Air

Pity the poor French band Air. Masterfully mixing outdated textures and melodies with up-to-the-second production, this duo released an incredible collection of timeless, largely instrumental tracks on the brilliant Moon Safari album. The shimmery Bacharach melodies and spacey production pulls the best cheese from the '60s and '70s and the mellowest '90s chill-out room tricks and blends them together into irresistible postmodern sonic goo. Ideal for late night parties, afternoon picnics, or just chillin’ like a villain, this is pure perfect pop in all of its guiltless glory and perfectly captured the mood of the day, as one century gave way to another and people retreated into warm and fuzzy memories of futures past, trying to escape the present future. It is, in fact, one of the few perfect albums in my collection, and, not only that, one of the even fewer perfect albums that were a group’s debut (see also The Cars and Fountains of Wayne and their eponymous releases). When you grand slam it out of the park on your first time at bat, what can you do for an encore? Well, like every other band that hits perfection on their first try, you falter a bit. Stalling for time, Air released a collection of their early singles called Premiers Symptoms (from which this track was culled), and scored Sophia Coppola’s directing debut, The Virgin Suicides. Then they held their breath and released 10,000 Hz Legend, which was considerably darker and more experimental than anything they had done before. Fans and critics weren’t amused, but it’s almost as if they had to get the sophomore slump behind them so they could continue. After taking a couple of years off (except for a strange spoken word hybrid recorded with Alessandro Baricco), and helping score Sophia Coppola’s well-received Lost in Translation, Air released Talkie Walkie, which effectively straddles the dark experimentalism of 10,000 Hz Legend with the pure pop confection of Moon Safari. It’s good, but still not quite as good as their debut. But, unfortunately for them, what could be?

When I moved to LA, there was a serious recession going on. Back when “Generation X” was being shat upon for being slackers and losers, things looked pretty bleak. The Boomers had ripped through the culture one generation ahead of us and, in their (hopefully) inimitable fashion, burned all the bridges after them. They got all the sex and drugs, we got AIDS and “just say no”. They got the jobs, the community, the sense of empowerment, we got none of that, plus we had to put up with their unbearably smug and patronizing attitudes. While most American generations (at least in the 20th century) reasonable expected that their lifestyle would be better than the one before, those expectations crashed around our ears. We would never have the things our parents had. And at the top of the list of unreachable goals was a house. I was convinced, along with all of my friends at the time, that I would never own my own home. How could I? I could barely make enough to support myself from day to day, there wasn’t any way to save up the kind of money or take on the kind of debt that buying a house entailed. Plus houses were outrageously, inconceivably expensive. Our parents were full to bursting with stories about how they bought a house for $35,000 and then sold it twenty years later for $350,000 (or, better yet, my grandmother who had bought her giant house on a corner lot in a very desirable Seattle neighborhood for $9500), but that clearly wasn’t going to be happening to us. The market peaked and, besides, there wasn’t any way to get in the market so it was all depressingly irrelevant.

Then my dad died. As his only nonfictional child (his is a long and complicated and ultimately unresolvable kind of story), I was responsible for closing up his affairs, but I also was the sole recipient of his insurance money. A bogglingly hefty chunk for me (at $100,000, it was about four times my yearly wages), I suddenly found myself in the real estate market. Well, we found ourselves in the real estate market, as my father’s untimely death pulled my wife and I closer together and pushed us into the next phase of our relationship – one that now includes two small children. Due to shear luck, the LA housing market was near the very bottom, having suffered badly due to the recession and the Northridge earthquake that convinced so many people to move away.

Before long, we were sitting in the backyard, sipping margaritas and watching our little bundle of boy crawl across the grass. The internet exploded, the economy boomed, and suddenly the slackers weren’t so slacky anymore. Now many of my friends have houses and children. Presto, change-o, we have suddenly become our parents. Except that while they were mixing and mingling to the soothing cheese of Herb Alpert, we were chillin’ like Bob Dylan to the belle fromage of Air. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.