dispatches from hipsterville

I sometimes joke that living in Glasgow is a lot like living in Brooklyn, but with more hipsters and more ridiculous accents. I'm only being semi-facetious when I say this- as far as I can tell, the #1 leisure activity in Glasgow is "attending gigs" (#2 might be "Experiencing Art in Every Form", #3 is "knowing DJs", which is rather derivative of #1, #4 is "Seeing Films", and #5 is "Talking about art, films and music"). And beyond that, every month there's some sort of big festival based around a theme - the current festival is Celtic Connections, which is a 3-week-long folk music festival.

It's like Extreme Brooklyn, I'm telling you. Basically, there is no shortage of things to do here.

There are a million pubs, and almost every pub has gigs; on top of that there are whole bunch of bigger concert venues- no matter what kind of music you like, I imagine you can find something that you'd be interested in - like, this is just SOME music coming up in the next few days - that link lists some of the more popular music venues, and you can see that tickets are generally affordable.

And a lot of it is super indie and interesting! This is the same city that produced Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, and Franz Ferdinand ("wankers", according to all native Glasgwegians), and probably 7 thousand other musicians - this should tell you something about the music scene. As you can imagine, if you don't pay attention you can miss a lot of awesome stuff. You often end up scrambling at the last minute to see stuff, because who can keep track of all of those dates? I know I can't!

What I'm trying to say here is that seeing live music all the time is a totally normal thing to do. Tomorrow I've got tickets to see Ani DiFranco, and originally I was going to go see Sleigh Bells on Saturday night, but I'm going to a conference all day and then out for dinner with the conference-goers, so it looks like I'll miss that. I've actually missed a bunch of gigs because I had prior engagements: I missed Beach House back in November because I was going to a Thanksgiving dinner party - I wonder if that's part of the experience of the Glasgow music scene? Sometimes things just sell out entirely before you're made aware of them to buy tickets (The National, Arcade Fire), or you hear about it too late (Foals). Am I disappointed? A little bit, but then you see something awesome. And that kind of thinking is exactly what's going on in hipsterville: yes, it sucks if you miss a gig, but someone equally as exciting will come along.

The next big gig I'm hoping to go to after this weekend will be Lykke Li, but there's an up & coming riot grrl band playing at a pub near me in early February, and I have tentative plans to go to Sunday Afternoon Jazz and Dubstep Thursday at two other pubs soon. Do you see what I mean about Glasgow being a music town? In the fall I saw a whole ton of local musicians, KT Tunstall, MEN, LCD Soundsystem, among others... and we haven't even covered some of the great guest DJ spots I've heard. Welcome back to Glasgow! Can't stop, won't stop...

legs to make us longer

I took a thesis vacation yesterday evening.

Basically, I'm trying to drink less. Due to this one-month-ish time constraint (my thesis is due on May 10), I can't afford to go out drinking mostly because of the time commitment. I have things to do, and I can't be hungover while doing them - it's a miserable experience. And, I'd rather not do this very serious, important work while drunk. So I have generally been showing up at parties kind of late, trying not to stick around for an exceptionally long time, and am limiting myself to no more than three beers, and especially No Being Drunk. I have been to a lot of parties and bars soberly these days, just to take a bit of a break from thesising. Look at me, being responsible!

So my choices last night were to go to a Joint Birthday Party, as two of my friends are turning 21-and-12-months this upcoming week, to go to a bunch of bars with another friend, or to see Kaki King in Boston.

Friends: I love you, you know this. But I took the Kaki King option. Even though a group of my friends are seeing her in Portland on 4/20 (ahem...) it was in my best interest not to do that. I have work to do, and I can't afford to lose all that time. I'd feel much better if it was on a weekend... so I went down to Boston with my friend Nicole.

And you know what? it was totally worth it. I ended up in front row, three feet away from her. She's this tiny, hot, ferocious woman (totally unexpected, by the way) who can fucking rock. I've liked her for a long time; I went to this concert to see her reproduce her albums' beauty. I left this concert with an intellectual and musical boner for her. Holy shit. opening with this song - disregard the Jimmy Fallon bit, sorry about that -


This happened too. No big deal or anything...

She ended her set by turning Jessica - a soft, light song, into a 7+ minute rock out. AMAZING. and then closed her encore with a dance-party version of Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers. So, I'm in awe and stuff. And I only see awesome concerts.

THIS

is one of the best things I have seen... ever.

I unabashedly love Lady Gaga.

She's great. She's crazy - mixing Bowie and Madonna and pure pop sensibility into the catchiest, most ridiculous cultural sensation in a very long time (I would argue my lifetime, at least.) She's a smart lady. She knows precisely what she is doing. AND she can sing.

To the best of my knowledge, I have yet to meet a single person who does not respect her, at the very least for her conceptualization of fame. (Are you that person? Let's talk.)

I feel like we all got hooked on Bad Romance. I mean, Just Dance? Okay. I remember first hearing it and kind of brushing it off: it was catchy, but whatever. Poker Face? Yeah, alright. It's clever. and then -- BAD ROMANCE. Anyone with fully functional eardrums in the past few months knows this song.

So needless to say, I was more than a bit disappointed when she fell off everyone's radar for a while. The Paparazzi video was cool - Gaga rocks disabledness! - but all things considered it was kind of normal (at least for her). There was a sheer shortage of asymmetrical glittery things and certainly no comically oversized hats. I was getting worried. Nothing strange had happened in a while!

But then the Telephone video happened. And all was right with the world yet again.



Things to notice:
- "I told you she didn't have a dick!"
- Gaga's symbolic commentaries on the prison system and the hypersexualization of women (by other women too!)
- CIGARETTE GLASSES! Diet Coke Curlers! WHAT
- Is that pre-(f/F)ame Gaga in the sunglasses?!
- new crazy arm flailings!
- Beyonce! With Bangs! / Gaga & Beyonce do Tarantino
>> (see also: references to Jackie Brown and the Paparazzi video)
- Telephone Hat
- Madonna reference! -- hair, choreography...

(EDIT 3/16, Upon Further Deconstruction)
erin: i feel like nothing can be more gay than this video
heather: sleeping with women is more gay than that video.
erin: i don't know about that!


WELCOME BACK LADY GAGA
i have missed you

do doot DODOO DOOT DOO (a short story)

Apparently nobody reviews demographics OR contemporality when it came to picking performers for UNH; I would like to review that this is, in fact, New Hampshire. As a result, we have had concerts by Third Eye Blind, Ludacris, Snoop Dogg, Lupe Fiasco featuring Sean Kingston, Akon, Guster, Brand New, and Dropkick Murphys (among others) while I've been here.

Now, to be fair, I've gone to a few of these. I am not hating entirely on SCOPE, who is responsible for bringing these major concerts (though their comedians are questionable: Jimmy Fallon? Demetri Martin? Bo Burnham?? really guys?). Third Eye Blind was fun if not nostalgic for sure. And if Guster hadn't been full of drunk biddies it would have been a lot more fun. And, admittedly, I am a little bit disappointed in myself retroactively for not seeing Ludacris when he was here. BUT... That's a lot of hip-hop. And not all of campus listens to this kind of music - I know that I wouldn't pay even $5 to see Snoop Dogg or Akon; so overall I've been a bit disappointed in the acts brought to campus.

Though SCOPE promised "not another rap act!" I think we all had our apprehensions. We all waited nervously. Last year I found out that the decision process was between Death Cab for Cutie, Wilco and Guster, and they chose Guster - who had been to UNH several times in the past - yet again. Maybe this was a scheduling thing, a cost thing, an any thing. I don't know. I'm not in SCOPE. Or MUSO for that matter - who brought Girl Talk my sophomore year and are bringing the Mountain Goats tomorrow - so I suppose I'm not really allowed to criticize. But, I think the campus collective was all sort of nervous that Taylor Swift or Toby Keith was coming for our spring show.

BUT NO, thank god, they actually brought something likely to pique the interest of the part of campus who probably wouldn't go to see Snoop Dogg and Akon. They're bringing MGMT - refreshing! Exciting! And just announced on Monday! So I jumped at the chance to get tickets, knowing that they're going to go fast...and I don't have class on Wednesday mornings. That helped too. So I dragged my ass out of bed at 7:30 am, chugged a few cups of coffee and walked over to the MUB for 8:30, thinking this would be a reasonable time to start waiting for tickets which went on sale at 9:45. We couldn't leave the line unless you had someone to swap out for you, lest you lose your spot. So I was stuck there. Not too bad, this should be quick, right?

FOUR HOURS LATER

I had tickets to MGMT. And I had also listened to approximately a thousand people over the course of the past four hours say the initialism "M-G-M-T" (their name is pronounced "management", everyone, pay attention). I spent my morning standing and occasionally shuffling along between a biddy collective and two pretentious and otherwise apparently dumb English majors who spent the entire time alternatively talking about how great Chuck Palahniuk's books are and how much one of them looooves Alice in Wonderland and every concert that has happened in Boston in the past six months (and of course they had been to all of them).

I had contemplated about six ways to either kill myself or these girls, but all of them required that I drink more coffee. My well-documented hatred of mornings comes with my consumption of enough coffee to kill a small rodent. This is one of those conundrums in that I can't do anything productive until I have my coffee, but I can't have more coffee if I can't leave. (Luckily Oliver, Former Coffee Shop Employee, walked by and was willing to go on a coffee journey for me while I was getting slightly closer to the ticket office. He understands).

But - the long and short of all of this is that finally a big concert is happening at UNH that I am legitimately excited about and demographically more reasonable than something like 70% of the past concerts in the past four years. And while the biddies and yah-dudes will probably still be belligerently stupid at this, too, it will hopefully be a good time.

The weekend of many concerts parades on

Tonight, along with every lesbian in the tri-state area, I'm seeing Tegan & Sara in Boston. Oh God.

kiss kiss bang bang

NOTE: I am trying really hard to not make this a music blog. But, I make no promises.


My friend Maxx is the sort of person who listens to every kind of music ever, but with a predilection towards punk music and interesting sounds. He goes to concerts a lot and is prone to accidentally finding these awesome bands. He gets really excited about them, and it's a lot of fun to talk about music with him.

A while ago he had told me about a band he had seen over the summer, opening for some other band at the Middle East in Boston. This band, he said, was "fuckin' amazing" and insisted I listen to them. He proceeded to give me all of their recorded albums. I added them to my iTunes and sort of left them alone for while. I listened to them a little bit and decided I liked them but hadn't found the right context to fully appreciate it. Maxx had mentioned that they were playing a show in Manchester, NH when we got back to school and I should come.

Now - I have a tendency to be informed of these sorts of things and immediately forget about them. I also have a tendency to arbitrarily end up places without necessarily planning on it... which is how when I woke up at 3 PM today, I was convinced to go to Manchester to some sketchy bar to see a band I was almost unfamiliar with play.

After suffering through some shitty, shitty opening bands including one which was made up of three fourteen-year-olds (mutilating early Green Day, The Offspring, AND The Strokes - yes, it was a crime against humanity), some sort of screamo/metalcore band which was technically really cool for a high school band but sometimes tedious to actually listen to (screamo is DONE, guys, nice try though. Also your name was something like "Beautiful Imperfection in Loneliness") and this circa-2001 punk-pop band who were unfortunately comprised mostly of assholes playing fun music.

At this point I was hoping the band we were actually there to see would be worth this trip. I had been promised a "killer live show" and while the opening bands paraded on, I had been seriously contemplating going downstairs to have a few drinks just to make this whole experience mildly entertaining.

And then Kiss Kiss started to play. I don't really know how to describe this other than say "a controlled noise experiment" wherein it becomes a mission to see how many more ways one can make noise sound sonically pleasant. No understatement - their performance redeemed the entire experience thus far. Part Arcade Fire, part St. Vincent, part noise rock, all awesome (and a splash of Heather is a hipster at heart). I can't find any sort of YouTube video which do them justice, so you're just going to have to trust me on this one. Maxx was totally right.