#ThrowbackThursday: 4 Strings, “Take Me Away”
Dance your troubles away with a slice of Y2K trance-pop realness
I don’t know exactly how it happened — blame the Internet and an American populace finally being exposed to culture from around the world? — but trance-pop was a real thing in the early 2000s. It was a strange time and the world was changing in unexpected (and scary) ways thanks to 9/11 and the impending war in the Middle East.
It makes sense, then, that music was an escape, and what better escape than a trance track literally called “Take Me Away”? When “Believe” and “Ray of Light” took the late-’90s new wave of electronic dance music mainstream, it opened the door for trance to step out from the fringes and into the spotlight. We were blessed with tracks like “Take Me Away”, Ian Van Dahl’s “Castles in the Sky,” Lasgo’s “Something,” and many more — not to mention pop culture moments like the movies “Go” and “Groove” that focused on rave culture. For goodness’ sake… “Sandstorm,” an instrumental trance track, was playing on top 40 radio, and if that’s not indicative of the shift in pop culture, I don’t know what is.
“Take Me Away” is a perfect time capsule of that time. It’s a pulsing, atmospheric electronica track, and while it doesn’t have the dramatic second-act crescendo that trance is often known for, its energetic slow burn makes up for it. The song reminds me of my early college days, living at home in a small town and dreaming of what it might be like to experience “real” clubs and “real” dance music in a big city. It also reminds me of the new-ness of the turn of the millennium. Trance music was an exciting and new frontier, and it felt like the perfect soundtrack to a world that was careening at lightspeed toward digitization. It also felt exotic. The artists behind 4 Strings were European (Dutch), like many of the big names in electronica in the early 2000s. Because of this, their music felt foreign in an exciting way; in the early days of digital music, buying 4 Strings’ album on iTunes and downloading it to my iPod felt like it shouldn’t have been possible, much less legal.
It was all so shiny and new, and while we won’t experience this exact brand of dance music revolution again, we were treated to a similar renaissance ten years later when artists like Skrillex and Avicii took dubstep and EDM to new heights and helped usher in our current era of mainstream music festivals. Dance music has more mass-market presence and appeal than ever before… so maybe there’s hope for a trance revival in the future… but I won’t hold my breath. Throw away those JNCOs and pacifier necklaces, friends. The future is now.
Hungry for more of that Y2K dance-pop? I’ve collected a few of my favorites in a Spotify playlist below. Enjoy!
