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One Song I Had Totally Forgotten About
New Young Pony Club: “Ice Cream”
While killing time before the Grace Ives concert, browsing in a clothing store with a name I will not mention because no free ads here, my spirit was briefly teleported back to the golden age of indie sleaze — 2007! — when whatever algorithm had been programmed to provide millennials like me with a pleasantly nostalgic shopping experience served up this bit of post-punk blog-rock ephemera. I tried desperately to remember the name of the band, to prove that constant access to the internet has not completely ravaged my memory … but it has, so I Shazam-ed it. New Young Pony Club! Of course. Apparently their drummer, Sarah Jones, now plays in Harry Styles’s backing band, and N.Y.P.C. is reuniting for a gig in London next month, if you need further proof that the mid-aughts are so back.
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One New Song
Olivia Rodrigo: “The Cure”
I’m not the only one who hears a Smashing Pumpkins influence in Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single, “The Cure”; those ominous opening chords give me some welcome “Disarm” vibes. Incidentally, Rodrigo has said that “Siamese Dream” was one of the albums her mother listened to when she was pregnant with her, a fact that makes me feel even older than Shazamming a New Young Pony Club song does.
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… And One for Rob Base
Lyn Collins: “Think (About It)”
Finally, this week hip-hop lost yet another of its pioneers way too young, when the Harlem rapper Rob Base died at age 59. Base was the M.C. on “It Takes Two,” the immortal 1988 hit he released with his musical partner DJ E-Z Rock, who died in 2014 at the also-way-too-young age of 46. “It Takes Two” was built around an exuberant sample of this 1972 funk tune by Lyn Collins, written and produced by none other than James Brown. Although the Collins song’s kinetic beat and ecstatic “woo! yeah!” would go on to be sampled so frequently that it became known simply as “the ‘Think’ break,” Base and DJ E-Z Rock were among the first to recognize its brilliance.
“A lot of people said, ‘Oh too much ‘woo, yeah,’ you need to take it out at some point,’” Base said in a 2018 interview with Rolling Stone. “I had to fight and say, ‘Nah, we got to keep that in the whole record. That’s got to stay in there.’” Rest in peace to a man who knew there’s no such thing as too much “woo! yeah!”
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