I originally posted this on my personal facebook page to share the nostalgia of the video, but I’m posting it here because of the song.
This is one of several versions of something I made in the early 2000s with my homegirl Christa Marie. It was a tribute to my transition from b-boy to raver and to all the people and music I encountered along the way.
For context, my first success in electronic music came under the name DJ Decent (my hip-hop moniker since grade school) with the release of the acid breaks-oriented Stupid Def EP. My first two releases, under different names, hadn’t done much at all.
My next major success was I’m Lonely, and from that point on, I mainly released music under my real name, focusing on my own interpretation of house music. In the process, I pretty much abandoned both hip-hop and breaks-oriented music.
After a few subsequent releases failed to hit the mark, I was feeling pretty down. As I Remember was a note to myself: a reminder of my roots as DJ Decent and of the unpressured joy of making music without feeling compelled to chase past successes.
For whatever reason, none of the versions of As I Remember were ever released. It became another of those unrealized projects left languishing on hard drives for a couple of decades.
It wasn’t until I revisited that old Hi-8 footage that I realized how perfectly the song captured the warmth I feel when seeing those faces and remembering the places where we laughed and danced together.
You may not know these people, but you definitely know (or will know) the feeling.