Nostalgia of the Day

Oh man.

This single was such a masterpiece. Shame about, well, most of the rest of the album. I really remember those years, 2001-2004 or so as being this magic period where everyone with ears seemed to suddenly find one another. I can't describe it better than that. But maybe this track is a great example. Depeche Mode-loving Ethiopian-American man writes a great song with British New Wave and American Alternative influences while collaborating with one half of the hottest Pop/R&B/Hip-Hop production team of the decade. It was this brief period where "everything" seemed to work, meaning that the total collapse of previous meaning systems expressed through genre actually seemed to unleash a short but beautiful burst of creativity before "everything" suddenly became nothing.

Yeah, it may just be nostalgia for my early twenties, but those days of listening to free jazz one day and, say, a Kylie Minogue record produced by Kurtis Mantronik the next, all the while saving up for the Greensleeves Diwali compilation seemed to point to possibilities that never seemed to arrive, a world that never came to be.

Yes, it could be, of course, that art is a lie, that that world could have never existed outside of my own perception, and yet, and yet, and yet, you know what, fuck you, you are wrong. Maybe the world will never live up to what I could imagine it being, but, at least at some point, I lived in a world that seemed to want to be worthy of the hopes I and others had for it.