Featured Essay: Post by Bjork; Aquemini by Outkast and Connecting the Two

by Kevin McCraney

It was 2006. I was half a summer into my driver’s license, and the sprawling, mostly empty pavement of Northwest Ohio was the best place for me to test my mettle. My (sort of) girlfriend and I had just finished our typical Saturday, wherein I would pick her up at her mom’s apartment in the city, driving about a half-hour from where I lived in the country. We’d visit the antique mall and do some laps looking for bizarre curios and other esoterica, and then pop over to Goodwill to find outlandish outfits. Then we’d spend some time back at her mom’s listening to music and go our separate ways.

You have to understand that the place that I grew up in was once prosperous and elegant, one of the wealthiest cities in the United States per capita. There was an industry there—a cultural hotspot for a burgeoning postwar middle class. It was a place on the map that people sought to go to, looking for opportunities to grow, to explore.

By the time I was born, the city looming in the distance had been massively depopulated; the malls were dying, and a major one had just closed, to be bulldozed years later to make way for an Amazon Fulfillment Center. But on this day, there was a new thrift shop in the strip mall next to the Olive Garden that neither of us had visited before. Before that, this small shop was a nail salon, and before that, it was a Christian bookstore. Now it’s a hair salon. The cycles of life endure.

The two of us went in. Essentially everything about the space was unremarkable–drab walls, fluorescent lighting, signs in generic typography designating the items for sale. It was somewhat reminiscent of a church basement— you felt like something was supposed to be going on, but the space was mostly empty. The cynical part of me, world-weary from digging through beat-up records at the Goodwill down the street, knew there was nothing for us there, maybe some well-worn copies of Acker Bilk or some midwest polka king. There may have been a wall with wooden lattice work on it holding hats and handbags, and several racks of clothes; my memory neither confirms nor denies this. But there was a tall white wire rack adjacent to the counter, brimming with CDs–we made a beeline for it.

There were some fairly standard thrift store discs there–Live’s “Throwing Copper,” Pearl Jam’s “Ten,” a couple of weatherbeaten copies of “Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume ∞” but there were two things that caught my eye.

I bought Aquemini and Post for $3 total off the rack, based on the covers alone. I half-recognized Bjork–I had seen her thing with the swan dress, and heard songs “Vespertine” and “Homogenic” but didn’t have a great sense of what she looked like. And the cover for Aquemini reminded me of the Funkadelic album covers made by Pedro Bell–something I had dug out of my parents’ collection and spun late into the night on headphones, after a high-school football game and some mediocre cannabis. I had heard “Hey Ya,” but who hadn’t at that time?

Both of these collections are of their time and outside of time. Post is the sonified, personified “irrational exuberance” from 1995 that would go unnamed until Alan Greenspan’s speech a year later. Post what? Post everything. Aquemini was born in 1998, when AOL had hastened the digital transformation of our commons to something cutthroat, getting communal bulletin boards onto the internet—the iterative, rapid-fire dialectical response to culture and creation were just beginning, and people were ready to remix. They chart out the first steps of a world going through a major adaptive process, one which people would not, could not understand (and probably still don’t).

And curiously, as a music lover and a midwesterner, both of these are sounds of the heartland filtered through other cultures—a small taste of home wherever you go. For Björk, it’s about the electronic beats of Chicago making their way to England where she would hear them and recontextualize them into something like “Army of Me”. For OutKast, their penchant for genre-hopping begins on “Aquemini”, the name of the record itself being a dyadic portmanteau of aquarius/gemini, just as portentous as the totalizing stylistic experimentation of Parliament/Funkadelic. The horns on this record could have been straight out of Detroit.

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I remember having to run out to my car to scrounge for change in the cupholder, finding a couple of quarters sticky with spilled soda that I would pry off the plastic and polish up before handing them to the lady working the counter. 

We went back to her mom’s house and put Post on, then Aquemini. I think we listened to both of them straight through. We might have kissed a little bit. Saturday afternoon turned into Saturday evening, and I drove home under the half-light moon, windows down, swampy summer heat enveloping everything.

Our relationship didn’t stick, but the music did.

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Looking back all these years later,  I still hold onto what powerful touchstones these albums were for me. They were portals for exploring other music realms and imagining the people who produced these fabulous tunes–conceptualizing other ways to be. In some sense they gave me two different blueprints for what my life could have been. I could leave home, build upon the scaffolding of what I learned from this place, and mix what I knew with bits of the world and encounters from other places; alternatively, I could make a life for myself, in the community I knew, doing my own thing with my friends and our own special weirdness.

I chose the cosmopolitan one, making a life of recombinant desire and aesthetics, my own version of what Björk did.  I sold my CD collection and most of my records, living all over the United States and the world, making my way from city to city and learning about all of the different nuances of cultures that were not mine. Eventually as I got more sedentary and decided to put down roots, I acquired these totemic records on LP. Now,  I’m getting to the point in my life where things have stabilized enough and I start to question whether I should’ve taken the outcast path.

Kevin started his career as an English teacher with designs on being a writer, and ended up a software developer with designs on being a writer. He has lived in China and all over the US, but is rooted in the American midwest. His twice-weekly published project singmemory.com is where he takes notes on his record collection, publishes his memoirs, and learns to paint watercolors.

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