I turned 24 yesterday, which isn’t generally considered a milestone birthday, but that combined with the earliest tremors of “decade in review” essays and features has put me into retrospective mode. In some ways, I came of age at the turn of the milenium. I started high school in the fall of 1999, I started to develop musical tastes, political opinions, and that sort of awareness of self that, when you’re just getting used to it, is the burden of teenagers everywhere. So what I’m pondering is the decade of my adolescence.
Meanwhile, Pitchfork has just completed a list of their staff’s favorite songs from the 00s (in 10 years we still haven’t decided what to call this decade?), topping off with Outkast’s “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)”. I remember loving this song when it came out, despite my newly developed disregard for rap’s artistic validity (this was swing back and forth to present). It had bombast, attitude, and a strange sense that it was somehow more than it let on. Go back and read the first verse. After a little bit of obligatory boasting and throat-clearing, Dre produces this flurry of images that is so prescient in describing the Gestalt of the 00s. The beat is at once apocalyptic and celebratory, the electric organs thundering down. I remember thinking, back in 2000, “Why are they talking about the Persian Gulf war? That was almost 10 years ago!” Crazy how these things come around, having now spent most of this decade in a war centered around Baghdad.
In some ways, I feel like this song is going to be like our “All Along The Watchtower”, the soundtrack for those video montages of the iconic moments of the decade, the shorthand for the spirit of the times.
