Dizzee Rascal, "I Don't Need A Reason"

My favorite music magazine at present is Under The Radar (If it shocks you to discover that there are still some people who learn about music through words and photos printed on glossy paper and then distributed through newsstands and the mail, you are probably new here, so let me introduce myself: My name is Alex, and I am a man whose advancing years put him closer (but never close enough) to death each day, and each day presents me with a rapidly increasing number of reminders that what passes for popular culture now no longer aims itself at me and would, in fact, be rather revolted if it were in any way associated with someone of my sadly undesirable demographic. The fact that I even continue to make an attempt at keeping relatively current with what’s going on is an effort on my part that grows ever more embarrassing with each new gray hair on my head or shrieky atonal synthesizer “song” that comes down the pike for people to party to, and a growing combination of curmudgeonliness and apathy make it considerably unlikely that I will be doing anything within a year or so except complaining about “the noise they listen to now” or (hopefully) moldering in the grave. In the meantime, I read some music magazines; I tend to enjoy Under The Radar more than most.) but as I was reading it over the weekend I kept being reminded of exactly how many eras have already passed me by: an appreciation of Ride’s Nowhere record was filed under the “Retro” rubric; the introduction of a new artist made reference to his having “[cut] his teeth professionally by working as an assistant to contemporary classical music composer and arranger Nico Mulhy”; a review of the latest Franz Ferdinand record actually had the line, “A generation of indie pop/rock aficionados will fondly recall the odd drunken sing-along to the hits from Franz’s eponymous debut album almost a decade ago.” It was a nonstop series of affirmations that not only am I old, so are many of my more recent reference points. So it doesn’t do me any good to consider just how long it has been since Dizzee Rascal was the absolute cuttingest of edges and how excited I was then to be in on something so fresh right at its outset. Don’t wanna know. Not gonna think about. Just gonna enjoy this video. And then a quick nap.