This might be your first time reading this blog, so you should know that some posts on PRR are better than others, and I think you might like the blog better if you started with one of my favorite posts. Here are a few posts I’m proud of:
Telling Barack Obama About Pitchfork, or the Official Version
A Pitchfork Writer Mailing Me This
When I was 14, I was 5’2” tall and I weighed 220 lbs, and every day I woke up and had to go to school, I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and every day when I came home I wanted to walk in front of a bus, and I didn’t want to look myself in the mirror and I didn’t let people take pictures of me. Every year I went to the doctor for a checkup and I gained at least 20 lbs, and some years about 25 or 27 lbs, except one year when I only gained 17 lbs, and the pediatrician showed me the height/weight graph and for the first time my height/weight combo was actually on the graph instead off the graph. On the way home, my Mom was really happy and proud of me that I’d managed to gain so little weight that year, and I went home celebrated with a huge plate of chicken parmesan and spaghetti with meat sauce and cheese and bread and Diet Coke, a piece of cake and some cookies and Starburst before bed that my mom didn’t know about (Sorry, Mom if you are reading this right now).
Anyway, so I went to summer camp every year and got really into tennis because it was the sport I could play that didn’t have shirts and skins teams, and I swam in the lake at camp with my shirt on and told counselors that I didn’t want to get sunburned even though I am an olive-skinned guy and had been sunburned under only the most extreme solar conditions.
On days in school when the school conducted physicals in the gym, we were given a card and had to walk around the gym to all the different stations to get weighed and have our heights measured and our blood pressure taken and other stuff checked, and the staff would fill out our cards, and on those days I would either pretend to be too sick to go to school or go into the bathroom with my card and fill it out myself and wait like half an hour in the library so people wouldn’t suspect anything was up, and then just hand the card in so I wouldn’t have to walk around with my weight publicly displayed, even if it was just on a little card, not like written across my forehead, I don’t know what I would have told someone if they had asked to see my card and I would have had to show them and then they would have seen that I was 13 and weighed 200 lbs.
One year in middle school, I saw my friend Doug’s card and it said 90 lbs and my card said 180 lbs and I wanted to tell him I weighed as much as two hims, and laugh, but obviously I didn’t because it was too sad to laugh about and I didn’t say anything.
So every day on the walk to school I’d get a $1.59 bag of Dipsy Doodles (which was a huge bag) and a Starbucks bottled Frappucino to supplement my lunch, which was like a chicken parmesan sandwich or cheeseburger and french fries and a soda, and my parents didn’t keep any good-tasting food in the house so sometimes I’d get candy from the vending machine and hide it in my bag and eat it secretly before or after dinner or before bed. One time I heard my mom crying and telling my dad that she didn’t know what to do to help me, and I used to look in the mirror and think of what I would do or give away to be able to lose weight, like I would think to myself that I would literally amputate one of my legs to make the rest of my body thinner and other stuff like that, or I wished I was too poor to be able eat that much, honestly. I played a lot of tennis and walked a lot and every time I exercised I’d reward myself with food so it was negated.
When you are fat, and you eat a lot, you don’t start off by eating huge portions of individual foods right away, or at least I didn’t — I started eating a little of one food, like one cookie with lunch, and I’d eat one cookie with lunch for a long time and then one day I’d be like, “What the heck, two cookies please,” and then the next day I’d go back to one cookie because two cookies seemed like an indulgence and then the day after that two cookies again because really what’s the practical difference between one and two cookies right? Or between medium and large? And then one cookie again, and then two cookies and then two cookies and two cookies for a long time, I’d promise myself, “Two cookies is the most I’m gonna have with lunch EVER,” and then one day I’d just say three cookies, because, hey, what is the difference between two cookies and three right? And it’s just one day right? And then the next day I’d get two cookies and be proud of myself for eating just two and then the day after that I’d get three to reward myself for having only two the day before, and then it would be three for a long time after that. Portions grow gradually because you are trying to not gain weight.
Another thing about being fat for me is that on one hand it felt like it was totally my fault and I was the one eating two or three burgers as dinner or three slices of pizza because that was what I was choosing and I hated myself for it, and on the other hand I felt like I had almost no control over what I ate and I needed three cookies and if I restricted how much I ate at one meal, I would feel like I owed myself an overindulgence at another meal, and there is a more complex psychology to overeating than that but you get what I’m saying, right? But there is no one else to blame except yourself and I’m sure a lot of fat people would find it condescending if you said they didn’t have that total agency in their overeating but I know that’s what it was like for me. Being a conscious and ongoing victim of yourself is maybe worse than being someone else’s victim because at least you can blame them and know there’s something wrong with them, but in this case, you just know there’s something wrong with you.
And then one day I was on the bus up to summer camp after freshman year of high school and I was reading Stupid White Men by Michael Moore because I was 14 and that was where my politics were, and there’s a chapter about being a vegetarian in the book and I obviously needed to make a drastic change in my life, so I decided to become a vegetarian on the spot and threw out my salami sandwich at a rest stop and told the other kids I had been a vegetarian for six months so they wouldn’t be cynical or doubt my resolve when I said I didn’t eat meat. And then I used being a vegetarian as a way to not eat almost anything — I’d say, “Oh, chicken patties for dinner tonight? I can’t eat that but it’s okay, I’m not hungry anyway,” and my motto was, “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” and I don’t know how I summoned the willpower to not eat but I was not eating as voraciously as I was eating before that. Losing weight became effortless and I felt a sort of ecstatic peace that maybe like monks feel, but I didn’t care if I fainted because at least girls would talk to me if I was thinner and I could play basketball or ultimate frisbee like a regular kid. My first girlfriend, junior year in high school, called me Rocawear because that was the only brand of clothing I’d been able to fit into — I was like a XXXL and had to get my sweatpants hemmed.
I am not telling you all of this so you will feel bad for me because I lost a bunch of weight and am now of normal weight and there is nothing here left to feel bad for, and I am sorry if you are thinking I told you all of this so you will feel bad for me, but there is no other way to tell this story and it’s gonna be music-blog relevant in 30 seconds.
So when I was in high school, my girlfriend’s mom said she was an alcoholic and I asked my girlfriend if she drank like every day and my girlfriend said she hadn’t had a drink since 1985, and being fat is sort of like the same thing — like when you are fat during formative years you will always think of yourself as fat, or maybe it was just me, but like eventually no matter how skinny I could ever be I will probably still feel really fat and Ihave never had an unconflicted relationship with food and have made peace with the fact that I will pretty much think about my weight consciously every day for the rest of my life but I wanted to say that as easy as it is to blame fat people for being fat, it’s not really right, or it’s superficially “correct” because no one is putting a gun to anyone’s head and saying “eat.”
But there is so much more going on in the mind of the man who’s sitting in front of you on the train who weighs 415 lbs and is eating a Whopper with extra cheese and a large fries and a large Coke and even if you want to slap that food out of his hands and shake his shoulders and say, “Stop killing yourself!,” you might be missing the point. And not even in a “Society makes poor people fat by providing only cheap unhealthy food options” way (although that’s true too), because there’s more going on on a personal level. Literally I could not stop eating and all I wanted to do was stop eating since before I can remember, and blaming fat people for “choosing” to be fat sort of misses the point and it’s a condition that deserves compassion, and I don’t mean that condescendingly because nobody wants to be pitied but there’s a difference between pity and understanding. For instance, you know a heroin addict would probably stop using heroin if they could flip a switch to turn the heroin need off and it’s easy to vilify the heroin addict or fat person but food is as addictive as drugs. If you ask the 415 lb. man on the train if he thinks his lunch is a ludicrous lunch he might tell you it would have felt like a ludicrous lunch ten years ago, but today it feels like a rational lunch, just like the guy with the $50/day percocet addiction or cocaine addiction would feel like something was missing with only $35 of percocet or cocaine even though that would be enough to lay me or you out.
So anyway, the reason I was fat was not because I was poor and could only afford cheap food, like my mom kept all snackfood out of my house and stocked the fridge with fresh vegetables and fruit and made me healthy meals that I could circumvent at school, and my parents chided me into not eating so fast so I would feel full sooner and always tried to get me to eat healthy and paid for me to exercise almost every day through tennis lessons and made sure I walked a lot, but I think that me and a lot of other overweight people feel an unusually strong consumptive instinct — I can just say I felt uncomfortable when I wasn’t consuming a lot, and I still feel that way and when I do stuff I like to do, I do it a l lot.
And so in the vein of alcoholics often replacing their consumption of alcohol with consumption of something else like cigarettes or the Bible, I came home from camp and was afraid that I would be plunged into circumstances where I used to eat a lot and it would trigger me eating a lot again, but instead of food I came home from camp and started downloading music more and reading about it, especially Pitchfork obviously, obsessively and every day like I used to eat, and I could download records and add them to my iTunes all day every day after school instead of eating, and I started going to concerts every weekend and buying CDs and instead of rushing to the kitchen after dinner for dessert I’d rush back to my computer to see if anything new had come out, and I would download and download and add and add and that became what satisfied my need to consume and consume. I’d just download whole discographies of bands I knew I’d probably never listen to. Anything anyone mentioned, I would find, and if I couldn’t find it after a while I’d just buy the physical CD, and honestly, all of this may be unique to my psychology, but I’d bet that there are a lot of people who used to be really overweight who replaced the consumption of food with the consumption of something else and this wouldn’t sound that crazy to them.
Downloading music became like buying or ordering food, and hearing it became like tasting and chewing and swallowing, and thinking about it is like digesting. Have you ever heard someone say something like, “I heard that record, but I still need a few more listens to digest it, you know?” That’s how I feel all the time.
And if it wasn’t for the ability to download as much music as I needed to be satisfied, and I know this might all sound crazy to someone who it hasn’t happened to, but it is what I went through and how I still feel, I probably would just have gone back to food or done drugs and I would have either weighed (and this is a conservative estimate based on gaining only 20 lbs/year which was much lower than average) 380 lbs right now and died from that very soon. Downloading music literally has saved my life.
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
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
