99, Wolfkid, Wit. The Light (2022)
When recording the opening line of today’s trap track, “I can’t find the light”, Wolfkid, 99 and Wit. probably had a metaphorical meaning in mind, but when I listened to it the first time in foggy, dark Western Europe back in February 2025, all I thought was, “me neither, buddy.” Good thing we have daylight saving time coming up soon now, right?
It is entirely likely that you shook your head at this remark because the concept of setting the clocks back an hour in summer remains a controversial one to this day:
Daylight saving time was probably first suggested by an Englishman with the fantastic name Willam Willet in 1905. He was so adamant about everyone getting to enjoy as much of the warm sunlight as possible in the summertime that he even published a brochure titled The Waste of Daylight, but sadly, he didn’t see his idea come to fruition before his death in 1915. Ironically, the first country then did implement it just the following year, when Britain’s wartime enemy Germany established daylight saving time in 1916 in order to preserve electricity during World War I.
Over the course of the next few years, many European countries followed suit with implementing this wartime measure, and despite a lack of evidence that daylight savings really saves energy, they’ve stuck to it since.
As we live in a Eurocentric world, this gimmick had global consequences: Some places, such as the U.S. and Canada, Australia and the majority of South American countries, started setting their clocks back along with Europe, but almost all of Asia and Africa never put the practice into place. Today, approximately every third country observes daylight saving time, but that number is far from consistent and has been steadily (and chaotically) decreasing: Mexico, for example, voted to abolish daylight savings in 2022, and they did except in a few cities close to the US border. And Egypt, where daylight saving was abolished in 2014, has even re-implemented it since.
The moral of the story, it seems, is twofold here. One: In a partially daylight-saving world, no matter how extremely globalized it is, time is relative. Better check you get the time difference right when setting a video call with someone halfway across the globe! (Does that country observe daylight saving time? If so, does the whole country observe it? And if so, when do they set their clocks back? It’s all a fun mystery!) And two: If you find yourself stressed out by this concept, give yourself a break and listen to the track that inspired today’s topic in the first place: “The Light”, with its smooth, vibe-y trap beats, is bound to make you feel grounded again.
Dig Deeper
Even if you do live in a place where daylight saving time is observed, it’s likely that the only clock you actually have to set back manually in today’s digital world is your microwave—your phone and computer just do it for you. In his book Analogue: A Field Guide, design historian Deyan Sudijc offers a digital antidote and surveys the make and development of a carefully curated collection of analogue product designs, including clocks you indeed have to turn back, cameras, turntables and much more.
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