A lot of NYC Substacks out there doing party reports. You know: downtown stuff, art stuff, film stuff, lit stuff, annoying political stuff I don’t even want to get into… That’s not John’s Music Blog. Here at John’s Music Blog, we have other interests. Dumb interests. Interests that make me question my maturity level and wonder where it all went wrong. Do I even have to say it? I spent an hour or so last Friday at “WHAT'S MY RAVE AGAIN, a Blink 182 Night” in Brooklyn.
When I arrived I was reminded why I don’t go out and also why having a blog where I sometimes force myself to go out is a horrible idea. The 400 or so capacity room was almost completely empty and Taking Back Sunday was playing.
I was there because my friend Kyle was DJing. When I first met him, over 15 years ago, he was the kid playing pop and rap at noise shows around Southern California. Back then, it was a confrontational gesture. Poptimism hadn’t fully congealed yet. Indie rock still mattered. Pavement were still more “important” than Mariah Carey. In that context, it was sick to hear someone play the Venga Boys and end the night with “Closing Time” by Semisonic. He might even piss off some kid in an earnest post-hardcore band. You know what I’m saying?
That was a long time ago. Kyle never “pivoted to techno” and so he now pays his rent by doing things like, I don’t know, flying in to DJ a Blink 182 Rave in Brooklyn. He has been traveling the country playing theme parties: he already did a Bad Bunny one in Frisco and next week he does a “Mean Girls” party in Chicago. As “Dance Dance” by Fall Out Boy played, I started thinking about Kyle’s journey from noise troll to professional DJ. These gigs are about as far away from the underground as possible. Some might call them soul crushing, but I would just call them work.
Let me keep it 100: I’m no stranger to pop punk and emo nostalgia parties. They are the new 80s nights. There are different competing Emo Night franchises around the country. I once played in the basement of maybe the most popular Emo Night at Webster Hall while Machine Gun Kelly and Halsey DJ’d to thousands in the club’s main room. Maybe 30 people watched my set. That party sort of blew my mind. Rarely did “actual emo music” get played. Instead, everyone was going off to songs like “In Too Deep” by Sum 41 as if they were EDM Bangers. There were even remnants of EDM culture: I spotted more than a few hula hoops.
Those Emo Night DJs reminded me of The Misshapes, a crew whose popularity peaked at some point in the early 2000s. The Misshapes had asymmetrical haircuts and played The Smiths for the Olsen Twins and didn’t know how to mix records. I assume they are about to make a major comeback. With Emo Night, instead of The Smiths it was My Chemical Romance. Instead of the Olsen Twins it was Machine Gun Kelly. I heard A Day To Remember’s cover of “Since U Been Gone” at least three times.
Whatever my friend was getting into last Friday, though, was some 5th-tier derivative darkness. Blink-182 factored in heavily, but it wasn’t really all about that. An early Blink song (“Carousel”) actually cleared the tiny dancefloor. I watched a man in a Rangers jersey make jerky movements towards the DJ as “Self Esteem” by The Offspring played. Two young women in full Hot Topic formal started to dance to “Hit Or Miss” by New Found Glory, but then stopped about a minute in. There was some sort of VIP “throne” situation in the back of the club, elevated with cheap plywood. That kind of shit. Youth Of Today played at the same venue the night before.
There were maybe 20 people in the room. They skewed young. The kids at Misshapes didn’t actually remember the 80s, just like some of these people were probably born around the time Bleed American came out. I was actually surprised at the turnout. After my experience at Emo Night, I assumed it would be a rager. I knew more people would come, at least a few more people, but after an hour of standing in a corner watching 23-year-olds mouth the words to songs like “Ocean Avenue” by Yellowcard (an undeniably great song; I would say that I loved at least half of what was played and liked a good portion of the rest), I felt like I had to go. The subway stopped running, so I walked home and listened to Born To Run.
Kyle told me more people did show up. But not many more. Maybe 50 tops. I’m not sure if I have the patience to be an unpaid nightclub reporter. Also: I don’t drink. I told myself that I wouldn’t go to a DIY show for the rest of my 30s. Felt like the only reasonable response to 20 wasted years. This wasn’t a DIY show. But I’m getting unnervingly close to breaking that promise…