The driver from 1986 | The Rewind

This isn't the Sunday issue. Sunday still comes. I'm writing on a Wednesday afternoon with the attic fan going because I've been sitting here since ten this morning trying to start a sentence, and at some point you have to stop circling the block and park.

Kavinsky is dead. He was fifty.

Here is what's actually known, and I'm going to keep this part short and flat, because he deserves better than a stranger in Ohio speculating. Vincent Belorgey was found at his home in Paris late Tuesday night, around half past ten local time. A neighbour called it in after not seeing him for a few days. French authorities said first responders found no suspicious elements at the scene, and the Paris police have opened an investigation to establish the cause. No cause has been confirmed. There are reports circulating about what it might have been. I'm not printing them, because "might have been" is not a thing you say about a man's last days while his family is still finding out who to call.

So instead let me tell you what he did, because I don't think most people outside this scene understand the size of it.

He invented us.

That sounds like grief talking. It isn't. Around 2005, encouraged by his friends Jackson Fourgeaud and Quentin Dupieux, the man who makes films as Quentin Dupieux and records as Mr Oizo, Belorgey started putting out music under a name and a story. The story went like this. There is a driver. He crashes his Testarossa in 1986. He comes back, not quite alive, and what comes back is the music. That was the whole conceit, and he committed to it for twenty years. He said, more than once, that putting his own face on a record sleeve never felt right to him, so he built a character to stand there instead.

I've now written two issues of this magazine in a row about 1986, and I thought I was making some point about anniversaries. He got there first. He picked that year on purpose, in the mid 2000s, when nobody was nostalgic for it yet, and he built a dead man out of it and then made the dead man famous.

The records came out slowly and they all counted. Teddy Boy in 2006. The 1986 EP in 2007. Then the Nightcall EP in 2010, with Lovefoxxx of CSS answering him on the title track in a voice pitched somewhere between a lullaby and a threat. His first proper album, OutRun, arrived in 2013 and went to number two in France. Then almost a decade of nothing, and then Reborn in 2022, which was a good title for a man who had spent his career being a ghost.

Two albums in twenty years. Two. There are producers in this scene who put out two albums a quarter and would trade the whole shelf for one song that lands like his did.

Because there is the other thing, the one everybody knows even if they don't know they know it. In 2011 Nicolas Winding Refn put "Nightcall" over the opening of Drive, under Ryan Gosling and the LA night, and that was that. It stopped being a song and became a piece of infrastructure. Kids who weren't born when it came out use it now the way my generation used a mixtape. He played it at the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics in 2024, in his own city, to the whole planet.

I need to say the personal part, and then I'll get out of the way.

In the first issue of this magazine, in the counter list at the bottom, I put down College's "A Real Hero" and wrote that it was the song that pulled me into this scene in 2011. That's true. What I skipped over, because it was a five item list and not a memoir, is where I heard it. It was in a theater in Westlake, on a Tuesday, at a movie I went to by myself because Dana had watched the trailer over my shoulder and said, with love, that this was a me movie.

And before College, before Gosling says a word, there's a car moving through a city at night and a man singing "I'm giving you a night call to tell you how I feel."

I sat in that seat and something in my chest reorganized itself. I was thirty two. I hadn't worked a video store in nine years, and I had spent most of a decade assuming, without ever quite saying it out loud, that the part of my life where things sounded like that was finished and I'd just have to be an adult about it. Then a movie played a song over a car and told me no, that place is still there, other people live in it now, here's the address.

Everything I've done since traces back through that. The blogs nobody paid me for. The podcast that died after two episodes, which I will explain to anybody who stands still long enough. Fifteen years of arguing about this music with people generous enough to argue back. This magazine, this job, this attic in July. All of it starts in a half empty theater in Westlake with a Kavinsky song playing over the opening titles.

He made the night sound like a place you could actually drive to.

I never met him. I have no story about a handshake at a festival, no interview in a folder I can finally publish. I was just one of the several million people who got handed a door.

The thing I keep coming back to today is how strange it is to grieve a man through a character he made up to avoid being seen. He built the driver so he wouldn't have to stand on the sleeve himself. Now the driver is going to keep going, in every car and every pair of headphones and every bad remix and every kid discovering Drive in 2044, and the man who made him is the part that stops. He would probably have found that funny. Based on twenty years of evidence, that's exactly the joke he was telling the entire time.

If you're new here and you only ever play one thing from this magazine, play that.

If you've got a car and it's dark where you are, take it out. Not fast. That's not what this music is for and it never was. Just out past where the streetlights stop, with the windows down, and let it run.

Fifty is not enough. It isn't close to enough.

Thank you for the nights, Vincent.

Marty