summer 2000

The song of summer 2025 came out in 2000.

Caroline sent me a link to an article about the band X-Cetra on Instagram a few weeks ago and said “computer room core” which is in reference to my book that comes out later this summer.

The story of X-Cetra is pretty wild—four friends, average age of 11, recording pop songs over top of German-produced electronic beats from home in the early 00s. The mix got circulated on some radio programs several years later and became an underground hit for sounding, as I replied to Caroline, “like mary kate and ashley if they were a little bit cursed”. The album was reissued this year and I’ve had the song Summer 2000 stuck in my head all week.

More than half the stories in my book are about girls around the age of 11 being online and having very little shame about following their weirdest and wildest whimsies. My greatest tools for art-making at that age were the internet and my camcorder. I would’ve tried to make something similar to X-Cetra’s Stardust if I’d had enough friends who were down for it. Instead I made music videos and elaborate house tour videos. I wrote fan fiction and traded live recordings of bands I liked on forums.

There is something very beautiful and perhaps increasingly rare about making stuff when you’re young without a fully formed sense of self-consciousness.

Kate's therapist asked them to do an assignment on "values" that required sifting through several options and narrowing down their top three. For a couple of days, we talked at length about what felt most true for each of us. I was particularly struck by "Play"—especially as the antithesis to self-consciousness. Trying things even though you might be bad at them. Letting yourself experiment and be wrong and also right. Creating things just because you feel like it.

As I’ve written this book, I’ve tried to channel that same energy of the younger self I’m writing about.

Mackenzie and I went to the Re-Happening in Black Mountain over the weekend, which was full of people “playing”. We saw an Ant Ballet. We saw someone DJ with Randy Travis tapes. We saw an Improv Orchestra. All unexpected delights that can really only come from prioritizing playfulness over polish. It’s the same spirit that made the Black Mountain College artists influential, that makes X-Cetra so fun to listen to.

On the drive home, Mackenzie and I listened to Summer 2000, nodding our heads along to the chorus—all about summer and going crazy.