I’m not sure how to describe this band. Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still,” released March 6, 2017. The song feels breezy and playfully retro, but the original interactive video concealed about 30 Easter eggs directing viewers toward causes such as voting rights, climate action, the ACLU, and fighting misinformation. It was a protest song disguised as something you could dance to in a Target commercial. Very 2017.
There are songs that remind you of a year, and then there are songs that seem to contain the entire year inside them.
Portugal. The Man’s “Feel It Still” belongs in the second category. Released in March 2017, it was short, stylish, instantly familiar and nearly impossible to escape. It followed you through car radios, movie previews, television commercials and any store that sold decorative pillows with triangles on them. The song lasted less than three minutes, but for a while it appeared to own the building.
The video was even more concentrated. It had dancing, motorcycles, burning newspapers, sharply dressed strangers and enough retro production design to make 1966 look like a place you could visit after buying the correct sunglasses. Everything moved with the music. Every cut landed on the beat. Even the junkyard looked art-directed.
The year had barely started, but the filter was already doing a great deal of work.
The Greatest Party That Never Found the Party
A few weeks later, Fyre Festival demonstrated what happened when the filter became the entire product.
The proposed luxury music festival was promoted through immaculate Instagram posts featuring models, turquoise water and the promise of an exclusive weekend in the Bahamas. It looked less like an event than an invitation to enter a better tax bracket. Guests paid thousands of dollars expecting private villas, gourmet meals and major musical acts.
When attendees arrived in April, they found emergency tents, wet mattresses, inadequate food and very little sign that anyone had remembered to build a festival. Blink-182 had withdrawn. Flights were disrupted. The luxury meal immortalized by social media was a cheese sandwich in a foam container. It remains one of history’s more effective arguments for packing a granola bar.
Fyre Festival had been constructed on Instagram, then dismantled on Instagram almost immediately. The same machinery used to manufacture the fantasy broadcast its collapse in real time. The orange promotional square gave way to photographs of soaked tents and sad cheese. In roughly one weekend, the internet watched aspiration turn into evidence.
“Feel It Still” and Fyre Festival both understood the power of a beautiful surface, but they used it in opposite ways. The music video rewarded anyone willing to look closer. Fyre punished anyone who believed the advertisement.
Then the Movies Found the Beat
By June, Baby Driver arrived in theaters and turned the summer itself into a music video. Shot in the mean streets of Atlanta, and before lead actor Ansel Elgort was included in some Me-Too controversy, we had the great Edgar Wright pump up the radio and do some Tokyo drifting in the Dirty South.
Edgar Wright built the film around its soundtrack. Car chases, footsteps, gunshots and camera movements were synchronized to music that existed before the scenes were filmed. The songs were not decoration placed over the action. They were the machinery underneath it.
The opening chase set to “Bellbottoms” announced the idea immediately. A bank robbery becomes choreography. Cars slide through Atlanta traffic while the song dictates the timing. Later, lyrics appear in the background as the lead character walks through the city, as though the entire world has agreed to participate in his playlist.
It shared an irresistible quality with “Feel It Still.” Both made movement look effortless even though every second had clearly been planned within an inch of its life. They captured the peculiar pleasure of watching sound and image lock together perfectly. For a few minutes, the world appears to have rhythm. This is comforting because most of us have seen the world attempt to parallel park.
The Summer Everything Had a Soundtrack
Together, “Feel It Still,” Fyre Festival and Baby Driver form a strange little portrait of 2017.
It was a year fascinated by presentation. Music videos hid political messages inside gorgeous scenery. Movies transformed crime into choreography. Influencers could sell an unfinished patch of land as paradise using one orange square and sufficient confidence.
Everything seemed to be moving. Everything had been edited. Everything looked good on a phone.
That is part of what makes “Feel It Still” so nostalgic now. The opening bass line does more than recall a hit song. It brings back an entire atmosphere. Suddenly it is 2017 again, the radio is turned up and summer appears to be happening somewhere just beyond the windshield. Instagram is still capable of surprising us. Streaming has not yet divided every movie and television show among 47 separate monthly payments. A music festival without music still feels like an astonishing new failure instead of a business model.
Of course, 2017 was never as carefree as the song sounded. The anxiety was already there. “Feel It Still” simply gave it a bass line and taught it how to dance.
Maybe that is why the song survives. It captures the moment when we were learning that every polished image deserved a second look, but we had not yet become completely exhausted by looking. We could recognize the sales pitch, spot the hidden message and still enjoy the chorus.
For one summer, everything moved to a soundtrack. Some of it was art, some of it was fraud and nearly all of it looked terrific on Instagram.
We feel it still.
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