Sound Bite

With music, a song might spark an obsession that lasts a lifetime. When it comes to food, there are rare moments when a single dish can have the same effect. For JEFF GORDINIER, that dish was at Noma.

I’m going to assume you are a music fan. I’m going to guess that your connection to music was forged when you were young. A moment in solitude or a moment in a crowd, a Chopin prelude or a Cat Power ballad collapsing in on itself, high-gloss ear candy pumped out of speakers at a Saturday pool party. Or the swelling voices of a neighbourhood choir at church on Sunday morning, the propulsive opening war chords of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” or the modal blossoms of “So What” – whatever it was, something lured you in.

If you are a certain kind of music fan, an obsessive, that initial swig led to a period of glutting, a slurping from the vat, fireworks flashing across your brain each time you made contact with the latest iteration of the greatest song ever. I’m willing to bet that these songs contributed to the formation of your identity. They became tiles in the mosaic of you. But after a while the rush begins to fade. The years pass and you go back to old songs seeking the comfort of recognition instead of the thrill of the unheard. You try and fail to connect with much of the new stuff. This band from 2014 reminds you of that band from 1994, or 1964. This new song strikes you as little more than an abstracted algorithmic reference to that old song. Music starts to become, in your mind, a museum of half-remembered associations. There are still many years ahead, you hope, but it feels as though you will have to rely on music as a vehicle for carrying you backward, not forward.