May 25, 2021
Sometimes, you remember just where you were when you connected with a piece of music so powerful it erupted in your head. In the summer of 2000, I rushed in late to a packed all-media screening of “Gone in 60 Seconds.” I’d had a vexing day at the office, and was hoping the film would revive me. It did, more quickly than I imagined. After a flurry of titles, the soundtrack was filled with slow rhythmic claps, and over that came American voices, ancient yet present, not so much singing as chanting: “Green Sally up, and green Sally down. Lift and squat, gotta tear the ground.” The piano chords came in, simple but seductively syncopated, and then, beneath it all, a beat that was bigger than big. It echoed, it boomed, it made John Bonham’s thuds in “When the Levee Breaks” sound like someone banging on a tin can. And as it all repeated, the sound got bigger, grander, more primal. I had a vague knowledge of who Moby was, but didn’t know his music; his album “Play” had been out for a year, but I’d never heard it. As I learned during the closing credits, this was Moby (a track entitled “Flower”), and it was more than a song. It was pure drugs.
