Kat Says: “The Prime Time of Your Life, Now, Live It—Again”

On the 16th anniversary of the best concert of my life, is it time for a true bloghouse revival?

Are you enjoying Kat Scrawls? Do you think your friends would enjoy it? Please consider joining the paid subscription tier to support my work, or sharing this newsletter with a friend who likes good tunes and silly essays. As always, please always feel free to respond to this email and share your thoughts with me—or “like” it, leave a comment, and tweet it or something. Just spread the love and holler back, I’m always here for you ;)

Hey Friends!

It’s been a while (are you singing Staind? Haha, now you are!), but I didn’t leave you empty-handed for no good reason. Here, I’ve got three!

1. It was my birthday. Yay, I’m 35! 

2. I’ve been helping my aging grandma get set up with Medicaid.

3. I went to New York City to chase the ghost of bloghouse, and good news! I found it in a dirty Brooklyn dive bar with blown speakers; a giant, neon smiley face behind the bar, and anime playing on the TVs. Just like the first time around, it wasn’t the venue that made the vibe what it was. It was the people and the music and—well yeah, the fact that it was dirty and cramped in there had a lot to do with it too.

But I can’t get into my NYC story right away. I have to make like James Murphy says and “set ‘em up.” I have to start at the beginning. 

I have to start 16 years ago in November 2006, when I went to the one and only edition of Bang! Music Festival in Miami and saw Daft Punk live for the first time.

It was my first trip home since leaving for FSU in Tallahassee. I was freshly 19 and attending with my childhood bestie Amanda. Both of us had fallen in love with the robots’ magnum opus Discovery in 2001, largely due to the music videos snippets of Interstella 5555 that I’d VCR recorded from the famous animated music video episode of Toonami on Cartoon Network.

We enjoyed a lovely day of music with sets from Common and Gnarls Barkley as well as Florida DJ icons Baby Anne and DJ Icey. Hell, we probably saw Tiësto too. He was still playing trance at the time, and we all know “Adagio For Strings” is still a banger regardless of the weird EDM stuff he’s still doing in 2022.

We tried to see Modest Mouse but their equipment wasn't working, and there was no way we were going to miss Daft Punk. Of course, we had no idea it would wind up being the best concert of our lives or go on to incite a new generational youth movement that would come to define the rest of my life and the overarching concept of my professional career, but how could anyone know that?

Yes, Daft Punk had already debuted the iconic pyramid at its Coachella performance six months earlier, but this was well before YouTube and social media were as pervasive as they are today. The Alive 2006-07 tour  preceded the great proliferation of personal content, and while maybe I’d read something in Spin about how great the show was—and my friend Michael may have heard some rumor that it really was robots under the helmets—the myth that has gathered around these shows had simply not solidified. 

We ran into one of Amanda’s friends on the lawn, our bodies full of euphoric chemicals and anticipatory energy. 

“Oh my god, Kat,” Amanda said, pulling me toward her friend. “He’s never listened to Daft Punk before.”

“What?! Not at all? Not even ‘One More Time’?”

“No, I don’t know,” he said, is eyes wide like saucers.

“Well, let me tell you,” I said all smug, having no actual idea what I was talking about, “you’re in for a treat.”

The show started with the ethereal, high-pitched tones made famous by Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Everything was dark, and then the stage grumbled with long, guttural noises. 

It took me about 30 seconds  to realize the sounds—which were steadily looping faster and faster—were computerized voices alternately saying “human” and “robot.” Two distinct spotlight patterns blinked for each word. Eventually, the sounds got so fast that they overlapped, and the gritty “guitar” of “Robot Rock” kicked in. Every hair on my body was standing on end, and even though it had just started, there was a shared feeling among the crowd like, “Wait, hold on. what the fuck is this?”

By the time the drums hit, we’d gotten the collective message. We were inching slowly and loudly up the initial incline of a roller coaster, and once the bass of “Oh Yeah” started booming, we were in for the ride of our lives. It was all breakneck turns and gravity-induced body slams for the next hour and a half; a collection of sonic reverberations that would ripple throughout global dance culture and continue to be felt today.

All this you might know, or at least think you know. Anyone who’s listened to Alive 2007 has the privilege of saying they experienced at least one-third of the show. 

That live album was recorded during Daft Punk’s July 2007 hometown performance at the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy arena in Paris, eight months after I’d seen them in Miami. It was released to the world on Nov. 19, 2007, which means Alive 2007 just celebrated its 15-year anniversary; so now’s as good a time as any to give it a re-listen.

Alive 2007 captures the first of three dimensions that made Daft Punk’s Alive 2006-07 tour the greatest concert that ever was: the audio. The second dimension, of course, was the visuals by way of the pyramid; the technicolor light grids flanking its sides; the giant LED wall behind both, and the fact that Daft Punk themselves fucking lit up at the end! 

It offered more spectacle than anything my mere human psyche had yet seen, and it sparked a mad dash for electronic music acts to go bigger and bolder with their stage productions in the years to come. 

When I later saw Avicii perform at what was then known as the American Airlines Arena from a giant head—and then watched as the forehead of said cranium removed itself from the rest of the skull and floated around the audience with the “Le7els” producer still inside—that was a Daft Punk ripple. 

There is a direct throughline from Daft Punk’s pyramid to Skrillex’s spaceship, deadmau5’s cube, and Madeon’s big floating-on-a-mountain illusion in the latest iteration of his Good Faith Forever live show; and so on and so on, the ripples continue.

But I’ve made it a point to remind people that it wasn’t the dazzling lights that made that show so magical. The most important part of the show and hardest to replicate (trust me) was the third dimension: the human connection. 

Through the greatest melding of sound and vision a live concert has ever accomplished, these “robots” led us on a journey to ourselves and one another. To this day, I’ve never stood in a crowd that felt more collectively mind-blown. We were all having the same life-altering experience and looking for the proof that it was real in each other’s eyes. We were all jumping and screaming and throwing our hands up, not because it was expected of us, but because we simply did not have a choice. It was like Daft Punk abducted our bodies, wired our neurons to electrical wires and plucked at them like violin strings. 

It was primal. It was absurd. It was glorious. It literally changed my life, and I will never ever shut the fuck up about it sorry not sorry I DO NOT CARE LOL FUCK.

Before that show, I had worn black every day for eight years. After that show, I went to American Apparel and bought every pair of skinny jeans I could in as many colors of the rainbow Dov Charney could get his creepy little hands on. I had spent 10 years wishing I was alive during the late ‘70s and early ‘80s when all the goth and post-punk bands I loved had mattered most. Now, I couldn’t wait to live every second of the electro-punk future that had just arrived.

I left that show a ravenous fucking mess. I was desperate to listen to whatever it was I had just heard, but that mix of disco-metal-techno-punk wasn’t something I could revisit through a Spotify playlist. Shit, SoundCloud didn’t even exist yet. So I was left to wander the streets and re-listen to Daft Punk’s first three albums over and over, always on a CD player and divided across three separate discs. 

Thank goodness I didn’t have to wait long. Just a couple days later while surfing the Internet in my boyfriend’s college dorm, I read that Kanye West stormed the stage when he lost the MTV Europe VMA award for Best Music Video to some French group named Justice. Apparently, this up-and-coming pair had remixed that Simian song “Never Be Alone” that was getting played on all my indie friends’ iPods.

I cued up Justice’s “We Are Your Friends” on the then-nascent YouTube, and it was done. my fate as a bloghouse burnout had begun.

I spent the next six months railing Adderall until my eyes dried red, face glued to the soft glow of MySpace as I procrastinated on class essays. Instead, I researched every band or producer in Justice’s Top 8 — and then their Top 8s, and those Top 8s’ Top 8s, and so on and so forth. 

That’s how I found Boys Noize and Chromeo, Soulwax, MSTRKRFT, Digitalism, Midnight Juggernauts, Klaxons, Danger and Revolte, not to mention the entire Ed Banger family (I think you already know how I feel about that crew). 

Further Reading: Busy P Talks Ed Banger’s Past, Present & Future, Shares ‘Ed Rec 100’ Compilation: Exclusive (Billboard Dance, 2017)

When I wasn’t speed-surfing social circles, I was going to house parties to find more. There were a few DJs in Tallahassee that would download all these jams and play them in someone’s dirty living room. I would inevitably end up cornering people in the line for the bathroom and make them watch videos I’d taken of Daft Punk’s concert on my silver Canon digital camera. It would always blow their minds, but I was really looking for any excuse to relive the wonder and share it with others.

Justice wound up going on a U.S. tour in 2008 (sponsored by MySpace!), and I saw them in Orlando. It was incredible, and this guy named DJ Mehdi opened for them from a booth in the middle of the dance floor. The duo even headlined Ultra that year, and Boys Noize was there, and MSTRKRFT too!

Me at Ultra 2008 in a homemade t-shirt

Eventually, those Tallahassee living room DJs I loved so much started a monthly party at a real club, just in time for me to move away and transfer to the University of Florida in Gainesville. My Tally DJ friend Mandley told me to check out this weekly party called Neon Liger once I was there; and sure enough, it became my church. 

The venue, Spannk, was small and dirty. The floor was sticky, and the one time I sat on the benches, the ass of my white jeans was stained black. You weren’t supposed to sit, you were supposed to climb on every flat surface you could and lose your fucking mind, and that’s what we did every weekend. 

When Four Loko was legal, Neon Liger sold it for $5. The bartenders figured out how to get vodka into whipped cream canisters, and we’d go around squeezing it into people’s mouths. We’d pour pretty much every and any liquor bottle we could find onto people’s faces, and we’d always roll into the DJ booth *which happened to be the front end of a Chrysler Plymouth) with arms full of Andre champagne we’d bought at the convenience store across the street. 

My buddy who ran the party, Vijay, bought these shiny, latex catsuits made for fetish play, and our friends would wear them and run amok around the club. We had a fake “blood rave” there once, and while we were always dressing up in crazy costumes, there was no one more committed than this guy Carlos. He might have been the last living Club Kid on Earth. On more than one occasion he came to the club with spinning Spencer’s gift disco ball lights on his head, screaming “I need to stand next to the wall socket” while he danced in 8-inch stiletto heels.

This sound and energy, spurred on by a manic blend of rock 'n' roll mania with the sort of release that can only come from the dance floor, came to be known as bloghouse. It was among this youthful chaos that I really felt my first sense of belonging. It was a violent kind of love that was just my speed, and it felt like a family in there—shit, Vijay always closed the night with the Cheers theme song—and we were all brought together by a movement too ephemeral to be defined until it was all over. 

Further Reading: Kat Says: “EDM Needs a Comeback, and So Do We”

Eventually, all this energy caught wind and the culture was commodified into the thing we now know as EDM. While I’ve come to love that period of my life as well, I’m always searching for that wide-eyed feeling of togetherness, of total unadulterated and debaucherous fun; for that undefinable feeling of a culture on the edge, screaming “Ugh, fucking yes I feel alive!”

More than anything else, that’s what “bloghouse” means to me, and that’s what I heard poking through the dirty, scuffed up, obnoxious sound of New York City artist The Dare’s debut single, “Girls,” released earlier this month.

My friend and fellow music journalist Zach Schlein had sent me the song, but I didn’t get around to listening to it until several days later. 

“Did you listen to the song I sent you yet?,” he asked—as he had many times before—during one of our late-night phone calls. 

“No.”

“Okay. Dude. No. It’s literally two minutes long. I’m gonna hang up the phone and walk around the block. You listen to it right now and tell me what you think.”

“Girls” is two minutes long, but it takes only 10 seconds to realize this fucking kid nailed it. Fat bass melodies, overfiltered synth lines, computerized hand claps, NSFW lyrics, slut-worshipping sentiments and a club girl chorus give this song every ounce of the late 2000s spirit without any weird “I’m doing this for the nostalgia play” posturing. It’s of the moment, not of the memory. It had the bones of a proper, sincere “revival,” so I was immediately hooked.

“Girls” is the only song The Dare has released under the moniker. The DJ-producer is 26 years old and has already racked up plenty of indie cred, having previously played live drums for Porches.  I flew to NYC just a few days after hearing “Girls” to see Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs in Brooklyn, and the original plan was to fly back home the following Tuesday. As it turns out, The Dare throws a weekly Thursday night party called Freakquencies, and the pictures of the party look pretty legit. 

I ho-hummed about it for a few days, but come Tuesday, I called American Airlines and changed my flight. I mean, I was already in town, it was maybe the last Freakquencies of 2022, and my friend/NYC DJ about town Alex English was gonna throw an “indie sleaze” party that Friday and let me handpick some bloghouse bangers on request, so what the fuck was I in a hurry to get back to?

<p=“sidenote”>Let’s take a moment to address one of the biggest buzz phrases of 2022: indie sleaze.

Indie sleaze is the newfangled descriptor for the subculture my friends and I lived through in the mid-to-late 2000s. Is it the same as bloghouse? Not exactly, but it’s directly aligned. It’s the same messy kids wearing v-neck tee shirts with chunky graphics and skinny jeans; our sweaty, side-swept bangs held back by neon hairbands as we freak out to lo-fi mp3s of Yelle, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Feist, MGMT, etc. 

I’d say bloghouse specifically refers to the corner of the culture occupied by DJ-producers specializing in electro sounds, while indie sleaze refers to the whole generational shebang, indie bands and cinema culture and pop icons, et al. 

In short, bloghouse is a sub-genre within the greater indie sleaze Wikipedia entry.

You see, bloghouse was never a formally accepted part of the era’s rave culture. It grew inside the indie world, and “indie sleaze” is just a continuation or direct descendent of the electroclash movement that defined my high school years. The first extra-cultural group to get onboard with Neon Liger after what we’d now call the “indie sleaze” clique was the queer kids. Eventually everyone started thinking Neon Liger was a gay party, but the gays just happen to have fucking fantastic taste. 

The rave kids came next, and the first time I saw a glow stick in the club, I knew a cultural shift was underway. Next came the frat boys and sorority girls, and EDM soon followed.</“sidenote”>

Thursday came, and I was starting to feel a little silly. “What if this party isn’t so fun that it was worth changing my flight?” But as I stood in line outside Heaven, the Bushwick bar where the party took place (it usually goes down at Manhattan’s Home Sweet Home, but this week was different), I looked at the throngs of hipster youth smoking cigs within the gated patio. Their t-shirts shouted witticisms and nostalgic whims that surely came from some Internet specialty store but had the appearance of a thrifted old rag. They were excited and radiating confidence, shouting at each other with the same giddy energy that I once felt running into all my friends at our own sanctified shithole.

“Please have your IDs in your hand,” the oversized bouncer said with no trace of humor. “It’s too full inside, and you’re probably not getting in.”

Whatever. I wasn’t worried. I would stand out here for an hour if I had to. There was nothing else to do! I’d changed my flight for this!

I knew it was on as soon as we entered. La Roux’s “Bulletproof” blared from the fucked up speakers, and I felt comfortable as heck snaking my way to the dirty bar. This nice kid next to me was boppin’ his head to the beat.

“This song is amazing!” he said, and I matched his big smile.

“Hell yeah it is! A classic.”

“And it came out in 2011?”

“2009.”

“What?!” he freaked. “I can’t believe this came out before 2010.”

“Hahaha, have you seen the music video?”

“No!”

“Well, you have to when you get home.”

I noticed that I might have cut that nice kid in line, so I ordered and paid for his gin and tonic. I decided then and there how this was going to go: I was gonna have a great fucking time as the elder stateswoman of a scene gone by, sliding back into my cunning young-lady skin and dropping quippy comebacks with all the fierceness of my 20-year-old self. Only this time, I’d have enough money to actually buy shots in the club and enough sense not to blackout or punch anyone’s drink out of their hand. After all, someone’s gotta show the kids what indie sleaze is all about!

So that’s what I did. I had a great time: I gave my number to some drunk girl who wanted to be friends; I made barside connections with fun and clever little assholes; I took dirty bathroom selfies, sweated my ass off, and chainsmoked clove cigarettes on the patio. 

When The Dare played the last DJ set of the night—dressed in an era-appropriate black suit and tie with a white tee underneath—I screamed my fucking lungs out, singing along to Gang of Four’s “Damaged Goods,” Soulwax’s “Miserable Girl,” Kylie Minogue’s “Can’t Get You Out of My Head,” and Daft Punk’s “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger.”

I damn near broke my hand slapping the wall in time to Peaches’ “Boys Wanna Be Her” and got my whole ass on the floor to a remix of DJ Blaqstarr & Rye Rye’s “Shake It To The Ground.” I thrashed around to Justice’s “Waters of Nazareth,” and I probably gave Zach a concussion from shaking him so hard during SebastiAn’s “Kindercut.”

I was hard-pressed to hear “Kindercut” in a DJ set back in 2009, let alone 13 years later in some Brooklyn hole in the wall with exposed wires hanging from the walls. Then again, isn’t that exactly where I would hear it? In grungy space serving as the belly of the bloghouse revival that really might be?

Zach and I approached The Dare as the bar cleared out. We talked to him for a bit outside; at some point, he mentioned how he’d gotten tired of playing The Rapture for his friends who “didn’t get it.” He’s working with the right sounds and digesting all the right references, but he’s poised to turn it out in a way that feels refreshing and new rather than tired, coy and cliché. 

Whether all his friends—who are actually really, really nice—“get it” when he plays Le Tigre’s “Deceptacon” and Cajmere’s “Percolator” the way I “get it” doesn’t really matter. I don’t expect any 25-year-olds to feel the way a 35-year-old does about those songs, because to me, those songs are memories of the best time in my life; the time when I found myself once and for all on a filthy dance floor which now leaves me forever wandering the streets for the next filthy dance floor in search of a sound or feeling that comes anywhere close.

These kids shouldn’t feel the way I feel. Rather, they should feel exactly the way they do; young, dumb, and full of come-hither confidence as they stand on the precipice of their own giant mountain of life, ready to rip the world into confetti through sheer ecstatic will, writing new songs that pay respect to the old songs in the most honest way possible by doing something that honors the past but looks to the future.

That’s what makes a “revival” an actual revival, and I can’t wait to watch it all unfold “One More Time.”

Alsooooo

WOOOOOOW, this was definitely my longest newsletter essay so far. Can’t believe you read all that. Love you.

Speaking of Daft Punk, Gabriel Szatan just wrote up a heartwarming interview with Thomas Bangalter’s dad, who is himself a legend of the ‘70s disco scene and hadn’t given an English-language interview in like 30 years or something wild.

• Daniel Vangarde, Father Of Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter & Disco Innovator, Breaks His Silence

Szatan is currently working on a book about Daft Punk and its influence, and he just launched a Substack of his own that will chronicle the process, sharing tidbits and rare interviews along the way. Do check it out! I subbed!

• After Daft Newsletter: The AD Files

On the subject of newsletters that chronicle book writing projects, my good friend Molly Hankins recently launched a Substack as well that will showcase her writing process on a new book. It’s got a wild title! Read along!

• Timeline Jumping for Dummies

And I did an interview with Music Journalism Insider which you should totally read, if you’re not sicking of hearing from me yet <3 I talk about how I got my career started, how I organize all my various deadlines and projects, where I see the industry going, etc.

• Kat Bein Interview for Music Journalism Insider

Coming Up

No Kat Calls this week, because I’m heading to Art Basel weekend in Miami. Also celebrating the 40th birthday of my big brother from another mother, Joel Kienitz! I’m sure it will make for one interesting essay :) Stay tuned.

Absolutely Necessary

(This is the part where I share songs that are so good, they’re absolutely necessary to listen to. That’s it. That’s the bar.)

I made two Spotify playlists for this section that you can follow: one weekly playlist updated with just the new stuff every week, and one cumulative playlist that will host every song I pick ever (until Spotify tells me it's full). Check them out! I made them for you—and me, but mostly you.

Blabhlahblah, the playlists have been updated but I’m sparing your eyeballs from more reading by just ending the newsletter here. Go listen to the songs, fuck yeah.

Thanks for tuning into my newsletter. Listen to the playlists on Spotify. One is updated weekly with all the songs from each edition. The other is cumulative with all the updates ever!

HMU on Twitter / IG / YouTube / Twitch / Discord