1989

In 1989 I was 13 years old and just becoming politicized. I wasn't a militant young black man, but what I gleaned from PE was that there were things worth changing, and the possibility existed that we just might change them. We were going to create racial equality, harmony, understanding, tolerance. We were going to cure AIDS, eliminate hunger, colonize space, save the damn planet. The fuck happened?

Musically, holy shit -- pick a style, let me point to a seminal (or at least important, or at the very least "pretty damn good") album released that year. How about Full Moon Fever, 3 Feet High and Rising, Doolittle, Raw Like Sushi, The Stone Roses, Bleach, The Real Thing, Margin Walker and Paul's Boutique?

I don't want to fawn over what then held cache and now looks hopelessly kitschy ("the hair was funny! the pants were big!"), but try to remember what it felt like to be alive then (if applicable). It was naive and fresh and fun. We were smack in the middle of the Golden Age of Rap. Nobody had died since John Lennon. Am I remembering this right? The goddamned Berlin Wall fell! Communism was totally on its last legs. And even if the notion that The People made it happen turned out to be a romantic exaggeration (cf: Bulgarian blue jeans, heavy debt loads, inept leadership, wasteful and redundant systems... any of this sound startlingly familiar?), it sure felt like the future was a ripe oyster eager to split itself open and reveal to us, the youth, its slick and shiny treasure.

Ha ha!

The 21st Century never done me no favours.

Over the weekend my wife and I were doing some housepainting, and in the course of choosing some music to soundtrack the chore she said to me, "Let's relive 1995," and proceeded to throw some Verve, Cardigans, Massive Attack and Superchunk into the deck (yeah, we were those people). It was an enjoyable excercise, but yet another in a string of moments that make you think, Will I ever be relevant again? Which is to say, have I discovered all the music I'll ever love?

Fast forward to today, a rainy Monday, and my daughter and I were futzing around the house, making guacamole, hacking up a watermelon. These activities required musical backing, so I fired up a bunch of MP3s. None of which were from the current century, as it happened. None.

The culprits: Fela Kuti (pictured), Charlie Parker, Woody Shaw, Tlahoun Gessesse, Otis Redding, Mongo Santamaria, Toots and the Maytals, the Lovejoys, Eric Dolphy and Tony Allen.

Maybe the 20th Century didn't make any sense, but the '00s make even less. I miss "sir" and "ma'am." Rotary dial. Looking it up in a book. Formalities.

And right now I'm watching a ball game, Diamondbacks-Dodgers, and digging it because Vin Scully is doing the play-by-play, and I love Vin Scully. Why do I love Vin Scully? Because he works alone, and because he sounds like 1950.

All of which begs the question: Am I a man out of time?