Music Review: Trying to Dance in Stilettos

Dear Reader,

Please look kindly on this non-review of the Sander Kleinenberg concert at the Avalon this past Saturday night. Please forgive my having bailed at a mere 1am, while the peppy young intro DJ was still on, pumping his fist in the air periodically, in admiration of his own mad skilz. My excuses are many (two midterms! boyfriend with bronchitis!) but the real reason I had to pack it in was I just couldn’t take any more of the shoes.

Yes, shoes.

Maybe I should back up, a bit. And try to describe to you my own difficulty in getting dressed for this weirdo post-millennial-retro affair. Because that’s the thing, it’s post-milial retro, which is hard to dress for. Even 90s retro has a template. But…Sander is kind of a god of rave, and rave is over. It’s in that weird zone where it can’t be referenced, it can just be a little out of date. So my reversible iridescent polyester & fake fur vest – was I supposed to wear that? And…glitter? Sincerely?

When I got there I found that much of the crowd had had the same problem.

There were ex-ravers, trying to be mellow, and there were ex-ravers who had gained 20 pounds trying not to look aged, and then there were the clubbers, who were legion, bumping into people with their drinks and bopping their heads and trying to get laid just on automatic, as though showing up and getting a vodka and cranberry should reasonably be the price of admission not just into a venue but into a pussy, name immaterial, and then, finally, were all of the girls there to meet those guys.

They were all wearing 3-inch stiletto heels.

I was really depressed by those shoes. You can do a lot of things in them, I admit; you can sway, you can shimmy, you can club dance. But you can’t dance dance, you can’t liquify the shell of all sex-role-and-social-expectation, you can’t be a new exultation of…whatever. You can be a hot chick, and that’s about it.

In short, it wasn’t a raver scene, or even a post-raver scene, it was a meat market with speakers, and the person who had the power to change it was no-where in sight. For a while there, the crowd was malleable (as crowds always are), it was amiable, there was a white balloon getting floated around the dance floor. We were together enough to share a toy, as a symbolic gesture, if just the one. But then after a while it seemed like the bass line had been doing the same thing forever, the same slightly aggro and leaden and expectable thing, and I get really depressed and – I left!

It’s pretty bad.

But trying to pull out of the parking lot, there were two guys on cell phones standing on the curb, in the exit. And when they saw me, they didn’t move. And their dull eyes said, we’re young dudes with leather jackets who drive expensive cars. You’re a girl in a Toyota Corolla, you’re not even a girl we want to fuck. So we’ll just stand here as long as we want, and you’ll feel lucky we didn’t decide to rape you. It was a long way from PLUR. But it was also, for its own scene, perfectly average. I was really glad to get back home.

Written by Karin