I brought a bunch of my old CDs back with me from Lebanon, prioritizing the harder-to-find local releases I listened to in high school and undergrad, like Soap Kills, Scrambled Eggs, Zeid and the Wings, and the one and only major label release by the 90s rap group, Aks’ser.
That album in particular is a weird trip back down memory lane, which is appropriate enough, given the transport metaphor in the group’s name (it can be read as both “going the wrong way down a one-way street” and “against the current”). It features several self-referential call-backs to earlier parts of the band’s indie career, including a re-recording of their biggest hit up to that point (“Ahla Bel Chabeb”), a pastiche of another track they did mocking the music industry (“Pizza”), as well as different versions of the album opener included as part of the regular track listing (i.e. not remixes).
What I’m describing would be bizarre if it weren’t in keeping with a lot of indie music from the time, often looping back on itself with new variations on old things. Almost like you’re stuck in moment and you can’t get out of it, as an unrelated lyric from that same era put it.
Maybe I’m too culturally embedded or my personality too drawn to nostalgia, but these recursive loops never felt like a rehash, to me, because repetition is more geology than genealogy: more sedimentation than re-trace, a layering of story upon story retold.
You ever had a conversation with a person who isn’t getting any younger? All of this might be a stylistic choice, maybe even culturally conditioned, but over time, I think we all end up stuck on repeat.