hey so last night me and joe and angelica went to a modular records label showcase at this bar/venue in greenpoint, me and joe biked there and it was like 999 degrees and humid so by the time we got there my face was glistening with sweat, like beads of sweat were dripping off my nose and my hair was stuck to my forehead, and honestly it couldn’t have come at a worse time because the first thing i noticed when i got there was that the rest of the people there were like the 150 most attractive people in the music industry and sharply dressed and not even sweating at all, most of the girls were like 6’2” blondes and had just stepped off a beach in your dreams and joe said “yo even the sixes here are eights.” so we walked in and grabbed some complimentary red stripe lights and posted up in the most dimly-lit area in the whole place while my face dried off and i scanned the crowd to see if i could spot any of the members of tame impala (who i was trying to recognize from their pitchfork guest list thumbnail photo) so i could interview them but i guess they were all backstage…

so eventually the band came on and started playing, as my high school english teacher would say, they laid about eight thick slabs of sumptuous psychedelic rock upon the audience, all of which were met with a disinterest characteristic of people in the record industry. whenever the band hit a quieter instrumental part you could hear people talking over the music and also like three songs into the set the crowd was noticeably thinner. i guess if you have already gotten behind this band financially and it’s your job to listen to records and promote bands and go to shows and schmooze with other industry people like all day every day, you probably could give a fuck less about yet another label showcase and for that i can’t fault you

anyway so then after the show i went outside with joe and angelica, she smoked a cigarette and i concealed my beer and we took in the the warm summer evening air and i thought i saw one of the dudes from MGMT milling around, so we speculated as to whether it was him or not (spin magazine confirms it was him, apparently he also played bass on stage with them with his back to the audience the whole time like a true major label rock n roll renegade). and then at one point i turned around and found myself standing next to the drummer from tame impala who was deeply engaged in conversation with a chick who looked like clare danes and as much as i wanted to interrupt that to ask him about his pitchfork score, it would have been a total violation of that unspoken code between men you know? and he probably would have turned down the interview in frustration

so as i was waiting for their conversation to end so i could approach him with my interview pitch, the lead singer walked up behind them and i intercepted him!! i went up to him and mumbled “hey i write this blog about pitchfork and i was wondering if i could ask you a few questions about your pitchfork score and some other stuff” and it was pretty loud out there and i think he thought i said that i wrote FOR pitchfork which was a misconception i was not eager to correct. he said “yeah sure”

so i was like, “okay cool, so how is your life different since you got that Best New Music” and he paused for a while and said “well now we’re highly regarded indie rock legends” and then he paused again and said “make sure your readers understand the humor in that” and i laughed and said “yeah of course” and then i said, “do you read pitchfork?” and he said “occasionally.” then i was like, “is it as big a phenomenon in australia?” and he indicated he didn’t really know. i said, “who do you like better, dungen or wolfmother?” and he said dungen

at that point i sensed my interviewing momentum slowing and his eyes were darting around over my shoulder, probably scoping the pretty honeys that had turned out to see him be the lead singer of a rock band and that’s not an opportunity he was eager to waste, especially on some sweaty kid with a tumblr, so then i cut to the question i REALLY wanted to ask and was like, “so how much weed do you guys smoke?” and he looked startled for a second and sort of giggled and said “i’m not sure if i wanna answer that” and i was like “come on bro” and he said “okay fine, let’s just say if we go a day without one or two spliffs it’s a rare thing” and then i said something like “you don’t have to answer this, i know it’s tacky but i’m just genuinely curious, how much money do you guys make off your record deal?” and he told me that each member of the band gets $500 a week from the label, and no matter how many records they sell or if their songs are in cadillac commercials they don’t get any more money than that. so now you know how much money some indie bands that get best new music get

then we talked about his record for like three more minutes and he told me the story of how he dropped out of college, which was that literally he was in the car on the way to his last exam ever in college (he studied ASTRONOMY!!! how perfect for a psychedelic rocker right??? like practically speaking, what else could you even do with an astronomy degree beside play psychedelic rock, how many astronomers are there in the world total, like 600?) and he got the call from modular records that they wanted to sign his band! so he turned the car around and drove home and never took his final exam and dropped out of college. i told him i thought that was really rock and he laughed. man i really turned the charm on for that interview ;) i was pretty nervous to be in a Best New Presence but i hope i pulled it off. you should get their record, and pay for it if you can, the dude was honestly really nice, and listen to it on headphones, it’s real good. okay have a good day

so i walked into the pitchfork party last night and honestly all of my darkest suspicions about pitchfork were like immediately confirmed. the first thing i noticed was the walls and floors and ceiling were made of stone, the office looked just like a medieval castle or the clubhouse of an ancient secret society. there were no conventional lights but the walls were lined with flaming torches. i knew i was about to witness something special.

then i saw the staffers: there were about 75 tall, impossibly handsome and truly sinister-looking thirtysomethings with severe five o’clock shadows and grins of pure evil flashing across their faces, almost impossible to detect but there nonetheless like flashes of genius in the Lucksmiths catalogue. so all these pitchfork staffers were impeccably groomed and clad in the suavest and most expensive hip eveningwear available, like rag & bone, they all looked like princes of darkness. there were wives and girlfriends with horrified looks on their faces huddled together in a corner while their men gloated about who had destroyed the most bands in their pitchfork reviewing careers and what models of drum machines dominated early Detroit techno, whether or not 8-track tapes would eventually overtake cassette tapes as the preferable format for music consumption. there were three doors on the far side of the room: one labeled Mens, one labeled Ladies, and one labeled Vomitorium. an unlabeled door near the entrance led to what someone told me was the dungeon

the floor was littered with check deposit receipts from record labels to pay for the Best New Musics they get. a videochat with scott plagenhoef was projected on the ceiling and his eyes were bright red and he didn’t say anything but he periodically erupted into cackling fits, and the laptop was pointed toward the crowd so he could see us too, it was like he wanted us to know he was keeping watch over his minions. i wanted to take a picture of the stuffed corpses of what i recognized as two of the members of the band Sound Team that hung from the ceiling in nooses like in that scene in the Sixth Sense, but my phone doesn’t have a camera. also a fire pit was dug out in the middle of the room with a spit rotating over it and when i asked Sean Fennessey what they were gonna roast on it he looked me in the eye and said “you’re the kid who writes pitchfork reviews reviews right?” then he winked and licked his lips. i was like trembling with fear and i told him i didn’t know what he was talking about, told him i never read a pitchfork review in my life, “i didn’t even know you guys did reviews, thought it was all news and videos,” i trembled, “my girlfriend brought me because she wrote a couple reviews for you in like 2008-2009,” i said “you can have her, just take her, please, i don’t want any trouble”

a hush fell over the room when ryan schreiber made his grand entrance, he stood eight feet tall and was trailed by three interns hoisting boomboxes over their heads that were playing Wolf Like Me by TV on the Radio, and also two interns carrying smoke machines. this lent a certain epicness to the proceedings you know what i mean? one of the interns with a boombox fainted and got swiftly carried out by two guys from the Advertising department (who i could identify because they were covered in complimentary American Apparel). before they reached the door schreiber commanded them to immolate the intern’s body in the video editing suite that’s located above the main office space, noting how that intern had cracked under the pressure. anyway schreiber was wearing a t-shirt for an Ed Droste side project so obscure that ryan schreiber is literally the only person who has ever heard it. during the thirty seconds i talked to schreiber, he told me he’s planning to review the Ed Droste record himself and give it a 10.0, you will have to download the review in a PDF to connote the gravity of the writing, and then schreiber will delete the mp3s of the record then burn the master tapes so no one can ever hear it, and maybe put the video for what would have been the single on Pitchfork.tv but make it a broken link, and then after he told me his plans he smirked and nodded in self-satisfaction and said “yeah that’s what i’m gonna do, that’s how much i loathe independent music and culture.” couldn’t believe what i was hearing. when Beach Fossils played later in the evening he stood behind them, brandishing an actual pitchfork menacingly, and when i talked to the lead singer he said ryan kept whispering, “play tighter, play more authentic” but they didn’t know what that meant

luckily i slipped out before anyone found out who i was, but now you know what kind of shit really goes on over there

i talk to a bunch of people who are really into music and really knowledgeable about it, but who never really got into following which labels put out which artists’ records. that’s a shame because i’ve always found the label that an artist is on can really explain a lot about the records they put out. when i read about an artist i first try to find out their release history, then where they’re from, then what label they’re on. and now, in an era when so many artists are just “from the internet” (the disparate locations of chillwave artists (or that new spooky witch rap genre that pitchfork described a few weeks ago), mean that their “scene” exists more on the internet than it does in a conventional place), the importance of record labels as extramusical signifiers is heightened, relative to where a band is from at least, which is considered pretty important

the label that a record comes out on gives you an idea of the record’s production aesthetic or the quality of the resources and thought behind it, and in a way, that’s crucial to understanding the record itself. for example, you know a record that comes out on True Panther Sounds will probably embody a subversion or ironic-unironic embrace of sunshiney pop and/or tropical rhythms (lemonade, tanlines, delorean, rainbow bridge, girls). Modular records is australian, and their records are almost all Australian psychedelic rock and psychedelic dance punk (wolfmother, tame impala and muscles, cut copy). if that’s your thing, check out their roster for records you might like from bands you might not yet have heard of but play in a style you’re into. underground rap labels like anticon (super left field, often conceptual, unusually difficult rap) and stones throw (also left field, off-kilter rhymes over screwed up soulful beats) have strong label identities too.

labels share resources and producers and contacts, and i’m sure bandmembers sleep on labelmates’ couches and sing backup on labelmates’ records all the time. labels are tiny artistic communities, and if you take the time to understand them as such, you can catch a lot of Best New Musics before Pitchfork calls them that, and, even better, catch the records that pitchfork can’t get to that are your PERSONAL best new musics, like that dignan porch record on captured tracks.

underwater peoples records or woodsist records will sound lo-fi and home produced but not exactly hissy, versus a record that comes out on island or interscope or sony (or any of their affiliates) that’ll sound professional and polished, and, you know, plasticky. if you ever read a pitchfork review and they pan something you think is pretty okay, see if it came out on island records and you’ll know why.

some labels, like the now defunct TVT records (former home to Lil Jon and a bunch of indie bands at the same time) or Universal Motown (home to The Rapture, Scissor Sisters, and some random soul stuff) or XL Records (devendra banhart and m.i.a. and vampire weekend and the xx, all on the same label) don’t really have a conventional sonic identity, but might give you an idea of how popular an artist’s records will be (most records that come on on XL records or 4AD or Domino or Matador are pretty likely to make a splash in indie music), and sometimes an idea of their quality: labels like XL are expertly curated, and the people who run them have earned a lot of listeners’ trust, even if some listeners aren’t aware of that. actually come to think of it, no one is on top of as wide a swath of hitmaking innovators as XL Records is at this moment, and anything that comes out on that label is worth a purchase.

a bunch of labels with really distinct voices have those voices because they’re run by people who don’t sign bands haphazardly/don’t just sign any band they like regardless of how they sound — they wanna develop brand identities that listeners can look to for listening guidance.

so in a way, record label heads, the people who decide which bands to sign, are both businessmen and THE ULTIMATE CRITICS — they’re the people who have to put their money with their mouths are, whose conviction in the resonance of their tastes powers their livelihood. ideally, label heads believe in the bands they sign more than any critic does, because their bands doing well means they can put food on their table and their business can survive (if a critic’s picks don’t sell well, it doesn’t really have any impact on the critic as long as the criticism behind those recommendations is worthwhile). so in the vein of all that, last night me and my temporary sublet roommate were talking about aging and sports, and he mentioned this quote from this football coach Mike Gundy who was defending one of his players after a newspaper wrote a piece attacking the player — Gundy said “COME AFTER ME! I’M A MAN! I’M FORTY!” implying that he saw the value in that player and was wise and schooled enough to be prepared to defend his player.

i think in addition to being the ultimate critics, label heads are also analagous to coaches in team sports. a label’s roster is like a sports team’s roster — the more quality work each band or player produces, the better the team does. Bands send their labels completed records, and labels give them varying amounts of feedback on those records, just like players come off the field or court to be given guidance by their coaches.

so in the spirit of Mike Gundy defending his player and the notion that label heads are the ultimate critics, how rad would it be if label heads wrote serious critical defenses and legitimizations of their artists? these pieces would be beyond the laudatory fluff of the conventional press release and could discuss the merits of each records in terms of the ideas that went into them, the traditions that the music works in, the circumstances the artists were living in when they made the record, themes that run through the lyrics and perhaps the artists’ hidden influences, like i guess influences that are hard to discern from listening to the record on its own but make sense once you read about them. these pieces could be on the labels’ websites or part of the press kits for their records, and could act as catalysts for more informed criticism of the record. if all a writer has to work with is a fruitless interview and a 12 downloaded tracks, it’s easy to get the record’s intent mixed up, to write and think vaguely and inaccurately about the record, and easy to dismiss the record offhandedly you know?

if any label heads are reading this, you should know you’d be doing your artists (and your bottom lines) a lot of good by releasing more information about them, and seriously discussing their work in public, getting into detail about why YOU love them enough and think their ideas are worthwhile enough to gamble your income on (beyond the frustrating vagaries of the press release, which is often discarded anyway), because really YOUR word is likely to be taken seriously because you’re the one putting your money where your mouth is, you are the curator and critic-in-chief of the label, and your unparalleled access to the artists personally and the records before anyone else hears them gives you the upper hand in starting the conversation about the record. obviously you can do this before critics get a chance to malign the record or misunderstand it or damn it with faint praise because they didn’t have enough information to write something really compelling about the record you know? think about it

last night me angelica and anna were sitting in a bar and the bar was playing only Pavement and the song 5-4=Unity came on and i’ve always hated that song because i thought it just really fucked up Crooked Rain’s momentum and was just stuck in there to indicate that they’re “just fucking around” or “just don’t give a fuck” or something. i mean it’s a pretty inoffensive dave brubeck song with some lazy pavement guitar licks strewn about, they probably intended it to be a palate cleanser, but it always struck me as a song that would not be put on a record in an era when it’s so easy to just uncheck a track on iTunes and never have to hear it again — i just thought it was a mistake to put on there, in a way it’s a BAD song, you know?

and Anna, who never really got into pavement, was trying to discern what we thought was so wrong with 5-4=Unity, and i told her that it was pretty much just like Electric Renaissance off Tigermilk by Belle and Sebastian, on a near-perfect indie pop record it’s a 4-minute interuption, another song begging for the old iTunes uncheck, another BAD song in its context.

and you already know that you don’t have to go far on the internet to find people saying bands and records “suck” but i feel like just saying a band or record “sucks” is, in a way, shrinking from the challenge of really hearing and comprehending what someone else is saying you know? THERE’S SOMETHING BAD TO SAY ABOUT EVERY SINGLE BAND IF YOU WANT TO SAY IT but at the end of the day, the real challenge of listenership is hearing value in music, not worthlessness — i mean, i feel like every band has something worthwhile to say, there’s a piece of someone’s soul or skill in every piece of music, and what i love about reading music writing is that good music writing gives you a lens through which to find that worthwhile something. or maybe that’s corny and wrong and some people just aren’t great at expressing themselves through music? who knows right? and maybe 5-4=Unity and Electric Renaissance are perfect right where they are, breaking up albums that might have begun to wear on the listener by the last couple songs if those tracks weren’t on those records?

so anyway, in thinking about bands and records that suck, i kept coming back to one of the worst records i could think of: Rebirth by Lil Wayne, you know, the unheralded and dismissed “rock” record that Lil Wayne made before he went to jail. pitchfork gave it a charitable 4.5 i think, and the review had a tone of understanding, rather than the “this is fucking retarded, let’s laugh at it” review that a lot of other critics greeted Rebirth with. it has a 37% on metacritic, where you can find 20 critics gleefully trying their hand at capturing what exactly is so odious about Rebirth. to paraphrase some extant thought on Rebirth: if you thought Dedication 3 was bad, Rebirth is a comparative blood fart, it’s a miscarriage in 12 tracks, it’s the worst instincts of a man who nobody can say No to run amok, it’s Chinese Democracy but released expediently.

and i thought about trying to write something in defense of Rebirth, so i put it on and started listening to it, and, in short, i found it exactly as horrific as the reviews (and perhaps your own experience listening to it) indicate that it is, and i gave up on my quest to find something worthwhile in it.

but then i was thinking about Rebirth again when me and Joe were sitting in a coffee shop on saturday afternoon talking about the Drake record and Joe said he’s hearing something in the Drake record that he has never heard in rap before, and he’s listening to the Drake record for a reason that he’s never listened to rap before. i think what he’s talking about is Drake’s mix of confidence and vulnerability, of proudly displaying all the chinks in his armor, and Joe was talking about how there’s a double standard for rap in which it’s pussy to explore your vulnerabilities and soft spots, and that people believe rap should be fun more and sad less, which i guess is unfortunately expressed in my writing about Drake from last thursday. talking about that kinda turned me around on Rebirth.

but i’m not the only one who limits rap this way: obviously Lil Wayne does too, or else he wouldn’t have felt the need to channel the anguish of fame and the agony of loss and loneliness out of rap and into “rock” you know? Rebirth is evidence that Wayne has deemed rap an unsuitable form in which to OPENLY and THOROUGHLY air out his isolation, his concerns that people use him, his fear that he has nothing, his desire to see himself in the tradition of something emotionally “deeper” and more “tortured” than rap could be. obviously if you’re the type of person to read this blog and listen to rap you know it’s every bit as capable a vehicle as “rock” for expressing suffering and fear and loss, but for Wayne, who primarily associates “rock” with Kurt Cobain and My Chemical Romance that are, to him, icons of tortured existences spoken in the language of rock, Rebirth becomes more understandable. for Wayne, Rebirth is not about rockstar glory but about rockstar agony.

i think the reception of Rebirth, including my own reception of it, was colored by that same double standard against rappers openly exploring their tortured existences (as opposed to unwittingly exploring their tortured existences, like on the new cam’ron record when he says “grandma was ‘mom’ / called mom by her first name / why the hell you think i stay up in the third lane / gettin head from a chicken / i call it bird brain” which is roughly summed up as “my fucked up relationship with my mom is why i love making women whores”), and Rebirth’s vulnerability is cloaked in ANGER and frustration and resentment, which Wayne could only color with the least fashionable modern rock signifiers. he doesn’t write for pitchfork you know?

a bit of Rebirth is Wayne expressing his Michael Jackson complex: Wayne’s been rapping since he was 12, had a kid when he was 15, and in Prom Queen you can hear him going back to recapture a High School experience he never had, just like Michael Jackson recreated a childhood fantasy world to try to finally live his lost childhood. the difference is that Wayne was put under the spotlight as a young teenager and Michael Jackson was forced onto stages much earlier than that, like at age five. really it seems like they’re both trying to pick up where they left off in their pre-fame lives…

Rebirth is uncomfortable to listen to because it’s so angry: he tells listeners “I’MMA PICK THE WORLD UP AND I’MMA DROP IT ON YOUR FUCKING HEAD”, he screams and yowls and you know it’s burning in his throat, he goes through moments of despair like “it’s like i have it all, but what’s it all worth?” in recognizing that no matter how successful he is, it feels empty, “i should cherish life but this ain’t paradise,” he calls himself a loser, a chorus begs “WHEN’S IT GONNA END??” and another one, “LET’S JUMP OUT A WINDOW, LET’S JUMP OFF A BUILDING” and then on record’s centerpiece, Wayne hits rock bottom: “I search but never find / hurt but never cry / I WORK AND FOREVER TRY BUT I’M CURSED SO NEVERMIND”

Rebirth is gut-wrenching if you take it seriously instead of laughing it off, it’s the saddest record Wayne could have made. i think its closest antecedent in Wayne’s catalogue is I Feel Like Dying, but the pain Wayne embodies in that song is drug-induced, and there’s an inherent way out of that, you know, quitting drugs. Rebirth’s pain is existential, entrapping, unending, and that’s the saddest part about the whole thing

in the Lil Wayne documentary The Carter, which was made at a time when he was making and thinking about Rebirth, Wayne is painted as lonely, fucked up, aloof, defiantly drug-addled, and awkward. his relationships seem hollow to non-existent (except with his daughter), and Rebirth comes out of what must have been an unbearable time. it’s his reaction to everyone expecting and NEEDING him to be cheerful and wacky and flamboyant when all he wants to do is scream. and if you’ve ever had to pretend nothing’s wrong after your girlfriend broke up with you, or your bike got stolen and you wanted to cry but you were hanging out with your friends and didn’t wanna be a downer, you can understand Rebirth. imagine the pressure on a dude who’s expected to sell more records than anyone else, to constantly be topping his earlier unfathomable successes, and how satisfying it must have been to make a fuck the world, fuck the industry, fuck my life record like Rebirth as a reaction to that pressure, knowing it wouldn’t sell and going off to jail with a middle finger in the air. kind of a rock n roll think to do right?

how can a critic devalue something like that? how can someone say someone else’s self-expression “sucks”?

if you can find something worthwhile in a record as loathed as Rebirth, past however uncool it is, there’s a future reward in that too — in one of Nitsuh Abebe’s Why We Fight columns he writes about stuff that used to sound corny sounding fresh again, and stuff that used to sound fresh sounding corny. i bet sometime soon, some forward-thinking indie band will make a record that uses the same rock signifiers and effects as Rebirth, the Godsmack drum fills and Three Doors Down guitar solos and Nickleback production and Fall Out Boy’s sense of lyrical subtlty, but it’ll be a little off-kilter, and it’ll get Best New Music because it’s risky and no one will have yet repurposed those signifiers to hip ends (in the way that Kurt Cobain famously repurposed hair metal’s volume and aggression to his own ends, here’s hoping some kids blow Nickleback out of the water in a similar way you know?), and people will download it and comment on Brooklynvegan saying “damn this is a fucking revelation” but you will have given Rebirth a chance and so it won’t be such a revelation to you, and that’s what makes you cool ;)

hi i am writing this on my blackberry

it is 12:40 and i am currently DJing at a secret bar that has no name or sign on the door and is under a fancy restaurant in the west village, like the kind of restaurant where the prices don’t have decimals. the cocktails here cost $12 (which is actually more than i’m getting paid for doing this. because the people who throw this party can only pay me in “unlimited columbian bam bam” but i think i gotta pick it up in the bathroom, i swear i am not making this up). places like this are what people are talking about when they say manhattan has been taken over by beautiful morons awash in $$$$$, bereft of class and perspective. but really what it is is that manhattan is just not indie anymore and the vibrant youth culture of the city i spent my life romanticizing was gone long before i got here, now that i am leaving manhattan for cheaper pastures i can finally admit that to myself after years of arguing with friends who moved to brooklyn that manhattan was where it was fucking at

so anyway i am playing the Pilooski re-edit of Beggin’ by Frankie Valli, a song that conveys the downtown cool attitude that feels appropriate to the venue. download it and listen to it while you read the rest of this if you really wanna set the mood. also note that the room is bathed in red light and all the walls are painted black and there is a display of crystals in a glass case near the bathroom, looks awesome

so i took this gig as a favor to a friend who got me a gig like two weeks ago that paid a lot, everyone here is about ten years older than me, and the other two DJs got here like twenty minutes ago (two hours late, 12:30 a.m.) but they’re upstairs looking for needles for the turntables because they brought records, and after they got here i took a half an anti-anxiety pill i found in my pocket because they look really cool (“cool”) and intimidating, new york nightlife vets who i will be spending the rest of the night with and i suspect they already don’t take me seriously cuz i play off DJ software. also my skin is bad because it’s been humid and i haven’t been drinking much water so the anti-anxiety pill will be especially useful

now i am playing No Comply by Studio. someone just came over to the DJ booth to ask what song it is, which generally means the song is so good that this dude has gotten over the embarassment of not knowing what song it is and asking the DJ

in nick sylvester’s piece about hipster runoff he writes about how all the pitchfork head honchos were in a car on their way to a weekend retreat, and like ryan schreiber i think put a song on and nobody knew what song it was and mark richardson was the only person who dared to ask ryan what song it was, and when ryan answered him was there was a palpable sense of relief in the car

if you like a song you are hearing somewhere, you should never be ashamed to ask whoever’s playing it what song it is, nobody knows everything, that’s how you learn — the people who know the most about music are the people who ask the most questions right?

not to toot my own horn but i think i am doing okay with this crowd right now

but one of the other DJ’s friends came over to the dj booth and the girl DJ said “how’s it sound out there?” and then her friend said “digital, like compressed” because i am playing shit off my computer instead of vinyl, these older DJs are real coolguys, just found out they are career bartenders at a legendarily hip establishment off Bowery, they seem to display little regard for my enjoyment of this night, little do they know i am standing two feet from each of them right now writing about them!!!!! the ultimate geeky blogger’s revenge

so doing the press for This Is Happening james murphy said he came to the realization that “cool” did not exist in the way he once thought. every day in new york i realize that too, like that “cool” is a label you apply to someone who you don’t know but is well-dressed or has a cool job or something. once you know someone well you stop describing them as cool and start describing like who they actually are. “cool” is one of the worst words in the english language, up there with “weird” and “nice”

now i’m playing Still Fly by Big Tymers

fuck yeah

the promoter just came up to me to request australian music (there are apparently many australian people here?) and i was like “cut copy?” and one of the other DJs said “they’re australian?” and i said “yeah they’re on modular” (then i realized i sounded like an asshole and he didn’t know what i was talking about) and then the promotor was like “no, like AC/DC” and i was like “wolfmother?” and he was like “no”

now i’m playing “5 minutes with jj” that amazing medley thing they did for the BBC, but i cut it off before the third song in the medley where she sings over the instrumental intro to The xx record

the two other DJs seem resigned to having to DJ off their iPhones — they couldn’t find needles. the bartender just handed me a tecate! the boy DJ just asked the girl DJ if she had any electro on her ipod and she said “i got electro out the ass!” these people are definitely older than me. i don’t even know what electro is. is it like crystal castles or justice or something? like aggressive electronic guitars?

just put on Most Wanted off the cults 7”, it’s still early enough in the night to get away with playing shit like this

i feel like i am filing a field report as a foreign correspondent for a newspaper except i’m a fifteen minute walk from where i live

putting on Faith by george michael, this one slays new york 28-year-olds like they just found out they just won free brunches

i am not a “real DJ” who beatmatches and remixes and “mines crates” for “obscure minimal techno gems”, i just wanna play songs that people know the words to and dance and go crazy to — not current top 40 though, it would be a faux-pas to play like taylor swift at the “hip downtown” clubs i play at. just reread that sentence and it sounds retarded. the best songs i can play are the ones you know every word to but don’t know the song title or artist, or songs you never thought you’d hear in a club or thought you could dance to but here you are, the gain is all the way fucking up so the snare is cracking your eardrums and you can feel the bass in your stomach, you’re dancin and fallin in love and you’re thinkin like “damn never thought i’d be hearing Never Let You Go by third eye blind like this”

now i am playing the vampire weekend cover of everywhere by fleetwood mac, gotta start the song 13 seconds in and turn the treble down a little bit because the song already cracks so much. what a fucking jam this is, i see group of people singing along to it!!! a song they’ve never heard before (maybe i’m wrong and they are into indie band obscure covers that never saw proper release but doubt it)!! seeing those people singing is a moment of joy and victory for me, a DJ who writes a blog about pitchfork

so anyway i should mention that i am basically unable to function normally in the new york nightlife scene. i’ve gotten frequent lucrative DJ gigs through a bunch of random fortunate circumstances from friends who know i’m into music, not the way that people usually get them, like by frequenting clubs and knowing the owners and getting gigs through that. like when people talk to me in clubs i can barely hear them so when i look at them i laugh when they haven’t told a joke or stare blankly and nod when they have told a joke or something. i go from faux-pas to faux-pas until everyone i know in the room has found better conversations, which is why i am filing this report from my blackberry right now

now i am playing jeepster by t. rex

i just took the bag of columbian bam bam the promoter slipped into my pocket into the bathroom and pretended i was insufflating some, because that’s what people who are having a good time do i think and they really want me to have a good time because i’m working for free, i sniffed mightily and smiled widely when i came out of the bathroom and handed the bag back to him, but i didn’t want any columbian bam bam because:

a) if most people who did cocaine knew how much raw human suffering was necessary to get it to them, how many women were kept in slavery and forced to work naked in the jungle in columbia, how many kids younger than me were fucking murdered on the streets of juarez today over drugs, or had upside down crosses slashed into their backs or were murdered because they refused to cooperate with drug cartels, they would never buy it again. purchasing cocaine in america is an endorsement of human slavery

b) i have work tomorrow at ten, it’s already 2:03

c) the economy has rendered cocaine tacky, it’s so expensive it’s like walking around with shopping bags from expensive stores when everyone’s unemployed

putting on Your Love by The Outfield, then gonna look for something to segue into soul with, perhaps Cecilia by Simon and Garfunkel?

NO!! RILL RILL BY SLEIGH BELLS!!! one time i heard Let The Beat Build at Lit on the day Carter III came out and i was like “damn can they play this so soon after the record drops?” but everyone went bananas for it

bartender just handed me a Cerveza Pacifico

people don’t seem to recognize Rill Rill. frowney face

today i was thinking about how all of the biggest indie bands have huge MISFITS like me in them. the king of the indie dancefloor is chubby and forty (james murphy). our world’s waspy new england golden boy is a jew with a big nose (ezra koenig). our biggest sports fan is a scholar of american literature and indie festivals and unconventional drugs (craig finn). animal collective is so awkward they can’t even manage to look comfortable in press photos where they get to pose. our world is made up of people who have been driven to defy convention because we can’t really operate within it. just a thought

fuck this woman is persistently requesting Rude Boy by Rihanna, yo i am not gonna play that song right now, i wanna be like “yo go listen to that shit on your ipod” but the woman is actually really beautiful so what i say is “okay gimme a couple minutes” which is a trick cuz i’m off in a couple minutes anyway! i’m a nonconfrontational kid. also my skin is bad right now so beautiful women intimidate me even more than usual

now i am a little drunk and feeling sentimental. unrelated to anything else i’ve written here, almost all my friends, the people who have become sort of my family since i came here four years ago wet behind the ears, just graduated college last week and now so many of them are leaving, moving to san francisco to start life anew, teaching all over america, going to south america or middle america to try to make the world a little better, you know? they are squeezing out the last drops of youthful idealism they have and hopefully they will parlay those drops into lives of righteousness and good. i am better for having known all of them, and if any of you are reading this know that my last song tonight before the other DJs take over is for you