Just kids.
When I was a much younger man—i.e. a teenager, i.e. innocent, precocious, wide-eyed and still just so full of Excitement! for Life! (i.e. basically all the things for which Present Day Me has now come to resent the shit out of Young Me)—I used to ask every old school New Yorker I met about What It Was Like back in the day, about what it must have felt like to be young and to be living in the city when “Some Girls” came out or when the New York Dolls formed or when “Horses” was released or when the Talking Heads got together or when “Marquee Moon” came out or—the list was endless!
And tonight I’m riding the subway and I start worrying about how long it’ll be before some uppity Young starts asking me What It Was Like, and then it’s not too long before I start worrying even more so about what the Youngs are going to be wondering about in ten or twenty years, because seriously! What’s it going to be? “Hey Old, what was it like to be a New Yorker when ‘Oracular Spectacular’ came out? When Grizzly Bear played the Pool Parties? When Vampire Weekend hadn’t sold out yet and gone on Lollapalooza? When Lady Gaga filled Madison Square Garden?”
And how will we even answer them?! “Yeah kid, the Dirty Projectors were fresh and all but holy shit did you ever see that YouTube of Static Cling Cat v. The Balloon?”
