From 1994 to Infinity:

The tune comes with a memory. In time, the summer of 1994; in space, the Bay Area; in love, me with two tall women. One is my girlfriend; the other is my girlfriend's best friend—both look very much alike. From close, one might confuse them for sisters; from far, for twins. I have known and loved both since the winter of the previous year—1993—the year after I discovered Nabokov. For the trip down from Seattle (me, the passenger; my girlfriend, the driver), I brought all of the works of a poet I had just discovered, Yeats. That is all I want to read that summer. The next summer I will discover and read all of Proust while staying at a cabin near the line where Oregon finishes and the ocean begins.

It is my first time in San Francisco, and my lover's best friend, who used to live in Seattle, now lives in the Mission District, in a two-story row house that shares a leafy, shade-cool courtyard with other row houses. My lover's best friend is a rising DJ. Her bedroom is packed with old and new rap records. She plays me everything that is important to her. And the most important record of the moment is Souls of Mischief's 93 'Til Inifinity. Because Souls of Mischief are from East Oakland, bars and parties all across the Bay Area are playing their record from start to no end. This is the birth of Left Coast hiphop.

The album, 93 'Til Infinity, shares its name with its most popular track. To this day, there is not a week that closes without within it four minutes being filled by the sad melodies and pounding beats that make "93 'Til Infinity" one of the highest aesthetic achievements in hiphop production. In fact, I now only listen to the instrumental version. The music says much more than the words. It's about the diamond infinity of moments that, in glittering rings, radiate from 1994 until the present, the now, the moment that's being crystalized by the sorrowful soul of the looped electric piano, the lonely blow of the Pete Rock-like horn, and the man-machine compression of the drum machine.

Next to the room I first heard "93 'Til Infinity," is the room I first read these lines, which, like the song, I return to again and again: "Though I am old with wandering/Through hollow lands and hilly lands/I will find out where she has gone/And kiss her lips and take her hands/And walk among long dappled grass/And pluck till time and times are done/The silver apples of the moon/The golden apples of the sun."