"Electric word, 'Life'. It means forever. And that's a mighty long time."I first heard Traxman's 'Lifeeeee Is Forever' in June of 2013. The previous year I had moved to London to try and make it as a freelance journalist, but things hadn't gone exactly as planned. The footwork spiritual was my salvation.In March of 2012 I found a place deep within Stepney Green's square-mile maze of low-rise blocks, a flat with no living room and a pre-Victorian plumbing system. Because there was no shared space, I never really got to know my housemates, anonymous bodies that passed through the flat's other two rooms in quick succession during my 15 months at the house. I was only vaguely aware of the young Republican, the Italian industrialist's son, the gay Canadian chef, the Dehli-born city boy, the nameless Slavic film director and the Spanish teen with his 30-year-old Sicilian girlfriend who would fight every night of the week (think it was them who ultimately made off with my Playstation and new camera, the fucks).None of them could hack it: the isolation, the cramped conditions, the winter freeze, the poltergeistian piping, the eventual arrival of rats and the horrors of what was the flat's only toilet. The toilet which could only withstand a half-glass of piss before blocking in incendiary fashion (there are things that happened in there that I'll take to my grave).But still I endured it, because all I wanted to do was work like hell so that I didn't have to go home and be a photocopier salesman again. So I disappeared into my new office-at-home and threw myself into my job, and bit by bit I sunk deeper and deeper into complete despondency.Soon came the reverse sleep patterns, which in the winter means you can go whole weeks without seeing daylight. I began to miss my old girlfriend. I stopped cutting my hair, and was spending nights watching Youtube videos of street fights, or documentaries about serial killers. I no longer called my Mum while the friends I'd made during my first months in London stopped calling me. I was ill all the time. In the grips of fever delirium I once watched the house rat scuttle across the floor to my dvd stash and use my Alien Quadrilogy box-set to prop himself up, to get a better look at my total fuckedness. Too weak to call out, instead he and I kind of just shared a moment. He was like, look at yourself for fuck's sake. Pull it together.I was God's lonely man, like Bickle, or that guy from Casualty who won't die. I had become addicted to the hot wings from a PFK two minutes from my flat. I remember one time I actually waited outside for it to open. Another time, I saw a pigeon crawl into a enclave beside my front door. By the time I returned from the PFK it was dead. And still, I scoffed the dead bird in my hands. I even had extra mayo.It was around this time that a child, or what I assume was a child, began shining a laser pen into my bedroom from a nearby low rise, on an almost nightly basis. There I'd be, typing away, when suddenly a red dot would appear on my chest and creep upwards to settle dead centre of my forehead. Now whether the perp was indeed a child or actually just a really indecisive assassin, is something I'll never know. But in any event this went on for weeks until gradually I began to believe that it was the eye of God itself upon me, and that my days were numbered.I was fucked. It had got to the point where I couldn't work anymore. In March of 2014, a year after my arrival, I turned in a 4000 word review of Comanechi's second album. It was, to say the least, excessive. I apologised to my editor Tom Lea, who told me to go away and get myself right. I finally surrendered. This nascent depression and the attendant agoraphobia had reduced my entire world to four walls and a battered Mac screen. But then along came "Lifeeeee Is For Ever", and it exploded these parameters.By May I had gingerly begun working again. I was slow and in my head it was still dark and crowded. Taking a break one day I stumbled on Da Mind Of Traxman. I was making my way through the album one track at a time with no real intent and more or less unengaged, until finally I reached its last cut, "Lifeeeee Is For Ever". It took me all of 20 seconds to realise I liked it. That I really, really fucking loved it. And those four walls, they vanished. This was an intoxication.Great highways opened up from behind the shitty posters hung behind by desk. There was a future again, and for once I was an alright human being, and the highways lead everywhere. Closing my eyes I thought of a vivid blue colour, and all the different things which I used to like. It wasn't like a vision of anything, or some epiphany, but suddenly I was remembering stuff, which felt a bit like remembering how to imagine, and for just a moment I could suck happiness in like breaths, because for the first time in a long time my chest felt warm enough to absorb it. It was as if this little afterthought of a track carried you so far above itself that from those heights your problems seemed very small. Something like that anyway.It wasn't a turning point in my fortunes or anything. This song didn't make me go on to have an adventure or become amazing or figure everything out. Chances are, about an hour later I had forgotten and was doing something like watching Friends online in a bid to fall asleep before 11am/the hell-shadows from Ghost came for me. But most definitely it was a lighthouse in the dark showing me the way to dry land.Unlike with other genres, most dance music isn't designed to facilitate a narrative. So if a dance track is to really get you, often it must do so by means of an isolated phrase. The technique in its purest and perhaps most effective form, in my book anyway, is Mylo's "In My Arms". At any one time, depending on what the music beneath the sample is doing, those four words 'In my arms, baby, yeah", culled from Boy Meets Girl's 'Waiting For A Star To Fall' and repeated throughout, are able to communicate everything from joy to yearning to lust and even a kind of maternal sympathy. It doesn't just tell us about love; it feels like love.It's this same principle that is at work on "Lifeeeee is For Ever" - sampling Prince & The Revolution's "Let's Get Crazy" - repeating the mantra of "Electric word, 'Life'. It means forever. And that's a mighty long time".This is a declaration of invincibility as bullish as any in modern hip hop; except with the braggadocio replaced with the truer confidence of inner peace, understanding, and enlightenment. There's an underlying message of positivity too, launched from the mean streets of footwork's West Chicagoan birthplace, where gang violence is common and regularly fatal. Trax hammers the word "life" to bits so that you remember it, and so that you remember that you are indeed alive, and that life is right now. The sample flip is as warmly human as music gets.The track holds a new poignance for me following the untimely death in April of Rashad Harden, A.K.A DJ Rashad. Listening to the track, I always imagine Harden as he merges with the infinite, and that maybe it was 'Lifeeeee Is For Ever' that soundtracked his glorious ascension to the big footwork battle in the sky. Traxman never completes Prince's little speech, because that would be to offer the listener a resolution. The track's uncanny quality of eternality - the way it doesn't end so much as stop playing, the way it's as though the organ drone is infinite even if after 2:50 mins we can no longer hear it - is the producer's way of showing us that life really is forever. In other words there is no resolution. But nevertheless, partner the sample with the missing lines and it's as if Rashad is speaking to me from the other side:"But I'm here 2 tell uThere's something elseThe afterworld"Buy Da Mind Of Traxman hereYou can follow Traxman on Twitter here: @TRAXMAN_TEKKDJZYou can follow John Calvert on Twitter here: @JCalvert_music
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