Do You Think That You Can Hold On
Roni Size & Reprazent—Railing (1997/ Drum and Bass)
Hello internet pals of music. Today we’re thinking about the future from back in the past with what still feels like the sound of the future.
“The year 2000 is now as far away as the year 2050”
That’s a real-life text I got this morning. I remember NYE 1999 well. I deejayed at a house party, hosted in a perfectly-90s situation: a rented postwar bungalow in Austin that probably now goes for almost a million but cost $500 to rent back then, by a German PhD candidate that I’m still convinced will help cure cancer—his focus at the time.
I played a lot of rap. But I also played some drum and bass, and no one was into it, really.
Didn’t matter to me, though. I was wasted.
SERMONS! is reader-supported. If you’re wishing to support our work, I encourage you to become a subscriber. Otherwise, we’ll all probably forget about this thing.
A record I didn’t have but wanted so badly to play was “Railing”. And the reason I wanted to play it is because on NYE 1997, DJ Sun played it at as his first song of 1998. And I went apeshit.
I was at the legendary Austin movie theatre-turned music venue-turned bar-turned back again to movie theater, The Ritz. In the 80s, it hosted punk / hardcore legends like Black Flag, The Misfits & Big Boys. By the late 90s, it was a giant, university meat market bar. People might know it now as the home of The Alamo Drafthouse. My best friend worked at a restaurant next door. The owner of that restaurant also co-owned this bar. So I was friends with the staff by proxy and I got a lot of free drinks—I was there often waiting for my friend to get off work, and then shucking quarters into the pool tables while devouring pints of Samuel Smith’s Nut Brown Ale, or double Tanqueray & Tonics. I wasn’t trying to be pretentious, I just sort of fell into a strange Anglophilic fugue state.
I guess I did want to move to London around this time, but first I’d thought about NYC.
I was there at The Ritz on NYE 1998 with a lot of friends. One of them was a woman I’ll call JS. I’d known her through the social circuit, but recently she’d started dating my roommate. We hit it off, and she saw some sort of potential in me and insisted I needed to be in NYC—where she had lived and was going back to live—and not small sleepy college town Austin. It really was a different town then, but not for too much longer.
She and I both were going nuts over Roni Size & Reprazent at the time. I listened to New Forms daily, from my portable CD player, zipping through Austin traffic on my bike. It made me feel invincible and so beyond all of you. The future felt amazing, and I felt like the future, stuck in the past.
So I wanted to move to NYC, too. And then didn’t. And then wanted to move to London. And then didn’t.
But in 1998, DJ Sun started off the New Year with this song, and it felt like the future, and the future was so exciting, and the world was going to be so amazingly sci-fi in the coolest of ways: cyberpunks hacking a new world away from the bloated carcass of the capitalist past.
Like, I really believed that shit. Wired magazine, culture jamming, the internet…
And this song sounded like the dawn of that new moment, where everything would work in completely unfamiliar ways and we would bury all of the rotting bloat-bags of The Old World.
When this came on that night, JS and I went apeshit. I think she stayed in NYC. For years we kept up and she told me hilarious stories about her fantastical NYC life, that for the longest time I wondered how believable it actually was—from working for Spike Lee, to dating both Quentin Tarantino and DJ Premier. She was fucking cool and smart and gorgeous so it wouldn’t surprise me. But it also doesn’t matter, it makes for a great story.
Let’s try and be excited again, about the future. I know that’s so hard these days. The world seems so fucked. But so it always has, in the moment. And so it always will. So I give you this song as armor.
SERMONS! is brought to you by Musik Klub. You can also find Jamie on Twitter and Instagram, if that’s your thing. Like what you’re hearing? Help spread the word!
Musik Klub: “Everythang’s Workin”
I remember when ‘New Forms’ won the Mercury Music Prize in 1997. I had been living in London for four years; it felt like the center of the universe, and England was part of “Cool Britannia.”
People used to ask me if I would ever move back to the States, and I replied with a quick and sharp, “No!” Thinking back on NYE 1997/1998, my life also changed as our first child was born in late Dec. 1997. Time flies, but man, I remember those carefree days well. London was a different city back then, too.
Happy New Year from your old haunt, Vancouver, BC, Jamie!