Music Mosaic: Seeing Ratatat's "Seventeen Years"

One December night we raced down the freeway with the windows fogged and Ratatat’s Seventeen Years booming. I made up a melody with lousy lyrics, my friend began to spit babbling rhymes, and our third friend, choir-trained, added a golden harmony from the backseat. We slipped through traffic and the dark, improvising.

Annie Dillard wrote that “the newly sighted see the world as a dazzle of color-patches. They are pleased by the sensation of color, and learn quickly to name the colors, but the rest of seeing is tormentingly difficult.” Seventeen Years was only that mad rush through the dark, the lights of other cars blurred by the condensation we couldn’t clear, so to listen and somehow, simultaneously, see – “tormentingly difficult”, indeed.

I attempted to first capture the clearest feeling. A high synthesizer wails, tight but keen: it feels like infatuation. Infatuation is its own isolated universe, shining and confused and colorful, so I cut out a night sky, pasted it onto an explosion, and added color, diamonds, and a couple to cuddle in this tiny world.

Then I tried desperately to convey that night and the rich darkness, the cacophony of nonsense we strung into music. I depicted the rap stuttering along, out-of-focus; the melody rose, fuchsia; and the harmony rolled, golden and curved, over and through them. I grabbed magazines and listened to Seventeen Years, cutting out anything that looked like the song felt. Thus the next collage was atmospheric: hushed jewel tones and reflections, unfamiliar patterns and crowded cities. Seventeen Years is a rich, layered, contemplative urban jungle.

As I watched for colors, I felt the rhythm instead. I found a picture of African women marching and drawings of thick arrows. Glued together, their joint march pulsed on like the beat. But the beat slipped into darkness, and I suggested that creeping stillness with a photo of the Aurora Borealis laid behind snow-covered pines and inverted rocky slopes. I ripped the edges because the descent feels less polished than primeval.

I ended at the beginning: a few lines are spoken, a high synthesizer warbles into being, and suddenly – the drop. I made it literal: a streak of red falls and explodes into dust and smoke and tiny fragments. What else could I see? National Geographic, the magazine from which I cut, showcased dozens of photographers looking into the dark and seeing. In Whale Whisperers, Anuar Patjane looked into the sea and saw light, shadows, majesty. So I closed my eyes and sketched what I saw in the dark: a man with a crooked nose, leather-jacketed, a little smooth, with lots of swagger.

At last, in the dark, a thing I hadn’t yet seen. Just halfway through, the bass enters, grey and nearly unnoticed. Like the collage, he walks into and through the levels of the song like a stranger learning a city before he disappears entirely into its walls.

Ratatat: Seventeen Years