Three Cheers for the "Hoedown Party"

Art-pop Wankers: Fuck Off, Nobody Likes You

So it was a massive success in Brooklyn; the show was great, sold out over capacity, and the people who came were some of the most amazing folks we’ve met in a long time. It was epic and a real throwback to the hot sweaty little rooms the Dreadnoughts used to play before we got enough XP for Level 2. I mean, look:

HOWEVER.

I mean, come on, you guys know me. I’m a ranty cynic. There’s going to be a rant about a bad thing. I’m choosing one thing to rant and roar about. I’m allowed.

The club did this (SARCASM ALERT) super amazing thing where they book another show for the same night without telling anyone, and we were left scrambling to explain to fans that our show was still on, yes we know our show isn’t on the website for some reason and this other one is, whatever. It’s fine, they need to make money, and obviously the best money-making strategy FOR A BAR is to kick all of the fans of the DRINKING BAND out at 11pm.

Anyway, this was fine, we did our set and it was epic. But of course some of our gear was still backstage when this next “show” started. I had to run past them to grab my guitar. And, of course, it was a bunch of folks with synthesizers and laptops dressed up in weird outfits with bizarre videos projected behind them. And about 8 people were there to watch them (the bar must have just been RAKING in that money).

Now ordinarily I would never publicly call out any artist, I respect anyone who has the guts to get on stage and try to realize their vision. But one of the “singers” of this group stepped up to the mic to open their set, and with all the sarcastic energy that her fishnets could summon, she said, in that nasally hipster twang that only a white city girl can truly muster:

“Hi everyone, we’re just here to follow the….um…. Hoedown Party.”

To begin: there are so. Many. Bands. Like this. They always have weird, quirky names, like “Cat Thunder” or “Zippy Mitts” or full fucking sentences like “They Shoot Mules, Don’t They?” On average they last about 1.76 years because eventually Cindy the melodeon player has to move to Philly to go to school for interior design. They think that it is super super interesting to get up on stage behind some synths, press play on the laptop, activate the light show, mumble meaningless “poetic” gibberish into their microphones, and allow the very very small audience to just bask in their countercultural quirkiness.

Except that it isn’t countercultural at all, because it’s been done a bazillion times and no-one cares anymore. Kraftwerk perfected the art. There was literally nowhere to go after 1985. But these tweedle-dees keep slamming into that wall, and one of the reasons local music scenes are so alienating to Normies is that when Cindy from work asks you to go see her band, you’re expecting something you might be able to sing along to, but instead half the time you’re subjected to an hour and a half of the Mumbling Weirdo With Colored Hair Travelling Light Show.

But of course it was the sentiment behind her snarky little outburst that is making me write this. In this town, in this country, when you say “hoedown” in that way you are calling up a huge amount of anti-rural prejudice, a long tradition that associates folk music with stupidity, with comic simplicity, with white trash yokel hillbilly yee haw bullshit. I do not have time to tell you about the damage that this attitude has done to the USA, but: it’s a lot.

And I also don’t need to tell you, dear readers, that this is not just about some inter-band snark, it is 100% political. I will repeat myself: folk/polka/klezmer/accordion-based music about singing and dancing together, about meeting new people, about bringing people up on stage when you can, about including people of all ages, about community. The world as we know it is at war with these things; we and our children are slowly descending into a life dominated by screens, segmented by demographics, isolated and atomized, where we are all supposed to endlessly scroll through walls of soulless messaging instead of having lives together.

So when a band gets on stage, delivers some more of that soulless messaging, and then proceeds to subtly slag off the folk-punk band for being hurr durr yokels, there is something deeply symbolic and depressing about that, especially after our last song looked like this:

Anyway, I’ll calm down now and just leave you with the wise words of The Master, whose Analects 3.14 reads as follows:

Gone down to L.A.
Talkin’ bout the new wave,
For a couple of bucks you get a weird haircut
And waste your life away

This computerized crap ‘aint gettting me off
Everywhere I go: the kids wanna rock.