Pure Bathing Culture :: "Ivory Coast"

The children of the 1980s are in a long kiss goodnight. We grew up at breakneck speed, developing a bizarre brand of generational still birth. We knew we hadn't torn down the Berlin Wall or sat at lunch counters in solidarity for civil rights. We watched Hitler get killed in a Tarantino movie. We never had a dare-to-be-great moment. We never really stuck it to the system. It ate at us, surely, and then we aged out of wanting to do it at all. We are in the act of becoming "the establishment" to a generation of Clinton-era kids who are, quite impossibly, more confused and disoriented than we could have dreamed. (They will be the ones who have to figure out how to rebel against nothing.) But there was still this love thing, one of those ineffable capital-L things that managed to transcend a cultural malaise, that managed to connect us to everyone else by invisible wires; our struggles became common, unifying even. Pure Bathing Culture, a beautiful band from Portland, Oregon wax philosophical about this type of unreasonable affection, the kind of thing that still inspires the human capacity for wonder. Or, put another way, "Ivory Coast" possesses just enough magic to make us forget about the above paragraph, what we might have been or where we're all going.