Nights of Snow and Anthrax
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It's an evening that has stayed with me all these years later. It's not the band's more raucous tracks that I associate with that walk around those cold, lonely streets in the snowy dark so much as the more sparse, plodding ones. The haunted melodica (a.k.a. "hooter") during "It's Her Factory" especially perfectly matched the moment. Similarly, I can't hear "I Will Be A Good Boy" or "Womantown" now without thinking of that night. Andy Gill's jagged, fragmented guitars are now inexorably linked in my mind to that experience.
December 2007: I'm bound for a music venue on Delancey Street to witness a benefit concert in support of Dave Eggers' youth literacy program, 826NYC. It is another snowy December night, and I almost instinctively find myself selecting a random shuffle of Gang of Four songs for my walk through the very same neighborhood. When Andy Gill's guitar crackles into my headphones during the opening moments of this song (this particular version culled from the 2005 album of re-recorded favorites, Return The Gift), I am eerily transported right back to that snowy walk of almost exactly seventeen years ago. Of course, the East Village and the Lower East Side are very different places today than they were then (I was kinda taking my chances at the time, in retrospect), but the same haunting vibe returns without fail. Fittingly, once again I find myself ahead of schedule and am forced to circumnavigate the same dark, lonely streets with Gang of Four providing the soundtrack.
I have no great point to make here. But the next time you find yourself alone on a dark snowy night in the bowels of the Lower East Side and happen to have an iPod with you, might I strongly recommend the Gang of Four.
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