Not even a guest starring role on Lookingcould save beloved Latino-oriented gay dive Esta Noche, alas! According to Eater SF, the Mission favorite is being sold by its owners— reportedly willingly — to the team behind SoMa meat market Wish.
The new owners take over next week, but will keep things the same for a while, in order for everyone to have some time to say goodbye. (New Mission businesses, please take note: this is how you help avoid a PR nightmare.) Then get ready for more craft cocktails and loungey vibes, Missionites! Ugh.
I like the Wish kids, and I know that the Esta Noche tale is more complex than a simple eviction. Still, it’s heartbreaking to see a community mainstay — 40 years! — shutter, especially one that caters to a different crowd than Castro-roaming bachelorettes and tired Britney queens. Legendary comedy nights, hilarious performances, and, of course, the insane Miss Gay Primavera contest all played out on its stage. And where the hell can I hear Norteno music while cruising cute boys now?
With this coming hard on the heels of the 77 Geary building booting out its art galleries for tech companies, it has been suggested that the Guardian should start a column shaped like a tombstone, listing all the things we’re losing. But at least we’ll have craft cocktails!
MUSIC “I always wanted to know how music sounded in outer space. And with certain types of crystals you can supposedly tune into different frequencies, receive other transmissions. Often I meditate with crystals, go to sleep, and dream about music from outer space. Then I wake up, make stuff like that on the turntables, and take it from there.”
That’s a lot of there to take it from, but DJ Qbert is no stranger to mixing the cosmic with the underground. A legendary emissary of scratch who became the international representative of turntable culture in the 1990s along with his “band” Invisibl Skratch Piklz, Q has always mixed a heavy dose of Bay Area flavor into his masterly sets — which aren’t typical DJ sets by any means, but untethered, jazz-like flights during which a set of turntables and a crossfader, manipulated lightning-fast, become their own kind of spaceship. His polyrhythmic scratch concertos summon white noise, radio interference, oceanic undertow, Looney Tunes quick cuts, vintage advertising jingles, embryonic hip-hop, Big Brother menace, and fiendish, childlike glee. Great beauty, too, especially when you think of them as pure sonic expression, floating free of time and space. Not that you can’t dance your ass off to most of it, mind you.
We were talking about his new album Extraterrestria, dropping in March on the Thud Rumble label and backed by a huge Kickstarter campaign that aims not just to fund the disc, a marketing campaign and a tour, but also typical Qbert innovations like amazing touch-sensitive digital album packaging that simulates DJ controller equipment. (More details at www.djqbert.com)
“The album is actually two albums in one, two different discs,” Qbert, looking tight in a buttondown shirt and track pants, told me. “Extraterrestria is music from another galaxy, hip-hop beats from other planets, collected by the Galactic Scratch Federation. It’s as bizarre and unique as I could make it, a collection of weird noises and different time signatures with as much scratching as possible. The second disc is called Galaxxxian, which is hip-hop from earth beamed into space: raw, primitive. It features a bunch of MCs — Kool Keith, Del Tha Funky Homosapien, Mr. Lif, Soul Khan, Bambu — doing their thing, which a lot of time, you know, means going for the sex, drugs, and hip-hop and roll. We’re not quite on the extraterrestrial level, yet.”
Other biggies like Dan the Automator, Chad Hugo of the Neptunes, cellist-trombonist Dana Leong, and rapper El-P (here a producer) also contributed. “What with the recession and everything, a lot of us have been trading with each other, so we can continue collaborating. Like I’ll do a beat for your album if you do a verse on mine. Something where the money’s phased out, a barter thing. It’s put us back in touch with what’s real,” Qbert said.
TWIST THE FORCE
As we talked on the second floor of the California Academy of Sciences, the first floor was rapidly filling up for the Academy’s weekly Nightlife party, this week a launch celebration and fundraiser for Extraterrestria — and a reunion of sorts for turntablism heads, albeit one bursting with fresh young faces. As b-boys and fly girls made their way through exotic landscapes, whale skeletons, stuffed giraffes, a butterfly-flooded rainforest dome, and aquarium displays including live stingrays, giant octopi, frisky penguins, Claude the albino alligator, and phosphorescent jellyfish, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the deliciously loopy, phantasmagorical animated movie version of Qbert’s era-defining previous album Wave Twisters, released 16 years ago.
That’s a long time between official releases, but it wasn’t like Qbert had been kidnapped by aliens. Although his live performance schedule was less-than-usual bonkers, he still made regular appearances, by himself or as part of his extended Bay Area scratch crew family. He popularized turntable techniques in a series of instructional videos and launched online educational community Qbert Skratch University, in 2009. He also went all in on the equipment tip, putting out his own brand of turntable cartridges and needles, an Invisibl Skratch Piklz-branded mixer, “and of course our own vinyl to scratch with — which is really vinyl on one side and a digital interface on the other, for use with DJ software like Traktor.”
Fifteen years has also seen the rise of social media and a more user-friendly Internet. Has that changed the way he produces beats or performs at all? “Of course it’s been great for finding new sounds to use,” Qbert said. “If I want to hear, say, a tarantula farting, I can look it up instantly and hear that. On the other hand, most of my old sets are up there now, with all their mistakes, and a lot of times I’m cringing and say in a small voice, ‘Please, please let them delete that.’ It keeps me on my toes now, knowing everything can be recorded in all its glory. But because I’ve actually been working on this album for seven years, all that’s been incorporated — it’s not like a shock. I use what I can use.
“But I try not to be trapped in the present. I often think back to the past, to cats like Sun Ra, Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong. That timeless, improvisational jazz feeling where you practice and practice, but when the time comes you’re just an instrument connecting with the god-force, channeling the sound through you, swinging through that ocean of feeling. When you’re in that zone, that’s the most wonderful thing. It’s a meditation, a spiritual thing. We’re all spirits, so we have to connect to other spirits and the most high, whatever you want to call it — God, Allah — connect to that creator source and use it because it’s yours to use. Like how some writers just flow and do that automatic writing, they’re just instruments. We’re just instruments you know, it all flows through us.”
SKRATCHING ROOTS
When Qbert, raised in SF’s Excelsior neighborhood, astonished the DJ world by winning its spun-out version of the Olympics, the DMC World Championships, not once (solo, 1991) but three more times in a row after that (as part of Rocksteady DJs with Mixmaster Mike and Apollo) it was an unparalleled triumph not just for local scratch and hip-hop community, but for Bay Area Filipino American culture as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2ZFsQjaOTI
As music critic and Guardian contributor Oliver Wang details meticulously in his forthcoming book Legions of Boom: Mobility, Identity and Filipino American Disc Jockeys in the San Francisco Bay Area (Duke University Press), a vibrant scene of Filipino mobile DJ crews — independent groups of teenage sound and lighting specialists hired to provide entertainment for weddings, graduations, and parties — thrived here since the 1970s. When hip-hop eclipsed disco on the request lists in the 1980s, the mobile crews defined streetwise Bay Area Filipino youth culture and provided a fertile training ground (and sometimes needed cash) for young DJ up-and-comers.
Qbert’s domination of the DJ world could be read as the apex of that scene, which faded in the 1990s with the rise of digital technology. And of course Qbert went on to create his own crew of fellow Filipino DJs: The Invisibl Skratch Piklz, with Shortkut, Apollo, Mix Master Mike, and several others. The Piklz went on to become insanely popular, establishing scratching and other turntable manipulations as a form of art and a highly marketable genre — turntablism — that changed the sound of hip-hop and dance music. Mix Master Mike went on to become, in essence, the fourth Beastie Boy; one early ISP member was A-Trak, current turntable-wielding heartthrob of the superstar EDM crowd.
In fact, the current popularity of turntable-rooted DJs like A-Trak and the burgeoning trip-hop and late ’90s revival makes the timing of Qbert’s return auspicious. “A-Trak runs a dance music scene and I think it’s great that he brings the scratching into it, he’s really unique in that field — so more power to him for turning on a different crowd to the sound. But for me it’s never really gone away, pure scratching. There’s a zillion underground cats who are genius at what they do — Quest, Deeandroid and Ceslkii, Disk, tons more. And maybe the widespread recognition isn’t there, maybe it isn’t in your face like it once was, but they’re all around. It’s like the guys who still do yo-yo tricks. They don’t know things have moved on. They keep practicing and practicing and doing incredible things, regardless of how many people are following. They’re always battling, always progressing. Never put down your yo-yo, man,” he laughs.
As for connecting to a new generation, working with (gasp!) turntables and (double gasp!) vinyl at this stage of DJ history is a deliberate artistic choice. Even with a resurgence of interest in analog techniques — a specific reaction to digital overload — does Qbert fear that scratching will be seen as merely a retro novelty?
“I think no one can deny that, whether you’re old or young, using a turntable to make a scratch sound — well, you can’t deny that it sounds really bugged out. How else are you going to make that sound unless you’re actually moving the sound with your own hand? Just to hold the sound and grab it, move it back and forth — that’s unique and fascinating to people. It’s like a sci-fi movie in real life, a sound that people have heard since maybe they were little kids, but one that also points to a future where man meets machine. It’s a real manipulation, a sound design in itself. What other instrument can do that?”
You know what happens if you stop, don’t you? The New Year’s Eve hangover catches up. So why not just power through the next day with some of the most fortifying party crews in town? Si se puede, honey.
Here’s the wheres and whenfors of one of the few days left when SF feels truly old school underground, and you can party for 28 hours straight. All whirligigs start Wednesday morning or afternoon:
So many great house and disco party crews coming together for this rager — one of my favorite parties of last year. With Steve Fabus, Sergio Fedasz, Taco Tuesday, Doc Sleep, Trevor Sigler, Robert Jeffrey, Robin Simmons, M*J*R.
The awesome Wednesday weekly goes full force, opening in the wee hours of Wednesday and staying open til 4am. THAT’S 22 HOURS. With classic West Coast rave daddy Doc Martin and Heartthrob, Nikita, Atish, Brian Bejarano, Mossmoss, Benjamin Vallery, Ivan Ruiz, Dao & Pwny, Tyrel Williams, Sharon Buck, Fil Latorre, many more.
6am-Thurs at 4am, $10-$25. F8, 1192 Folsom, SF. Facebook invite
While we shall never forget the years spent passing out at old venue Whisper, this burner-happy New Year’s Day block party with Space Cowboys and guests has settled in mighty fine at its new Mighty location. A extravaganza of wondrously questionable sights and sounds.
Fantastical Berlin prince of longform, pumping disco sets Hunee joins the Honey and NWB boys for outer space bliss. With DJs Josh Cheon, Conor, P-Play, Robot Hustle, Solar, Jason Kendig, more.
6am, $10-$20 advance. Monarch, 101 6th St., SF. Facebook invite
House legend (so good in person!) Lil Louis graces this annual blowout — the last one at Cafe Cocomo, which is scheduled to be torn down for condos — with Solar, J-Bird, Galen, Deron, Tasho, Sweet P, more,
2pm-2am, $10-$20. Cafe Cocomo, 650 Indiana, SF. Facebook invite
A messy, really messy (as in there was a glitter explosion last year) and really fun New Year’s Day tradition, with JoeJoe, Ding Dong, Mace, Ernie Trevino, Haute Mess, Ethan Miller, Dao & Pwny, Dr. Whiskers, Marky Ray. Can you make it?
That sound you hear right now? Every cool gay and/or techno nerd in the city rending their exquisitely positioned garments. Honey Soundsystem has just announced via newsletter that Oct. 20 will see the end of its weekly Sunday party at Holy Cow, one of the best overall club nights in the world.
“We started out wanting to make house and techno a regular thing for queens — and we did that and now it’s time to move on,” DJ P-Play of the collective told me. “We’re glad the party is so good right now, and we’re stopping it while it’s hot.
“We’re confident enough to move in a direction where people have to think again. Where we’re going with the music, together and individually, is too complicated for a weekly night.
“Now it’s up to the queens of SF to decide if they want to continue to keep this city interesting, or if they’re going to settle for the same top 40 bullshit.”
The importance of the five-year-old Honey Sundays can’t be overstated — starting with the fact that they filled the gaping hole in SF Sunday nightlife left by the End Up’s death spiral, and climaxing with an absolutely insane weekly lineup of challenging international underground artists, gay and straight, brought to a hungry, globally hooked-in audience here. Basically, you’re nothing if you don’t play Honey now.
The weekly family affair also introduced a new generation to the intellectual art of throwing a party: the soundsystem was unafraid to get hyperconceptual and subversively arty with its promotional material, themes, decor, and one-off locations. And the sheerdiversityof the people behind the decks each week was almost single-handedly holding up SF’s rep as a cultural Mecca. (I’m kidding about SF being totally over — there are still some great parties. Look, though, we are getting a bit same-y in the nightlife department.)
Honey Sundays took the effort. But yeah, maybe it’s time to move on. “Jason Kendig is being recognized on an international level,” P-Play says, rattling off the Honey members’ accomplishments. “Robot Hustle is touring live as Bezier. Josh Cheon runs one of the most respected labels in the world right now. And my work with Luther and as Jackie House is taking off.” (P-Play’s being modest — he was actually behind about five of the biggest and best Folsom parties this year.) He also compared the ending to the finale of Kontrol, SF’s mainstay techno party, some of whose promoters went on to become world-famous DJs.
Plus Honey’s ending on a high note. “It’s an inevitable, poetic idea that we want to give back, give something really back,” P-Play said. “Our last night is the release party of our double album of Patrick Cowley’s lost gay porn soundtracks, School Daze, something we feel really completes a kind of journey for us. We’re going until 4am. It’s the day after what would have been our idol Cowley’s 63rd birthday — it won’t be sad, it will be a celebration.”
Breathe, queens, Honey’s not totally dispersing — they promise to be back soon with great things. And they’ll be teaming up with the No Way Back crew to bring in Norwegian heavy hitter Rodhad for Halloween, and then in November are doing something big for Bear Pride Weekend, which is an actual thing happening.
“We’re not giving people their weekly fix anymore, they’re going to have to stir the pot,” P-Play said.
And what of the poor souls who show up the Sunday after Honey’s ended? “They’re idiots,” P-Play declares. “They’re not our crowd, and not the people we want to play for anyway.”
Get the memo, honey. I’m gonna go cry now. Here’s the full release from Honey HQ:
Dear Honey Bee,
It is without regret we inform you that the next 3 Sundays will see the end of our 5 years as a weekly party.
In our 7 year history as a crew we tasked ourselves with reinventing queer nightlife for all our friends, allies and supporters. We have and will continue to bring the highest quality sounds from the underground and create a safe space for people of all walks to mingle, dance and be free.
But in order for us to grow even further, we need to shed our old skin to create a new one. The party itself – whether at the Holy Cow, the Paradise Lounge or those that can recall back to our days at The Transfer or the Mineshaft Basement Parties – has always been a party on the move. We will be going back to our roots, but with a more direct line to the future. This is not a disappearing act, this is taking ownership of the destinies of everyone who has participated, supported and danced at our parties. This farewell is quite temporary, for you will soon be transported back to our dance floor as though it were all a dream…
For the final Honey Soundsystem experience at Holy Cow on October 20th, 2013 we pay tribute to Patrick Cowley’s life in our third installment of Megatron Man to celebrate the release of the 2×12” “School Daze”! The release features soundtracks to John Coletti’s pornographic films from FOX Studio that were long forgotten but now resurrected for your listening pleasure. Restoring these tapes to our fans marks the full cycle of what Honey has strived to achieve – bringing you timeless sounds from all eras of dance music, grounded in foundations of queer history.
Sad news came down the pipe yesterday that truly essential Bay Area psychedelic house pioneer Scott Hardkiss of the Hardkiss Brothers passed away at age 43. The cause hasn’t been announced, but he had been having medical trouble recently with an eye implant. His last Facebook post, dated March 20, quoted Whodini: “Friends, how many of us have them, ones you can depend on?”
Well, he certainly had a lot of admirers who loved his production and DJ work, me included. Along with “brothers” Gavin and Robbie, Scott helped put the funky, pagan native sound of SF on the underground map in the early 1990s — unafraid to mix acid and deep techno sounds with psychedelic and prog rock effects to create a sublimely ecstatic noise.
I first met Scott back in 1994 when I first visited the Bay Area, working with Detroit producer Carl Craig, who was scouting around for remixes and West Coast connections at the time. Scott couldn’t stick around long to talk as he was getting ready to DJ for a bellydancing troupe, if I recall correctly. It was then that I decided I wanted to live here. (There weren’t a lot of psychedelic techno bellydancing troupes in Detroit back then, believe it or not.)
We’ll miss you Scott, thanks for all you gave to the scene. <3
When I heard that super-popular, infuriatingly designed dance music download site Beatport had partnered with Shazam earlier this month, I wanted to write something about how the valuable mystery of the underground might be compromised by anyone being able to hold a phone up to immediately identify and download a track. And then I wanted to contrast some of the fun measures DJs might take to prevent their tracklists (one of the few proprietary things left that can really distinguish a good DJ) from being exposed, with the simple joy of finally stumbling upon a song you’d been looking for for 22 years that instantly projects you into your gloriously wasted youth because yay Internet. The partnership might not be so bad, after all, if it leads to new discoveries and interesting subversions.
Beatport has a lot of crappy mainstream tracks on it, and the back catalogue is incredibly spotty, but it has some great stuff, too, and it’s giant. (I go there once in a while to hear what a sizable audience is listening to and catch up on new releases.) And it does at least nominally reward musicmakers with some money and exposure, an opportunity to sell their handmade bedroom creations. It’s kind of like Etsy for pimply boys. If Beatport-Shazam helps people find and buy some great new tracks, then fine. I also remember how cute the Denver-based Beatport was in the beginning, its candy-raver-like representatives handing me alien-looking free download credit cards at Pride and Love Parade and the Detroit Electronic Music Festival. Awww.
But then I read this super-annoying but awesomely candid Billboard interview with Beatport CEO Matthew Adell about the partnership, and thought, “Hey, if they’re gonna treat underground music as just a big business to be repackaged and monetized, (albeit one they seem to enjoy at least a little), then they can defend the Shazam partnership from angry DJs their own damn selves.”
Because of course, despite its catalogue of music independently made and emblemmatic of underground party vibes, Beatport, like all music distribution, IS a business — a supervaluable one that considers itself in competition with iTunes and has exploded with the emergence of the boringly important pop-EDM phenomenon.
OK then: take all the Guetta and Swedish House Mafia imitators you want, SFX Entertainment — but leave our Silent Servant and Donato Dozzy alone! SFX had already built an empire based on the live rock performance boom of the ’90s and sold it to Clear Channel, which became the basis of Live Nation. Clear Channel was/is pretty damned evil. Will all the colorful characters of underground house and techno find themselves crushed by the wheels of industry? Will there be a rebel gospel house Pearl Jam, a UK dub-bass Prince in our future, fighting against the machine?
I’m merely a mindless consumer of all this music, though, dancing my heart out. Beatport is great, but when I (very rarely) DJ, I frantically run down to the Black Pancake record store in the Lower Haight, or purchase web-only tracks from Juno or Stompy or, gasp, record label sites themselves when Beatport surrenders no search returns.
So I turned to outspoken longtime label and production honcho Chris Lum of Harlum Muziq and legendary Moulton Studios to see what he thought. He replied in the form of a Facebook note — and as usual, he had plenty of thoughtful and passionate things to say about the general matter. I’m printing his response in full below, hoping to start a dialogue going about how the mainstream embrace of dance music, and just a particular type of dance music at that, is changing the industry and, quite possibly, the party.
Chris Lum:
In a 2009 Rolling Stone article, the great writer Matt Taibbi said this about Goldman Sachs. “The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it’s everywhere. The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
This quote read round the world was the 1st thing that popped into my mind. You see, a few interesting things in the world of dance music happened to me over the last several days. It starts with me, getting re-acquainted with my roots as pure fan of house by way of sweating on a dance floor for a few blissful hours this past Saturday at Mighty. Who was I dancing to? Just a young lad known as “The Godfather Of House.” You know, the guy with a street named after him in Chicago. The brief moment of disconnecting myself from the man who’s been working in the industry for 20 years and reconnecting with the young man who was turned on by the music was profound. During that evening a conversation with [local DJ] Franky Boissy lead to him sharing a film with me called “Keep On Dancing. The God Father Of Disco.” This documentary is about a man very few of today’s younger set have ever heard of. A man by the name of Mel Cheren.
Mel was the man behind a seminal label called West End, the early investor in a little NYC club called “Paradise Garage” and supporter of a wee popular DJ named Larry Levan. He’s also the guy that worked with Tom Moulton on getting the first 12″ record to the marketplace. Mel’s place in the lineage of todays dance music industry can not be overstated. It is men like Mel Cheren and the David Mancusos of the 1970’s that inspired the likes of Frankie Knuckles. Who in turn laid the foundation for what we call house for the last 30+ years. In fact, it may arguable that Mel and Westend is a vital part of hip hop/rap history. Think of this period as a star going supernova. A brilliant flash of light and energy that travels light years in it’s reach and creates the building blocks for future stars that then give life on their own.
The documentary ought to be required viewing for anyone claiming to be in this industry. (See it here.)
Flash forward to last night when I started to see the links to the news about the purchase of Beatport. Mind you, my views to follow are less about Beatport as a single company and more about what this represents to the industry and more importantly the culture that it defines. As a label owner and artist I have ZERO issue with Beatport. I have a friend who works there and he’s all about music. He’s a lifer actually, everyone I have ever met from Beatport is nice, passionate, smart and deserving of respect. Try and hold off on the “Beatport sucks anyway” comments. They add nothing to the discussion and are not that smart. As a customer, I also spend my money there. Again, the views expressed herein are not about Beatport. They are about the pinnacle of a trend going for about 10-15 years now. What is that trend?
Let’s put Taibbi’s quite next to one from NYTimes music writer Ben Sisario’s report on the Beatport sale:
Matt Taibbi – “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money”.
Ben Sisario – “SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.”
Anything pop out to you there? It does to me. You see, what struck a chord to me in the Mel Cheren movie was contemplating a time where the leaders of a particular part of the industry were actually participants and creators in the culture. They were often the vanguard of creativity, taste, trend and style. They lived in it. They were it. Even in my early halcyon days of the early to mid ’90s, you had the cultural leaders enjoying commercial success from their work. There were few “carpetbaggers.”
Events like Wicked, Stompy, Funky Techno Tribe, Toon Town, etc, were created, run, nurtured and profited by those directly and deeply involved in the community. The same held true in the Mel Cheren era. These people lived and breathed the culture and their economic success was a result of the creative contributions they gave to the people.
What we have hear in this Beatport purchase is the reverse trend of the last decade +. That of pure economic exploitation of a counter-culture, the pasteurization of color, homosexuality, avant garde(ness), danger, edge. You know, all things that will scare average white americans and get in the way of higher ROI’s. Those that seek to buy out these companies do so with the same mentality Bain Capital seeks “opportunities” to “capitalize” on “trends” (aka craze). Much like Taibbi’s vampire squid, they will monopolize areas of the industry of highest return and devour the meat until only the carcass is left to fight over by the vultures in our culture. What we have now are MBAs making creative decisions. Carpetbaggers flying in on private jets to anoint the next big thing with the same techniques used to roll out a new soft drink product. Boardroom meetings and that special detachment to the history and culture of “their market” that only those in the elite class have.
Of course, it very well be that this is a uniquely American story. I’m not on the ground enough as a touring DJ playing in various sized venues and visiting local record stores to gauge the health of the dance music culture abroad. From the outside it appears as though it’s vibrant and flourishing. With opportunities available to a “middle” “class” of innovative, creative, hard working people create something wonderful for their community. We have a few left here in SF and the states as well. But from a long view of 22 years experiencing this culture, it seems the trend has become: Every year we lose a few more of those who have earned a place at the table while replacing them with consolidation, media mergers,buyouts and exploitative practices.
Before you select few chime in with “Stop worry and do your own thing. This does not matter” (I already know who you are). Let me state that I have been having private conversations for almost two years now with people that you would “assume’ are kicking ass. People that are making amazing modern music, running labels with great releases, great new artists. People that are working their asses off. Grinding, hustling, traveling, gigging, etc. All the things that you would tell someone to just “go do.” Even those held up as “doing it” are barely holding onto something worth doing. Like America, there used to exists a solid middle class in this culture. People who could pursue a passion, do it well, hell even do it locally only (hello Larry Levan) and earn enough to not be broke, invest in their craft and provide people joy from the ability to do what they were put on earth to do. Now we don’t. We have the 1% and the 99%. There are still different levels of the 99% but it ain’t the 1%.
And guess what, unless you are connected and have a million + to give to the 1%, your talent will not give you that access.
Most of my concern over this trend has been on the demise of any culture of dance music in America. There are some who will argue the point that mass exposure leads to more opportunities for all or that the business practices of the elite have no bearing on others. I would argue however that same trends we’ve seen with the mom and pop business trying to compete with the Wallmarts is what we are seeing in dance music land. You, see, we love $ in america. It’s our national religion. We love to have as much of it as we can. We love spend it we when we have and save it when we don’t. Because C.R.E.A.M (look it up), the huge media companies get to dictate what the industry does if the industry wants some of their $. This effects everything from booking fee’s for acts, access to artists, access to publishing rights, cost of entry for starting a business, access to promotional streams and local license and permit fees.
Over time it squeezes out the local businesses and leaves only the monolith. You ever travel through the states and pull into these little towns and all there is a Wal-mart, and a chain stores? The people in those towns are always sold a lie. Let us come here and “help” this town with tax revenue and jobs. Then the town gets no tax revenue and shitty low wage soul sucking jobs. It’s the same thing here with Clear Channel buying beatport. With Ultra buying the Salsoul & Westend Catalogs. With livenation dominating the landscape with it’s festivals. With local municipalities giving access and support to the large corporate entities while continuing to squeeze and pressure the small, local business.
Say what you will. I think this one little news item marks the official end the American dance music story. It’s over folks. Anything you thought was left in a real way is merely a hologram of what once was. In the current climate, we will not see the rise of another Mel Cheren, Larry Levan, Ron Hardy, shit, even the next Frankie Knuckles. Todays EDM is sterile, straight, un-offensive, milquetoast, and conformist. No one representing a true revolutionary spirit will be allowed on the big stage. If you doubt me, ask the Dixie Chicks how Clear Channel dealt with them the year after 9/11.
Oh jeez, sad news this morning from EO, owner of great, actually-underground rave cave 222 Hyde. Due to a change in ownership of the nightlub’s building, and some continued trouble with the ABC state liquor and license patrol, 222 will be closing March 9.
There’s gonna be a huge closing party that night of course! (Stay tuned for details.)
This marks the loss of one of the most truly open-eared venues to come along in a while, a space that had room – well, a little room, at least, that basement dancefloor got packed! — for ambitious electronic experiment as well as balls out crowd pleasers, but always on the cutting edge. The staff is pretty great, too — and the space itself is a historic nightlife landmark. I don’t want to make any grand statements about the blandification of SF nightlife, you’ve heard it all before, but 222’s size insured that lesser-known acts, or ones not so familiar in the US, could perform to a vibing dancefloor, rather than risk the cost of larger venues. (And I regret not making it to some of the recent parties like Wednesday’s “What?!” party and the appearance by Skooz. Next time!)
EO will continue on with his ear-grabbing electronic music production — I wish him and his staff well and thank you for the music! Let’s make sure the next few weeks and the closing party are real blowouts. EO’s message to me after the jump:
Hi Marke,
I have some news regarding 222 Hyde.
Sadly, we are closing our doors. Our last event will be March 9, a farewell party with djs and acts who have been staples at 222 over the years. Lineup to follow, but so far Jeno, Atish, Sleazemore, Polk & Hyde (live), and more to come. The final week we are open will be one for the books, starting with the final Tutu Tuesday March 5, As You Like It w/San Proper March 8, and the closing party March 9.
A few things factored into what is leading us to close. Problems with the ABC (Alcoholic Beverage Control) over a technicality concerning a condition on the license being one of them. Also, the building that houses 222 is also changing hands in a couple months, and the new owners would not be sympathetic to the club or it’s operations. We were lucky to have a great landlord for years and his departure signaled the last sign that it was time to move on.
222 will be remembered as a unique and special place in the SF club landscape, and we know it will be missed. It will live on in everyone’s memory, and there is something to be said for ending on a high note.
Personally, I will have even more time to devote to my first passion, that being producing and performing electronic music on my own, as well as with my collaborators Kenneth Scott (Moniker) and Jonah Sharp (Polk & Hyde). There are a string of upcoming releases on deck and I look forward to having more time to focus on music.
We would love to see everyone at any and all of the last events at the club!
The phenomenal house DJ and experimental musicmaker on mainstream visibility, transgender globalism, Bay Area queer culture, and the “shopping mall diversity” of the current dance music scene.
Techno has always had room for theorists and intellectuals, from Derrick May to the Mille Plateaux label roster, and social activists, like Moodymann and Underground Resistance. Most of that discourse usually takes place musically, however, with concepts emerging from the vinyl itself. The celebrated DJ Sprinkles, a.k.a. Terre Thaemlitz, the American head of Japan-based label Comatonse, tops all that by making intellectually grounded music glimmering with poetic touches and expounding in interviews and writing on such heady, heated topics as essentialism, gender idenitity, surveillance, and authenticity. She leads workshops, goes on speaking engagements, and isn’t afraid to let loose in interviews. (For example — see below — rather than “born this way” platitudes, she considers her queer identity “beat this way.”)
It’s a beautiful thing, especially in the rare context of controversial truth and radical opinion pouring from the mouth and keyboard of an outspoken transgender major player on the stubbornly homogenous global house-techno DJ scene. Of course, it all comes down to the music — we’ll get a treat when Sprinkles (who chose the name because he wanted something that sounded “totally pussy” in opposition to macho DJ culture, to buck the testosteronal scene) performs Sun/24 at Honey Soundsystem — and Sprinkles certainly has the goods. He’s released umpteen pieces in an astoundng breadth of genres under multiple pseudonyms over the past 20 years. Masterpiece deep house album “Midtown 120 Blues” siezed the top of several best of 2009 charts and was, typically, followed by Soulnessless, a 30-hour “mp3 album” of music and video. Because why the hell not?
I got a chance to exchange emails with Sprinkles before her appearance here. It’ll be an interesting return to the Bay Area, where she lived for several years before decamping to Japan. Here’s all she had to say.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY79cyv8pH8
SFBGIt’s been 13 years since you lived in Oakland, is that correct? Can you tell me why you decided to leave and what it was like to live here then, with regards to the music, political, and queer scene?
DJ SPRINKLES Yes, it’s been a long time. I used to live across the street from a hotel where the Unabomber once stayed. Honestly, I can’t say I miss California. I never really connected with any queer or transgendered communities in SF or Oakland. Whenever I tried, they seemed immersed in West Coast spiritualism and zodiac bullshit, which I found completely alienating. Most of the transgendered people I met there were prone to metaphysics — by which I mean they were ideologically (and economically and medically) invested in defining their transgenderism in relation to a perceived split between their “physical bodies” and their “true inner selves.” I’m an anti-essentialist, non-op, materialist, anti-spiritualist… so that clearly wasn’t a match with my own transgendered identity.
There was also a weird conservatism in SF’s queer scenes that I associated with the fact a lot of people in SF had been raised in conservative Midwestern towns, so they were in SF to “live the life.” I felt there was a lot of unacknowledged parody and role play going on — people trying to overcome a life of repression and closets by wrapping themselves in rainbow flag culture. Yet, when going to buy groceries or such, I still found myself being harassed as a “fag” on the street like in any other town in the US. I felt my four years there was all quite standard. I don’t really think of the Bay Area as a “special place” for being queer and transgendered.
US identity politics have a particularly inextricable link to the concept of the ghetto — not only as a place of economic strife and forced communal ostracization from a “white middle-class mainstream,” but also as a self-invested “safe space” for non-mainstream social movements. This is part of migrant culture. For example, after my grandparents passed through Ellis Island, they immediately moved to a place where people spoke the same language as their homeland, etc. The Castro, New York’s West Village, Little Italy, China Town… these are all migrant-based communities formed by people seeking safety in numbers in the face of not being welcome elsewhere — these two dynamics of “safety” and “alienation” are inseparable to most US identity politics. So these communal zones all display the problems and contradictions of cultural identification that plague mainstream US culture as an “immigrant nation” that is simultaneously “anti-immigrant” – because the “immigrant” is a brutal reminder that there are no “real Americans” beyond Native Americans, which the majority are not. And of course, the fact that recent generations of immigrants are primarily people of color does not jibe with conventional black/white US race discourse, which continues to be largely devoid of other browns, as well as the concept of the person of color as a willing immigrant (as opposed to the descendant of a slave). This history and context is peculiar to the US social landscape, and it creates a lot of weird identity essentialisms and hostilities around gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, class…
Not to say other countries don’t have their own fucked up ways of causing and dealing with social problems, but moving to Japan and realizing that pretty much the entirety of Western identity politics did not function here was a big life experience. It was like leaving the Earth’s gravitational pull — it didn’t mean gravity no longer existed, but almost everything I had internalized and believed I understood about my relationship to gravity was no longer helpful in understanding the dynamics of dominations at work in this other context. I wasn’t freed of gravity, but lost in weightlessness. I had to learn to feel weight in a completely different way. This is why so many of my projects dealing with my own immigration and cultural issues consistently invoke the rather limited and problematic US language of black/white race relations. It is a critical gesture intended to highlight the limitations of my having been raised amidst that US language and social conditioning, yet now living within a non-US context with few tools to work with.
Because music’s value is so often tied to an essentialist concept of racial authenticity, it becomes difficult and risky to ask an audience to question their relationships to the very value systems through which they likely purchased the album – but that is also why I choose to work with audio. Not because of its possibilities, but its all-too-clear limitations. Since I am unable to believe in the authenticity or purity of identities of any kind, when I invoke “identifiable” sounds (a “queer” sound, a “black” sound, etc.) I am doing so to question the social relationships around their construction, proliferation, and distribution. The moment we become lazy about our use of those “identifiable” sounds — the minute we take it for granted that the essentialist associations they have come to carry are unquestionable and real reflections of material social experiences — everything becomes one-dimensional and shallow. This is why almost all music is one-dimensional and shallow! [Laughs.] For example, if I can beat a dead horse, my problem with Madonna’s “Vogue” is not that it was “inauthentic,” but that its terms of discourse misrepresented its relationship to vogueing by actively erasing the very contexts of Latina and African-American transgendered culture that inspired it (via lyrics about “It makes no difference if you’re black or white, a boy or a girl”… it TOTALLY made a difference, and THAT SOCIAL REALITY is where any real discussion on vogueing BEGINS.). So I’m interested in these other directions of audio discourse that cannot even occur if one is preoccupied with conflated essentializations of identity and sound. There is never a true point of origin for anything. It’s all referential and contextual. In my opinion, there is no point in discussions focussing on identifying the source of a sound or style — that is a hopelessly futile exercise, although it is the dominant exercise! It’s a distraction from the real discussions needing to be held, and those are discussions on relations of domination.
As a DJ in the late ’80s and early ’90s, there were a lot of drag queens asking me to play Madonna’s “Vogue” when it first came out. I refused, but I could understand their requests. We all have very complicit and complex relationships to dominations, and a perverse desire to celebrate our visibility within the dominant mainstream, no matter how unfamiliar or distorted that reflection may be… often because we are conditioned to feel so unhappy with what we see in the mirror to begin with. Mainstream visibility is like getting approval of the Father. It’s a mental and abusive process. It is also totally standard. So I get it… But there is also that which remains unrepresented and invisible to most. That which existed, and may have already been lost, but did so without seeking approval of the Father. And again, this is generally not a freed or liberated space, but a space of intense hatred for the Father. These are difficult things to speak of and represent, because any act of representation has the potential to be a violation of the cultural site it wishes to speak of. So to speak of them requires obfuscating or complicating the usual functions of language – not through vague poetry, but unexpected flashes of clarity coming from unexpected vectors.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2iKF_11WbY
SFBGYou left during the first Internet boom I believe, and now SF is in the middle of a second one (although a bit different than the first — the first wave seemed to have much more geeks and freaks in it, while this one seems much more regimented and Ivy League, even while many longtime residents are still feeling the results of “global recession”). When was the last time you were back here? And what are some of your recent thoughts on how house music is being affected by economic circumstances?
DJ SPRINKLES I was only back once about 10 years ago, visiting friends for a few days. When I moved away at the end of 2000, internet and web development had already undergone a rigid formalization. Years earlier, a web designer did a bit of everything. By 2000, developers were already split into specific teams focussing on interface, coding, page flow, etc… all processes were specialized, departmentalized, corporatized. I hadn’t heard about the “second internet boom” there, but the way you describe it doesn’t surprise me since it would surely be an extension of that regimentation that took place in the first boom.
And in a way, the same can be said of this “second boom” (third?) around house music. In the same way almost all websites have taken on the same continuity and feel, so has electronic dance music. You buy an album, and all the tracks sound similar — as opposed to the old days when an electronic dance track like Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” was tacked on to the end of an otherwise standard soul-band album that didn’t sonically match it at all. Today’s music consumer experience is much more streamlined and organized, which affects how people produce an album as well. Younger generations — 20-somethings — grew up amidst this homogenization, so I am fairly sure they do not feel what I am speaking of… although they may recognize it as a historical process.
I try to play with discontinuity and mixing things up, like in my K-S.H.E album, “Routes not Roots,” which had monologues and ambient tracks interspersed between house cuts. But I once made the mistake of reading people’s blog comments, and they really seemed upset about this kind of thing. “Way to ruin the mix,” or “Why the fuck didn’t you put that monologue at the end of the album?” They have no patience for non-homogeneity. The same goes for my Comatonse Recordings website itself — people seem utterly confused and helpless. If one doesn’t do everything completely standard and at the same level, people get disoriented. It’s a kind of cultural compression going on, similar to audio compression, where everything has to be “punched up” to the same intensity or people feel lost. What the fuck is so wrong with being lost? Why would you expect — let alone insist — your interactions with non-mainstream media to be completely mainstream in process?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8iF7JQiz50
SFBGI’ve been hanging out recently with the new, young generation of ACT-UP activists who are transcending mere ’90s revival and undertaking a lot of energizing political discourse and action. Were you involved in the queer activist movement back then — or now? Would you characterize your musical project as a form of activism, especially in its more intellectual and challenging aspects?
DJ SPRINKLES That’s nice to hear. Although you use the term “action,” I assume the real interesting stuff has little to do with demos and “direct actions,” and more to do with communal education initiatives, etc.? My direct action days were mostly during the late ’80s and early ’90s, while living in New York. Most of those activities were in conjunction with various caucuses in ACT-UP, and WHAM! (Women’s Health Action & Mobilization).
I do consider my audio and other projects “political” — in theme, and also in their attempts to (dis)engage with standard industry practices. But clearly this is something different than direct action “activism” or community outreach, because my main social engagements are with people working for labels, distributors, music festivals, museums, and other culture industries. Maybe “culture jamming” is a better way to put this kind of political activity. Personally, I found myself distanced from direct action groups because the terms of identification they cultivated out of strategic necessity so often folded back into essentialisms that excluded me on a personal level. So I was always advocating for the recognition and acceptance of something other than myself (like the way “born this way” ideologies take over discussions of LGBT rights… I consider myself more “beat this way,” my queer identity being primarily informed by material ostracism and harassment than by some mythological self-actualization and pride). That, combined with the mid-’90s move away from direct action toward CBO’s (Community Based Organizations) — largely because the tactics of direct action had been so thoroughly coopted by mainstream media – was pretty much the end of my serious direct action involvements. Over the years, enunciating this process has become the core political act of my projects and activities. I do not do this to discourage people from forms of direct action, but as a simultaneous form of critical analysis that hopefully contributes in other ways to our various attempts to react to dominations.
SFBGDo you feel that, as the means of production and distribution have been more and more democratized in the past decade, house and techno music-making and DJing have been living up to their potential as a form of resistance to mainstream capitalism and culture, or do you feel they’ve become more homogenized and/or annexed by neoliberal, bourgeois culture?
DJ SPRINKLES I do not believe the means of production and distribution have become more democratized. I take issue with the way people always confuse “commercial accessibility” with “democratization.” The breadth and variation of today’s music production strategies is no more than a shopping mall diversity. We are all working with similar software on similar platforms. Mac, Windows, Unix… Banana Republic, Abercrombie & Fitch, The Gap… Having said that, if these musics had a potential, I believe it was lost back in the ’90s when anti-sampling legislation (mostly focusing on hip-hop) laid the groundwork for today’s electronic music. It basically reinvigorated house with “musicianship,” “authorship,” and all that crap which used to play far less of a role in this genre’s early days. And the younger generation – basically, today’s 20-somethings who grew up after the whole sampling debates — really don’t seem to understand how record label legal departments work.
So they list up all the samples they recognize in a track in the comment fields of music websites, which is putting the producers they wish to support at risk. There is no sense of how we can cultivate — let alone protect — “underground” media and information in this online era. Everything is about “sharing,” when in fact we need to be developing a parallel discourse around meaningful information distribution patterns, including strategically withholding information from the web. The cliché idea of making “everything accessible for everyone” is not only naîve, but negates the social and cultural specificities that give certain forms of media their alternative values, in particular collage and sampling. Anyone who has used a random image taken from a Google image search on their blog page, and then gotten an email from Getty Images’ legal department asking for back royalties, knows what I’m talking about. Treating subcultural musics as though they are meant for “everyone” — whether this is being done by fans, or the labels and online distributors themselves — is the biggest sign of people not understanding the media they are dealing with. And since all of that is SOP these days, it’s pretty much a sign that the sample-based genres of house is dead. Is talking about house’s political potential in 2013 really all that different than the trend of talking about the radical politics of ’60s rock during the ’80s?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4M3-t9lw7o
SFBGI feel like, with parties like Honey Soundsystem, there is a huge resurgence of interest in an underground queer dance music culture — a kind of new underground opposed to corporate or low-quality dance music (yet still taking place in corporate spaces). Is this phenomenon occurring in Japan as well? Do you feel there are specific possibilities with this, not just in terms of opportunity for queer DJs to travel but of transformation of queer discourse and politically actualizing a new generation?
DJ SPRINKLES Hey, low-quality is where it’s at. It’s what it’s all about. What was Chicago house if not low quality? It’s important to place value within the “low” in order to counter conventional associations between the terms “good,” “high quality” and “upper class.” I’m not talking about celebrating kitsch, or that kind of petit-bourgeois trivialization of the “low.” I’m talking about finding other values in the “low” that cannot find expression within a language developed to express everything in terms of “low vs. high.” This is ultimately about the identification of other values amidst class struggle.
I don’t think house resonates as a queer medium anymore. Those days are over. Today it is primarily a white, heterosexual, European phenomenon. That was the case early on. I mean, how many Americans became aware of house music in the ’80s by buying Chicago house sold back to us on UK compilations? The US has always treated its own history of electronic music like utter shit… The US is such a fucking rock’n’roll shithole. So I think for people to appreciate house music’s queer roots, and to actively invest in those themes today, requires people becoming deliberate and explicit about those interests. But whether that deliberate action would focus on “queer visibility” or not is another issue. It doesn’t have to focus on “visibility” — especially since visibility has become such an oppressive aspect of dominant LGBT movements. Explicitness can also be about closets. Not only the usual closets born of heterosexism, but less considered closets around sexuality and gender that have been formed by the actions of the “born this way” LGBT mainstream. Well, that’s the direction I try to take it… reflecting on, and constructing, queer and transgendered histories that are as skeptical of Pride[TM] as they are angry about violence. And I do believe, globally speaking, queer and transgendered experiences are much more informed by violence than pride. So this should be reflected in how and where we make noise. In my opinion, music that functions in completely standard ways – socially and economically – does not have much potential for reflecting queer or transgendered contexts in politically precise, helpful or meaningful ways. You end up with essentialist, humanist shit like Lady Gaga’s, “Born This Way.” She is not somebody I would consider an ally.
You know, American media is so fixated on the idea that sexuality and gender must either be biologically predetermined, or a personal choice. The “it’s not a choice” argument is a common theme in television shows, etc. Both of these options revolve around a fiction of free will. Like, if it’s not a choice, then the only other possibility must be some supra-social, biological reason that cannot be questioned. Both of these conclusions preserve the status quo brutality of how culture forces gender and sexual binaries upon us. The thought that our absence of choice might be rooted in social tyrannies – not biological predispositions – remains unthinkable. The mainstream has it half right when they say, “it’s not a choice,” but it’s a half-truth that has been twisted into a decoy from the real issues at hand – the inescapability of the hetero/homo and female/male paradigms. We are given no other choices through which to understand our genders and sexualities. Sexuality is far greater than two or three. The same goes for gender — and yes, I’m speaking biologically, human bodies are way more diverse than A or B. To argue that the reason you deserve rights under a humanist democratic system is because of genetics is a retreat into feudalist logic. It’s the same as an aristocrat arguing that their rights and privileges were deserved because of their family blood-line and DNA. “Born this way” is antithetical to any democratic argument for rights rooted in a social capacity for understanding and transformation. It is astounding that the majority of people cannot comprehend that any “born this way” argument is a complete obliteration of their social agency. “I can’t help it, so give me the same rights as you…” Fuck that. We shouldn’t be asking to participate in the rights and privileges of those who have oppressed us. We should be trying to divest those groups of privileges. That is the best way to help ourselves and minimize the violence we enact on others.
Humanist legislative practices are still rooted in feudal ideologies, and I am convinced the long-term repercussions of this is a cultural entrenchment that makes any democratic project (including US-brand democracy, socialism or communism) an impossibility. We can already see how the post-Cold War world is retreating into clan-based, privatized, anti-state organization structures. Capitalism is increasingly liberated of democratic agendas because — surprise! — capitalism works better with slavery. Capitalism is not about the distribution of wealth, and everyone’s equal chance to partake in a petit-bourgois lifestyle. It is about the isolation of wealth. There is no doubt in my mind that today’s moral insistence that all people must work at whatever job society throws them, and the accompanying presumption that all lower-class unemployed people are “lazy” (which is perpetuated by many lower-class peoples themselves), is an argument for slavery: forced labor in return for base subsistence at best. How is that not the reality of poverty under globalized capitalism?
…and that’s why I hate Lady Gaga. [Laughs.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-JtoRxqK8s
SFBGYou have some fascinatingly poetic thoughts about the intersection of transgender issues and immigration, the idea of “living as a ghost” in politicized and police-monitored spaces. Do you have any current thoughts on how globalization continues to affect transgender issues?
DJ SPRINKLES I think the fact that the world’s two largest economies around gender transitioning are in Thailand and Iran, yet the aesthetics of those economies follow largely western models of beauty and body, says a lot about how globalization affects transgendered issues. Thailand’s dominant transgendered culture revolves around the “Ladyboy” — a very essentialist transgendered model that is rooted in heterosexism and the cultural/ideological necessity for some men to “unbecome-man” in order for “straight men” to have sex with other men. Western transgendered discourses love to fetishize the “Ladyboy” as some kind of locally celebrated and accepted third-world transgendered native other, but this is patent orientalism. It refuses to envision how the strict regimentation of social codes for those transgendered people can be oppressive, or how the mythical “transgendered native’s special place at the edge of the village, possibly as a shaman” is a form of segregation. People also never address how such cultures are invariably patriarchies, and their models for transgenderism almost exclusively revolve around the MTF paradigm. And far as I know, Thailand has still not lifted their government prohibition on homosexual government employees, which is relatively new legislation passed just a few years back. This is all part of that context of transgendered production.
Meanwhile, Iran is a country where Islamic law prohibits homosexuality by fatwah. Since the ’70s, gender transitioning has been promoted as a way for men who have sex with men to avoid the death penalty, although many transitioned people still face the possibility of being murdered by their families or local communities. The cost of their procedures is partially subsidized by the Iranian government itself. While some Westerners have attempted to portray that as “progressive,” clearly it is the opposite. Many post-op transsexuals find themselves ghettoized, unemployed and cut off from the family structures that play such important roles in Iran’s social structure.
In both Thailand and Iran one can see how the global growth of gender-transitioning economies is connected to heterosexism and homophobia — something current Western gender analyses attempt to separate from gender transitioning through clear ideological divisions between gender and sexuality. While I believe these divisions between gender and sexuality are important and do have social value in the West, it is clear that the West is not the world. And the West has surely not overcome its heterosexism and homophobia, either. I believe it is more than coincidence that the global proliferation of gender transitioning technologies is happening parallel to medical industries’ attempts to divest of their previously blatant attempts to cure homosexuality, due to such methods falling out of cultural favor in the West and elsewhere. I also believe it is more than coincidence that today’s inescapable “born this way” arguments serve and justify today’s medical agendas so well.
For sure, my stance on medical transitioning has always been that I support peoples’ abilities to transform their bodies as they see necessary. Considering how few options for gender identification are offered to us, I can understand how a person can become no longer able to live within one’s body as it has been defined and shaped by social gender constraints. But, for obvious reasons, I am unable to believe those medical systems which propagated today’s gender binary are capable or willing to offer us a way out of our gender crises. Those industries move us further and further away from cultural environments that enable transgendered people to build medically unmediated relationships to our bodies. I just can’t accept that the medical industry’s methods for mediating our suffering are the only way. It really angers me… particularly since so many transgendered people are impoverished and without health care…
Hmm, you’re probably getting an idea as to why I am never invited to perform my more thematic projects in the US — just to DJ some house and go back home to Japan. [Laughs.]
SFBG Speaking of essentialism, ha: Any food or restaurants you miss from living here?
DJ SPRINKLES Mexican food…! It’s shockingly absent in Japan… and when you do find some, you generally wish you hadn’t. But what a weak note upon which to end this interview. [Laughs.]
“SO TIRED OF PEOPLE DOING RECORDS AND EVEN WHOLE EPS BASED ON VOGUE WHEN ALL THEY KNOW IS PARIS IS BURNING AND HAVE NEVER EVEN BEEN TO A BALL,” awesome new-generation vogue beats pioneer MikeQ (appearing with Big Freedia Fri/8 at the Lights Down Low party at Mezzanine) recently posted on his Facebook. And it’s true: vogueing culture and its music has been choppin, mopping, and dropping to the fore of dance music lately — a joyful salute the the glorious pioneers of underground black gay nightlife culture, but also, unfortunately, the latest peg of “authenticity” for producers wanting to get some trendy attention.
MikeQ would know from all of that — he’s not only deeply rooted in New Jersey and NYC’s ballroom scene (and regularly featured at Jack Mizrahi’s party Vogue Knights), he and his Qween Beat production company have been at the forefront of a new generation of vogue beats pioneers that exploded in the past few years with their own styles. (I interviewed him about it in 2011). As new and affordable technology makes it possible for bedroom producers to create, emulate, and transform the traditional “Ha” slam beat that drives vogueing battles, the “Ha” has taken on new life. Now it’s the “Ha” heard ’round the world. Ummmm….
And MikeQ’s at the center of it all, with his ace mixing skills and his ear for cunty beats. I emailed him about his feelings regarding the latest voguesplosion, his future plans, and his upcoming recording session with Azaelia Banks.
SFBGCan you elaborate a little on how you feel about so many people jumping on the vogue beats bandwagon? Is it reaching criminal levels? And what do you think is being lost or gained in the spread of “vogue” as a style rather than a culture?
MIKEQ Well. Like I always say, it’s nothing wrong with other people making ballroom and showing love and whatnot, whether you have been to a ball or not. But people are starting to just go a little more than they should in my opinion. EPs and entire projects based off ballroom. People always try to oppose what I say, saying things like. “It happens to all music” and “It’s not my music or my choice what happens with it.” And me being one of the forefront people of this sound I feel like I have to protect it from being “overused,” “misused,” and “exploited.”
For one, money was made from Paris Is Burning, and it wasn’t given back to the ballroom culture. And I don’t want it to be my fault for not putting up a fight if the same thing happens with the music. Not only that, I see what’s happening today in the world of dance music and I see that everybody producer/DJ jumps on these trends and completely kills them into being hated and forgotten about only for them to move on to the next. In the scene people put a great deal of time and money into being a part of this culture only for some outsiders to come in, rip it apart for the moment, and then on to the next. That’s my issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iPtg0VDyt4
SFBG Are you still in with the (NYC foreward-thinking bass label) Fade to Mind crew? I talked to Kingdom a little bit back and he talked about how much he admired what you were doing. Are there any upcoming releases from you on that label — or anything else upcoming from you? And are you really going into the studio with Azaelia Banks?
MIKEQ Yes I am now and god-willing will always be apart if Fade To Mind, that is my family, not just a label for me. I do have an upcoming EP series with fellow Jersey producer DJ Sliink, as well as I will be officially launching my own label this year, my Mad Decent EP Debut and plenty of remixes and other releases here and there. And yes I will be in studio with Azealia this week. I don’t know what it will be like, I just know we are going to turn it for the cunts. Lol (can I say that?)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSFMWEUcV-M
SFBG Oh yes you can! And you’re playing Sydney Mardi Gras too? Have you been doing a lot of international? What’s the reception?
MIKEQ Yes, I will be in Sydney in less than a month actually. I traveled this world end of November 2011, the entire 2012 and getting ready to do it again this year. The reception is good, not many people know who I am or what ballroom is so the music is just regular good dance music to them, but there are always a handful of people who do know and are always just as excited as I am for any overseas shows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGAZh4MEHIA
SFBGThis is your third or fourth appearance in SF in the past couple years, yes? Do you feel like your music is reaching the right audience here (or other places you perform outside the ballroom)?
MIKEQ Yes, SF is like another home to me. Like I said above about the reception to my music internationally. Sometimes it does [reaches the ballroom audience], sometimes it doesn’t. I’m not really trying to say “come vogue and learn about ballroom” at my shows. But it’s always different depending where I am. It’s easier to get non-ballroom people to my shows than it is with the people actually in the scene.
So get on the floor Friday night, people! I know you know some ballroom and can bring it for MikeQ’s amazingness.
LIGHTS DOWN LOW: MARDI GRAS TWERK ACTION WITH MIKEQ AND BIG FREEDIA
The stimulating and excellently-eared Icee Hot crew is blasting a two-part third anniversary party at Public Works: this Sat/19 sees dreamy R&B chopper Jacques Greene (yes, the guy with the glasses from the Azaelia Banks video, but also one of my favorite producers ever) and Dutch hyperdubber Martyn on deck. Part two on Sat/26 brings in alien techno soundscapist Space Dimension Controller and astral floor-pounder Basic Soul Unit. You will find me face down on the floor in sonic worship for both. (And you may be able to score a pass to both parties for a mere $15 here.)
Usually I abhor parties that just throw a big name guest up and then give partygoers no other vibe-guidance: no decorations or look or neon Easter eggs of any kind. But the Icee Hot foursome — Shawn Reynaldo, Rollie Fingers, Ghosts on Tape, and Low Limit, all fantastic DJ/musicmakers in their own right — take an expressionist approach to gigs that transcends the bare-boned, and fends off any cynical charges of money-grubbing (the parties are hella cheap). Their excellent curatorial sense brings disparate, original sounds together to create something more stimulating than the sum of sonic parts.
I traded emails with the Icees on the eve of their blowout to talk about the party’s evolution and the SF scene right now.
SFBG Every time you guys throw a party, I trip over myself trying to describe the music with anything more substantial than “awesome” and then I overuse the word “bass.” How would you describe the music you look for when considering guest artists?
GHOSTS ON TAPE We have a hard time describing it too. I think that’s part of the fun. But since you asked, I’d say we go for weirdo house, outsider artists, and underground pioneers. It’s hard to put a finger on what exactly we look for in a guest, they just have to do music that excites us. We also like to book people that are doing things that no one else is really doing, and it’s important for us to bring acts that have never played in SF before. That’s not always possible, but we try. We don’t really wanna bring artists based solely on internet hype, we have to genuinely like their music.
ROLLIE FINGERS I think we just book people we like and people who influence people we like. The overarching theme is house and techno. It’s fine to just call it that. (Ed. Note: Mr. Fingers does not have to write exciting things about nightlife every week.)
SFBGWhat inspired you to start Icee Hot, and what are some of your favorite memories from the past three years?
SHAWN REYNALDO Icee Hot sort of grew out of Tormenta Tropical, another monthly party that I still throw here in San Francisco. That night is based around cumbia and other Latin/tropical styles, but back in 2009, I was mixing in a bunch of UK funky and other new house/bass/grime sounds. Some of those records were vaguely “tropical,” but I gradually realized that they didn’t properly fit the vibe of the party. Still, in November of that year, I booked L-Vis 1990 and Bok Bok at Tormenta Tropical for their first SF show, simply because I was so enthusiastic about the music they were making. This was right around the time that they were launching the Night Slugs label, and they hung out here in San Francisco for several days, during which time Rollie Fingers and I got really inspired, just by talking with them about music and realizing that there was something interesting happening with all these new hybrid sounds coming out of the UK. We also realized that this music melded really well with a lot of great classic house, garage and techno that wasn’t really being celebrated in the SF club scene at the time. Anyways, within a few weeks of that show, we enlisted Ghosts on Tape and Low Limit, booked our first party at 222 Hyde, and began planning ICEE HOT.
In terms of highlights, there are just too many to mention. Hosting Todd Edwards for his first-ever SF show was something special, and it was even better when we brought him back a year later and paired him with MK, one of his musical heroes. Beyond that, there was Robert Hood and Anthony “Shake” Shakir showing us what being a Detroit legend is all about. Ben UFO and Oneman going back-to-back, which was a real landmark for the party. Cedaa literally kicking off his 21st birthday with a midnight set. MikeQ turning the dancefloor out with drag queens doing bicycle kicks on stage. New Years 2011 with Bok Bok and Ramadanman. Girl Unit making his SF debut in the sweaty basement at 222 Hyde. John Talabot, both his DJ set and phenomenal live set a few months later. Our second anniversary last year with Mosca and Altered Natives. I could go on forever. It’s been fun.
ROLLIE FINGERS Hieroglyphic Being is an amazing DJ. He played a delayed vocal sample of “I Feel Love” for like 20 minutes when he played. If anyone else did that, it would be messy, but with him, it was bliss. I also have a very distinct memory of DJ Stingray getting out of the cab at Public Works wearing his ski mask. It was deep.
SFBG It seems like the number of parties has grown exponentially in the past few years. What are some of the challenges and rewards to throwing a party in the current SF nightlife landscape? Has it become more a matter of branding, rather than a distinct music or crowd profile? And do you feel that the party scene is being overdetermined by artist booking agencies?
SHAWN REYNALDO ICEE HOT is the product of a lot of hard work. Between talking to artists, negotiating with booking agents, locking down venues, purchasing flights, picking people up at the airport, fulfilling riders, and doing all the other behind-the-scenes tasks, it can be a little daunting, especially when we’re operating on a zero-profit basis. I don’t know if people always realize this, but ICEE HOT makes a point to keep our door prices as low as possible. Sure, we could charge $20, $25, $30 for a lot of our parties, but we don’t, because charging exorbitant door prices is lame. We’re not doing this to make money. We’re doing this to throw good events, and we don’t want anyone not to come because it’s too expensive.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwyxmrMSOUM
ROLLIE FINGERS We don’t mind branding our party at all. Every flyer for the past three years has said ICEE HOT really big on top. I think it’s nice for parties to have a distinct look and feel to them. ICEE HOT always feels like ICEE HOT, no matter what artist we are booking. I like that.
SHAWN REYNALDO And sure, dealing with nightlife landscape in San Francisco can be tricky. Even though the city attracts top-level talent, it’s still a relatively small place, so most promoters know one another. Sometimes you wind up competing with other parties to book the same talent, or dealing with booking agents who are trying to pit us against one another. Thankfully, we can usually avoid all of that mess. When booking agents are being unreasonable or don’t understand what we’re about, we usually just bow out of the proceedings. After three years, ICEE HOT has built up a good reputation, so the artists we’re trying to bring out have often already heard of the party and want to come play. Don’t get me wrong, it can all be frustrating sometimes, but we’re proud of what we’re doing and hopefully the parties and the label speak for themselves. Plus, it’s hard to really complain too much. Every month, we’re throwing parties exactly the way we want to throw them with guests we’re personally really excited about. Things are going well, and we want to just keep building on that.
SFBGWhy’d you decide on a two-part blowout? It’s almost too-too good. Although I know you haven’t shot your wad yet — any hints on who might be coming in 2013 (or who your fantasy artists would be).
GHOSTS ON TAPE The kind folks at Public Works were nice enough to let us use their club two weeks in a row, and since our anniversary is something of a milestone, we wanted to book artists that are in line with our vision of what we like to do at ICEE HOT. I think Martyn, Jacques Greene, Space Dimension Controller and Basic Soul Unit are going to help us celebrate our three-year anniversary in fine form. As far as future bookings, I can’t give anything away, but we’re going to continue on the same path and keep on booking freakishly talented individuals. In the past, whenever we thought of a fantasy artist that we’d like to book, it always ended up coming true eventually, so I don’t want to say anything to ruin any future surprises.
If you think you’re cool (or merely interesting) — please drop everything and watch this clubkid-packed 1981 video masterpiece by scene terror Timmy Spence. He’s being shamelessly and publicly roasted on the occasion of his 60th(!) birthday this Saturday, courtesy of some might big drag queens. After the jump, Trannyshack’s Heklina dishes the dirt and gives the deets.
Well, there’s a few things I thought would never happen!
First of all, I never thought we would be celebrating Timmy Spence’s 60th Birthday…if there was ever someone with nine (or more lives), it’s The Tammers. We’ve been through a lot together; thrown in jail together in Mexico, a cross country road trip where I got so mad at him we didn’t speak all the way through Texas, a near death experience while hiking in Nevada, cruising the Christopher St. Piers in drag in NYC together back when that was fun, the list goes on and on. And she’s still kicking. Even after countless trips to the hospital, she’s still here, shocking and offending everyone and really serving as an inspiration to countless young queens. Like an Auntie Mame from hell, every fiber in her body screams, live….LIVE!
Won’t you join me in honoring this queen of queens this Saturday?
Timmy Spence’s 60th Birthday Bash!
Saturday January 12- Join us as we pay tribute to this legendary drag fossil! Who would have thought she would live this long?
With your hosts Peaches Christ & Heklina, and appearances by Arturo Galster, Ethel Merman, Matthew Martin, Miss X, Laurie Bushman, Darlin’, Pippi Lovestocking, D’Arcy Drollinger, Deena Davenport, Sexitude, and more! With DJ’s Chicken and Dank.
Rebel, 1760 Market St. @ Octavia. 8pm. No cover, RSVP here
Anybody can go out to any fabulous party on New Year’s Eve. But how long can you survive into the dawning of 2k13? Below are the best parties happening on Tuesday, New Year’s Day — how low can you go! (It’s kind sad that we now only have one day a year that’s like SF nightlife in the 90s, sigh.)
But first, here’s the exact chill-before-thrill mix I want to hear at 7am rolling up to the venue with my girls, blunt smoke pouring from the cracked window:
OK Lets Do This. Click in the names for Facebook invite link thingie.
Features: Hot queers, bedazzled club kids and dragged-out drag queens, leftover horny bears from the Bearracuda NYE party in the same venue, gorgeous early risers.
Music: Post-disco disco, acidy house, kiss-kiss techno with DJs Stanley Frank, Robert Jeffrey, Doc Sleep, Steve Fabus, Sergio Fedasz, P-Play, M*J*R, Trevor Sigler
Features: Supperclub’s athletic blend of acrobatic burlesquers, cool characters, old school partiers, and feather-bedecked smilers.
Music: Lovely, pumping soulful house and tech plus a dose of psychedelia with DJs David Harness, Galen, Rrooz, Andrew Phelan, Alain Octavo, Cosmic Selector, Michael Anthony, Meikee Magnetic, Marija Dunn
Features: This party at Monarch was THE party last year, a blurred and delirious intersection of dancefloor mavens and fabulous personages (a few of whom had lost their shoes somewhere along the night’s way, ahem.) Good times.
Music: Straight up house-y (and disco edit) goodness fromspecial NYC guest Justin Vandervolgen, Solar, Conor, 40 Thieves, James Glass, Junior, Dewey Chan, Jdisco, Soft Soil.
Features: Weekend mornings at the lovely Monroe in North Beach have become the new End Up for those of us into great music and meeting up with other adventurous souls. I was tickled pink to hear there’s a New Year’s Day party there — it’ll be cute-bananas.
Music: Techno! Lots of techno. I bet I know what huge name DJ will be the special surprise guest (ahem, Bee Lurridge?) — but that person will have great backing from DJs Nikita, Rooz, Bo, Nikola Baytala, MossMoss, Pete Fraiser, and Francesco Signorile.
Features: Tons and tons of Burning Man fun, including a lot of runny neon mascara and sequined cowboy hats — now even bigger since this party has moved to Mighty and taken over the whole block.
Music: Funky techno with a little acid-crunk craziness from the Space Cowboys camp DJs and friends.
Features: Starts at 2pm, so you’ll get a bit of everything at this beloved party teaming up two legendary SF house crews at the well-patioed, great sounding Club Cocomo.
Music: Sooo yummy house with deep international flavor from special Mexican guest Daniel Maloso plus breakout local duo Tone of Arc and DJs Tasho, Solar, Deron, Galen, Sweet P, J-Bird
Features: More kooky, cray-cray, superfunky Burning Man-based goodness from the infamous Brass Tax afterhours crew at this gonzo annual affair at Public Works.
Music: Funky house, alien techno, and straight-up funk from DJs JoeJoe, Ding Dong, Mace, Ernie Trevino, Haute Mess, Ethan Miller, MoPo, and TophOne
3pm-midnite, $5-$10. Public Works, 161 Erie, SF.
If you are still party-functional and looking for some awesome parties to go to around 11pm, might I suggest the bass-head Icee Hott DJs guesting at the ever-amazing High Fantasy at Aunt Charlie’s and the friendly, dance-crazed future bass shenanigans of Soundpieces at Monarch.
For those of you who haven’t been listening: Ana Sia is kind of a big deal. One of those quaintly San Francisco nightlife things — you blink for a hot minute, and someone familiar on the scene blows up, their hard work rewarded with major festival gigs, a large and growing following, and DJ sets being featured on NPR. Heeeey.
I’ve been a fan of the poised yet energetic Ana for a long while, and I must say I’m pleased as punch for her continued success — and to see what she’s got in store for us as she plays again in SF. (She’s one of the headliners, along with the UK’s excellently house and techy Ben UFO, at Friday night’s As You Like It party at Beat Box.) Onstage, the local Frite Nite label head quickly pulls you into her zone, tempering a concentration born of pure appreciation of the music with some playful bouncing and disarming charm. “I’m having a shit-ton of fun!” you can hear her shouting from the decks.
Categorizing her actual sound, however, can prove challenging.
Ana’s been through a few transfomations. I first became aware of her as a member of the underground techno scene, then as a part of the crunk-meets-dubstep-meets-Burning Man Bassnectar touring juggernaut — at one point pimping herself with a wink as playing “global slut psy-hop,” a moniker which went well with the gaudy scene of the late ’00s. Then, as part of Frite Nite, she became a brainier glitch advocate, delving into more adventurous realms of broken bass. But she’s always been courageous, forceful, and fun — even now, when she’s adding full-on house and ravier techno to the mix, as you can hear below.
Love it. She took a minute to email me the answers to some questions in anticipation of her Friday gig. Welcome back, Ana.
SFBGYou’ve been playing all over lately — how does it feel when you come back to San Francisco?
ANA SIAReturning home and playing shows with my peers and in front of what very much feels like family is the greatest part of my schedule. What makes San Francisco so tight is the diversity and multi-cultural melange of the people, and those acknowledgments certainly carry through to the art scene. Connecting with listeners is easier on the home court — I feel much more safe and secure introducing more challenging music and unfamiliar sounds because everyone is so open here, They genuinely understand and love music. Ask any touring artist this question and I bet they say the same about our community here!
SFBGYour sound has really evolved since you were playing here regularly. Can you tell me where you’re at now, and what we can expect?
ANA SIA I think the one thing that has not changed about my sound is that it’s always different than the last time — whether that’s a yay or nay thing is another issue though. But right now, people can expect the agenda i’ve been pushing for a minute now; classy yet ratchet bass music, stepping on the toes of techno-house. And yeah, i’ve always tried to stay ahead of the curve for DJ sets, but honestly all the latest trends and best music out right now is re-introducing fundamental dance music. It’s nothing really super-shiny and new. It’s all slightly more modernized revisions of classic sounds which i’m grateful for. Because for me, my young rave days began with house.
SFBGWhat equipment are you using lately — and can you tell us about some of your recent or upcoming releases?
ANA SIA Ableton Live is still my bandmate, but I have this new bossy future-midi controller, the QuNeo. I’m working on an EP right now, probably music that no ones’ expecting but all the tunes are in the territory of the above mentioned.
SFBGIn my mind, your sound is always evolving, you’ve always been on the cutting edge — it’s hard for a writer like me to keep up with you! Who are you listening to now? And since you travel so much, do you have any good stories from the road?
ANA SIA Such a loaded question! Presently in my playlist of the last few months : Kendrick Lamar, Detroit Swindle, Bambounou, George Fitzgerald, Bach, 2 Chains, Dj Spinn, Lukid. And road stories? that’s classified information. Mostly because i fear self-incrimination. But i will say that it is shocking how many really great sushi restaurants there are in the most unsuspected of places in the middle of America.
Five years ago the local nightlife scene was broadening its scope in a multitude of awe-inspiring musical directions, from contemporary Afrobeat and baile funk to experimental global indie. In that atmosphere of diverse ferment, a couple of super-talented kids, recently returned from Argentina, started Tormenta Tropical (along with label Bersa Discos), a monthly at the Elbo Room dedicated to the electronic spin many Latin American artists were putting on the traditional cumbia sound.
The sound centered around club Zizek in Buenos Aires and its ZZK label — but it also found a home, strangely enough, in the tropical-hungry underground clubs of Montreal. Tormenta Tropical provided a third leg of the nu-cumbia triangle, and has been known ever since as a go-to for cutting edge global bass and electro-Latin tracks. There were also a lot of glowing Virgin Marys on the DJ booth and a taco truck parked outside.
Even though the party has become known for its insane roster of guest performers — including Buraka Som Sistema, El Guincho, Toy Selectah, DJ Rupture, Maluca, L-Vis 1990 and Bok Bok, Matias Aguayo, Kingdom, Uproot Andy, South Rakkas Crew, Chancha Via Circuito, Sinden, Schlachthofbronx, Roska, Los Rakas, Very Be Careful, and my secret byfirend Ghislain Poirier — this party will feature Shawn and oro tag-teaming on the decks, giving us a full five years’ (and four hours’) worth of pure TT gold. I emailed oro11 and Shawn (who’s also one of the Bay’s best dance music writers) to give us a little update about it all.
SFBGIn the past five years, and in the wake of moombahton, Diplo, and everything else Latin- and tropical-electronic obsessed — how has the nu-cumbia scene changed, are you finding new directions for the music? Will there be a trap hybrid soon? (I AM KIND OF KIDDING.)
TORMENTA TROPICAL When we started the party, there was definitely a sort of bloggy buzz around cumbia and the idea of tropical bass. Between Diplo, Mad Decent, and the attention our friends from ZZK in Buenos Aires were getting, it did feel like some of the crowd was coming out to check out this “new” sound, just because it was fashionable. Over time, that has totally changed. Five years later, it doesn’t feel like Tormenta Tropical is a party for the “cool” kids at all. At this point, it’s just for people who love the music and the vibe, and most importantly, want to dance. Also, it’s totally mixed, which is great, especially when so much of San Francisco nightlife is hopelessly segregated.
As for the music, we’ve seen so many trends and sounds come and go over the past five years, and the SoundCloud generation of producers is totally prone to hopping on whatever new sound they come across, only to abandon it just as quickly. It’s led to a lot of dodgy music, along with artists who fleetingly pass through the scene, but that’s why it’s our job to find the good stuff. Thankfully, even though cumbia and other sounds may not be as trendy as they once were, we still come across great music all the time. If anything, the most interesting producers are the ones operating out of their bedrooms in a virtual vacuum, just creating weird hybrids of Latin music or dancehall or African rhythms or whatever else because they have a passion for it, not because they’re trying to get posted on a blog.
And it’s funny that you mention trap. As cringe-inducing as that world has become, this kid DJ Quality in Chicago has been sending us some amazing cumbia and bachata tunes with trap beats. You never know…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLfNTztmSXU
SFBGHow many people have you had to kick out due to over-cumbiaing?
TT Thankfully, the crowd at Tormenta Tropical has always been well-behaved. We’ve both been DJing and throwing parties for a long time, and it’s honestly hard to imagine another party where so many people are just dancing and having fun. There’s nothing pretentious about Tormenta Tropical, even when we’re playing totally obscure music or someone from South America is performing live on stage. That’s maybe the most amazing thing about Tormenta Tropical — the vast majority of the people don’t know the vast majority of the songs, but people still show up every month, pack the dancefloor, and get wild.
SFBGHow’s the label doing? Any news?
TT Bersa Discos is still happening, although it’s admittedly been a little while since we’ve had a release. At this point, we’re just trying to promote quality over quantity, and it’s not like there’s any profit in putting out limited-run vinyl releases, so we’re just waiting for the right tunes to come in. It also doesn’t help that some of our favorite artists have a tendency to never finish their tracks. [There will be cool Bersa Discos t-shirts for sale at the party.]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZOaSX1uT_A SFBGShould I wear booty shorts to the anniversary and shower myself with cheap champagne?
TT Marke, that sounds fine to us. There has never been dress code at Tormenta Tropical, and we’re not going to start one now. Back in 2008, Buraka Som Sistema played their very first San Francisco show at our party. In the middle of the set, this girl hopped on stage, took her shirt off, and kept right on dancing with her boobs out and her sunglasses on. No one seemed to mind.
TOP 11 TORMENTA TROPICAL TRACKS OF ALL TIME
Casa de Leones “No Te Veo” Chancha Via Circuito “Cumbia Malembe” DJ Dus “Cuando Lo Negro Sea Bello” DJ Negro “Sabor a Gaita Remix” DJ Panik “Pintura de Nieve” El Hijo de la Cumbia “La Mara Tomaza” Erick Rincon “Cumbia de Nuevo Leon” Los Rakas “Abrazame (Uproot Andy Remix)” Mr. Vegas “Certain Law (Murlo Remix)” Omega “Si Tú Queres, Tú No Queres (DJ K-Ber Extended Reggaeton Mix)” Sabo and Cassady “La Curura”
Honey Soundsystem, that handsome group of techno and disco rarety-loving DJs and purveyors of one of the best weekly parties in SF (Sundays at Holy Cow), has gone through a few changes this year, parting ways with a couple members — perhaps temporarily — to side projects and expanding their reach greatly with several international appearances.
But the honeycomb hasn’t stopped pumping out great tunes, and it looks like Honey’s latest record label, HNYTRX, has launched with an expansive, uplifting new house tune, “Face Love Anew” by Australian favorites Stereogamous featuring singer Shaun J. Wright, formerly of Hercules and Love Affair. It’s a keeper.
If you’ve been to Honey Sundays lately, you know that they’ve been absolutely off the hook, one of the country’s true Sunday night party treasures. But this Sun/25 will be extra special — it’s a release party for the new track, and many favorite Honey patrons will be in the house. Have a listen to a few preview clips below (there are also some tasty remixes by the likes of Discodromo, Jason Kendig, Horse Meat Disco, and Kim Ann Foxman) and then meet me on the dancefloor.
“Hunee is a good eater,” begins Berlin-based DJ Hunee’s official biography. “Good” here surely means voracious — Hunee may be well-known for his deep disco sets (sometimes running to seven hours in length, especially at his great Hunchin All Night parties) and deep-grooved house productions, but his omnivorous ear takes in everyone from Eric Dolphy and Sergiu Celibidache to N.W.A and Madlib. He creates lovely worlds from these disparate interests, and his generous, off-handedly ironic manner spreads a layer of laidback jazzy soul over the sonic smorgasbord.
On Sun/30, Honey Soundsystem celebrates six years of putting on one of the best weekly parties in San Francisco (it’s honeycomb hexagonal!), Honey Sundays (9pm, $5. Holy Cow, 1535 Folsom, SF.) And to celebrate, the boys flew in this beloved underground soul traveller for an exclusive three-hour set. I caught him over email for a few questions.
SFBGHey Hunee! Thanks for taking the time to answer some questions. You have said that you came from a rap background, but your love of the dance floor soon brought you to disco, and from there into classic house. Can you tell me a few of the records that changed your life and drew you into disco and house?
Hunee Hi! Yea, for sure. The transition def. happened through tunes that were accessible from different sides of the dancefloor. Things that fall into my mind are Colors’ “Am I Gonna Be The One,” Convertion’s “Let’s Do It” (Leroy Burgess production), John Rocca’s “Move,” Chemise’s “She Can’t Love You,” and Definition Of A Track by Backroom Productions. These are not the deepest or most obscure records, but they helped me dance another dance. And shit, I still love playin’ the classics.
SFBGHave you been to San Francisco before? Are there any musicmakers from California who have shaped your aesthetic?
Hunee Never been to the West Coast. When I think of music and California, i connect to N.W.A., 2Pac, Snoop, Madlib, Stones Throw, and of course Dam-Funk. I am not familiar too much with the current dance music from California, but I am hungry to learn about it.
SFBGYou’re well-known for playing epic, hours-long sets, especially at your Hunchin’ parties. Is there any pressure when you have to play shorter sets? How does your sound change, do you think?
Hunee If I play a very long set, I bring even more different type of things, but it doesn’t matter if long or short — I always try to create a dynamic journey. If there is a real memory created for me and the dancers, that’s when I am happy. I love this moment when the vibe changes: the crowd and myself have been through a bit together, and everyone gets loose, and joyful and everything becomes one. That state if more difficult to achieve in short sets, but I also like the challenge of maximum impact in short times.
SFBGYou just took a month off from DJing which you characterized as “long” — can you tell us why you took the break? Beyond that you seem to be insanely busy. What are some of the more memorable parties you’ve played recently?
Hunee Ha ha, yes, after four weeks I was like “Damn, can I even still pull it off? It’s been so long…” Working full-time during the week and playing on the weekends is only fun for some time, and then you’re just tired. There was a need to align different needs and responsibilities. Big nights for me lately were definitely Watergate and Panorama-Bar, Terrassen in Stockholm, and Butter Side Up in Leeds – big up!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDPun8fe830
SFBGYou’ve lived in Berlin for a long time — what are some of the changes you’ve witnessed lately? Is it still easy for a DJ or music maker with no money and big dreams to move there and survive? You also have strong ties to Amsterdam, especially through the Rush Hour label. Would you ever consider moving there?
Hunee I guess nothing is easy if done right, but everything is possible. Berlin is still very accessible and forgiving and theres are so many opportunities for music minded people. Changes, well, commercialization of the neighbourhoods sucks, upgoing rents, more hostels, more hype, more bikes, more babies – good things, bad things. I love Amsterdam, they built an incredible musical legacy and community, but I am like a bird — I follow the sun. California here I come!
SFBGThis year’s “Tide” had a lovely, twisty-acid ’90s feel — it put me in mind of DJ Kim Ann Foxman, who played an amazing set here last weekend. Do you know her? Are you listening to anyone in particular at the moment?
Hunee I don’t know her personally, but heard great things about her DJing and hope to hear her soon. I mostly listen to Eric Dolphy, Sergiu Celibidache, and Jussi Bjoerling at home, Dance Music wise I dig Daphni, Robert Hood, Roy Davis Jr., Theo and the likes, DJs like Sadar Bahar and Mark Seven make me feel like my only task on earth is to dance.
SFBGSince you’re playing the Honey Soundsystem party, I have to ask: when did you start going by Hunee — is it a childhood nickname, or …?
Hunee Correctly it’s pronounced Who-Knee (and it took me years until I got the honey misunderstanding in english-speaking countries). My mom called me this way since I was able to understand I was an individual person, with an unique name, Hunee.
You can’t talk contemporary American bass music without starting right off at Kingdom, a.k.a. LA’s Ezra Rubin. (He appears here Sat/22 at the Lights Down Low party at Public Works, in a bananas lineup that includes Kim Ann Foxman, Miracles Club, jozif, and MikeQ.)
Two years ago, his bounce-rave masterpiece “Mindreader” and the low-creeping, R&Bleepy That Mystic EP popped the top of critics’ lists and club faves, and injected some mad energy into the scene on these shores. That was followed by last year’s acclaimed Dreama EP, which blueprinted some interesting bass possibilities, swinging from cinematic vogue-warps to post-grime gamer spaciness.
Kingdom also provided a crucial link between London’s fantastic label-club Night Slugs scene, in which he came up in the late ’00s, and the somewhat scattered US bass scene that operated outside the Diploshere. His Fade to Mind touring collective and label, launched with Prince William, became a focal point for underground American fractal-bass musicmakers like Nguzunguzu and Total Freedom who could hype a club through their disparate styles, but didn’t mind getting a little arty about it.
Although Kingdom seems to tour constantly and has appeared here a few times over the last couple years, it’s been a minute since he released any new material. I wanted to catch up with him over email about what he’s got cooking, and his feelings about the current direction of the American bass music scene. Also, who cuts his hair?
SFBGThat FadeFM live set you dropped in July hit me as a bit darker than expected. We’re all eagerly awaiting the follow-up to the Dreama EP — are you being drawn in a darker or harder direction, and might your future output reflect that? Can you give us any news about upcoming releases?
KIngdom The new tracks I’m working on are just more extreme! I’ll be releasing two projects through Fade to Mind this fall. My new solo tracks are darker and more minimal than my previous releases, and on the other end, the second project will be more melodic than any of my previous work, and will feature vocals from Fade to Mind’s first official vocalist, Kelela Mizanekristos. Can’t wait for the world to hear our first song together!
SFBGThe Night Slugs scene maintains its high level of quality, but its been kicking around for what seems like an Internet eternity — a lot of other bass labels have faded in the meantime. What’s the current environment for the Night Slugs (and your own personal) sound — do you find it’s still considered “underground”? Has a different generation taken to it?
KIngdom I think it’s timeless and will always weave in and out of what resonates with a certain type of music fan. Everyone in the whole Fade to Mind-Night Slugs continuum is producing different types music, music that is true to who they are, so regardless of passing trends the music stays true to itself and its maker.
SFBGHow has the experience of being a part of the Fade to Mind collective and label been? It’s been pretty amazing to watch artists like Nguzunguzu and MikeQ gain some fame in the broader hip hop and dance worlds …
Kingdom Part of? I created the label, alongside Prince William, and its the best feeling in the world to see them doing so well. MikeQ and Nguzunguzu are also close friends from before the label existed, so that makes it even more rewarding.
SFBGHow do you feel about the “trap” moniker being attached to a lot of trippy bass music these days, including music that’s only peripherally influenced by the original Houston trap scene? I’m finding a lot of Night Slugs joints being tagged with the trap genre label, and wondering if that might help wider audiences grasp what the sound is in the dubstep-EDM pop world of these United States…. which may be a blessing or a curse.
Kingdom Many members of the collective have been listening to southern rap music forever and drawing influence from it. When people try to ride any microgenre it makes us all cringe, especially one so terribly and insultingly named. Girl Unit really pioneered the sound a couple years back, but he gave it his own twist and made sure it was produced impeccably. Most of the stuff being made now has no production value and you can tell by listening that it’s made by former hard electro and dubstep producers.
SFBGI think a big part of your image is your great (and consistent) look — can you give us some drop on any labels or designers you favor? Who cuts your hair?
Kingdom Haha! I mainly support my friends who run their own labels like Cassette Playa, Hood By Air, Telfar, and Gerlan Jeans. Aside from that I just hunt through garbage really. As for my hair, that’s a trade secret, but I by no means invented this hair cut.
SFBGYou released your own genius twist on a vogue ha track with “Stalker Ha” — and I’m sure you’ve witnessed the rise of vogue beats to the fore of cutting-edge bass music. Can you tell me a bit about the genesis of that track, and how much influence vogue beats have had over you productions?
Kingdom I wanted to make a scary and cinematic “Ha” beat. The original bootleg demo I made had Missy’s rap verse from Monica’s song “Knock Knock” which is about a dude bugging her and trying to come up to her house begging her to take him back, so it fit with the stalker vibe of the song. For the final version I stripped out the rap. Vogue beats have been an influence on my music forever, it’s crazy raw energetic music, but also off-kilter and jagged in its own way.
SFBGThe last time I saw you was in October 2010, you were playing Mustache Mondays in LA. And I was kind of blown away at how great the combination of a mostly gay freak crowd and your beats was. Do you find yourself playing many queer-oriented parties outside of NYC or LA? If so, how has the reaction been?
Kingdom I haven’t been booked at many queer events recently, mostly straight clubs, and mixed events, too. I find I get a good reaction from both scenes!
SFBG Who are you listening to a lot right now?
Kingdom R&B is always on my playlist, loving the resurgence of a lot of my favorites. Brandy has new material out right now, Missy just dropped two new singles with Timbaland, Ciara’s new song “Sorry” is an anthem, and the new Jeremih mixtape is crazy. Also listening to Beek and Divoli Severe from MikeQ’s Qweenbeat label a lot, as well as the masters we just got back for the next Fade to Mind release, which consists of five new compositions by Fatima Al Qadiri.
In this week’s Super Ego column, I wrote of my deep, abiding love of bass music (and revealed my secret source of UK bass knowledge). As low-low luck would have it, 222 Hyde will be woofed and tweeted this Saturday by Body High, a label out of LA whose roster is comprised of several Cali bass stars: Samo Soundboy, LOL Boys, Floyd Campbell. Plus you get DJ Dodger Stadium! (requisite half-hearted boo from Giants fans, and then indulgent smile.) Here’s a few sounds you can expect to be rumbled by:
I hung out yesterday evening with the new occupants of the Eagle Tavern (now known as the SF Eagle, apparently) at a celebration of the lease-signing at the Lone Star Saloon. Alex Montiel and Mike Leon seem perfect to replace the former Eagle operators Joe and John: Tough-looking and leather-bearish, a tad gruff at first but friendly once they warm to you, and a wee bit shy of the press right now.
They’ll be releasing their full plans for the storied queer bar in a couple weeks, but I did manage to squeeze some juicy info out of Alex. They hope to open the bar in time for Halloween, the liquor license has indeed been secured (in fact, they have two!), and they’ll be doing their best to return some of the Eagle’s ambiance to the now-pretty-much-gutted space, with a few slight modifications to the bar layout for code and traffic flow reasons.
It’s certainly been a long, winding, super-convoluted road to get to this point!
I’m not sure anyone can convey all the twists and turns and backroom mechanations of the whole thing — Jay Barmann at Grubstreet has done some excellent reporting on it all, but there were still many, many balls in the air, shall we say, and the shady politics got slightly out of control. The fight to keep a historically queer space queer — despite the previous occupants’ quasi-abandonment, despite the lucrative offers from upscale restaurants, despite the limited power and will of the city to legislate such things — was a bit of a hot gay potato for the past year. (The Eagle’s infamous, charitable Sunday Beer Busts lived on in monthly form at El Rio in the Mission, at least.)
Even the idea of a “historic queer space” was questioned: if the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence had sanctified it, and the ashes of multiple queer people were scattered about a place that raised tens of throusands of dollars for amazing local causes and was regarded as the heart of the old school gay leather rock ‘n roll biker community, was it important enough to fight for?
Hats off to Milk Club president and outspoken queer activist Glendon Anna Conda Hyde for saying, “Hell yes!”
Glendon (identified slightly incorrectly in a recent Chron story as the Norm of the Eagle’s “Cheers” — that was actually the frizzy-haired dear in the thong and flip-flops who stood around clutching a goblet of piss) kept the Eagle issue at the forefront of the city’s debate about gentrification and the loss of queer nightlife spaces, angering some fussy queens with his usual passion and stridency, but in the end succeeding in rallying an assortment of powerful players to the Eagle’s defense.
I talked to Glendon today about how the whole thing went down. His basic summation was that Supervisors David Campos and Jane Kim did excellent jobs of making sure the Eagle stayed queer (Sup. Scott Weiner does not get very high marks from him in this regard), and that dubious dealings by the person supposedly representing the owner of the building — who lives north of the city, and who Glendon said had indeed wanted to welcome in new queer owners all along — were what kept screwing everything up. Finally the building owner (actually, the manager of a trust that includes several elderly owners) awarded the lease to Mike and Alex after he realized what was happening with his representation and the reaction of the community.
“I think it’s so great,” Glendon told me. “People keep saying that you can’t revitalize queer nightlife in SoMa — but that’s just a lazy excuse for gentrification. I’m glad we could band together to ensure a future for queer spaces in this city. We should be proud of what happened here. Our shared queer history is a powerful force.
“We’re still fighting for an officially recognized queer historical district in SoMa that will honor those who came before us, and also help preserve lively alternative queer spaces. Supervisor Christina Olague and CMAC [California Music and Culture Association] is working hard on that. One of the major problems is that it’s illegal to say something has to be or remain ‘gay.’ I think we saw here that it can be done within the limits of current boundaries.”
As for the future of the Eagle? “Mike and Alex have indicated that while they’ll still be preserving the main traditions and atmosphere — as well as probably hiring some of the old staff back — they are hoping it will be a much more open space. Already the Lexington Club is planning to host a fundraiser to help them remodel, so that suggests the Eagle will be more women-friendly, and there may be new parties there from some of the city’s younger promoters as well.”
My favorite part of this whole thing — besides the colorful faux-funeral outside Foreign Cinema restaurant, or the “assless chaps” takeover of the Skylark bar (both at one point identified as villains in the Eagle saga)? Beyond the banding together of the community to save an actually cool place that is a huge and drunken part of my life (also, DJ Don Baird on Sundays was secretly the best DJ in the city)?
At one point it was announced that the Eagle was to become a fancy pizza place with a wood-fired oven on the back patio. Glendon turned to me and hissed: “I always knew the straights wanted to put us in the oven!”
Ours was another SUMMER OF BASS. I love it, of course — who doesn’t like their buns to get a rumblin’ in the club? As an SFer I’m spoiled with low-low riches, and have amazing access to the very first and best in post-dubstep, moombahton, trap, and spooked. And when it comes to more driving, esoteric UK bass house? Oh, I have a very special secret weapon. A very special Scottish secret weapon.
Ay, it’s DJ Deevice, aka Martin Collins, host of the excellent Gridlock radio show on Radio Valencia (www.radiovalencia.fm), 87.9 FM, Thursdays noon-2pm. The weekly playlist is a veritable feast of cheat sheet for those of us looking for the latest hypnotic bass sounds rolling out of London, Brooklyn, and other woofer-blowing capitals. Here’s his latest radio show podcast:
And here’s an excellent bouncy mix he recently put up:
I’ll be profiling Deevice in the paper next week, where you’ll learn much more about him (and listen to his show tomorrow for some great tunes!). But I wanted to post his current top 10, which doubles as a good “best of summer 2012.” I also asked him to share a couple juicy stories from his long experience as a DJ and international player, which you’ll find below.
DJ DEEVICES TOP 10 FOR SUMMER 2012
1. Makoto “Another Generation” (Apollo)
2. Om Unit “Ulysses” (Civil)
3. Ave Astra “More L (Original Mix)” (Filigran)
4. John Tejada “When All Around Is Madness” (Kompakt)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJCeiyz-5yk
5. Sarrass “A New Day (Original Mix)” (Third Ear)
6. Steve Huerta “Take Me Closer” (Amadeus)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PzoeTy233C4
7. Ripperton, “Let’s Hope (Bicep Remix)” (Mugpie)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdceMV92Yxw
8. Ghosts On Tape “Nature’s Law” (Icee Hot)
9. Volor Flex “About You” (Apollo)
10. BWANA “Baby Let Me Finish (Black Orange Juice remix)” (Somethinksounds)
>>COCKTAILS WITH STACEY
“In about 1995, I was doing a party at the Sub Club on Thursdays, a weekly house-techno night I did with another DJ, his name was Mark Ryal. And back then, we were playing pretty much everything that was coming out of Detroit and Chicago, all the stuff on Balance, Prescription, all the Ron Trent, all the Chez Damier, plus all the techno that was coming out on Underground Resistance, Robert Hood, you name it — basically if it came from Chicago or Detroit, we played it on Thursdays. It was really one of the most popular things that was happening at the the time and it was every Thursday on Jamaica Street in Glasgow.
“We were bringing in guests like Derrick May, who played a bunch of times. The Slam guys (Soma Records), Ralph Lawson, Darren Emerson, Dave Clark and Mark Broom were all playing. And then there was this one time Stacey Pullen was playing the Sub Club for the first time, on a Friday or Saturday and the management of the club asked me to take him around, shopping for vinyl for his set, since I knew all the good spots.
“It was Glasgow, and definitely not exactly the nicest day in the world. I suggested after we’d been to a couple of record stores, ‘Do you want to go get a drink?’ And we went to this place off Great Western Road — nothing special, just a typical Glasgow bar. So we went up to the bar and I asked Stacey what he wanted to drink. What you have to understand is, this was like the worst foggy day in San Francisco, but 10 times wore than that and all rainy and horrible and in Scotland. And here I was with Stacey Pullen from Detroit, the Kosmic Messenger, “Forever Monna,” etc…. in this hole-in-he-wall in Scotland on a shitty day.
“And I kid you not, he said ‘I’ll have a pina colada.’
“Needless to say he didn’t get a pina colada.”
>>BANNED FROM THE DJ BOOTH
“A couple years back, I played an all-night party, it was a friend’s birthday. We were up still and we had been partying, so a bunch of us decided to go to the End Up. It was me and maybe eight to 12 other people. We pulled up in separate cabs and I got out of my cab right in front of the End Up, and I had two bags of records with me. The door staff were really, really nice, as nice as nice could be, which really kind of shocked me a little bit.
“They were like, ‘Hey, how are you doin’?’ and asking me all these questions, ‘How’s things’ and everything. And I was, ‘Yeah, I’m fine.” And they asked me ‘Are you on your own?’ and I said, ‘No, I’ve got a bunch of people with me.’ So basically, we all just rolled in for free. And I thought, ‘That was nice of them!’
“So I’m coming in the door and going by the DJ booth, and the guy who’s spinning — this is a Saturday morning — says, ‘You’re early!’ It was only then that I realized what was going on — they thought I was the replacement DJ.
“So I answered, ‘Yeah, I suppose I’m a bit early!’ I went out on the patio and hung out with some of the people I came with and told them, ‘Hey, I’m actually going to go on in 15 minutes’ — they were stoked, and said they’d keep the party going.
“I ended up going on, played for half an hour, 45 minutes — and then the guy turned up, and he was pissed at the fact this was happening. He was late, so who cared. Basically what happened was I wasn’t banned or escorted out of the club.
“But I’m banned from the DJ booth. Not from the club — they still managed to get a lot of money from me at the bar, but I’m apparently banned from the DJ booth. For impersonation.”
Eighty-year-olds like myself keep finding new Wonders of the Internet: despite basically living at record stores in Detroit in the early 1990s (props to Buy-Rite, Record Time, and Sam’s Jams) and working my way through college throwing raves, it is only through YouTubes, Discogs, and the recent resurgence of old-school dance music DJs and producers that we fully comprehend the breadth and scope of some of the major techno and house players. Case in point: Detroit’s MK, aka Marc Kinchen, who’s appearing this weekend on the roof of the W Hotel as part of As You like It’s second anniversary.
MK appeared here last year with his brother Scottie Deep, and they dug up some amazing, harder house sounds of the late 1990s on the Public Works dance floor. But it’s MK’s wizard early ’90s house dubs that have rightly enshrined him, along with Masters at Work, as the underground winner of that era. In the age before the Internet, when the only way to hear this music was on the dancefloor, you needed a clear and unique style to “brand” yourself instantly on listeners, and MK’s was one of the most recognizable. You just knew a new MK joint once it dropped — but only now, 20 years later, have I discovered just how many tunes of his I missed simply because I showed up at the club or the record store on the wrong day.
I heard MK kill it with a mix of all his own records at Movement: the Detroit Electronic Music festival this year, and afterwards at the KMS label’s 25th anniversary show (in the booth with Stacey Pullen, Kenny Larkin, and Terrance Parker — dreamy!!) he’ll likely bring that same warm intensity and catchy sensibility to the awesome-looking As You Like It party (don’t worry, despite the W location it won’t be douchy at all — the last one was quite wonderful with a great crowd). I wanted to share some of the memories I have of various MK joints below, in the context of growing up a gay Arab house-loving boy in Detroit and encountering his works one by one of some amazing dance floors.
1. LOVE CHANGES
I fell in love, broke up, fell back in love, broke up, got back together, and then spent a couple melancholy years alone to this track. Thing is — I couldn’t find it anywhere on vinyl. So basically I would sing myself to sleep with it, laugh and cry to it in the back of my head, and pester my poor DJ friends like D. Wynn and Butch to death to play it. And when they would I would explode with feeling. When I finally got my hands on the MK + Alana album (on cassette), which was lovely but definitely a play for mainstream respectability, thus the more slowed-down R&B tempos, I wore that shit out on my Walkman. When MK dropped this at the DEMF this year, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house.
2. CAN YOU FORGIVE HER?
Props for the silent Trollope pun and the absolutely brilliant lyrics, especially for a bookish queer boy obsessed with all things British (if anyone else has so skillfully deployed the phrase “cricket pavillion” in a dance song, I know not who.) But MK’s mix of the pet Shop Boys b-side is what propels this tune into my top 10 songs of all time. It’s a dub masterpiece of propulsive rhythms and surrealistic touches — and possibly one of the greatest mixes of all time.
3. BURNING
One of the theme songs of what I would call Detroit’s greatest club, DJ Ken Collier’s Heaven, an all-night gay club (“black gay club” in the homo-segregationist language of the time) out near Six Mile and Woodward, “Burning” revealed how very poor the Madonna pablum of the “white” gay clubs was at the time, and also introduced a new generation to house music. (By then enough kids had come through the rave scene without hearing proper house music to constitute a mini-epidemic.) This mix probably introduced the same crowd to dimished 7th chord structures as well. When I ran into MK outside the KMS 25th anniversary party at St Andrew’s Hall this past May, legendary radio DJ Alan Oldham dropped “Burning” from the third floor — MK cocked his ear as he posed for a photo and said, “I smell something burning.” What a kidder!
4. 4 YOU
My own theme song right here. Put out under MK’s 4th Measure Men guise, it pairs well with MK’s greatest hit from a year earlier. We all though the sample said “all hands” so we would all raise our hands when it played at Times Square.
5.GET IT RIGHT
Er, I regret limiting myself to 5 MKs here — and really I’ve only skimmed some of the hits — I’d love to include this one that sealed the New Jack Swing movement with a kiss, or this one that shows that MK is still alive and kicking, or this one, which will always hold a place in my heart. But this one, this one — I never even knew who did this one, but it followed me around during my formative house years and wouldn’t let go. I hadn’t heard it in 20 years until I started looking up MK’s works, and I could still remember every lyric (or at least every lyric I made up). I remember getting down to this joint at Menjo’s on Sunday nights in Detroit especially.
… and apparently I am hosting them with Anna Conda on Thursday, May 31. What the heck are the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards? No worries, they are magical, and you should totally go because it’s gonna be a fun party that supports the future of San Francisco nightlife. But let’s back up a minute.
A few weeks ago, my Nightlife Bat Phone started ringing off the Nightlife Bat Hook. “We were just nominated for a 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Award!” or “Why weren’t we nominated for a 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Award?” or “What the heck are the San 2012 Francisco Nightlife Awards?” said the chorus of voices into my Nightlife Bat Voicemail, because my Nightlife Bat Ringer broke when I dropped it in a vat of fake blood while vampire-wrestling for charity (gay).
It seemed like the awards had come out of nowhere. But I will reveal all! Or rather, Nathan Allbee of the California Music and Culture Association, which is putting on this year’s awards, will reveal all via my short interview (along with a complete list of nominees) below.
By way of introduction first, CMAC formed a couple years ago in response to the War on Fun, a series of misguided attempts by city officials and police to shut down the city’s nightlife. A group of partiers and bar and club owners got together to form a non-profit awareness-raising and lobbying association to try to keep fun alive, especially as one of our primary tourist industries and community-building activities. (In this way, CMAC is kind of like the great San Francisco Late Night Coalition of the late 1990s and early 2000s). Raves were getting busted again, permitted parties were being raided on the flimsiest of excuses, and perfectly anodyne street fairs were seeing their fees jacked up due to “increasing security.”
Now CMAC is using some breathing room to expand for the next fight, because you know there’s gonna be one, hunny. Thus, the 2012 San Francisco Nightlife Awards — this is the second annual edition — trying to bring people together and give recognition. Nathan Allbee says more:
SFBGMost people associate CMAC with efforts to save and bolster San Francisco nightlife — has there been a recent expansion of the mission over there? It seem like there’s a lot more people involved
Nathan Allbee Yeah, we’re really excited to be taking the next step organizationally. We just opened a physical office, brought on a full time Executive Director, Laura Hahn, and I came on as the Director of Events.
CMAC was really born out of crisis: the war on fun, which the SFBG wrote a lot about, was in full swing and we had a major hand in stopping it. Now that that particular crisis is behind us (hopefully) we’re able to devote more of our resources to building the organization and that includes reaching out to DJs and promoters who are the lifeblood of San Francisco nightlife and culture.
In addition to our 2nd Annual Nightlife Awards, we’re in the planning process for some other big events for the year – we’ve got a Bay Area-wide DJ competition, a battle of the bands, and we’re going to be working with the awesome people that throw the Bartenders Ball to really make that an even larger event. Tom Temprano from Hard French, who also does a lot of nightlife advocacy, is helping to coordinate our outreach strategies and events.
SFBGThis is the second official CMAC Nightlife awards, yes? How on earth did I miss the first ones?
NA I don’t know Marke, we missed you last year.
SFBGHow were the nominees for 2012 chosen?
NA We started with our Nominations Committee – DJs, promoters, venue owners – who developed a list of people and places that they were impressed with (which was massive and really hard to narrow down by the way) and our Board of Directors had the final say.
The criteria our Nominations Committee used as a guide included: creativity, popularity, and a positive representation of nightlife and entertainment.
SFBG There’s been some controversy over the fact that the nominees win by getting as many people as possible to pay to come to the party and vote for them. (I think this is kind of a promotional stroke of genius by the way, and if it weren’t all going toward a good cause, it would be pure evil!). Can you tell us where the money is going, and how this might be tied in to a sort of membership drive?
NA We really wanted this award to be democratic and not just be about who has the most fans on Facebook or the biggest email list –- like what often happens with online voting. Having people turn out to vote in person is the best way to assure that voters are actual participants in SF nightlife, and that winners are being honored by their peers. There’s also a place on the ballots for write-in candidates so that everyone can be included.
The door cover is going to cover our costs for the event, but we’ll also be doing the old-fashion non-profit ways of fund raising: a raffle, asking for donations and sponsorships.
And hell yeah this is a membership drive! CMAC wants more diversity in our membership and a larger variety of voices at the table. We’ll be working hard this year to get more DJs, promoters, door workers, bartenders, barbacks, musicians, performers, designers, photographers, and people who just love nightlife involved.
SFBG Um, I noticed there’s no ‘Best Nightlife Writer” category ….
NA Why bother? You would win it every year.
SFBG It’s an honor just to nominate myself. So what other kinds of deep involvement with the nightlife community can we expect from CMAC in the future?
NA We’re going to fight…for your right…to party. (RIP MCA)
2012 SAN FRANCISCO NIGHTLIFE AWARDS
Featuring DJs from Debaser, Future Perfect, Hard French, Lights Down Low
Hosted by Anna Conda and Marke B.
Thu/31, 8pm-midnight
Members $5, Non-Members $10, Join CMAC and get in for free! $25
All voting for each category will take place at the event from 8pm to 10pm with the winners announced during a ceremony immediately after voting has ended. All attendees are welcome to vote.
Sometimes being a nightlife writer feels like getting stranded on Techno Dude Island. Not always cuuute. So when I got wind that the classic Sisterz of the Underground hip-hop party crew was hitting the Bay for a huge 10-year anniversary celebration Sat/31 including a party at Public Works and a day of tech workshops and empowerment talks at CellSpace, I jumped on the chance for a breath of fresh female airand an indepth talk with folks who inspired me back in the day to try a few dance floor moves I probably shouldn’t have.
SOTU founder Sarah “Smalls” McCann, creative director Traci P, and organizer Crykit moved away from the Bay a little while ago (and the groundbreaking in-school hip-hop education program they started, Def Ed, is currently in hibernation mode), but the international Sisterz of the Underground network they helped establish is still thriving and inspiring women to discover and transmit the roots of hip-hop dance, art, music, creativity, and culture. The 10th anniversary party reflects that all-encompassing approach with live music from Kid Sister, DJ Shortee, Green B, Jeanine da Feen, and tons more, plus a 1-on-1 dance battle, art and vendor fair, live painting, nail booth… It’ll be a much-needed femme attack in this age of War on Women, hip-hop style acrimony, and the mainstreaming of street spirit.
I communicated with the trio over email in anticipation of their return, and got not only the trademark Sisterz blend of energy, outspokenness, and positivity, but some juicy tidbits about Bay hip-hop history, the current state of rap and dance, and the ladies’ current doings as well. Check it.
SISTERZ OF THE UNDERGROUND 10-YEAR ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION
SFBGIt’s been a minute since you’ve been on my radar. Can you introduce yourself and tell us what’s going on with y’all now?
TRACI P I moved to Las Vegas a little over a year and a half ago after an almost decade stint in San Francisco throwing events and creative directing the Sisterz of the Underground. Currently I am the managing partner of RAW Entertainment (www.raw-e.com) which is both a booking agency and event production company based here in Sin City. I book for a variety of artists, like BReal of Cypress Hill, two-time DMC champ DJ SHIFTEE, and NYC club and fashion DJ Roxy Cottontail. Aside from artist bookings I continue to produce local events here in Vegas as well as a monthly in San Francisco called Femme Fatale at John Colins, every second Thursday — it features an all-female lineup and highlights music, fashion, and art. The next one is Thu., April 12, and will feature live painting, a guest performer and a dubstep DJ line-up including Lotus Drops, Sculltrain and Smashletooth. I also write music interviews for Thrasher Magazine, mostly about hip-hop and rap artists.
SARAH “SMALLS” MCCANN I’m the founder of SOTU and also a B-girl in the Extra Credit Kru. After years of being in the Bay and running SOTU and Def Ed, our hip-hop education program, I moved down to Los Angeles at the end of 2006. Since then, most of my experience has been selling events at various venues including House of Blues Hollywood and Jillian’s Universal. Currently, I’m the marketing sales manager at Pacific Park, the amusement park at the Santa Monica pier while also being a partner in Clique Events Society and a board member for the tour and travel marketing association of Southern California.
On the side of all of that, I also run an entertainment company with my husband, B-boy Machine, called Hit the Floor Productions (www.hitthefloorproductions.com), help direct our in-house dance company, West Bound, and manage Bboy Machine as an artist. When I’m not busy being the business guru that I am, I’m still just a hip-hop head and a die-hard B-girl with Extra Credit Kru! However at this present moment, I’m not breaking as i’m almost 8 months pregnant with my first child!
CRYKIT Hey hey! I’m Michelle, aka Crykit, aka Miss Crix 🙂 I grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, moved to the Bay Area in 2000, LA in 2010, and currently in Las Vegas since 2011. I started DJing, popping, and breaking in 2002. The rave scene of 98-02 is really where it all began for me. For the last eight years B-girling has been my main focus. I’ve been a member of Extra Credit Kru since day one and with this crew of amazing talented inspiring ladies we’ve taught in schools and studios, entered hundreds of battles, performed at some pretty epic events, been featured in music videos and short films, traveled nationally and internationally
When I moved to LA I manifested what originally was an idea for a hip fashion line with the perfect balance of masculine and feminine HAPPY MEDIUM, into a dancy DJ duo that encompasses everything from dance to art to fashion to music. My partner in crime is a funky stylin’ B-girl I met back in the Bay: Faye aka 13 Moons. (She is DJing the 1-on-1 female dance battle at our Public Works party.)
SFBGYou must have a lot of memories of SOTU — how did it all come together and what stands out for you most from the past decade?
TRACI P Sarah’s the founder, but I can tell you a bit about how I started with the collective. I moved to San Francisco when I was 19 after leaving UC Davis. Having decided to take an alternate educational path towards my ultimate goal of working in the music industry, I decided to intern at as many record companies and entertainment-oriented entities I could. This included Bomb Hip Hop, Look Records, Live Up Records, and Quannum Records. A boyfriend of mine at the time introduced me to Sarah. I loved the idea of women in the music industry and hip-hop, and felt an overwhelming sense of welcome and support in the collective. I pushed Sarah to let me do whatever she needed and learn more about how she produced events and operated. I started coming in everyday. I had such a respect for her vision, dedication, and the energy she put into making this collective so visible and tangible for women all around the globe. From then on she became a mentor to me. Both she and the Sisterz of the Underground changed my life forever.
SMALLS Well, this is always a long answer for me, as even though I’m pregnant with my first child, I always saw SOTU as my real first child. This all started back in 2000 when I was approached by the owner of the Justice League (now the Independent) about doing a hip-hop event at the venue. I was super inspired by two females in my life at that time: Arouz, a female graff artist, and Inchant, a female MC. i thought it would be super dope to produce an all-female hip-hop event that included all elements of hip-hop (MCing, breaking, graffiti, DJing, beatboxing, etc.). I spent about a month scouting talent from all over and found B-girls from UC Berkeley, Syndel from old dominion, and many more. I asked Medusa to be the headliner and threw a show on January 18, 2001 called Sisterz of the Underground. The show had over 600 attendees and was a huge success! After the show, everyone was asking me who is Sisterz of the Underground… Well, I was in college at the time and didn’t really have any plans for who or what was SOTU. I decided to ask the girls involved if they were interested in forming a collective where women could comfortably express themselves, come together to share, and put on shows.
After a few more successful shows in the Bay, I decided to organize a group of us to teach at a young women’s conference. At this time, we really didn’t know what we were doing, but we knew we had something to share. From that conference, we were contacted by two all girl groups to come and teach at their center. Well, the year was filled with many shows and many workshops and soon we were voted “Best Hip-Hop Monthly of the Year” in the Guardian and we created a hip-hop education program called Def Ed. Def Ed became such a success and grew into a program that was eventually serving over 3,000 youth a year and existing in 6 counties of the Bay Area.
It’s hard to pinpoint my favorite point of SOTU, but I have to say that my life wouldn’t be the same without it and i would not be the woman that I am without all of my Sisterz that I have met along the way.
CRYKIT I first found out about SOTU at an all girl weekly dance practice at Dance Mission around 2002. There I felt supported in learning all about the culture and its elements. I would sketch in a black book, create stencils, DJ parties, pop, break, freestyle in the car on battle road trips, hahaha. It just sort of became a part of me, a lifestyle. I’m so grateful to have had a collective of such eclectic, empowering, talented women to grow as an artist with, to jump in a cypher with, to create a mix tape with… And most of these women are like super hero goddesses LOL.. Nurses, firefighters, neuroscientists, designers, massage therapists, business owners… the list goes on and on.
My favorite story I guess would be connecting with and building friendships with girls from other countries like Sweden, Germany, and India through SOTU! It’s so cool the network and community has spread globally.
SFBG The lineup for this party at Public Works is absolutely insane! It really brings together some true female talent. With female MCs like Nicki, Azealia Banks, and Iggy Azalea all over, do you have any thoughts about the state of females in hip-hop right now? TRACI P Thank you first off for the compliment, that’s endearing! As far as the state of females in hip-hop, I would like to start by saying that hip-hop in general is in a state of transition as is the music industry as a whole. As the landscape of popular music shifts more and more to being influenced by electronic music, I think that hip-hop as well is starting to play into this trend. Nicki Minaj is a great rapper but some of her songs are SO far from rap or even hip hop. “Starships,” enough said. Iggy Azalea has got a lot of style and I am interested to see where she goes but I am not so confident in her skills as a lyricist.
Then there are one hitters like Kreayshawn whose success can be attributed to the beat of ‘Gucci Gucci’ being along a electronic-dubstep style as well as her look being right for the time. There is less and less attention paid to substance and more to image and look. Half of these girls can’t even perform live and are in a sense disposable because they have no stage presence. Just a pretty face with flashly clothes and jewelry. Then you have these record labels and agencies making it worse because the industry is so in the toilet that the SECOND they smell a lick of talent, they come along, swoop them up, charge ridiculous amounts of money to promoters, the artist never fully develops before being fed to the sharks, and ultimately fails!
But then you have girls like KID SISTER and MIA who steady hold it down. They have their own style and do a good job of incorporating current trends as well as keeping true to themselves and having a voice instead of being a puppet. I’m forever a student, however, and am interested in what’s to come in the music industry.
And the female DJ should also not be forgotten. As is evident in our line-up we respect all elements of hip-hop and the DJ is no exception. I feel as though the past few years have given rise to a great window of opportunity for female DJs and we’ve seen more and more emerge and tear it up! Living in Vegas I see a lot of plastic behind the decks but there are truly real women who can throw it down and rock a party and/or battle just as good as men, La Femme Deadly Venom for one, Pam the Funkstress, Spinderella, we have our own Crykit in Vegas killing clubs with style. It makes me happy to see this. SMALLS To be honest, I think hip-hop overall is ever changing and growing with different niches and styles that come through. As for females in hip-hop, we’ve definitely come a long way and are continuing to get out there and do our thing. If you look at the different eras of hip-hop, you’ll see how many female MCs were legends in their own right: MC Lyte, Roxanne Shante, Lil Kim, Raw Digga, Bahamadia, Nicki Minaj, the list goes on and on. I also think that female DJs have come along way and are continuing to show that they can rock just as hard or even harder than some male DJs. The thing that’s always been an issue for us women, or at least for me as a B-girl, was not wanting to be viewed as “just dope for a girl.” We want to be viewed as dope overall for our skill and not having anything to do with the fact that we may be a different sex.
CRYKIT I would like to hear better lyrical content in hip hop overall right now. I’m not really moved by too many female MCs at the moment. Wishing Missy Elliot did more, I feel like she can be true to herself but also bring it in at a commercial level. One thing I love about her is she always had real dancers in her videos.. she understands hip-hop as a whole and a community with all elements on display. I’m excited to bring Kid Sister to Public Works, I love her versatility, she sounds fresh on electro house tracks as well as hip-hop.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOgLK4t-Rts
SFBGI feel like hip-hop in general in the Bay Area, while still lively, is slipping below the radar, on the down swing of a cycle — any thoughts about that?
TRACI P Hip-hop in the Bay is most def on a decline. It was once a mecca but is no longer a hub for new and exciting artists, unfortunately. I have a lot of friends in the rap and hip-hop industry here in the Bay Area whom I would NEVER discredit or whose music I would never put down but as a whole, but I haven’t seen much that’s exceptionally great coming from this sector of California as far as hip-hop is concerned. I would say that the RAP is still there but the hip hop is falling off. I would also like to take this time to say RIP to Special One of Conscious Daughters who hip-hop lost late last year.
SMALLS Unfortunately I don’t live up there anymore, but I have heard that the hip-hop scene has sort of died. Well, i can tell you that it’s not only in the Bay… it’s the same thing in LA. I remember places like the Justice League where you knew you were always going to find a sick hip-hop show whether it was Black Star or Wu-Tang and in LA going to Project Blowed every week. Now, you’re lucky if you can find a club that doesn’t have a dress code and won’t yell at the B-boys and B-girls for starting a cypher. I think this is one of the many reasons that we’ve tried to keep SOTU alive and always try to incorporate the true meaning of hip hop behind our events!
CRYKIT I would say the hip hop dance scene is still thriving in the Bay Area! There’s a lot of talented dancers from the Bay in videos, TV, movies. And currently there’s classes offered at studios like City Dance taught by dancers who have been in the scene for a long time and have learned from the OGs and originators. There are battles almost every weekend filled with high schoolers and up… So in that arena it is still thriving and is a genuine mecca for dancers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBjcW9rnjoE
SFBG I love that you’re having workshops during the day at CellSpace that cover both female empowerment and technical skills. Can you tell me a bit about what inspired you to turn the reunion into a true community event?
TRACI P Community is very important to us and key to the idea of empowerment. Obviously the nighttime events are geared toward adults, but we recognize the importance the youth has in shaping the world as a whole — and it’s always been important for us to reach out to the youth through hip-hop. We also founded a hip-hop education program called Def Ed years back, it is unfortunately no longer active, but we taught at many sites around the Bay and still have strong access to many of the kids around the area, it’s important that we maintain that connection.
Also, there is a lot more to the culture of hip-hop than just what you see on a stage or in a music video, the aspects of art, dance, production, and fashion are equally important. At a time when everything seems so fabricated it’s essential that people be exposed to the roots of music and the culture. It is our mission to teach and empower in any way possible. By having females host these workshops, you never know who might be inspired, because it’s not every day women are so praised in such a male dominated arena such as hip hop.
SMALLS This is easy: SOTU has always been about community, education, growth, expression, and hip-hop. This event marks more than 10 years strong as a female hip-hop collective and tying in all of these aspects was truly important to us. There’s no point in just putting on an event to make money (at least for us)….we wanted to produce an event that included the youth and our amazing sisterz sharing their knowledge along with a night time event to remember. We figured having workshops, battles, showcases, vendors, art galleries and all of the various things we are including in this event would show was SOTU has always been about — true hip-hop expression in an open environment that welcomes anyone and everyone!
Crykit SOTU events have always been community-based, that’s where we all began. I love that a part of the celebration is at Cellspace because that’s where we established our breaking practice eight years ago actually, almost a decade we’ve been working with them. It’s a piece of Bay Area dance history, and our practice is the longest-running established regular practice in the city of San Francisco. It’s always important to include the youth. We love the spirit, freedom, and creativity they bring!
SFBGCan I get a current top 5 from each of you?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDo8Z-eoBiI
Traci P
MIA, “Bad Girls”
Slaughterhouse, “Hammer Dance”
Schoolboy Q, “Hands on the Wheel”
Joey Bada$$, “Survival Tactics”
J. Cole, “can’t get enough’’
Crykit
1. B.Bravo “Swing My Way” remix
2. Flying Lotus/ Thundercat “$200 TB”
3. Trina “Red Bottoms”
4. Mark Ronson “Animal” remix
5. Rye Rye & M.I.A “Sunshine”
Smalls
If I can twist this and get you my current top 5 reasons for still being a true hip hop head: 1. The feeling I get at a live show when everyone has their hands pumping in the air 2. The feeling I get jumping into a hot cypher where the DJ is killin’ it and everyone wants to get in 3. The feeling i get seeing the little girls of Extra Credit Kru enter a battle with us OGs 4. The feeling I get watching my hubby, B-boy machine, smoke someone on the dance floor 5. The feeling I get knowing that no matter how commercial hip-hop has become, that there’s still so many folks doing it right in the community
Hyperproductive fashion designer and revered fantasy engineer Jean Paul Gaultier was in town last week for the opening of a (very cool) retrospective of his work at the de Young. His nightlife stops included the Some Thing drag show at the Stud on Friday, a cruisy interlude at the Powerhouse on Saturday — and of course a lavish opening gala celebration at the de Young itself on Friday evening.
The fantastic function included an exposed “backstage” area where models were fitted into Gaultier pret-a-porter, primped, temporary-tattooed, and hairdressed with amazing sculptural headpieces by SF’s Glama-Rama salon, before trotting out onto a makeshift runway. Attendees — not all of them our city’s social page elite, btw — wore their most unusual outfits. (There were a lot of sailor stripes, man-skirts, and Gaultier looks from the past three decades.) Even the servers were decked out in handmade kaleidoscopic Krylon smocks by graffiti gallery 1:AM. Tunes from the gorgeous, killer-bobbed DJ started out retro-cute and fun, including JPG’s own 1990 dancefloor hit, “How To Do That” before devolving into the standard party jams of today, which certainly got the singles (cougars) in the crowd “puttin’ their hands up.” It was a blast.
Soon the raucous and always riveting Extra Action Marching Band took over, the flowing cocktails kicked in, and we drifted down to the exhibit itself, which includes eerie singing mannequins with projected faces beamed in directly from Uncanny Valley. (There’s even an interactive one of Gaultier himself, which supposedly answers questions, although I think the ambient noise levelof the gala confused it.)
The amassed collection of clothing and concepts, of course, was overwhelming in its creativity and development — although I could have done with a few more iconic items from the “Chic Rabbis” 1993 collection (personal preference!) and some more recent work, and perhaps a wee bit less emphasis on the infamous Madonna-cone bra connection. But I did tear up at the site of Gaultier’s childhood teddy bear preserved in a vitrine wearing, yes, a miniature cone bra prototype.
I think the most touching thing in the show, however, was a Polaroid by Andy Warhol, taken of the young and not quite hatched Gaultier at New York’s Area club in 1986. Gaultier is caught in a stairwell, a bit Joker-like in what looks to be a purple silk suit with a gold lozenge pattern and his trademark bleached blonde hair. It’s accompanied by Warhol’s famous quote, ““I think the way people dress today is a form of artistic expression. Saint Laurent, for instance, has made great art. Art lies in the way the whole outfit is put together. Take Jean Paul Gaultier. What he does is really art.”