A small but significant memory I have from the early days of COVID lockdowns: I was going for a bike ride with my kids. They were small enough that they fit in the front bucket of the cargo bike I had recently purchased, and they were sitting there happily babbling to each other and listening to music coming from my phone through a Bluetooth speaker nestled between them.
We were biking on one of my city’s many valley bike paths. I’d been on this path countless times, but on this day – the first reasonably warm day of 2020 – there were many more people than usual populating the path. Joggers, walkers, other bikers, even a unicyclist, much to my kids’ delight.
But the specific moment that sticks in my memory is of a snippet of conversation I heard as we passed some people who were walking in the other direction. They were holding hands and looking around them in wonder. As we whipped by, one said to the other, “I love this! I had no idea this path was even here!”
For a split second I felt superior for already knowing about the path, but I quickly realized that if it weren’t for COVID, wouldn’t have been there at that moment either. I wouldn’t be working from home with the ability to take the kids out for a midday bike ride. I might not have purchased the cargo bike. I would have, in a way, been less present for that phase of my kids’ childhood.
I’m not implying that I’m happy COVID happened. But it was nice to see people out in droves on that beautiful path, adapting in a positive way to what was in many ways an awful situation.
It was a reminder that when surrounded by darkness, people have a tendency to make their own light.
Meanwhile in those early COVID days, an electronic duo called Joy Anonymous, tired of being shut up indoors, were making their own light as well. They began taking to the streets of London in impromptu jam sessions that gradually grew to outdoor dance parties, and for many people their music was probably the brightest light of those dark days.
What makes this a beautiful song:
1. Although it sounds like it’s built around a sample scraped from a crate of vinyl somewhere, it’s actually a song that Joy Anonymous made themselves with the express purpose of re-sampling into a dance track. This process means that most of their songs are released as a pair; the upbeat dance version, and the “source” version.
2. Another of the duo’s traditions is to name every track identically – JOY, in all caps – and then give its unique title in parentheses. There’s something difficult to define that I love about that. Something to do with individuality within commonality.
3. It is so undeniably joyful. It’s like the 21st-Century re-incarnation of “We Are Family”.
Recommended listening activity:
Giving an unsolicited head-nod to a stranger.