I remember a moment in the early 1990s when I stood in the crowd at First Avenue as we all waited for the show to start. The house speakers blasted Nirvana, Smashing Pumpkins, My Bloody Valentine, and other loud awesomeness.
Suddenly, I was arrested by an amazing new song I hadn’t heard, a sonic revelation with a deeply hypnotic groove. It took me about fifteen seconds to realize that I was hearing the Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows,” a recording that even today sounds like something from the future.
I’ve noticed this phenomenon in movies. 2001: A Space Odyssey, almost fifty years old at this point, still looks new. (Star Wars, by contrast, looks dated, almost charmingly so.) James Baldwin’s essays feel as if he is still speaking to us in this moment (a sobering thought).
Not many works of art attain this quality, but just now, as I sat in the coffee shop, I was blown away by a brand new release that I quickly realized was this classic.
– Author and musician Jacob Slichter is the proprietor of Portable Philosophy, a trenchant, masterful arts blog.
