This morning, Vanity Fair published an exclusive look into the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens (is that a fat Bossk in there?). For a certain generation, the thrill and sensation takes us back 16 years, when the magazine published some of the first images from the inaugural Star Wars prequel, The Phantom Menace.
While that film may have fallen short of expectations, it’s disingenuous to ignore the excitement we all felt when first thumbing through those photos, eyes fixated on Queen Amidala, Darth Maul, and the Tunisia desert that framed Tattooine. Today, on Star Wars Day, Boston post-glam dynamo the Daily Pravda are taking us back to that pre-millenial euphoria in the aptly-named “1999,” their latest in an ongoing series of new monthly singles that will culminate in the follow-up to 2013’s Columbia.
“1999” is a black-gloved pop stalker that fuses Pravda’s now-symbolic elements of theatrical glam rock and ’90s Britpop. It may lyrically have nothing to do with the Star Wars franchise, but vocalist David Jackel’s themes of love, hate, and urban boredom ring true for those wishing to join any sort of rebellion here in the wasteland that is 2015.
“This isn’t the first song called ‘1999’ but this is, as far as I’m aware, the first written after all the pre-millennium tension,” Jackel tells Vanyaland. “And the party’s over. The song is time travel. Boomers had the summer of ’69. Those of us who remember rock music had the summer of ’99. Not all great memories to be sure — it was the summer or Durst and Binks — but it was also the year I first stepped into a studio, and I imagine for all of us in Pravda, it was around that time that we went from fantasizing about making music to actually recording it. To me the number 1999 still connotes images of a flashy future in which the moon has been knocked loose from the solar system.”
It was a different time, just 16 years ago. But the sound of hope remains.
Listen to “1999” below…
