It often pops up the last couple of years, my favourite, earlier too often ignored word. Still, they are strange situations in which it finds itself, as if my word is lost, or better put: obducted.
In homeland U.S.A. it was already dwindling. Although in itself lively enough, its meaning was only known regionally there too. Then the American press eagerly introduced it into its columns, treating it like a child labourer. From that moment on the seducing word exploded from the pages in fashion reports. It had to describe bright, often screamingly loud colour combinations, my elegant word, or worse even: fashionable sunglasses or ladies’ purses, outcryingly expensive and, apart from that, horrendous.
My sensual word was also misused on the celebrity pages to describe the behaviour of certain showbizz types bombarded to stardom. Invaribly they were women whose biggest quality was their determination to put their meat on offer as long as it took to be picked up by the paperazzi too.
That as such so very promising word has now also flown over to our country, but is deployed against its will here too. My sweetest word visibly does not feel at home in those sentences, lost in a cold world full of calculations and haste. It does not defend itself, it does not feel like that, and seemingly unattached it stands between other words, waiting dreamfully for better times. They are going to come, my languid word is sure of that: one day, full of surprise, everybody will recognise its meaning. Then it will be restored in its honour in New York and in Amsterdam.
Even in music it leads a dwindling existence, that is to say in most CD racks by far, because the music itself is doing well: maybe it thinks it is alright like that, my slightly lazy word. After all, it has difficulty keeping pace and always wants to keep an unexpected rhythm of its own, swinging supply and enough in itself: funky.
Published in roots music magazine Heaven, September-October 2005, no. 39/no. 5