I Thought About You And You Finally Came

TV Girl and George Clanton featuring Magdalena Bay “Messy Hair”

We’ve been trained as consumers of culture to expect novelty in art and fashion, and to conflate newness with quality. And while it’s always exciting to experience innovations in art and design in the moment – almost always enabled by shifts in technology – the consumer’s pursuit of novelty is more about marketing, packaging, and commerce than it is about appreciating artistic expression. The flip side of this is the knee-jerk dismissal of “retro,” eye-rolling at either the seeming return of older aesthetics or the continued success of popular styles. I can sympathize with being sick of old styles, and feeling bored by predictable cycles of aesthetics going in and out of fashion. You can get jaded easily by this, but a lot of the time that’s just congratulating yourself for noticing a pattern.

It’s better to think of the accumulation of styles as the gradual creation of a canon, a pantheon, a palette for future creation. “Nostalgia” isn’t always the point, particularly when artists reach back to times before they were alive. Ideas will be rooted in cultural moments and become shorthand for those eras, but ultimately it’s the same as new phrases and vocabulary become part of a shared lexicon – useful tools for expression.

I bring this up because “Messy Hair” is a great example of a song that uses an old style to great effect without necessarily being a “retro” piece. Listen to the breakbeat drum part that enters the song around 30 seconds in – it’s a very late 90s sound, and I think on some level it’s meant to signify a bright, stylish, and upbeat future. A lot of late 90s/Y2K sounds have this effect now, particularly for listeners who were either children or came of age in that period. So it isn’t just “futuristic,” it’s a sound associated with youth and innocence, a “simpler time.” Hearing that breakbeat hit as Mica Tenenbaum from Magdalena Bay sings about realizing she’s in love gives the song a nice jolt of excitement and relative weightlessness. It’s like she’s hitting a stride, and feeling all her burdens disappear.

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