It's too late to change events

Something comforting about this song to me today, beyond that it reminds me of any ordinary day during my summer stay in France, drinking hot chocolate in the morning out of a big bowl while pop radio blared overhead in the windowless self.



I think 1990 is becoming another musical It Year for me. Something to think about, especially these moments these days when all I wanna do is go back, not forward.

You wrote the note.

This track serenaded me during wheels-down in a gray, rainy France in June all those years ago--not to visit, to live. As we coasted on the tarmac at CDG, that guitar riff barked out of foam-covered headphones and a worn TDK in my player, and the cascade of drums urged me from apprehension to exhilaration. I was gonna do it.

What, I didn't know. But I was. I had to. I was already there.

And, funny, I thought I didn't have this--and I had wanted it--but it is already here.

French Kiss

I've been watching this history of house music documentary in fits and starts over the last couple of weeks, to enliven chores that must be done during pre-bedtime brain-deadening hours on weeknights, which seems appropriate given the repetitive but enlivening nature of the form itself.

I've gotten to late 80s London thus far; the music has moved from Chicago to acid house nights at The Hacienda in "Madchester" to raves in undisclosed London locations.

Then, as if was shot back in time some twenty-four (!) years, my attention snapped to while performing some drudgery (probably laundry) when this track began to accompany the documentary's talking-head remembrances about loads of E and something Paul Oakenfold did.

I'm 90% sure that I heard this for the first time in "the boîte" (club--there was a dude I worked with there who'd ask nearly every week, "Arrrh you goeeeng to the BOITE tonight, mademoiselle?") in France during the summer of 1990. The timing would be right. And the title.



I definitely heard it later, back in Milwaukee in a club (not a "boite," but probably Esoteria). Oh, it moves you around like an insistent, hypnotic sonofabitch--until it becomes a sonofabitch to dance to around the six-minute mark, for reasons that are clear--as well as definite reprise of an earlier, ground-breaking (shaking?) effect that was more integrated into the track itself.