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It sounded like a futuristic rave divebomb attack, and it also sounded like a widescreen take on circa-1990 Miami bass, an entire genre that I’d been conditioned to think was stupid. “B.O.B.” felt like everything happening at once. My reaction was something more like: “ What fuck whoa holy shit fuck whoa what.” I kept hitting repeat, trying to make some kind of sense of everything I could hear. I didn’t have the mental bandwidth for anything like that in the moment. I would like to tell you that the arrival of “B.O.B.” felt like some kind of big-bang moment - that I knew the rules had been shattered and nothing would be the same again. Threw it in the Discman as soon as I was sure nobody else from the station was watching me. Grabbed one, shoved it in my pocket, walked out of the student center all paranoid, like I had purloined diamonds jammed in my boxers. A couple of CD singles had shown up at the college radio station where I was volunteering, and I immediately stole one. This would’ve been September of 2000, a month and a half before Stankonia landed. I remember the sunlight reflecting off of the windshields of the cars around me, the faces of the people walking past, the air suddenly tasting a whole lot more vivid in my lungs. I remember all those sounds and ideas pinging around in my head as I walked across that parking lot. I remember everything about it - the tingly music-box intro, the whispered count-off, the sudden adrenaline-jamming surge of booming bass and rampaging drums and needling dubbed-out electric guitars, the way that adrenaline surge didn’t let up over the next five minutes. I remember exactly where I was the first time “B.O.B.” hit.