TITLE: "Anthrax"
ARTIST: Gang of Four
ALBUM: Return the Gift
RELEASE DATE: 2005
December 1990: I'm invited to a party at a new friend's apartment deep in the East Village. In typical fashion, I arrive to the neighborhood way early. As I've lamented before, I'm chronically guilty of getting places far ahead of schedule -- which often results in me being the "first guy at the party" (i.e. loser). Not wanting to make that impression this time around, I decide that a good stroll around the neighborhood will kill sufficient time enough for me to arrive at a more fashionable hour. With a cassette (remember those?) in my Walkman (how about those?) of the then-newly-released Gang of Four compilation, A Brief History of The Twentieth Century, I go for an atmospherically snowy stroll around the then-still-ominously squalid and comparatively desolate East Village and Lower East Side, scored by the fittingly chilly and brittle sounds of one of my favorite ever bands.
It's an evening that has stayed with me all these years later. It's not the band's more raucous tracks that I associate with that walk around those cold, lonely streets in the snowy dark so much as the more sparse, plodding ones. The haunted melodica (a.k.a. "hooter") during "It's Her Factory" especially matched the moment. Similarly, I can't hear "I Will Be A Good Boy" or "Womantown" now without thinking of that night. Andy Gill's jagged, fragmented guitars are now inexorably linked in my mind to that experience.
December 2007: I'm bound for a music venue on Delancey Street to witness a benefit concert in support of Dave Eggers' youth literacy program, 826NYC. It is another snowy December night, and I almost instinctively find myself selecting a random shuffle of Gang of Four songs on my iPod for my walk through the very same neighborhood. When Andy Gill's guitar crackles into my headphones during the opening moments of this song (this particular version culled from the 2005 album of re-recorded favorites, Return The Gift), I am eerily transported right back to that snowy walk of almost exactly seventeen years ago. Of course, the East Village and the Lower East Side are very different places today than they were then (I was kinda taking my chances at the time, in retrospect), but the same haunting vibe returns without fail. Fittingly, once again I find myself ahead of schedule and am forced to circumnavigate the same dark, lonely streets with Gang of Four providing the soundtrack.
I have no great point to make here. But the next time you find yourself alone on a dark snowy night in the bowels of the Lower East Side and happen to have an iPod with you, might I strongly recommend the Gang of Four.
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