The world has changed so much.
This song came out in 2003: "Ground Zero" was still a hole, practically still smoldering, the United States had invaded Iraq in March (one of the greatest acts of folly committed by any nation in human history), and I had just graduated from college and moved to Minneapolis. I would actually get to visit New York City in the fall of 2003, see where it all started, the hole at Ground Zero, and consider my future as an educated adult in this madhouse of a country I was born into. On a societal scale, there seemed very little joy left in anything. It seemed all washed out, like the staticky shock you feel after getting t-boned at 50 mph.
And yet, some of the most sweet, happy memories of my life also come from that same time.
After graduating and getting established in Minneapolis, I began going out to see my other friends who had relocated to be part of the lively Minneapolis creative scene. Most of my pals were musical, but Minneapolis was a cultural center on many other fronts as well. This was an age ago, when arthouse movie theaters were still functioning - even arthouse video rental places still existed!
I remember the night, over at a gathering, that I mentioned to my new friend Evan that I was going to 2001: A Space Odyssey at the Oak Street Cinema, a charming old one-screen arthouse that showed excellent classic films every night of the week just off the University of Minnesota campus. Evan said it sounded cool and went along with me. And then we proceeded to watch about a thousand additional movies together, in theaters as well as rentals long into many nights, long before streaming was a glimmer in anyone's eye. We became film-obsessed together, and that dark summer of 2003 also came to stand as a monument to the founding of that relationship.
One of the highlights of things Evan and I saw at the Oak Street Cinema was a compilation of music videos produced by the super-hip Aughts collective Shinola, who were on the forefront of a kind of colorful, whimsical, lo-fi surrealism sweeping indie culture then. You saw this same aesthetic in everything from the videos and films of Michel Gondry to middle-period Beck albums to even Yo Gabba Gabba, a wild, musical kids show on Nickelodeon. Shinola especially were pioneers in all sorts of digital effects, opening doors to the kinds of visual insanity that seem quite common these days.
Probably the biggest joy of that night was seeing their video for a song we'd never heard before, a super-catchy dance song called "Move Your Feet" by Junior Senior. I don't usually link to music videos for songs, but I made an exception in this case, because to me, that video is integral to the song itself. That's to Shinola's credit - but also the song's: So catchy, so repetitive in all the right ways, such a funky drum beat. The song's pure sugary coolness willed into existence Shinola's images of simple silliness and escape.
And it was escape.
This was a time of catastrophic human collapse on a broad scale worldwide, of stupidity, malice, profligacy, nationalism, and every other Dark Side trap we could have fallen into. 9/11 transformed the United States. I didn't have to, but it did. Young people who don't remember pre-2001 will never understand. And we were next to powerless to stop it, because the overall population bought into the idea of sweet revenge for the shock and national embarrassment of 9/11. Reports would come out that maybe the Pentagon was pushing unsubstantiated evidence of Iraq's involvement in 9/11, but the reports were meek and thus unpersuasive. Stupidity went ahead unchecked.
So instead, many who perceived the folly found a new way to protest. Many of our great artists began producing a kind of sarcastic happiness, a kind of cryptic washing of hands of the whole drama. They and us, their fans, decided to busy ourselves with finding all the joy we could in the midst of anarchy. At this time when mainline pop music was full of mannequins being moved to the old shimmies of the New Kids On the Block, and when uncreative bands like Nickelback and Creed were still plucking the heartstrings of the Hummer owners, this fun, electronic, '80s-inspired dance-pop music emerged on the indie scene. It would come to influence (get ripped off by) much of mainstream pop music that we hear today.
The Oak Street Cinema is long gone now. Streaming dominates. People don't need to leave their homes. Big screens, theater sound quality, and often even the sharing of viewing experiences with others are apparently acceptable sacrifices. But Evan is still my best bud. We still get out to big screen films once in a while, when schedules align. We still recall the good old days. I still see the interest in his face as he opted to come to that screening of 2001.
As it turned out, the Aughts were a unique, fun time to be in my 20s. All it took was good friends to find it.
And historic disgrace.
