The first paragraph

of a rejected article.



And now, as we look back, us all ‘musicians’ (of course), we can say, without even a hint of reservation or irony, that things were simply better in this ambiguous moment we choose to call ‘then.’ It’s not even that the 1980’s were quantifiably ‘better,’ in even the vaguest of senses; but to think back on something like Creation Records – something, for many of us, and I hesitate to admit this, but something that came and went before many of us were even born – is to immediately confront that now-plastic image of a moment outside of history, in the sense that it cannot be approached, singularly, as ‘document’ (even as ‘music’), but only, and necessarily, as untenable sensation…