for movies, TV shows, and video games. I would assume this is because the added visual aspect makes them much more “real.” As mentioned earlier, “real” typically requires being seen or physically felt with the hand or external body, unlike music, which is entirely invisible and immaterial.
Music does have the explicit label, but it carries almost no information. With the onset of streaming media and the binary nature of the system, it has become almost useless at this point. Songs like Lollipop and WAP get the same sticker as a tender, introspective song that happens to use three swear words. The explicit label tells you a word was said, not the meaning behind the word, or what the song might do to you. That's the gap the Rising Compass fills.
Music as a Gateway
Music is the closest thing we have to magic. Medicine is tangible. We can see it, we can track it, we can orally consume it, we can inject it, and we can repeat it on an exact basis. Food is tangible. Weapons are tangible. They all alter the human experience differently, yet all can be physically confirmed through linear tracking. Eat food, feel better. Take medicine, experience cure or symptom relief. Fire a gun, puncture flesh.
Music is one of the closest things that moves us in a way experientially akin to all of these things I've just said, yet is invisible and intangible. Sound is not something that you use your eyes to prove. You don’t see blood when music runs through your neural pathways the way you see blood from a papercut. You don’t see an apple disappear into your mouth as you eat it. The most we see is a progress bar filling up as the seconds tick by.
Music changes an entire room of people without any perceivable touch or matter reaching a single body in the room. Music changes our mood without a physical apparatus that we can see or feel. Music changes reality in a way that physics can measure but can’t explain. Physics can describe every wave that hits your ear and still say nothing about why the song moved the listener. That is the definition of magic.
Music is one of the few invisible, non-tangible experiences, dare I say metaphysical experiences, that the secular world still admits to. No one says that a song didn't “do” anything to me or that they didn't feel something when they hear a song that they like. Nobody says that music has no power. In fact, how many times have you heard a fan talk about how an artist or a song saved their life? What else saves lives? Food? Medicine? Defensive weapons? Those save the body. Music saves the will to live; it pulls you back from giving up and helps you face your fears, whether mortal or material.
Music has become one of the most powerful industries in the world, not because of its recording artist stars, but because of its metaphysical power, a power that has only relatively recently been commodified and packaged in its current form. Records are metaphysical prescriptions; spells you might say, dispensed with the same repeatable, controllable dosing a pill has. Play a song, deploy the same lyrical ingredients, every time, to every patient.
Long before recorded music, music was even more magical than it is now. For most of recorded human history, music was controlled by the church and other overarching societal powers because of its uncanny power to move the human psyche, and frankly, unite and uplift. The thing is, music is still controlled by an institution, it's just not the church, it's the music industry.
Even with recorded music, essentially the world’s greatest un-quantified “magic,” seemingly owned and controlled by industry gatekeepers, I believe music is one of the easiest entry points of piercing the materialistic wall; cracking the materialist monolith. It is a relatively low barrier to entry, a bridge, from the physical to the metaphysical.
We have admitted that sound waves are a physical yet invisible vibration that moves the bones in your middle ear in a way that triggers sensations in the brain, which trigger sensations in the body, just like food, just like medicine. Just like weapons cut through the flesh, music cuts through the mind and the soul.
Here is where it gets slippery. The sense that music moves the soul is ancient, but try saying out loud, right now, that substantial segments of popular music have become toxic for the soul, and you get laughed out of the room at best and berated at worst, the same way a handful of other moral and cultural concerns get shut down before they can be spoken. That reaction is exactly why no one, from what I've found, has built a formal way to weigh it. A spoken or sung word is sound too. A word is just a vibration we have collectively agreed to load with meaning, and that agreement is the entire difference between a word and a tone. The tone carries feeling, but the word carries a claim. A claim is the only thing you can put a moral charge to. You cannot indict a chord for what it says, because it says nothing in particular; the lyric says something in particular.
Opposite the physical forces we validate like food and medicine, we also validate invisible forces, yet none of these will shock you. I’m talking about x-rays, radio waves, WiFi, and Bluetooth. All of these are invisible technologies that we as consumers simply and exuberantly accept as magic. Why? We accept them because they're real and measurable, harnessed into devices by companies and rubber-stamped by institutions we trust, so we never personally look into the science. A key factor here is that we enforce limited exposure to all of them.
Some of these invisible technologies we use everyday, if cranked up, can cause harm to the human body. Crank an x-ray up and it shreds the cells of your body; crank an RF transmitter up and it cooks tissue with heat, so we’ve decided to legally force companies to limit availability of tools and devices that emit dangerous frequencies. Therein lies my direct bridge to “dangerous” frequencies in music. Exposure to invisible frequencies (ahem, magic) can produce dangerous results in humans, but there are no exposure limits to dangerous frequencies emanating from the invisible magic that is the lyric. Why? Because there’s no linearly correlated proof of danger. That is what The Rising Compass has set out to prove.
A Return
We once were a species of metaphysical understanding. We knew and accepted, collectively, that there was more than meets the eye, and we respected it. We may not have known how it works in the way we know how the system of the human body works, but we had faith. We had faith in the invisible forces of nature before the scientific “Enlightenment” of the eighteenth century, when logic and reason began to push faith in the invisible out of mainstream acceptance. I admit, religion had bastardized and compartmentalized it by then, so I’m not positing that the way faith was being presented was supremely healthy, but there was a time, even before then, that we did have general faith and reverence for the invisible powers of the universe.
When logic and reason (science) shifted towards dominance, instead of expanding upon and maintaining our metaphysical understanding, science slowly convinced us that the invisible, metaphysical world was a fairy tale, and what was left got partitioned off into organized, dogmatic religion. Science and physical matter became (and still are) the end-all-be-all of human existence and of life on Earth. The Rising Compass does not intend to disprove science. In fact, science is getting closer to proving the truth of metaphysics and the invisible forces of the natural universe, things modern physics hasn’t yet been able to reach.
We are collectively inching closer to the reintroduction of metaphysics, and The Rising Compass is an instrument that mimics the tools of science to encourage that reintroduction.
What The Rising Compass Is
Now, what does the instrument itself actually do? It measures an effect that's real whether you like it or not, and it applies a standard that we agree on together. The Rising Compass reads the lyrics of a song and gives it a score, called a charge. The charge consists of a number and a tier: a numerical score from +100 to -100 and the tier of positive/negative frequency into which that integer falls. The tiers are Ascended, Elevated, Decent, Degraded and Corrupted. The matching colors are Violet, Blue, Green, Orange and Red. If there's a song that ranks as Ascended, Elevated or Decent but contains messages that promote, normalize or glorify Degraded or Corrupted traits, there's a contamination tag attached. If a song is dogmatic, it is tagged as such. If a song is translated from its native language to English, that is also tagged. However, the AI behind The Rising Compass can read many languages natively, so we submit original lyrics whenever possible.
Sidebar on the word Decent: I settled on the label Decent for “the middle” tier after several sessions of deliberation. At first I went with “normal,” but quickly was reminded that normal is a setting on the dryer. I tried a few more words like neutral, but none of them were fair to the mass of songs that fall in the true middle of the spectrum. Songs that don’t do harm and don’t do good, songs that are pure entertainment, don’t move the needle much, but they move it nonetheless. Even a song that nets out to zero isn't static; it's still saying something, still present. “Neutral” implies nothing is happening at all, so I settled on a word that neither discounts nor endorses, nor describes staticity: Decent.
The Rising Compass’s brain is built on one of the most advanced AI models, Anthropic’s Claude. Claude already carries a broad moral baseline, trained on a vast range of human writing and shaped by a documented alignment process. That gives the instrument its starting standard. The consensus comes from the public: people motion, deliberate and ratify that standard through the Audience Vibe and the Motion and Amendment system.
From the start, I’ve hedged against my own personal subjectivity from leaking into the tool. I’ve tediously ensured that The Rising Compass is as formulaic and bias-resistant as possible. The measurement is applied consistently by the instrument; the standard is ratified by the public via the Audience Vibe.
The Audience Vibe is a feature that allows the public to cast a vote on whether a song’s charge should be moved up or down. Another public feature is the Motion and Amendment system, a constitution-like system to call for and ratify changes to the instrument.
Doesn’t Measuring The Vibe Kill It?
Only if you let it. If you're listening to something that the Compass says is Corrupted, and then you feel like maybe you don't want to listen to it anymore, isn't that a good thing? Not an easy thing, but a good thing? That's what the Rising Compass is meant to do; open the door to actually being honest with ourselves, individually and collectively. It’s built to offer an honest and voluntary way to ask ourselves: are we, individually or collectively, revelling in degradation and corruption a little too much? Are we reenacting our favorite songs over and over? Are we living vicariously through music, for better or worse?
Preempting The Kill Shot
There is a reflex that rises again and again something like this: that scoring the charge of a song is censorship, the Hays Code and the Comics Code all over again. No. This is the exact opposite, and the conflation is worth killing on sight.
Those codes crushed dissent and marginalized people and truths like interracial love, gay existence, and anything disrespectful to authority of the moment. That was not measurement. That was the machine: power deciding what could be seen in order to protect itself. The Rising Compass is the instrument built to expose that machine, not to become it. It could only cross into that machine by gaining the power to ban or gate, which is exactly why it is built to do neither and why its rubric is public and open to amendment. The day it removes options, it has become the thing it was built to expose, and that is the day to shut it off. The codes demanded censorship; they hid things. The Rising Compass reveals. One is a hand over the mouth. The other is the lights coming on.
When you suppress expression, the need to express it only grows. The fact that humans want, on a global scale, to express degraded and corrupted content is a symptom of the wounds still afflicting our society. When the appetite for degradation leaks through every crack you try to seal, the leak is not the problem. The wound is. You do not heal a wound by hiding it. You heal it by finally looking at it. The codes were a bandage thrown over something no one would name. The Rising Compass names it.
So strip the objection to the bone. The Rising Compass asks for nothing. It does not lobby, complain, or call for banning of songs, genres or expression of any kind. It only makes the charge visible. “Leave my art alone” criers assume the Rising Compass wants to take away their toy: their freedom to revel in degraded and corrupted media. Realize this and the fear of the toy being taken away is stripped down to: “Do not look at me. Do not look at my wounds. Let me play in the dark.”
No one can say that out loud and be validated. There is no principle that grants you the right to do a thing and forbids the rest of us from describing the thing you did. That is why it always shows up in costume, dressed as free speech, as expression, as art. Pull the costume off and there is nothing under it but a demand to keep the lights off.
The ferocity of the objection to something like the Rising Compass is the proof. Nobody writes a manifesto to protect a toy. Nobody riots over Monopoly. The heat of the defense is the exact measure of how much it was never just entertainment. Shrug at the Compass and you have conceded it is harmless, so let it stand. Rage at it and you have confessed, out loud, that a song is a force worth defending to the death, which was the whole point.
This was never about measurement. It is about visibility, and who and what of society has been thriving under the cover of darkness. Make the vibe visible, and the only ones still objecting are the ones who relied on its invisibility. Let them tell you why.
Making The Vibe Visible
Music is the first complex the Compass is pointed at, but it won't be the last. The Rising Compass intends to make the vibe visible in many ways. Music, being one of the lowest barriers to building a bridge from the seen to the unseen, is just the beginning of making the metaphysical just as valid and visible as the physical in our world today. Without the awareness and validation of the metaphysical aspects of existence, we're missing half, if not more, of what it is to be human and living on Earth in this universe.
We'll start with music and move to other entertainment and other forms of intangible charge. Everything carries a frequency, a vibe, and what we do is read its charge and put it on a scale. Measuring the invisible is the whole project: positive and negative, good vibes and bad, and most importantly, the spectrum between.
When we give the metaphysical a voice, when we make the vibe visible, humanity will be forever changed. We once had reverence for the invisible but no way to measure it. Then we built instruments and aimed them only at matter. For the first time, we can carry both at once: the reverence and the measure. That is closer to our Natural State than recorded history has ever allowed.
There's a lot more to do than just “making the vibe visible” through one digital platform, and that's all that I'm claiming this is at this time. It’s one platform. But once we see the vibe, what we do with it is a whole different story. A story that’s being written right now. The Rising Compass is just an early chapter in the story of humanity’s return to consciousness.
