Joakim: Forever Young
Being as how I have mad love in my heart for France’s seemingly endless fount of brilliant electronic music, I got super excited when over the last few weeks, “Forever Young,”…
By Mario Cotto • • 1 min readForever Young,” the lead single off Joakim‘s latest (greatest?) album “Nothing Gold” (Tigersushi) has been getting some Morning Becomes Eclectic spins…
Last summer I’d had a chance to sit with Joakim and informally chat about life, love, and change just before he was moving back to France from New York for the first time in a little while…and he was not only really happy and super proud of the record but I got the impression that he was really grounded and interested in investigating what it means to mature and age gracefully in a youth obsessed culture and particularly in the dance/electronic music culture.
The track “Forever Young” in particular is his ode to that feeling. It shuffles and clomps along like a synthesized, information age update of the Beach Boys’ “I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times.”
It’s gloriously existential dance music, and the video captures the concept perfectly. Effectively a montage of 70s commercial/television footage, cut to the rhythm, with repeated returns to footage of lava cooling…it captures the endless drama and tragedy of the unstoppable passage of time.
Someone likened it to Malick’s “Tree of Life” in music video form.
Sounds about right.
In this case, the winner is Joakim. And US for having “Forever Young” to listen to as time goes by.
– Mario Cotto