When you see LCD Soundsystem en concert, and we’ll use the imperative because why wouldn’t you see them, you should go, not that anyone can afford it and also LCD who? So anyway when you see them, after the sweaty dancing to compositions of considerable rhetorical and musical ambivalence, nearing the end of your exuberant soiree with these Brooklyn sisters & brothers, the tempo will relax, as Nancy Whang, from her prominence stage left of the band’s frontman, where she perpetually weaves 90s style before a tableau of keyboards, steps back to sit at a piano and without grand gesture introduces the overture to New York I Love You, LCD’s ode to the loss of gritty NYC to the uncomfortable inequities of gentrification that happened sometime in the, um, hang on, this song is from around 2007 or so, so maybe not the first time New York lost its everything. The loungy dirge conducts plaintive nostalgia for the death (from above) of something special, something real, something authentic, something unique, and this is the Gen X obituary we wrote while we gentrified the corpse, a big, sprawling warbling mess that is literally crooned like when people crooned, not Sinatra or Martin or Peggy Lee, this is James Murphy and that name sounds awfully Irish, James, were your predecessors/ancestors maybe a bunch of unwelcome vagabonds to Brooklyn whom if they were around today and browner of skin, ICE would be hunting down in their fucked up extra-judicial capacity.
If London is the living room of global culture where the wine and cheese are, then Brooklyn is the finished basement you don’t even know is there until you see someone with a curated outfit of spectacularly differentiated indifference disappear through a door and you follow them down into a room where a Warholian Factory simulacrum operates with orange lamps and teak furniture and vinyl spinning a song so new the singer doesn’t know the lyrics yet and a crowd who take Sontag’s principles of culture for granted. It’s the party you only get to by constantly showing up.
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I recently showed up to a house party in Parkdale with my attorney (my attorney is the likeable one who gets invitations and I am the one who comes to make sure there are working bike lights for the ride home) and Parkdale, I love you. Parkdale resists gentrification the way a 10-year-old resists bedtime, with great force and conviction: this time we have set for bed is transparently arbitrary so let’s negotiate. Developers might want to incarnate upon the land and its people more of their “luxury” condos but this land and its people are having none of it. Parkdale is a neighbourhood of pamphlets and leaflets imprinted with words like STOP and UNITE and the words mean what they say and there will be a meeting and there will be shouting. And by this virtuous opposition (a concept utterly disappeared from a very conservative sitting Canadian Parliament) Parkdale holds onto its cred, its shabbiness, its mess and of course, its soul. Which romanticizes the fuck out of a place with an absolutely crazy drug problem courtesy a pharmaceutical industry partying in Las Vegas with the proceeds from the mass distribution of opioids abetted by stalwart consultants at McKinsey or whatever while they hide from taxes in Ireland or some dodgy place like that and thereby contribute nothing to helping the problem they manifested.
The gentrifying Parkdale house party is remarkable for its makeup. There are kids, teenagers, and adults sharing the same buffet, the centrepiece of which is a strawberry and whipped cream thingy so fucking good it made this food critic (I criticize food to its face) burst into song (it was the Sound of Music) prepared and delivered by twin sisters and it’s just that kinda party with twin chefs and hormonal kids and drunk parents and everyone talking at once, and here’s the thing: aside from the intrusion by outsiders like me, this is a Parkdale party; they know each other because they all live in the hood. Look man, I live in a fucking condo and we don’t even look at each other in the elevator (when it’s working). So here is community or at least a picture of it, with more out of frame than could ever be caught in it, and it’s Canada so it’s a kitchen party, where I keep talking between sips about Parkdale and the Parkdalians are happy to talk back. It’s great, we say, the neighbourhood, the mix of incomes and housing, and the young families, and look at these teenagers bemused by their parents, the way we were (you can croon that if you want) and their parents half worried and half fed up and half proud (parents give 150%) wondering if there’s a way to know exactly what their children are up to without having to actually see and hear them. Because Parkdale at night can be a little 70s NYC.
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Brixton is a part of London with Parkdale vibes or maybe that should be vice versa. Brixton with its Caribbean food and hefty open-air stalls of fruit and fish and top shelf sneaker outlets (ah, the magic pair of Adidas foretold in the legends of Run-DMC and Beastie Boys).
In Brixton, LCD Soundsystem are holding a residence, term of art for playing the same place for a few nights instead of one horrible stadium show, and the lineup to get into the 02 arena goes around the block, like actually around the whole fucking block, this lineup of Gen X and down through the ages, millennials, Gen Z, teenagers. Gen X London Branch prepares for this deep disco dive by popping into the convenience stores for cans of beer and less working class alcohol concoctions like pre-mixed G&Ts, which they imbibe like a Formula 1 car drinks gas, but who are we to judge (oh please, that is all we do here) and it looks like they can still party like it’s 1999.
The general admission situation means it is a crowded dance floor. The lights go down (Heaven is just a place where the lights go down every time the next drink you ordered arrives) and the disaffected Brooklynites amble onto the stage like they just came upon this collection of instruments by accident (look Terence, it’s a Roland Jupiter-4!). And musical hearts start beating and it turns out this sodden crowd of a lost generation that absolutely does not want to be found knows every fucking word Murphy sings into his charming vintage 40s microphone, his signature mic if you will, and is there anything more hipster in your whole fucking life than a singer with a signature microphone, the emblem of gentrification, keep a vestige of what was there before you renovate the interior, the furniture on stage a spectacular bank of synthesizers and modules operated by a couple of Brooklyn technocrats, tech girls of the highest calibre (more necessary and beneficial than any tech bros you may be suffering through watching Mountainhead) the dark, manoeuvring orchestra buttressed by guitars and real fucking bass. Most pleasing is the placement of the drum kit at the front, Murphy’s stage right, its prominence coherent with its central role in the production of this most excellent dance music.
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Toronto, the city that contains Parkdale and Rexdale and probably some guy named Dale, transformed, as Gen X adulted, from its weird 80s persona of big small town of punk and country and massive reggae culture into the inglorious bastard in which we now live. Toronto, I love you, but we fight all the time. Toronto, an ugly Gen X-ian paradise of parks, cafes, bars and record stores, is trapped in an epic and unwinnable struggle with its suburbs (which have their own culinary magic; if you want insane Chinese food, skip Spadina and get yourself to Markham) that was set in motion sometime in the 80s by a provincial Premier who assembled the constituent parts into a ‘megacity’ which, in terms of a functioning society, can be seriously megashitty. City Hall is practically a misnomer. Toronto barely has any control over its future, beholden to the air-conditioned gas guzzler that is the conservative provincial legislature. Toronto is the teenager not allowed to grow up the way it wants, bedevilled by social ills the province somehow blames the city for.
Toronto produces megastars like Drake (permanently damaged from his idiotic taunting of Kendrick, like daring the kid with the insane slingshot to try and hit you) and The Weeknd and some deadly DJs like Bambii and indie darlings like Broken Social Scene and if no one knows they are from Toronto, at least we do.
From the outside in, we are refracted in a mirror ball by the American culture behemoth as New York city, usually a gritty version from the 70s, one which James Murphy would surely approve of.
BALLS OF MIRROR
· Shameful Tiki, purveyors of massive rum cocktails, has moved, counterintuitively, from Parkdale to Next Play’s hood in West Queen West. We (Next Play is a massive media conglomerate) can be found there contemplating a second Painkiller.
· Toronto Mayor fail. Do better, Olivia. We’re with you until we aren’t.
· Québec shows it can always be weirder. Go Habs.