Jamie xx: "I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)" [ft. Young Thug and Popcaan]
Reverential club nostalgia is the thread tying together the last year of Jamie xx tracks, but it’s always countered by a calm, clear understanding of where we are right now. The gap between the then and the now is smaller than ever on “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times)”, the latest and, on paper, strangest offering from his first solo LP. Where other tracks reminisce on the glory days of rave, or even those of his band, Jamie described the song’s inspiration as a drive from Manhattan to Brooklyn with Hot 97 blasting, a moment that could have been yesterday, or hours ago.
There’s no better freeze-frame of where we are now: not just in terms of the instant-onset nostalgia that social media prompts, but in terms of Young Thug, the most “now” artist we’ve got. (I already expect that, looking back on the music of 2015 a decade from now, Thugger’s “dork!” adlib will be the first bit to bubble into my consciousness.) “Good Times” is the best presentation of Thug’s pop appeal since “Lifestyle”, over snappy steel drum synths that Jamie thankfully didn’t leave back in 2011. And braided around the soul sample is Popcaan, who made last year’s best dancehall album and who, like Thugger, has never let a famous mentor keep him from throwing time-tested rules out the window.
Too often, these world-beating fusion attempts seem to exist more because they can than because they should, but this grouping feels particularly thoughtful (as supported by the far inferior, Popcaan-less early leak). Thug, who is Haitian, has been incorporating abstractions of Afro-Caribbean music into his own for years—on “Haiti Slang” and “Jamaican Slang” more literally, but in the ghosts of dancehall in his half-sung delivery, too. Here, though, Thug reframes the wistful romance of his ultimate pop ballad, “Keep In Touch”; but where that song had him clinging to a fading, temporary love, here he giddily awaits the, err, “stroller rides” of the near future. After all the love letters to the past, “Good Times” looks optimistically ahead, fuck a FOMO: “I know there’s gonna be good times.”
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