Forever Songs Pt. 1: Unfinished Sympathy

A few times I've commented on Moby's "Go" and how it always gets used to signify "okay, now ecstacy's going on". I am back in Willoughby now on my dad's TiVo, and inevitably I am once again watching vh1's great documentary The Drug Years. It is interesting because it is well researched and all about drugs in the 20th century, see? "Go" is a pretty great anthem/lazy-indicator-of-ecstasy-culture, but this time I noticed an even better song creeping into the soundtrack. Massive Attack's "Unfinished Sympathy", in addition to having an oddly classy pun for a title, has been used to the hilt in the media before, but mostly for mediocre erotica. Check out the softcore Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver for that. Let us not overlook how great a song "Unfinished Sympathy" is. 17-18 years now and it has not aged, only become more familiar. Massive Attack gets under-rated quite a bit because their innovations actually took and became commonplace. In 1991, though, it was still quite novel to hear a transcendent classical lost love ballad/anthem based around a classic hip-hop sample. This is the apex of Bob James cribs, despite being used by Run-DMC many years before and Ghostface many years later. And Shara Nelson on the vox! How can you beat that? What happened to her?