overheard in girlhattan

bouncer on rivington street: i'm from the south bronx, aka baghdad. so this neighborhood is like amsterdam to me. total peace.

music is the message; what's in a name?

i think you can tell a lot about the zeitgeist of the nation's youth by the names of the bands.

in the 50s it was cutesy and braggy - the comets, the rockets, fats domino, chubby checker...

in the 60s, animals and delicious optimism - the temptations, the righteous brothers, the supremes, the beatles, the monkees, the turtles - lovin spoonful??

the 70s gave us war, and a funkadelic parliament. but also got us high and sexy with names like wings and cream, and later peaches & herb, kiss...

anyway. i'm sure someone somewhere is writing a dissertation on this right now. no need for me to go on... and you could easily argue the point that i have no point, or that i'm wrong.

but i was watching some fuse over the weekend and it seemed to me that the kids all have the same bleak outlook... the bands i saw were:

anti-flag
armor for sleep
against me
senses fail
the casualties

add to these my other fave band names:
my chemical romance
and
i love you but i've chosen darkness

this is totally unscientific, because all of these bands are in the same vein - emo/screamo/indie/punk/rock - but i still found the nihilistic pessimism interesting. or maybe just appealing.

by the way, anti-flag's video for this is the end is one of the better videos i've seen lately. low budget, DV, with energetic screaming kids and a message. what else do you need? i think hip-hop should go in this direction - strip it down, lose the slickness (that feels 90s anyway) and get real.

no love

the president was down the block from my apt this morning. the crazy loud helicopters woke me up, and when i turned on the news i saw that he was arriving at fort pitt. when i went outside, the area around the williamsburg bridge was a nightmare, streets blocked off, no outbound traffic on the bridge, no bicycles on the bridge, swarming rush hour chaos.

two teenage neighborhood boys were walking by me while all this was going on. one boy was super pissed. "what the fuck is he doing over here? that shit didn't even happen over here. it happened over there," he said, gesturing toward ground zero.

then i read what moby had to say on stereogum.

zeitgeist.