Laura C by Big Supermarket is a song about Tomb Raider. I love it.

Part of the reason why, is that I cannot reliably hear the downbeat in the right place. There is a clear "right" way to hear it that my mind can snap into if I try, but most of the time I hear it spasmodic style.

In the "wrong" way of hearing it, the bass drum hits on the one, which is a ubiquitous convention of rock music, and something I am very biased towards hearing.

But by that counting, the rest of the beat makes no sense: there's a snare hit on the first "and" and then on the "four" - a non-ubiquitous unconvention.

By comparison, hearing it the "right" way (with the bass drum on the first "and") gives the song a natural, head-bumping groove. When my mind lurches over to hearing it this way, it immediately makes sense and I feel almost, like, relief?

This doesn't seem to happen to other people as much. Some get a little confused in trying to count it, though I think it often has more to do with the song's timing being kind of imprecise and wobbly, not due to an ambiguous downbeat. In my surveying, most people only ever hear it the "right" way, and struggle to hear it my way at all - if they do, it's usually with effort and incredulity.

It reminds me of the spinning dancer illusion. I used to be scared that I would lose my ability to perceive it one way or the other, but so far, it seems like I'm always able to oscillate between the two, unlike another kind of illusion that is famously one way.

It's been highly enriching to have a song that highlights instability of my subjectivity so reliably... and it bumps, too!