Um...Over the last two years many genres have competed for the hipster dance crown. Disco has made a real comeback, and I have to say that of all the contenders, it's the one that I like best. You can make jokes with disco dance moves and I like that. It also doesn't eschew the word and concept "hipster", which is becoming the new hip, btw, the eschewing. Nothing sleazes things up more than Baltimore house music. It only incites gratuitous grinding with girls, and, as I used to be a fat kid, I still don't feel confident enough to grab some smoking hot girl from behind and rub my dick (and not yet forgotten fupa) all up in her butt crack. There' s also this stuff popularly known as blog house, which sounds more like "power saw fart" house to me. The stuff has become really popular this year, and never wanting to be considered insular (most of the stuff comes from Europe, which btw apparently means infallible in hipster), I gave p.s.f. house a shot.
A Sunday night, at the Trocadero, in my hometown of Philadelphia. This act, Justice, which is p.s.f. house's flagship, was playing live. Man, did some weird shit go down at that show. These guys walked onto the stage wearing robot masks, no robot suits. Instead, they sported altar boy cassocks. The room was almost pitch black. All the sudden, this gigantic cross lit up at the back of the stage and the entire crowd fell to its knees and these really metallic synthesizers began to crescendo and the crowd started to recite the "Our Father" over and over, increasing in volume with the synths.
The robotic acolytes then jumped off the stage and began to administer Communion, which I immediately noticed tasted nothing like the body of Christ. I said, "Hey!, robotic acolytes, this tastes nothing like the body of Christ!". To which the taller one replied (in a robot voice), "Yea, but it is, my son. The Catholic church has been telling you lies your whole life. When Jesus Christ our Lord died he wasn't buried, but rather cremated. His ashes were spread over the entire earth by a mighty hurricane. In the year 909 in what is today Columbia, South America, a farmer named Jesus found some of Jesus' ashes, but he didn't know Them and so being a poor, hungry farmer, he [Jesus] consumed Them and received great feelings of euphoria. Today, you may know the ashes of Jesus by the slang name of cocaine. That's the Communion you've just eaten. That feeling in your heart, that uncontrollable throbbing, that's the everlasting life kicking in." As soon as he finished, this 4/4 bass beat kicked in, and the crowd started to chant, and I saw ten guys having missionary sex with ten girls upon this huge neon altar that appeared out of nowhere on the middle of the stage.
After that, I wanted nothing more to do with hipsters and their p.s.f. house. Funny thing, when I regained my sanity and could resume downloading music, I stumbled across this record,
Myth Takes, by the !!!. In spots the record was chintzy, but it does contain two really great songs, "Must Be The Moon" and "Heart of Hearts." After doing some research, I found out that people termed this type of music "dance punk" and that it was the epitome of hipster culture from 2000-2004, and that any attempt at it outside of that time has been universally panned. I found a wealth of really great tunes from the era from bands like The Rapture and !!! (I've listened to "Me and Giuliani..." upwards of 50 times this year.) and Out Hud and the DFA and LCD Soundsystem before they went Funk, and Liars before they got Serious. All awesome dance tunes that made you dance in the most Bacchanalian of ways, made you forget the pretensions of prior hipster generations. Now, for some reason unbeknownst to me, it's sacrilege for a hipster DJ to play one of these songs in the clubs.
In today's hipster scenescape you can't be an out of the closet dance punk. In the time of p.s.f. house, what are we, hipsters, but innate
dancers too, who don't want to partake in bizarre religious cocaine orgies, to do? Standing around as if petrified or jumping up and down or wrestling isn't dancing, people. It's like the singer from The Rapture says on that one song, "People don't dance no more, they just stand and pump their fists..." We have NYC Disco, sure, but without dance punk to what do we now lose our shit? Can we even lose our shit anymore, or has our shit already lost us?
