We Don't Need No Floor Just Let that Motherfucker Crumble

Date: 7/14/07
Location: Reversible Eye
Bands: Dan Deacon, Brilliant Pebbles and Neuer Musiker Kollektiv
Cost: $3
Drinks: $3 warm whatever is available, BYO
Things I missed to be there: Skeet Skeet Skeet with Menowah, Flashbulb and More at the Fulton St. Collective; Pitchfork Festival with Girl Talk, Mastodon, and Yoko Ono
Reason for going: Pitchfork is wack; Skeet is expensive; this cup of porridge was just right
Thing I was able to go to afterwards that reinforced my faith in people magick and the Chicago arts community by netting me a musical toy, showing me a totally awesome video by Bill Brown, and being the first time in a long time that I got to hang out with my girlfriend after 4AM and we weren't lying in bed: The 48 Hour Free Store at Ausgang Studios

Two viewpoints on Neuer Musiker Kollektiv:

(1) "So wait, they've got Dan Deacon here, and also someone whose act is making fun of Dan Deacon?"

(2) "Oh my God, this is the shit! If he only built up his shtick, like if he wore big puffy Outkast jackets or talked in a fake British accent, he would be my favorite thing in the world.

It doesn't need to be said again, but life is redundant like that: The space definitely affects the performance. The space always affects the performance. A couple weeks ago, when Mike Perkins was playing for just a few handfuls of people at Intercourse, his jokes went over really well. In a room packed with frothing hipsters, at the only jam I've ever seen people turned away from at Reversible Eye, he kind of got swallowed up.

I think a similar thing happened with Dan Deacon. Dan Deacon didn't get eaten up, of course. I don't think that's possible. Like always he provided a big sweaty dance party that resulted in crowdsurfing, a collapsed floor, his own electrocution, and a million and two flickr images. That was bound to happen though. Dude is the hype star of the year and at one of the hippest bigtime music festivals of the summer, the fire marshall pulled the plug on his set. That kind of stuff is liquid sex, and add that to some speedy synth numbers and the sets bound to be live, but he wasn't as dynamic, and a few of the people I came with, some people who had never seen him play before, and could give two shits about what happened earlier, didn't get it. Now people who have seen him before, in rooms of just a few dozen people where the actual seeing of him was possible, they'll love him forever because they know what his set is like They saw him shaking his shit and rapping about sex in vocoder chipmunk tones, when nobody knew that he was going to be awesome, when he walked onstage, chubby and balding, with birth control glasses and a scraggly beer, and expecting some sort of math noise nerdishness, got treated to a dance party.

Without the element of surprise, it's kind of like he's outgrown his britches, and if he lets the hype die down, to where there isn't a guaranteed rager every time he plays, he's gonna have to try that much harder to not just be left behind like all the other funny hipster party iconoclasts before him (see The Moldy Peaches, just so it can be the second time I mention them this week, and Andrew WK).

The highlight of the show was Brilliant Pebbles, who rocked everyone's asses after handing out individual business cards to everyone early on. They were as theatrical and glittery as always, but in a smaller space than the last time I'd seen them (at the Empty Bottle), with an audience that was far more ready to dance. I noticed my friends, the ones I mentioned before who I don't want to make sound like killjoys when I say that they are not super inclined to dance, totally going apeshit with the bootyto-shoulder shakes, as if the dance had been pulled out of them. It's partly that the band is coming together, and as Aleks & the Drummer rise to the next level, it'll probably be Aleks' Lovely Little Girls co-star Monikah, and her Brilliant Pebbles that take their place, but props must also be given to the space, for making everything so diggy diggy down.

Props be to the space. The space giveth and the space taketh away. Word is bond.