Post Post
Meta Meta EP
Awkwardcore Records

I want to start this review off in a sort of stupid direction. I don’t want to begin with some dissection of this band’s style, musical ability, message, or anything like that. I don’t want to rattle off reference points and mark off what scene they belong to and who should listen to this. I want to open this thing with something relatively superficial. I want to talk about signifiers… about names.

At first blush, Post Post just struck me as “clever,” you know? Generic indie rock wordplay, minor intellectual fronting with a liberal arts sense of humor… the usual thing. Normally, I guess I’d stop paying attention at this point. Most of the time, band names are little more than the least stupid thing the group could agree on when they started playing shows. They’re usually kind of throwaway, a put-on, without much relationship to the actual music (cough… I’m looking at you, Dismemberment Plan). Who the fuck cares about a name?

This is usually a sane way to approach things, but as I got into Post Post and grew to love the music that they make, their name kept coming back to me. It’s almost like I’d made up a story about these two words, a story that helps me understand and position this band in a context that’s bigger than the usual “sounds-like,” “looks-like” fodder that most record reviews are built on. As crazy as it may sound, in this story, the words “Post Post” take on the weight of almost perfectly summing up the moment that I hope we’re moving into right now musically, culturally, and politically. In this story, “Post Post” is what it means to grow up out of post-modern nothingness, and to become something new, meaningful, and beautiful. “Post Post” is to move past the recent fad of declaring history to be over, of declaring that the forces, struggles, and positions that defined our old historical progression have magically evaporated or become too unfashionable to take seriously… that the contradictions that once burned bright and hot in our lives and in our social reality have been finally resolved. And artistically, it means a renewal of the premise that art can serve as a means of honest expression that takes sides, provokes, reveals truths, and creates strength through an acknowledgment of vulnerability.

To give context for this idea, once upon a time folks risked their lives and their material comfort fighting for justice, freedom, control over their work, and liberation along lines of race, gender, ability, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic class. Behind the scenes, the state brutally repressed those movements, killed a few folks, bought off a few more, and put most everybody else in jail. Commentators, corporations, and all the people in power took the moment of relative quiet to announce that the slate had been wiped clean, that the benevolent few at the top had voluntarily transcended the blood and bad manners of the past. The world had supposedly blossomed into a utopia of “post-racial,” “post-feminist” social harmony. Whatever narratives survived about the past struggles were cleaned up and turned into inspirational bedtime stories. The activists and revolutionaries left standing found themselves reduced to cartoon characters in the popular imagination… curiosities at best. Whatever problems remained in this new order could only be accounted for through the failings of individuals and a few constantly redefined “bad elements.” This mirage of social peace was sold to us at a heavy cost: we had the same problems, but now we had only ourselves to blame. The songwriter David Bazan hit the full depth of this deception when he sung the lines “the class war is over / and everyone wins” in a song that was ultimately about suicide. This is roughly how they drowned history.

As a suburban punk coming up in the late 1990s, I stood in the wake of this transformation… the heyday of the post-modern condition. The same systemic forces that were erasing memories of resistance and committing genocide in urban ghettos were producing alienation and psychological dysfunction on my relatively privileged side of the class lines. On a cultural level, this translated into the full-blown retreat of the broader alternative (aka “indie”) music scene from functioning as a real site of resistance. Though the scenes I was a part of were filled with kids like me—full of pain, social anxiety, and desperately looking for connection and a different life—the spaces I found myself in weren’t centered around liberation or even bringing people together to gain strength from shared experience. What pervaded the scene at that time was estrangement on the deepest possible levels, a feeling like we not only had to keep space between each other, but publicly we had to put space between ourselves and anything we might feel or believe. We played out the script that we were given: there was nothing wrong, there was nothing that needed to be taken seriously, no causes to be joined, no fights to be waged, this crushing alienation that drew many of us into the scene could be remedied through vapid socializing and cool points.

Irony, that great chicken-shit strategy for making statements the ultimately state nothing, became an essential cultural currency during this period. To admit anything, to even put something serious on your fucking t-shirt was to be vulnerable to ridicule or sideways glances. Except for small tribes of fanatics—anarcho-punks, some straightedge kids, the few emo kids that wanted more from their scene than self-indulgent melodrama, and the riot grrl true-believers that had survived its commodification—it felt like everybody was just hiding in view. Where the punk rock nation once had the symbolic and emotional character of being at total war with society, the 1990s indie rock scene it helped spawn often felt disconnected from a coherent grasp of even personal/emotional struggles. There were places in the scene, places as vast as they were utterly lifeless, where truth had been abandoned in favor of pure artifice. Too much of the art that was coming out of our community was sustained with a core of little more than dumb jokes and fashionable posturing. The outsiders had made outsiders of themselves. Our post-modern rock scene was devouring itself, and as I got older, it only got worse.

In 12-step programs, there’s a notion that change doesn’t come until you first recognize that your life has become unmanageable: that the shit you need, you ain’t getting; the shit you do to fulfill your needs, it ain’t working. On a cultural level, I’d like to think that we’re getting to this point: that those of us that take a conscious approach to engaging this generation’s music scene are beginning to recognize that in order to have art and community that meets our needs and our desires, we have to do things differently. Philly’s Post Post may not be an outwardly conscious band (they’re certainly not as outwardly political as this batshit review I’m writing), but in my view they are doing something differently than a lot of the indie rock bands out there… namely, the songs they write, the music they play, it all feels honest to me. The tracks on Meta Meta are emotionally rich, often heartbreaking, but without self-pity. As lyrics go, lines like “I wish I wasn’t this way” and “I don’t ever want to be sober” are about as straightforward as you can get in expressing what it feels like to hurt. Michelle Zauner’s delivery—belted out in impassioned crescendos—only serves to drive the point home. As beautifully lush as Post Post’s sound is, as gifted as these musicians are, and as much as their music conjures up similarities to well-marketed bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, there’s a plainness and a directness here that stands apart from other easy-on-the-ears acts who are more comfortable hiding behind wit and intellect than they are getting up on stage and just communicating who they are and what they feel.

On Meta Meta, there’s a kind of fearlessness and a willingness to stand exposed that is rarely heard from a pop-inflected indie rock group. It’s fearlessness like this that makes me hopeful. The post-modern conditions of our reality taught many us to deride truths, deride the deeper narratives that frame our individual and social lives, and took away many of the ways we had to partially understand and communicate the validity of our experiences with each other. Today, we cannot go back: we cannot rebuild old struggles, rewrite old love songs. But we can evolve. We can find new ways to express meaning, new methods to come together and get what we need. The phrase “Post Post” describes our situation—historically we stand in the aftermath of an aftermath. And it also raises the obvious questions: What do we do now? Where do we go now? To me, the band Post Post implies an answer: we write new love songs, and we go forward.

Post Post’s demo ep, Meta Meta, came out Fall 2009 and is available for download (with donation) or purchase from Awkwardcore Records (http://www.awkwardcore.com). On August 7th, they will be having the release show for their newest ep, Residents, at Kungfu Necktie.

hey ARTNOISE faithful. this has nothing to do with punk rock but also EVERYTHING to do with punk rock and i wanted to help spread the word. – germ

ART FOR LIBERATION with Elizam Escobar and Joserramon Che Melendes
Friday, July 16, 2010
7:00pm
The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St

Calling all poets and playwrights, radicals, culture workers and community organizers! Join us for a conversation about art in the everyday work of social movements.

With special guest Elizam Escobar, a renowned painter and art theorist from Puerto Rico who spent twenty years in prison for his involvement in the Puerto Rican independence movement. During and since his incarceration, his art has been a vital component of Puerto Rican organizing on the island and in the U.S.

Plus performances by poet Joserramon Che Melendes (San Juan), Spiral Q Puppet Theater, and members of MMP Arts and Culture Collective.

Also featuring a special one-night exhibition of ZAPATA VIVE!, a portfolio of prints from La Escuela de Cultura Popular Martires del 68 (Mexico City).

Because Art Makes Resistance Irresistible!

Co-sponsored by Books Through Bars, Centro Pedro Claver, MMP’s Arts and Culture Collective, the National Boricua Human Rights Network and Spiral Q

$5 suggested donation to benefit Centro Pedro Claver

Leatherface – live Brooklyn/Philly, March 5/7, 2010

Yes, the rumors are true… I went to see Leatherface twice last weekend. In two different cities.

Granted, Leatherface is a legendary British punk band that can still throw down better than anyone; and granted, the two cities were Brooklyn and Philadelphia, which are a mere two-hour, ten-dollar bus ride from one another… but the whole enterprise, to a less-rocking individual, could have been termed excessive. To me, it was just right.

The rundown:

The March 5 Brooklyn show went down at the new Knitting Factory on Metropolitan Ave., on the eastern edge of Williamsburg. This was my first time at the new location. It doesn’t have the charm of the old Tribeca spot (which — crucially for us Philly transplants — had a balcony and an old-worldiness that recalled the Troc), but it has good clean acoustics, and a bar next door with a glass wall so that you can see the band even if you didn’t buy a ticket.

I had bought a ticket. I was right up at the front of the stage, and the band sounded amazing. The set pulled pretty evenly from new album tracks (God is Dead, Broken) and older classics (Springtime, Not Superstitious, How Lonely). I’ve heard people say that, in the Leatherface lineup, Frankie Stubbs’ voice almost functions as another instrument — it sits low in the mix, and adds that essential grittiness to an otherwise fairly polished sound. There’s so much complexity in his vocals — the way he sings sounds like a punk band, but there’s such thoughtfulness in his lyrics and in his delivery that I found myself moved even as I was rocking out.

And there was a lot of rocking out — a lot of energy, a lot of stage-diving, a lot of dancing. I danced until I lost everything I had — my hat, my scarf, and my wallet. But everything was miraculously returned to me by bemused onlookers.

This brings me to…

March 7, Philadelphia! I trekked down with a crew of dedicated New York Leatherface fans. After some haggling with SEPTA, we got ourselves to the Northstar bar, where I was reunited with fellow ARTNOISE staffer Germ Ross.

This show started out a bit rockier. Northstar has rules against stage-diving (as evidenced by all the sternly-worded MS Word-generated signs tacked throughout the space), and there was a fair amount of security near the front of the stage. Throw in some technical difficulties, a stone-faced, cross-armed crowd, and a bizarrely obnoxious heckler (who goes to a Leatherface show for the sole purpose of standing in the crowd and taunting the band? I’m baffled), and you had a distinctly unpromising beginning.

About twenty minutes into the set, though, things started to click: the band got their guitars in tune, people uncrossed their arms and began to dance, and a few songs later I was in the middle of one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long while. IF YOU EVER HAVE THE CHANCE TO SEE LEATHERFACE ONE OR MULTIPLE TIMES, DO NOT MISS IT.

I lost my scarf for good this time, but Germ was kind enough to give me his.

Layers/Quake
tape 2009
self-released

Deconstruction is to punk rock as gasoline is to internal combustion. Punk rock propels us forward. Through punk rock we are able to feel something different than we used to feel in our normal lives. When we are in the grips of punk rock, we are able to know and taste and sweat and shake with a transcendence—with a sense of power in ourselves and in each other—that is beyond words, that is deeper and more profound than words. This process, this holy fucked up experience, is fueled by an intentional breaking shit down to its rawest, most basic components.

There are many modes of art that move people. There are many modes of art that impress or entertain people. What makes punk rock different than many modes of art is that punk rock demands that we all take part in its creation—that it is only realized out of the love, the closeness, the positive frenzy we share together in common. “Talent,” “expertise,” or any other arbitrary pretense that elevates the artist above the audience or shuts any of us out of the collective act of making shit together can thus be seen as fundamentally poisonous to the project of realizing punk rock. Such elitisms hold us back, turn us against each other, and in the end they will keep us from getting what we really want. Our art must be democratic or it will not be. Our art must be articulate and explosive enough to rock people’s souls, but at the same time it must also be rough enough and honest enough and humble enough to make any of us capable of its creation. This is how you make punk rock.

I write these words more or less in response to the Layers/Quake tape that came out back in August of 2009. Layers/Quake is an instrumental-heavy, female-fronted, drum/guitar 2-piece that’s been playing around Philly a good bit over the past couple months. Their tape 2009 really hits at a lot of what I find valuable in punk rock music and is probably one of the finest masterpieces of DIY rock that I’ve heard coming out of the city in a bit.

As you might expect from a self-released cassette debut, the production values of tape 2009 are raw and dilapidated. The drums crash in blurry cacophonies, the guitars are massive and overblown, the vocals are variations of frantic howling and distorted harmony, the lyrics are almost universally undecipherable. Banging out 14 tracks in less than 24 minutes, Layers/Quake make the most of their stripped-down format, diving headlong into song after song without pause, transition, or apology. Overall, this is less a proper album than it is documentation—a simple recording of two friends throwing molten lava at each other for fun and brutal self-realization.

This isn’t music that lulls you with catchy choruses and pleasant melodies (although there’s a few points where they come remarkably close such as “just gazer,” “feel it,” and “have it all”). This isn’t music that fronts intellectual or impresses you with well thought out composition. At its core, this is ass-kicking music. This is shit that’s about crescendos, contortions, crushing weight, and regular bursts of full-throttle intensity. Halfway between Pink & Brown, riot grrl, and The Breeders; between bratty punk and pummeling guitar-driven instrumentals, Layers/Quake is yet another Philly band that is out there killing it right now—creating music that is alive, powerful, and provoking our passionate engagement.

If you would like to pick up a copy of tape 2009, get in contact with the band. The tracks are also available for free via the band’s website: http://layersquake.wordpress.com.

Last month, local extraordinaire Sam Allingham, along with a crew of other roustabouts, organized a Valentine’s Day cover show of Magnetic Fields’ entire 69 Love Songs album at Chacharazzi. The best thing about this show — other than its shameless celebration of a 4-hour album about heartbreak — was that it invited anyone and everyone to come onstage and sing along with the band.

Germ and I were happily in attendance. Beer, song, and dance flowed freely; and the performances themselves were remarkably unabashed and heartfelt. True, much of the crowd was friends with the band and with one another, which contributed to the open atmosphere; but there was also a larger sense of campfire community that comes with any good singalong. The line between performer and audience becomes blurred; the event becomes not about watching and consuming, but about participating and creating. It is truly the best kind of show.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a cover-show junkie. The day after gorging myself on all 69 Love Songs, I went to a riot grrrl cover show in Brooklyn and danced to local incarnations of Sleater-Kinney and Le Tigre. I’ve attended awesomely creepy Glenn-Danzig-based cover shows for the past two Halloweens. What’s more — and this is the kicker — I record my own acoustic covers in my spare time. My computer is full of them. I’ve got renditions of everything from Green Day to Eric Donaldson to Hank Williams, and my productivity — if you can call it that — shows no sign of slowing down.

I love covers because I believe that they gesture toward every song’s potential to achieve immortality. If a two-minute, three-chord punk song lasts as long as its creator’s music career — well, that will be pretty short. If it last as long as the vinyl and polycarbonate that it’s been recorded on — that’s a few decades, but still not a very long time. But if a song can find a new home in the guitars and voices of everyone who listens to it — and if those people go on to share their versions with others — now we’re talking about posterity. It’s a humbling, beautiful thing to think about. And it’s a continually refreshing challenge to discover and learn the songs that I love enough to try to make my own.

[This is the third installment of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK, an ARTNOISE manifesto. The first installment, containing the preface and introduction, was posted on 08/02/09 (available here). The second installment, containing "What is Punk Rock?" and "Nihilism," was posted on 10/03/09 (available here) - germ]

Lemon! Vanilla! Cherry! Mango!
Water ice! Water ice! Water iiiiiice!

-”Water ice,” Rizzo Machine

Punk rock is people art. It’s shit that anybody can make. Punk rock is stupid, raw, loud, noisy, un-tuned, broken down, and totally fucked up. Punk rock is screaming like a lunatic while rolling on the floor. Punk rock is laying bare every idiot thought and impulse, and profoundly asserting them as if they were the most meaningful sage truth. Punk rock is a beautiful practice where kids that never properly learned to make art are convulsed and overtaken by an urgency towards expression that overcomes all their understood limitations. Punk rock is a talent-less, deranged medium that summons forth its existence not from studied, learned technique but from a simple recognition that all human beings are capable of transcendence—into revelation about the essential substance of their existence, into revelation about things larger than themselves, into beauty, creation, love, truth, poetry, the electrical rush of connection, etc.

Democracy—the practice of recognizing everyone’s capacity for creation and the necessity for everyone’s collaboration in order to create—is another means through which punk rock wages war against alienation.(6) Through alienating society, people get told over and over and over again that they are powerless to engage their lives or the world in a way that changes things or allows them to actually manifest their real needs and desires. Folks wake up, go to work, and waste their creative powers doing shit they have little control over, and very little personal stake in. Creativity is regularly pulverized into routine production—a thing done by isolated experts or technicians, repeated infinitely with only minor substantial changes, and carried out in the proper place under the proper conditions. Even though all the elements of society are made possible through people’s work and activity (if one day all the workers called in sick, society would grind to a halt), people in society are simply expected to follow orders and play out their assigned position—whether that position has them making car parts, cappuccinos, babies, or simply making customers happy.

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My Mind
Path Masher 7″
Badmaster Records

Once upon a time in the land of Philadelphia, there was a band called Eat Forever. Eat Forever played a frenzy of loud, melodic, ADD-fueled pop songs with abrupt endings and surrealistic lyrical undertones.

Back in 2005 or 2006, they played a show in my old house’s tiny basement and afterwards, smitten by their deafening awesomeness, I asked Mr. Tim Westberg from the group if he could give our webzine a promotional copy of one of their releases to review. When I was going to shows back then, this was a frequent question I’d ask musicians. The sane answers that I’d get in reply would usually range somewhere between “Yeah, sure” and “No asshole, you need to fucking pay for that!!!” (Fair enough.) Tim’s response was much more illusive. He made it clear he was excited to have us write up a review of Eat Forever’s music, but at the time Eat Forever didn’t actually have any official releases for us to write about. His solution to this apparent quandary was to make me a fucking crazy, rough-as-shit burned cd of songs they were thinking about using for an ep (as a bonus, he also tossed in a handful of his solo experiments on 3″ cds with full artwork).

I was hardly a stranger to thrown together DIY recordings, but this Eat Forever pseudo-promo was a real kick in the butt. The whole thing was comprised of thirty-six rough mixes of only about seven or eight distinct songs played in a different random order over and over again. Some of them were decently recorded, some were totally fuzzed out or taken straight from from practice recordings. I didn’t even have a track list to help me sort out song titles or anything.

For almost any other band, I feel like this kind of confusing, completely unedited vomiting of raw material would be nearly impossible to sit through, let alone review. For Eat Forever, it strangely worked. The shit was just so catchy, so quick, so energetic, so careening from one idea to the next that it didn’t phase me to listen to a distorted third or forth out-take of the same song I’d heard just a few minutes ago. And since Eat Forever songs were inevitably written to leave you wanting more, the extreme repetition proved to be a really satisfying way to listen to the material. All in all, it was a fine introduction to a fine Philly band.

Flash forward to 2010, and much of what was Eat Forever has morphed into My Mind. Now, instead of finding myself trying to intelligently review a sprawling heap of unfinished proto-songs, I’m faced with Path Masher—a totally together, totally tight, ten minute monster of a 7″ that plays like a fucking LP.

It’s pretty clear on Path Masher that Tim and the rest of the EF holdovers in My Mind haven’t given up their old ways. Just like on the Eat Forever recordings, almost all of the eleven songs on this 7″ are well under the one minute mark. Just like before, all the songs start and stop on a dime, pull you in with sweet melodies, rile you up, and cut out just when you feel like the chorus should cut in. The opening song “Be A Fascist To A Fascist” is even straight up Eat Forever-era material—an updated version of a song that had made it onto the original burned promo they gave me years and years ago.

But as conceptually true as My Mind is to much of the old Eat Forever schtick, Path Masher definitely isn’t a simple regurgitation of old formulas. The most impressive part of this 7″ for me isn’t how much it sounds an old band I used to like, it’s how much they are able to break new ground and take the music to the next level. While Eat Forever was more bound up in the spastic gesticulations of their psyche-pop punk oeuvre, My Mind’s pop stylings are somewhat cleaner and more expansive—on Path Masher they seem more willing to slow things down, making it easier to pick out discernible notes of The Zombies or inflections of old Elephant 6 bands in their brief compositions. Despite their self-imposed limitations around length and pacing, My Mind seems to constantly push the envelope to find new ways to bust out razor sharp song-writing that makes its point in less than sixty seconds flat.

Jam-packed with compellingly innovative tunes, Path Masher is about as full a meal as you’re going to get on a 7″ record. It’s a special thing to come across music that is as provocative as it is catchy, and so I absolutely recommend this release as an entry point into the work of a band making important music here in Philly.

While I believe this 7″ may presently be out of print, you can still check it out via this My Mind-related blogspot. (This site also features most of the Eat Forever discography, some of Tim’s solo projects, and a bunch of other really solid music for your downloading pleasure.)

[This is the second installment of TO MAKE PUNK ROCK, an ARTNOISE manifesto. The Preface and Introduction were posted on August 2, and are available here. - germ]

The project of resurrecting a living punk rock movement begins with a game of connect the dots. This is where we gather up all the disjointed pieces that have been left for us from before and start to put together the fucked up form of exactly what it is we are trying to shake to life.

We’re already abundantly versed in the stupidest conceptions of what punk rock is and what it represents. On one side, corporations have literally spent millions hacking images into our brains of moody, self-destructive consumer-kids clad in tight pants, tough-guy leather jackets, and porcupine haircuts. On the other side, we have all the nostalgic ramblings of washed-up scenesters that like to peg punk rock as a thing that happened when they were young that either no longer exists or just exists in some bubble around them and their friends like some mythical city in the mist. Clearly for our purposes, both of these stories are total horse shit, but at least they can give us some insight into how our understanding of punk rock must develop along a radically different line than this junk.
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Leatherface
Minx
Roughneck Records

Why a brand-new review of this 1993 album? Our staff’s late-night plans to form a Leatherface cover band notwithstanding, Minx is one of the smartest, toughest punk records out there. Two decades after it was written, the songs here not have not only withstood their age; they are, in fact, stronger. And, at a time when ARTNOISE—and music-loving folk in general—are working hard to find worthwhile records, it’s inspiring to revisit the albums that draw lines in the sand. Here, then, is the first entry in our Punk Foundations series.

Fundamentally, Minx gets its charisma from Frankie Stubbs. His gritty voice, at once comforting and cutting, ushers us through the album. His vocal style, along with the record’s driving tempo and simple melodic lines, recalls the sonics of Hüsker Dü; but it’s the complex wordplay that distinguishes these songs. The lyrical nuances—by turns clever, silly, and unbearably earnest—can be easy to miss under the wash of distortion that cloaks the band; but it’s well worth the effort to catch all the words.

Many of the songs are intensely personal: in “Do the Right Thing,” the album’s sole single, Stubbs plaintively offers himself up to an indifferent world (“You can have me if you want!”) and stands up for the underdogs (“they can beat the world can come back for more”). Later, he rails against easy political answers in “Don’t Work:” “Pretty slogans and the crimes are meaningless tokens—don’t waste your time!” And my favorite Minx tune, “Fat, Earthy, Flirt,” laments people’s petty tendencies, reflecting on human nature in gloriously speedy two-part harmony:

But even as Stubbs lets his heart bleed, he maintains a verbal playfulness—reminding us that this band is, at the end of the day, a bunch of goofy British punks. “Heaven Sent” mixes up social commentary with colorful puns (“The bricklayer’s arse and his smelly stained vest… as a vested interest to be ignored more or less”). In “Books,” a rumination on mortality, there are lines from nursery rhymes (“If only their cupboards didn’t look like Mother Hubbards”). Leatherface are smart, and they take their music seriously—but sometimes they just can’t keep a straight face.

It is this push and pull—this cycling of bravado and vulnerability—that makes Minx so durable. That, of course, and the rockingness of it all. Throw on Minx when you’re in the mood for a new favorite song. You’ll find one here.

About a year and a half ago, I stopped writing about music. It seemed to make a lot of sense at the time. I knew I had limited resources to put into personal projects and it felt like the more time I put into engaging and supporting the music scene here, the more frustrated I became with it.

Through my work on ARTNOISE, I had been developing this powerful vision of what music and art could be, what punk rock meant, what qualities and characteristics made bands and recordings transcendent or transgressive. But it seemed when I looked out into the punk communities, the experimental communities, the hipster/indie/whatever communities that I was trying to support, this vision I had about art’s transformative potential always appeared to be buried under heaping piles of scene bullshit.

This bullshit took many different forms. There were the corporate and pseudo-corporate forces steadily working to hype meaningful artists into alternative celebrities. There were the cliques, the in-groups, the hierarchies of who-knows-who, who-plays-what, who-books-where that constantly locked people out or put people in their place. There were the pretensions, the expectations for people to constantly prove themselves, and judge others. There were the sometimes disguised, sometimes explicit undercurrents of sexism, racism, classism, transphobia, and homophobia that played out in varying degrees throughout the scene. More than anything though, there was the irrelevance—the feeling that at the end of the day most of the participants in these communities I was attached to were simply content to party, to play, to be seen, heard, and self-congratulated on their gentrified little islands around the city.

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