REBOUNDER “Hold On, We’re Going Home”
( Drake / Arctic monkeys )
Days before Autumn, in the sweltering knell of Summer ’13, we were given a gift we didn’t ask for.
Drake released “Hold On, We’re Going Home,” a divine slice of Serato bar mitzvah fodder with cavernous dancehall depth. The track threaded an impossible needle between the champagne-pop deliverance of mid-aughts Atlanta club bangers and the melancholic ballads of the unrequited. It was emotionally enveloping yet inarticulate, capable of soaking up every sentiment and setting. From shout-talking at the club to slumped silently in an Uber, it was at home wherever it went. Neither confessional nor confrontational, there was a romantic banality seldom seen in his songs— mere pleasant vagueries from a man who once doxxed a Hooters waitress just to clarify his loneliness. It was a benevolently empty vessel. But like most gifts, we had little use for it at the time.
In the soft optics of hindsight, 2013 was a nothing-year. Our zeitgeist concerns were tangled up in trivialities of the NSA, the Whitey Bulger trial, and the diplomatic tact of Dennis Rodman. The powder kegs beneath our feet, though long-tamped, remained unlit. But after the gauntlet of the last eight years, specifically the vacuity of the last two, Nothing Was The Same rings like a generational thesis statement packed with the tragic entendre of, “Theres no place like home.” And re-listening, feeling those feelings, we finally deserve it. In modern parlance, it answers the prompt asked of all great pop music. “Tell me it’s alright… without telling me it’s alright.”
Such is the gift of eight years of perspective. Take our artists. In the eight years prior to this 2013 release, these two men willed themselves into the realm of the remarkable. Drake, a child actor with the skittish gaze and busy hands of a Subway sandwich artist, and the Arctic Monkeys, a pack of pageboys and Bieber-bobs with all the glamour of an Accutane brochure. Through conscious and effortful self-invention, both became wry and sexy cartographers of self-fulfillment, whilst remaining utterly unfulfilled— “killing it” as affirmation that we’re all dying. Precisely the art we deserve in this moment.
By way of Turner and Co., this cover of a cover is humbly slid across your desk by sub-14th street indie ringer Dylan Chenfeld, bumping a years long thread among artists about the erstwhile Summer banger that was too good for us then, and perhaps still is.
Regardless, we’ll see you out there. Just hold on.
