Note: When talking about Aries in the abstract, I’ll use “it”; this isn’t to say that anyone with a Sun or other planet in Aries will act exactly this way, because people are more complex than that; I’m talking about the archetypal energy of Aries. This’ll hold for the whole series.
Commencing right with the vernal equinox, Aries is the overture to the Zodiac wheel and embodies all the most vital aspects of spring. Come on in! it calls. The existence is fine!
II’m reminded of a verse of Kalamu ya Salaam—Aries poet extraordinaire who turns seventy-five this week—that captures the essence of Life’s very inception. From his poem “We are all amphibians” (emphasis mine):
breathing beneath water, initially encased in a placenta contained within maternal flesh until we outgrew the pond and dove to birth to walk upright on earth
With this will-to-life animating, Aries is all about high energy, high hopes, and joie de vivre. This drive for action and spark can lead by turns to Big Results or, well, Big Fuck-ups. But Aries energy never lays low for long (“ain’t no grave…”): it’s never afraid of what its own agitations might bring. I mean, Aries is hardly afraid of anything. Cowardice is one of the few things that can draw judgment out of its generally tolerant nature (“Ah, somebody cut out your heart, you refuse to feel”).
As a grade schooler, my best friend at the time—an Aries, in fact!—and I had a passion for calling one another (and other ppl, more quietly) “fools.” We loved the audacity of the double o, the giddy rudeness of the rhymes it evoked: drool, ghoul, tool. With peals of laughter we’d bellow it from our guts at the most irreverent moments, half condemnation, half benediction. Me fool, you fool, he, she, we fools.
My father frowned when he picked up on this, letting me know that when he was young, he’d been taught that a fool was one of the worst things you could call a person—an intervention that meant little to me then, but has stuck with me since. It reflects a sensibility I now trace to a twentieth- (and nineteenth-, and eighteenth-…) century Black Southern context, where even a stray moment’s “foolishness”—i.e. less than preternatural prudence—could cost somebody everything. The flip-side of that, of course, is foolishness as intrinsic, inevitable human folly—something Black people in the Jim Crow or antebellum South, denied humanity by society, were not afforded, and so could rarely afford to afford themselves. Scrupulous self-governance as an effort toward agency under relentless white supremacist oppression. [On that note, one lagniappe song that I planned to include on this ‘list before Spotify grayed it out: “Warrior in Woolworths,” Poly Styrene’s ode to the civil rights activists who sat in at segregated lunch counters.]
In the Tarot, the Fool gets played a little differently. The first card of the major arcana, its number 0, the Fool is a natural complement to the inciting, fresh-faced energy of Aries, and that’s the spirit of the playlist’s title. Just like the chicken you’ll meet below, the Tarot’s carefree fool embraces the possibility of failure while trusting in the eventuality of meaningful lessons—or at least a wild ride, which ain’t nothing either. Sometimes, the joy of risk is stripped from us; other times, we forget that it takes courage to be open.
When I lived on Dumaine Street, a flock of chickens slept up in a live oak tree at night after pecking around the corner all day. In the first weeks of their new chicks’ lives, mother hens would gather the babies under a raised house overnight to keep everyone safe. But as spring wore on, the time came for the pullets and cockerels to take the inevitable upward dive and learn to roost like the rest of their kin.
This chick was the latest bloomer of its brood.
Let its self-hyping peeps bursting into self-initiation be an inspiration for exhilaration!
This chick’s energy is mirrored on the playlist by trailblazers Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in 1969, and Odetta, who boldly blended folk, children’s music, and spirituals with a belly-quakingly operatic delivery, along with powerhouses Grace Jones and Diana Ross. Sinéad O’Connor, who tore up a photo of Pope John Paul II in a 1992 SNL appearance as an incendiary protest against the child sexual abuse epidemic in the Catholic church, is also notable here. (And yes, Euphoria season 2 led me to this particular song of hers. If you know, you know, for better or for worse.)
Elemental as gravity or as wingstrokes against it, Aries can be prone to oversimplification or naïveté (“There’s a light in the darkness of everybody’s life”) for the sake of momentum. It tends to lack the more footnoted vision of say, Aquarian energy, going instead on gut-felt vision. But then, unflaggingly confident optimism can be exactly what’s needed to get shit started, with the finer points left for a later date. When a bridle is what’s called for, though, Aries can get frustrated (“Don’t bring me down!”), aggro (“There go the gun click”), or sullen (“A man gets tied up to the ground / He gives the world / its saddest sound”). But flareups rarely last long, for Aries is also about keepin it positive and keepin it moving toward the horizon (or tree bough).
Good sports all around, Aries thrives on healthy competition, though they’re hardly afraid to break the rules or play by their own (“We down to break the law, bitch!”). Affable teammate and verified fan of the underdog, still, Aries will never shy from the glory of MVP status. For the rugged ram, one is truly the magic number—a tendency that can read as arrogance, but is just as often a stirring vision of ego-integrity.
This one goes out to Lydia, one of my all-time favorite Aries, who once got us out of Rome when I was dead certain our cause was lost before we even got on the commuter train. “We should just rebook when we get to the airport,” I grumbled to make official what I assumed everyone else was thinking. “No!” Lydia shot back from across the aisle, fighting half with the clock and half with me. “We’re doing our best! We’re gonna make it!”
I resisted my urge to point out that sometimes, one’s best just isn’t enough—which was good, because then I would’ve had to have eaten more of my words.
“Everybody have your stuff together,” they instructed. “As soon as the doors open, we’re running.”
Some well-placed appeals, a few nasty blisters, one pair of confiscated boudoir handcuffs (could that holdup have come at a worse time?), and a whole lot of scurrying later, damn if our asses weren’t on that rickety plane to Athens. Thanks again, Lyd ❤️
Happy Equinox! May all your gambles pay off
and all your trails blaze to high heaven.
more soon 🌙 !
Chelsey K. Shannon 