Natalie recommends “Love Dance (사랑춤)” by THE KOXX
It begins simply: an eerie synth, over which a single guitar trills, before drums and bass crash over you as halogen light cascades from streetlights on a pitch black highway.
I think most people who are enthusiastic about music have an artist they adore that no one else in their life has heard of. For me, it's THE KOXX. I love this fucking band, and I want everyone I know to love them too.
The best introduction is "Love Dance (사랑춤)," the opening track to their 2012 EP, Bon Voyage. Much of the group's discography is poppier and brighter than this hazy song would suggest, but I always show people this song first. Its laconic vocals, whizzing and whining guitars, and percussive exclamations draw you in and pull you into the darkness.
The person who introduced me to THE KOXX was getting ready to spend a semester in Seoul; she found the band while looking into popular Korean music. THE KOXX, and especially "Love Dance (사랑춤)," became staples for us, during long hours studying, while bouncing between YouTube videos of bands we liked, on the iPod during late night rides around town.
The person who introduced me to THE KOXX is no longer in my life—another something I suspect most music enthusiasts have: an artist you love that evokes absence. Someone I loved introduced me, and time eventually separated us.
This is so often the story of our favorite bands, songs, movies, books. It repeats itself, like so many endless loops of Bon Voyage that semester. You never lose the associations. A song they used to hum while doing the dishes, a film they adored beneath the blanket forts in their childhood living room, a TV show that made them laugh so hard they knocked over an entire pitcher of lemonade.
I want to believe the people who enter and exit our lives will always be a piece of us, insofar as the truth of our entanglement remains forever a fact of our histories. I will never hear "Love Dance" or any song by THE KOXX without thinking of the person who introduced me to them. I will remember their absence, and be transported to the moment we last saw each other.
But endings are just moments. They are not the whole of our experiences with people and places. An ending that leads to an absence can never take away that which was good and whole. A person may exit your life, but the things they said to you, the ways they made you feel, and the songs you whistled together will always remain somewhere on the dark highway of memory.
natalie layne is a writer based in Philadelphia.
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