Cathal recommends "In This City" by Iglu & Hartly
Upon its 2008 release, Iglu & Hartly’s debut album was slated by British music magazine NME, who ended their review by asking listeners whether they would tune out of the record in revulsion or embrace the band’s aesthetic with, quote, “credibility snapping at your feet”. The threat was clear, and fascinatingly divorced from the content of the album. The fear here is that Iglu & Hartly would, at some point in the future, be seen as a joke and you, too, will be laughed at for listening to their brainless, irresistibly catchy brand of pop/rock/rap/electro/questionmark. There’s no claim that the music isn’t fun, lively, funny, chest-thumping-ly anthemic. No, instead, the fear is directed at an external arbitrary judgement. Who cares if you’re having fun now; what if someone mocks you later?
This message is don’t enjoy this today, as you live in the present, since somewhere, someone, someday, will laugh at you for listening to it. It’s an intensely British literary device at work here; naked insecurity, cloaked in pseudo-intellectualism, masquerading as meaningful criticism. Whether or not the music is fun doesn’t matter. What matters is that you should be afraid of being laughed at.
Iglu & Hartly’s “In This City,” the second single from & Then Boom, is inarguably an unserious song. Its lyrics would not fare well with your high school English teacher. Its cultural impact was minimal and the cultural moment it captured (mid 2008, immediately prior to the financial crisis and Obama’s election) is utterly inessential, an era that is almost pointedly not remembered in history. “In This City” has the staying power of an inside joke you half-remember.
And, like an inside joke you half-remember, “In This City” has an indescribable power. A smell on the wind that you can’t put a name on, beyond “something I knew before now.” “In This City”is a track that can pull you back into a moment when the fear of being laughed at in an imaginary future wasn’t what drove your existence. “In This City,” for anyone fortunate enough to be born half a lifetime ago, is a synth-heavy reminder of halcyon late summer nights, a blind, headlong run down high street under orange lamplight after the sun rolls down, drowsy and warm, over small-town nowhere. A shopping cart ride through an empty floodlit carp park; a hammering heart beat over stolen bottle of beers and starved first kisses. Scraped knees scrambling over back walls, spilt vodka late-night wanderings and whispers about unrequited crushes. Tune in, brain off; stop caring about what someone might say about what they might think about something you might do and be here now.
Cathal Gunning is a writer and poet whose work has appeared in (string of reputable locales).
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