Redeye - Dipping into Some Holes December 06 2006

Whether you’ve shared drinks or just ink with me — are a hater or a supporter — one thing you know fershur is mah feelings awn hipsters. I think hipsters are little more than the personality holes on an otherwise passable scene. Personality holes are those glaring tears in a façade — say the split shoulder seam on a thrift-store jacket’s sleeve — that the hipster leaves frayed as some delusional form of cred. That’s the hipster’s funniest character trait — they wanna be of the Now (even more preferably the Generation NeXt) and yet they love for the Future Present to appear unnaturally aged. You little twats. I’ve actually got gray pubes and clothes I never meant to tear and I’d be happy to see either mended.

Along with being prematurely distressed, these personality holes are often just that: holes, generally vacant. There’s no story to them. “So, how did your $269 jeans get all those rips and red-panda semen stains?” “Oh, they came that way, though I had to pay extra to upgrade from the whale-shark semen splatters everyone else is wearing this season.” These people have to borrow someone else’s back-story, including the music of other people’s childhoods. Case in point: I was at this DJ gig at Azul on Fri., Dec. 1, and experienced all this griping from a twentysomething crowd that instead of letting a DJ give them something new to talk about wanted to hear New Wave/Indie 101 playlist-friendly shit like Duran Duran. What, the new Bond movie remind you how awesome A View to a Kill wasn’t? It was no Diamonds Are Forever.

The best part of that night was when U.K. MC Lady Sovereign showed up post-show and rode pop whore P. Craggie from the bathroom to her booth. Man, I wish I had a picture of that appropriateness. After that, it looked like she might just have been drinking and hitting on chicks like everyone else ...

That gig had me bummed most of the weekend. But on Sun., Dec. 3, I went to my friend Laura’s graduation party at Blind Willie’s, and I’m glad I did. On the opposite end of personality holes, that hole in the wall had actual personalities. Stop in to catch 60-year showbiz veteran Tommy Brown, who can belt an R&B number, tell a great dirty baby joke or just go off on why BMI-withheld royalties fuel more blues. Many musicians might agree ASCAP is missing an “S” in the middle.

And I enjoyed the stripped-down band’s Velvet Underground and Modern Lovers covers. At first, I was under the impression the band was named Theasides, after the Greek philosopher who espoused the virtues of primal but pulsing lo-fi. But then I found out the duo was actually the A-Sides. Check ‘em out, and celebrate how often the fringes beat out the “cutting edge.”

RedEye celebrates going out and going off. Send comments to redeye@creativeloafing.com, but hand-scrawled hate mail is preferred.