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The Death of Jonny Dollar

Sad news. I just read the obituary for the great music producer Jonny Dollar. I confess I didn't know his name before now, but I knew the music he helped to create: trip-hop. It seems like the distant paleolithic, but was really only a generation ago, in the 1990s, when the trip-hop style was the most exciting and fresh around - it really felt like the sountrack to the lifestyle of my friends and peers on the streets and clubs and cafes of Montreal, in the summers that made up the mid-90s on St. Laurent Boulevard (once Grunge had died). Nothing was stranger, sexier, or more of the moment. Of the songs that came from this period, Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, was the masterpiece, and Dollar co-wrote that. It was the music that played on the first date with my (now) wife. Dollar's part of my life, and his genius, unknown to me then, is now plain. What a loss, he was only 45.
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