“Freshman year of high school my friend was given a mixtape by a senior named Josh. Josh had a Renaissance-esque bob haircut and was extremely good at the drums. Handwritten on the spine of the cassette was “The Boogie Back.” “The Boogie Back” was a master class in ’70s funk and became the soundtrack to our summer. I think the context is important—this was the late ’90s and soundtracks and mixtape exchanges were defining parts of adolescence.”
“By sophomore year we were funk obsessed, our teen brains were consumed with hunting for more—more obscure, more authentic, more original. This desire led us to stalk New York City record shops, specifically in the West Village. I dreamt that I, too, could maybe work in a record shop one day, and even more of a maybe, maybe be cool enough to silently judge each customer’s selection at check out. I would dare to hope for approval when I picked up a Kool & the Gang LP. They were never impressed, never amused. Each time I handed over an LP, I thought, “This is it.”
My friends and I uncovered old turntables from our parents’ basements. After school and on weekends, we’d go to each other’s homes and listen to whatever we found. An unheard of funk 45, a song with a funk beat on an otherwise straight-ahead jazz LP became a win in a game we didn’t really have a name for, but I guess it’s the rush of any collector’s habit. I was never very good at this competition but I was keen to discover new music.
We started making our own mixtapes from all the records we were buying. I wasn’t great at finding the good tracks, but I had a knack for compiling it on these tapes and playing it for whoever would listen. Recently, I was given a boom box with a cassette player and revisited my mixes, which hold up, with some surprises. Recordings of my sister and I doing comedy skits were carefully edited interstitials between songs. And then I hear Carl Carlton singing “She’s a Bad Mama Jama (She’s Built, She’s Stacked),” and I’m back in high school all over again.”
—Homer Steinweiss
Holy Hive’s full length release Float Back to You arrives in stores on June 19, 2020 via Big Crown Records—on vinyl.
