WHEN DID I LOSE TOUCH WITH THE FUTURE? I remember how imminent it used to feel, how exciting. The old world was dissolving, all the grime of the past sluicing away in digital rain. The future was reflective, metallic. Soon liquid drops of mercury would reconstitute themselves into spacecraft, weapons, women and men. Now I would say the future is behind me. It is, in any case, out of my reach. It would be easy to put the blame on Carter, on his melancholy attachment to the crackle and hiss, but I bear my share of responsibility. I let my guard down. I let myself fall. Nostalgia: from the Greek “nostos”—homecoming—and “algos” pain or ache: the pain a sick person feels because he is not in his native land, or fears never to see it again. Now I am nostalgic for the future, which was my native land.
One weekend my dad came to town. He wanted us to bond, so he took me to “Sunday jazz brunch” at one of the clubs in the Village, the ones that trade on the fantasy that as you eat your bad burger you’ll be transported to the wild and swinging bebop era and all the city breakers and European backpackers at the tables around you will magically morph into angelheaded hipsters burning like roman candles in the night. Not that my dad even liked jazz. I don’t know what he liked. I think he thought that place was my scene.
It was an act of duty, most probably. My brother was living in Las Vegas. He hadn’t been in touch. Dad mentioned, as he sometimes did, that he had “promised to hold the family together for mom.” He was making an effort. We drank watery Bloody Marys and I tried to tell him about the studio. All he could think to say was, so he’s rich, your friend. He tried his best, hammily nodding and tapping his fingers on the table, demonstrating that he “liked something I liked,” that we had “shared interests.” Some loser took a busy, vibeless tenor solo and a leathery blonde who would never be Julie London, let alone Ella or Billie, scat-screeched oooon-a-cleeear-daaay and I prayed for release because that wasn’t music, it was the death of music, what happens when people repeat the same gestures for forty years after they lose all meaning.
When we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk outside, we knew that was it. Nothing happened. Nothing that would make a story. We were always going to lose touch.
A few days later Carter and I were asked to sit down with a major label. We found ourselves in a midtown office with a view of the Hudson, talking about a famous white hip hop artist who wanted to pay his dues to the tradition by releasing an album of classic covers. The executive running the meeting had walnut skin and a facelift that made him look like a pilot in a centrifuge, a clean-cut American hero experiencing some large multiple of earth’s gravity. He tried to impress us by telling an embarrassing story about doing coke with Sly Stone. His assistant was so beautiful, I didn’t dare meet her eye. She should have been on a yacht. The executive told her to bring us drinks and when she bent over to put the tray on the coffee table, he leaned back to check out her ass and made an insufferable I know, right? face at Carter, who looked back at him blankly. I was worried about Carter. His head wasn’t in the game.
The rapper arrived with his people and the room rearranged itself around him as he perched on the edge of a lounger, cradling a chai and explaining that he essentially considered himself a curator. He was a sincere young man from Maine, who’d had a Billboard number one with a song about drug dealing and had recently (according to a magazine someone left in our bathroom) purchased a nice-looking beach house in St. Barts. Onstage he was like one of those internet videos that illustrates the whole history of something in ninety seconds. Hyperactive, encyclopedic. Between verses he did James Brown dance moves, all slides and splits and theatrical sexual fainting, snapping into more modern styles: breaking, pop and lock. In person he was surprisingly low-key. He was always giving quotes about feeling “humble” or “in awe” of one or other canonical black star. Now, he explained, in a half-whisper that forced everyone to lean forward slightly, it was time to take his humility a step further. Every track on his album was to be a tribute to a particular period and style of African American music, from ragtime through fifties RnB to eighties boogie. Nineteen ninety, the year of his birth, was the cutoff. He was not going to cover other people’s songs, but remix his own material in other styles, the styles of the great artists of history. As the executive explained:
—It’ll be like my man was born in different time periods.
—My Past Lives, said the rapper. Am I right?
I said I thought it was a good name.
—I’ve decided vinyl only, he added. The executive said they would talk about that. I thought we were pitching to do one track, but it became clear that they wanted us to produce the whole album. It was a career-making opportunity. The rap star loved our precision. He loved our patina. Our patina was on a whole other level of precision. He told us he thought of us like those Chinese oil painters who turn out perfect reproductions of Monets and Cézannes to sell on the internet.
Expressing enthusiasm wasn’t my job, Carter was the one with the social skills, but instead of complimenting the rap star and closing the deal, he was staring out the window, tapping on his knees and humming the chess player’s blues under his breath.
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
Put me under a man they call Captain Jack
He wrote his name all down my back