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| These guys need to try harder. |
I'll try to hit you up with my unbeatable 2011 year-end coverage when I get a second, like a real part-time music critic, with rankings and everything-- maybe by roughly the time the Village Voice publishes its annual Pazz & Jop poll? Or by 2013, whichever is sooner. Hey, with the glut of online coverage and preemptive list-making these days, later is probably better. More time to cool off, get some perspective, and spend time with any records I might've underrated during the year. Or not, we'll see.
What I do want to tell you about in this post (so why don't I just tell you already, right?) is New Year's Eve. That's breaking news, so let's steal one of those sirens from that ol' Murdoch wannabe Drudge, shall we?
We started testing out our gear a little after 8 ("What, you guys don't have a mixer?") and for the first few hours there was basically nobody in the bar, so Bob and I just went back and forth playing whatever we felt like. Suddenly, not long before midnight, the place was just packed, to the point where you had to switch from plucking out obscurities that seemed to jibe with what Bob had just played (or you had just played) to, y'know, Michael Jackson. Which, I love Michael Jackson, but that's a whole different thing! We had a couple of microphones, too, and Bob was nice enough to do the countdown when midnight came (he was playing New Order's "Temptation," and then I segued into the Prince song that is the title of this post, which I thought to myself was particularly appropriate this year because of the Maya end-of-the-world thing and also because after all these tumultuous years 1999 really does suggest a time period when you'd have a super fun party).
Bob ended up having to leave around 1 a.m., which was cool but meant I would now have to pick all the records myself, and play them on my single turntable with its missing counterweight measure and fend off dudebros requesting the Rolling Stones or lady dudes asking me to "play something I know" like for example that MGMT record I was gonna buy earlier that day if they had it at Zzz Records if I had had time to stop by Zzz Records. Luckily, a couple of our Brooklyn friends and their family members had come out to Vaudeville Mews, including a guy with actual, I mean actual, DJing experience who had advised me on my purchase of a new turntable earlier in the week, the one and only David Bacon though not the DJ David Bacon that comes up when I Googled that name just now. So he was able to help steer me toward the good stuff and keep the records playing steadily as the crowd died down and eventually closing time came at 2 a.m. There are a whole lot of other funny stories I started to type just now but I just deleted them, because this isn't Pitchfork Reviews Reviews and anyway it's good to save something to tell each other over beers. You've gotta see the baby!
Here's what we played: (as best as I can tell from the hurried notes I took with the iPhone's "Notes" app)
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