I went to Park City for Slamdance in January and I had a couple of opportunities to DJ, but before I get to all that why don’t we rewind to 40 odd years ago. I came out after much agonizing when I was 20, largely because I really didn’t want to be a virgin when I hit 21. I found my little gay posse in college, and we really wanted to distinguish ourselves from stereotypical gays and the established gay culture. A big part of our identity was that we were into new wave, not disco. We would go down to the Boom Boom Room, the South Pacific-themed gay mecca in Laguna Beach — my boyfriend Dana; Gary and Ken, who were in a highly volatile and sometimes physically violent relationship (which didn’t seem like a big deal at the time); and Greg, our de facto leader, who had actually been in a band and taught us about music. The DJ played nothing but disco — “Do You Wanna Funk” by Sylvester and Patrick Cowley was the anthem of the era — and I’m embarrassed to say I would sneer at all that with a sense of youthful superiority and entitlement. We campaigned hard to get them to play some new wave, and eventually they relented and would play a set of three songs just to get us off their back. We would rush to the cramped dancefloor, and one of the songs was inevitably “Jukebox” by the Flirts, and when they sang the line “little things remind me of you” Ken’s joke was to lift his pinky finger, as if the line was about a guy with a small dick. Greg pronounced “Billy Jean” by Michael Jackson to be a cool song, even though it was disco-adjacent, so we would dance to that one too.
The point has been made that a lot of the hostility toward disco at the time was because it was black and because it was gay. For us it was that it was so innocent and literal — a lot like show tunes. It was the eighties and we wanted our world to be dark and gritty. For me I think there was also an element of wanting to define myself as butch and suppress my more feminine side. I also think that as a generation me and my peers felt like we were coming up in the shadow of the all-powerful cultural shift of the late sixties, which had defined what it meant to be young as well as what it meant to be gay, and we instinctively wanted to buck against all that — do the unthinkable and reclaim things like rigid gender roles in a sort of heightened, theatrical way, just to piss off the hippies. Over time that sassy counter-revolutionary spirit and blithe dismissal of everything that was learned and achieved in the 60s seeped into the mainstream of Western consciousness in a way that arguably led to the horrors of Trump.
All that to say that I have corrected the errors of my youth and eagerly look forward to the latest iterations of gay dance music in the majestic lineage of the first wave of disco. Through the ensuing decades there have been dizzying pinnacles such as Deee-Lite, Glass Candy and Hercules and Love Affair, but to actually get to the point, Decius and Lias Saoudi are the latest, greatest and gayest, injecting a full syringe of sleaze into the canon and swishing around to badass Berlin techno beats like Satan in a pink jockstrap; Saoudi’s vocals sound like Sylvester coming home from Alan Vega school. “Look Like a Man” is their most delicious track; it feels like it’s giving me an STD and I’m like what-ever, so worth it. “I got a front door, got the keys in my pocket / but there’s nothing in my house so there’s no need to lock it / I may look like a man / I may walk like a man / I may talk like a man / Oh but I’m not a man…” At first it seems like an au courant statement of gender fluidity, but I like the idea that he’s telling you he’s not actually human.
Anyway as I mentioned I went to Park City for Slamdance in January and I actually had a couple of opportunities to DJ alongside legendary Baltimorian underground filmaker and 60s rock conoisseur Skizz. The opening party was tough — finding music that would cut through the din of people talking was pretty hit and miss, and it ended up with a request to “turn it down.” But at the closing night party I started leaning into the legacy of disco and playing straight up dance music from different eras and there was a gaggle of young guys hanging out by my DJ area who were feeling it, dancing and laughing and giving me thumbs up, telling me “you’re killing it!” And that energy made me a better DJ — everything I was playing was landing, from “Baba Go Go” by Topo to “Randomness” by Olga Bell; “David” by Gus Gus, “(I Wanna Give You) Devotion” by Nomad, “Got Your Number” by The Maghreban, “Grapefruit” by Tove Lo, “Babe We’re Gonna Love Tonight” by Lime, and of course “Look Like a Man.” The boys hung around for most of the party, but then when they eventually left I totally lost my mojo, and eventually my laptop just shut down and wouldn’t start up again!
When I got back to LA I found that COVID had hitched a ride, but there was a magical treasure chest of music for me to get through and OMG I have so much to tell you about I don’t even know where to start…
Erasers have a droning slice of higher-wisdom channelling, Nico-esque imperiousness called “Constant Connection” that really hits my sweet spot: “Existence, it’s a delicate balance / As you move through / A sense of the silence pulls me through / A constant connection pulls me through.”
John Cale, who’s now 80, has a new one that finds him fully in the swing of contemporary indie, and in fact he collaborates with a lot of current underground luminaries including Laurel Halo, Actress, Weyes Blood and, coincidentally, Fat White Family, which is an alias of Lias Saoudi from Decius. “Night Crawling” would be the hit single, but “Marilyn Monroe’s Legs” with Actress goes to the spookiest places: “She’s always there, late to the party / She’s always there / I never did see, never did see, much / Always, always / Beauty, elsewhere / Elsewhere, elsewhere…”
The Tubs are a proper band as they existed in the 80s, with stories and angst and lyrics as God intended. I’d say they’re old fashioned but for some time now the indie zeitgest has been a buttery, soft and flaky philo dough made of hundreds of layers of styles from bygone eras. Anyway, they’re London-based and Welsh and born from the ashes of previous band Joanna Gruesome, so yeah, perhaps not the greatest at coming up with band names, but they do run wild with form: their show-stopper “Sniveller” starts with squalls of dissonant Mark E. Smith guitar, then next thing you know a harmonizing female vocal drops in and they’re wrapping you in a warm blanket of melodic self-hating earnestness: “The way I cower in the dark / the way I hide in the park / I’m a bootlicker / The way I wriggle like a worm / The way I writhe, the way I squirm / An ass-licker / The way every single thing I do / It’s all for you / How well we’ll make a break and be / And find I can’t / The way I’m your, your snivelling sycophant…” I’ve been there, mate.
I need to confess that I’ve underrated Ladytron over the years — when they first came out, so stylish with their matching heads of thick black boyish bedhead hair, they were one of the many bands in the electroclash scene (Adult., Miss Kittin, Peaches, Felix da Housecat) serving up chilly, minimalist, lysergic electro-pop, and magnificent as “Seventeen” was, it came across like a bit of a novelty. Bottom line I neglected to fall at their pointy patent-leather clad feet as I should have, and the band has nonetheless spent the last two decades bubbling over with genius. They have a delightful new album out called Time’s Arrow, and “City of Angels” is an spot-on sketch of my shape-shifting hometown: “Halogen sun sets over asphalt museum / Fragmenting language like a jazz to young ears / City of angels, semaphores disappear, disappear / All the tricks you know in a flash of light / The love you bring and the cherished things you do…”
If you’re in the mood for classic, circa 1962 country and western, “Wrong Sometimes Right” by Glyders goes down so smooth, a perfect bowl of buttered grits salted with Alabama tears (although they’re actually from Chicago).
But sometimes you just need to get down with some post-human robot shit, and Japan’s Ryoji Ikeda is a master of whirring, clicking hard drive anti-music. The hit “tune” on his ultratronics album, fancifully titled “ultratronics 01,” won’t have you humming in the shower, but there’s something so elegant and sinister about its bursts of static hum, beds of clicks and glitches, and its whispered/garbled ghost-on-speed vocal track.
Meanwhile, across the pond in Shanghai, American ex-pat Osheyack has been crafting somewhat more human post-human fare on his Intimate Publics album. “Being Online” builds to a bed of military attack sonics as an affectless female voice repeats “yeah… yeah.” “Thrall” is all chopped and collaged vocals against manic bursts of playful/aggressive percussion. Then on “Still” a pair of highly processed vocals drop in for a pas de deux in which words gradually come into focus: “do you still… even care?”
I’m not sure how anrimeal is landing on my radar now, but her 2020 Could Divine album is just so pretty and spooky and fully up my gothic alley. It’s like romantic, religious insanity distilled into a liqueur that might kill you. “Encaustic Witches” is rabid, coagulated poetry: “I shall live in hell, or else he will / He’ll bring me the tears that I never had, that I never will / Cursed be the child, ablaze as the sun / Right from within, wrong from without / Cursed be the child that slashed me in half / That waited no more for my tinges of bore / Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.”
When I hear the name Richard Dawson I think of the pickled, menacing, lady-kissing British host of Family Feud, but now there’s an indie Richard Dawson out there and he’s a lot in his own way. At first glance, with his thin falsetto, sprawling 11-part songs and dungeons-and-dragons-ish lyrics, his music comes across like the kind of nerdy, proggy classic rock that Ricky Gervais’ character liked on The Office. On “The Tip of an Arrow” he trills “Whittled down the poplar shafts / Where needed, gently bending flat / Rub them smooth upon that flap of thresher-sharkshin / Touch your newly-whetted scramsax to the thinnest end / And cut the nocks in / Next, with beeswax we glue on / The fletchings of a whooper swan…” And yeah, maybe you’re already starting to feel it — when you surrender to the too-muchness there’s a mad hatter genius to it all that brings unexpected shudders of enchanted forest pleasure. A lot like Joanna Newsom for example. “Thicker Than Water” is actually rather sad and touching — a personal vision of a nightmarish apocalypse: “Going under ochre arches / Once the rumbling arteries of a great city / To-and-fro-ing people in their droves / Above bright streets now desolate capillaries of stone / Their laughter resounds from the shells of every shop, every pub, every school, every home / Within weeks I manage to find the building where / Mum and dad’s earthen vessels are lain / And the dog’s, and my own.”
And whilst we’re exploring mystical magical lands perhaps we should pull over in the chiming, ethereal world of Sofie Birch and Antonina Nowacka and their Languoria album, where it always sounds like Glinda the Good Witch is fluttering by.
Ok I really should wrap this up but oh oh there’s such a lovely track from Saint Jude, “No Angels,” it’s a thick, sweet drizzle of synth-pop with a raw, bruised, populist foghorn vocal at its center: “You say the money doesn’t matter too much / You say the love for your people is enough / Then you hold it in your heart / But against the truncheons and the weapons then you run / Down the streets you used to roll when you were young…”
And and and OMG this monster of a track by gothy synth mavens PVA called “Exhaust/Surroundings” that starts out all breathy/detached/devastated female vocals; moves into a dying, wailing digital dinosaur extinction interlude, then soars into an infinite sky of plastic tragedy: “No longer / Surrounded / Exhausted / I’m twisting / I’m finding / Without her / Without him / No longer / Surrounding, surroundings.”