I hadn’t thought about the dynamic of time, but you’re right: the Hip is much less about chronology than it is about location. For example, I just got the “Phantom Power” CD, and in listening to it I don’t hear the Hip from a decade ago; I just hear the Hip.

This is a fantastic post. Thanks for these musings on recent albums from the world’s greatest band. It is very interesting that this is a band that we connect to geography before we do to age. I remember having a conversation with some friends about U2, listing our all-time favourite U2 album — War for JP, Joshua Tree for Skipper, Achtung Baby for myself, and Zooropa for Dave — it was purely a generational thing where the youngest preferred the more recent. But it isn’t that way with the Hip — we don’t automatically prefer the album we associate with our high school years. I like the idea that their sound is linked to geography before time.

And at a pub on Esplanade, it becomes part of our vernacular.