Glass Candy at Rotture 11/20/09
The diehard fans trickled in first, and, at first, it felt like it was going to be a typical Glass Candy show. “Is that a guy or a girl? I’m going to go hit on her,” my friend Matt said as he walked over to a 6-foot beauty. And, like most Glass Candy shows, one felt like they were in that Blur song “Boys and Girls” with the lyrics:
“Girls who are boys/who like boys to be girls/who do boys like they're girls/ who do girls like they're boys”
In other words, it was confusing. Genders and sexualities weren’t exactly straight and narrow, and that’s exactly how we liked it. After all, Glass Candy’s music is a modern blend of new-wave/ italo-disco, and disco music sprung from the gay culture in the 1970’s. The discotheque was a safe haven for blacks and gays, and with this new wave of it, the sentiment is the same, boys who are girls and girls who are boys, and those of us that are girls who are girls but just want to dance, this was our place.
Then the venue filled, and suddenly there were boys who were definitely boys-- in backwards baseball caps. Then came former “ravers”-- refugees from a lost culture that had no place left to dance and evidently sought refuge in OUR scene. When Ida No and Johnny Jewel, the duo known as Glass Candy took the stage, the crowd was rowdy, the jock-boys were “wooting”, and I was disgusted. It seemed every time I found my musical niche, a scene to claim as my own, it was just a matter of time before it was taken over by those I was trying to get away from. Johnny Jewel and Ida No have ‘70’s porn names and play dance music, their stage setup was hot pink speakers and glitter, Johnny Jewel had an open-chested button up shirt and wore make-up and Ida No was adorned in red flashing sequins-- these were the people guys in backwards hats were supposed to beat up, not pay money to see! I had felt the same way when I had seen the Pixies five years ago and the crowd had been a mixed bag of boys in skinny pants and bro’s in Broncos caps. It was confusing in the bad way, not the Blur way.
Their presence made me feel angry and I pondered why this was: perhaps because they made it feel less safe? Or was it simply because I felt like they were imposing upon my scene?
And then it dawned on me, this wasn’t my scene to claim. There was a place and time when disco was the music for gays and blacks (and for little blonde girls that just like to dance). But that was 30 years ago, and now this is just a rehash of the past, it doesn’t belong to anyone anymore. Same with the early '00’s so-called rise of “indie rock”: The Strokes, The White Stripes, they are an imitation of a time long passed. They aren’t the music of our generation-- they don’t belong to us-- their careers are an homage to artists that have come and gone (most died of drug overdoses 40 years ago). We are the generation of nostalgia for things we never experienced in the first place.
Musically and stylistically speaking, our generation is simultaneously the best and worst time to be alive. At the Glass Candy show, my friend Matt wore ripped up jeans and a flannel shirt- a perfect imitation of ‘92 Seattle, I donned silver hot pants and a ripped t-shirt that was in the vain of 80s hair metal, and my friend Jeff was styled in leather Oxfords and slicked back hair, a new spin on a classic ‘50’s look. We have more choices in style and music because we have the knowledge of all generations past, which is overwhelming and exciting, however, we are left with the void of having nothing to claim as our own.
This lack of understanding of our place in pop culture is what leaves us at a loss, and it’s why the jocks and the punks and the gays and the metalheads all cross paths and become intertwined, because we are all desperately searching for that thing that says, “THIS is 2009! This is the future of music, the band that will be our generation’s ‘Beatles’ or ‘Nirvana’, the band we’ll share, “I remember when” stories of with our children.
That’s why the backwards hats bounce to Glass Candy and the tight pants bump Lil’ Wayne. We are Generation “Why?”
We are confused.
While I never was a fan of the “rave” scene or its music, I felt sympathy for the candy-bracelet-wearing individuals in the crowd, trying to make their liquid dancing blend with Glass Candy’s Italo-disco beats, because, I must say, despite the fact that it burned out before it even really ignited, they probably had the last truly original scene. Techno music and rave culture was probably the last new, fresh movement that, while all music borrows from genres past, still actually had a sense of originality to it. I love Glass Candy, but to say they are doing something fresh and new would be a lie, I just appreciate them for getting me as close as I possibly could be to having had experienced the real deal-- unfortunately by the time I was born Studio 54 was just a memory.
Glass Candy was covering Belle Epoque’s “Miss Broadway” and I was wiping off the testosterone-filled sweat that was being rubbed all over me from the guy with no shirt on and Calvin Klein briefs hanging out of his jeans that stood in front of me. To my right, a lesbian couple danced like there was no tomorrow. Clearly they weren’t bothered by the mixed crowd, so why was I? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the defining characteristic of my generation is that while we might not be creating a new genre, we are creating a new concept, the idea of being everything and nothing all at once. We don’t represent time moving forward, but rather moving side to side—like in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five. We experience pop culture in a non-linear fashion; we can slip in and out of generations’ past with ease and without consequence. We get the disco without (as much of) the homophobic backlash, the psychedelic rock without the Hell’s Angels and the deaths of our idols, the blues without- well, the blues. It’s fascinating and it’s brilliant. But it’s also a caricature of our history, and without the risk it becomes a watered down version. I’ve enjoyed living off borrowed nostalgia, but now to my generation I plead: just give me something that I can believe in.
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