It Took Seconds

Three minutes and fifty-one seconds: Odd as it may seem now, “Let’s Push Things Forward” felt honestly inspiring for a few weeks in 2002. Mike Skinner’s diagnosis was bleaker than it should have been, and The Streets turned out not to be the answer anyway, and yes, LOL @ Altavista and all that - but that trumpet line was a straight callback to some primordial London clubland memory, as shivery a timeslip in its way as Skinner’s audacious Roman summonings on “Turn The Page”. (The Sabres Of Paradise’s “Wilmot” - too long for this project - played a similar trick, though they telegraphed it rather by the enormous DO YOU SEE of calling their album Haunted Dancehall.)

This track is equally explicit - the backstory is all very well, but it’s what happens next we ought to do something about. And I love it because Skinner’s vision of that ‘we’ is so inclusive. It’s not Skinner, or his fellow MCs and beatmakers, who have the responsibility of pushing things forward, it’s everyone involved in supporting the scene financially. “You say that everyTHING sounds the SAME, then you go BUY THEM! There’s no EXCUSES my friend, let’s push things FORward.” This is a (doomed) last call on the cusp of the free music era - you want things to improve? Buy the good stuff! Or it’s a rallying cry for that very revolution - stop buying the crap music and watch things change. But either way it acknowledges that the agents of change in music are the (wholly non-passive) audience, which is a basic insight for many scenes, though one people coming up through rave and clubbing would have absorbed pretty much via osmosis.

What would your 3’51” track be?