tha throwback
the other day i had a dream about a song. i can’t remember the words anymore, i can’t remember the tune, but it was something buried in my subconscious, and like a long forgotten mix-tape, my brain decided to dust it off, pop it in the walkman and push ‘play’. i remember as i dreamed, i sang along to the hook in my head. of course i knew the words, my own mind was the thing simultaneously playing and singing it, and as it played i kept thinking “remember this hook, i want to get this song when i wake up, i know i don’t have it and now i want it.” sometimes i wake up with songs already in my head, predetermining my day almost. like another day, i woke up and i kept playing flo rida’s low in my head. just the beginning. the part where it goes “mmm mmm mmm mmm…..let me talk to ‘em….let me talk to ‘em” just that part over and over again. and i don’t know, it became a part of my day. sadly, when i woke up i could no longer remember the song. it was gone, just wisps of it remained with my memory of how badly i wanted to cement it in my mind at the time. it was, and still is, irritating the back of my thoughts, a fly in the gooey ointment of my brain–a thought that is not fully alive, not fully dead, just buzzing.
but there is already a song stuck back there. sometimes when i listen to the radio, to radio that plays songs that aren’t contemporary, i hear something i already know by heart. i can call forth the words and melody almost effortlessly from the forgotten bits of storage in my head, yet not really be able to pinpoint how or why i know them. it’s like when you find something in your closet while you’re cleaning that you forgot you had. you remember all these things and they make you smile and you try to put the thing in a place you’ll remember next time. but you don’t remember it. you forget it as quickly as you found it. then something comes up and you need that thing for some reason, or you think of it again because it is fresher in your memory and you get excited because you remember that you put it somewhere you wouldn’t forget the last time you saw it. but you can’t remember where the hell you put it, just the fact that you’ve seen it recently and that it exists and is….somewhere in the mess. that’s what this other song is. one day i found it on the radio and then i lost it again, and now it’s there, side by side with this new one, waiting to be found again. summer, remembering, we fell in love? sigh, that’s all i have left of it.
sometimes, though, a song will come back without asking. it’s not something i dreamed or heard in a pass over the radio stations. i just don’t recognize the title, or maybe the artist, but it’s there in my music collection or online so i’ll press play. as soon as the first notes and words hit my ears they just light up with recognition. damn! i used to love this song! this was my JAM.
i had a lot of jams. i was going through all this old school r&b today and i came across this, one of my jams. yeeeah boy.
remember all 4 one? before ‘i swear’ came out they had this single.
and i loved it.
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