Backwards Century

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti “Hot Body Rub”

One of my favorite unrealistic fantasies is to have the means to travel backwards in time for brief visits to various points in the 20th century, mostly in NYC. It’s mostly a desire to walk around and experience the environment first hand, and to focus on small details – the look and sound and feel of things, the internal logic of culture in the moment. These things get captured in art, but it’s always skewed by interpretation. This Ariel Pink song has that sort of time travel feeling to it, but it’s really more like an impression of a time and place passed down and warped by endless replication and recontextualization that it’s more like a shared memory of something that wasn’t ever quite real. I mean, the effect of this piece almost certainly has more to do with cinematic representations of the ’70s and early ’80s than anything else, but it’s vague enough that it doesn’t come off as a reference to any specific thing. Nevertheless, you can hear this and feel as though you’re somewhere vaguely familiar, that somehow these sounds have something to do with the past. (Maybe that’s why the album it is from is titled Before Today.) It’s no time machine, but it will do.

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