Review of The Dare at Freakquencies, 11/10
Including thoughts on "indie sleaze," the figure of the "downtown scene," and other topics.
Last Thursday I went to Freakquencies, a party hosted by an NYC artist called The Dare. He has only released one single, “Girls,” under this alias. Previously (or still? I don’t know), he made indie rock as Turtlenecked. I listened to a couple songs from that project but didn’t find it to be especially memorable – it seems to be Brooklyn Indie, a style that is unlikely to rock my world. “Girls” is good, though. It’s a fun electroclash song that sounds contemporary while directly recalling music made in the city two decades ago.
I saw a screenshot of an article which claimed that The Dare is part of an “indie sleaze revival.” I don’t know if this “revival” has reached any kind of artistic critical mass, i.e. whether it can actually be said to exist – I kind of hope it doesn’t, and the term seems like attention-bait to me, anyway – but I’m not going to look into it any time soon. Wasn’t Brooklyn Indie simply the mass-market packaging of “indie sleaze”? Which is to say, did “indie sleaze” ever really go away? The term could just as well refer to the kind of guitar-focused millennial adult contemporary that dominated official Spotify playlists in the latter half of the 2010s. Anyway, going back to what I was saying, Charli XCX recently gave “Girls” a shout out in an interview – she said “it goes off at parties,” which it did last week.
I had fun at the event. The Dare played a lot of good songs. I’d see him play again. He had kind of a sloppy mixing style but it worked to the vibe’s advantage. He played a couple tracks from Soulwax’s Nite Versions, an early Justice remix of Franz Ferdinand, and a Digitalism tune that could technically be described as a “b-side.” I went to the party the week before, too, and enjoyed it enough to go back. The pervious week I heard an M83 remix and an MGMT remix, but I left early. The party is held in a small, crowded space, and everyone there seemed to be pretty into it both times that I went.
I used to listen to that era of dance music in my room as a teenager, so it was funny to be 30 years old hearing it in a club for the first time. I was too young to go to Cinespace for the Dim Mak parties back in the day, and didn’t know how to get a fake ID. As a result, I generally missed out on experiencing this music in person, aside from the handful times these artists did all-ages shows. I got to see a few of those, though, and relished each one.
At Hard Halloween 2008, I took “triple stack ecstasy” – this was MDMA’s pre-”Molly” era – that was definitely mostly meth. Boys Noize, Justice, MSTRKRFT, and Soulwax all played. I lost my friends for a couple hours and just wandered around. It was a cool, eye-opening experience. The whole thing was very carnivalesque, unregulated, and volatile. It felt like something spun out of control. Given the historical context, it’s not surprising there were bad vibes in the air. At one point, while Justice was playing, I stood in a porta potty for a few minutes, inhaling the rancid scent of piss while listening to the thumping, glitchy, amelodic music through the plastic walls. It was sensorially very intense and unlike many other aesthetic experiences that I’ve had. Even by the French duo’s standards, I remember their set being surprisingly abrasive and paranoid-sounding – much less celebratory than I expected.
The crowd at Freakquencies skewed a bit younger, and I imagine that they were hearing a lot of these songs for the first time. I’m curious what they heard in it, how it sounded to them, what they liked about it. The Dare played a number of “deeper cuts” from the era as well as some more well-known stuff, like The Rapture’s “House of Jealous Lovers.” The party was at Home Sweet Home, a dingy bar in the Lower East Side. The aughts wave of NYC indie emerged in similar venues, like Lit Lounge (in LES) and Plant Bar (in the East Village, the “unofficial DFA Records headquarters,” where The Rapture’s singer used to be a bartender). 20 years ago, when The Rapture’s scene-defining single was released on DFA (in March of the spring following 9/11), it was played out in environments bearing superficial resemblance to Home Sweet Home, although I imagine a beer wasn’t $8 then.
Even if you’re not a fan of early aughts NYC indie – there are many of aspects of that scene which warrant skepticism, and I definitely don’t “wish I was there” – it’s clear that there was some degree of artistic vibrancy specific to that time and place. Lots of people were making stuff, and a lot of artists emerged in a short period of time. By contrast, I am not aware of a ton of interesting music or artwork actually being made in today’s downtown NYC. Yes, there is some, but it would be a misreading of the social climate to suggest that it is even concerned with the artistic and musical production first and foremost.
Rather, the cultural artifacts coming out of this zone are defined by their involvement with attention as a kind of raw material, abstracted from connection to any artistic medium in particular. These artifacts command engagement through the cunning transformation of selfhood into content. The writer Dean Kissick has described this phenomenon using the concept of the “persona,” which seems accurate. (Interestingly enough, “persona” is also a technical term in user experience design: it refers to a psychological and demographic map of a given application’s archetypical user.)
One can imagine the motivations behind a persona-focused practice: cultivating a memorable, attention-grabbing brand is certainly a valuable skill in the contemporary media landscape. In fact, it’s one of the only ways to get people to actually pay attention to your non-social media-focused practice, whether it be artistic, literary, or anything else. There are many more artists and musicians now then there were 20 years ago, so there’s more competition.
The fact of the matter, though, is that while it is certainly affectively gripping, engagement is very rarely interesting to experience as a spectator, and it is almost never memorable in itself. Engagement is a kind of fleeting spell, and once it wears off there’s usually just a feeling of irritated exhaustion. Warhol spent his life meticulously cultivating his persona but he also produced many great artworks, and the latter are far more interesting and valuable than the former. The best ones are able to stand on their own, regardless of their producer’s approach to social life. Of course it’s possible for a persona to become a kind of work of art in itself; Amalia Ulman’s Excellences and Perfections is a relatively recent, powerful example in the long lineage of internet-based work probing the affordances of the avatar. Yet in 2022, after more than decade of the social web, virtualized self-styling has become the social norm rather than the exception: the artifacts it produces are rarely surprising.
All of this is to say, I’m curious what the younger crowd at the show heard in this music, because I would like to hear how they might take those forms and spin up something new. Both the Google/Youtube and Facebook/IG empires reported dramatic slowdowns in ad sales this year, in a remarkable reversal of previous trends. The online advertising industry as a whole is struggling. This matters because the whole political economy of being a monetized Online Person relies upon this revenue. There have also been a ton of highly-publicized layoffs at creator economy mainstays including Meta, Snapchat, Spotify, Substack, Patreon, and TikTok. This current iteration of the extended prosumer-social media-ecosystem is probably a lot more fleeting than we all realize. Anyways, I’ve got “Girls” stuck in my head. I’m gonna go for a walk and listen to it.