There are songs that want to make you feel good, songs that want to make you dance, and songs that apparently looked at the fentanyl crisis and went, “Right, we’re going to need guitars for this.”
That is “Salt,” the single from Washington, D.C. artist G Sharp BIG 40. Inspired by a news story about a young person who died after taking contaminated Percocet, the track tackles the fentanyl epidemic with all the subtlety of someone kicking down the door. And honestly, subtlety would probably be the wrong approach here.
The title itself comes from the horrifying reality behind the song: fentanyl being mixed into other substances in tiny amounts, almost casually, “like salt.” It is a simple metaphor, but that simplicity makes it hit harder. There is nothing abstract about what G Sharp BIG 40 is talking about. This is about addiction, contaminated drugs, and the fact that the crisis is close enough to affect almost everyone somehow.
Musically, “Salt” is just as rough around the edges as its subject matter. G Sharp BIG 40 combines hip-hop with guitar-driven rock, creating something that feels less like a carefully polished studio production and more like somebody decided the basement was perfectly good enough to make a record in and well, it was.
G Sharp BIG 40 is essentially a one-man band, handling the performance and production himself from the basement of his home, where he is also raising his children. His production philosophy is wonderfully unscientific: he basically twists knobs until something sounds cool.
That approach gives “Salt” its personality.
There is an appealing lack of studio perfection here. The track does not sound like it was engineered to remove every rough edge and package the subject into something commercially comfortable. Instead, the DIY quality becomes part of the message. The music feels immediate, imperfect and angry in a way that suits what it is actually trying to say.
That does not mean “Salt” is simply misery set to a beat. There is energy underneath the subject matter, particularly in the collision between the hip-hop elements and guitar-heavy attack. G Sharp BIG 40 understands that music can be a place to process something awful without turning the experience into a lecture and I find that to be the song’s biggest strength.
“Salt” is not pretending it can solve the fentanyl crisis in four minutes. It is doing something smaller: taking a terrible reality, turning it into sound, and hoping somebody hears it.
Sometimes that is enough to start a conversation.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for various publications around the world, the former lead writer of review blogspace Atop The Treehouse and content creator for Manila Bulletin.
