Senior year of college, my roommate/best friend began watching The Band‘s filmed final concert, The Last Waltz, and did not stop for a six months. He had always been familiar with it, but had it reintroduced as a syllabus item for his American Studies class. He told me, via his professor, that Scorcese’s live masterpiece — Van Morrison’s jumpsuit and all — marked the apex (and inherently, the end) of America’s civil rights era.

I’ve never been an absolute fanatic of either The Band or The Last Waltz. “The Concert Film That Changed My Life” ended up Talking Head’s Stop Making Sense. That movie is a signifier of what I understand to be the twin indulgences of the 1980s: Self(ish) fulfillment and utter greed, and a last blast of white-guy post-punk before the saxophone solo consumed us all.

I will never see a live Talking Heads show, but have gone out of my way to watch dance/rock masters LCD Soundsystem in person whenever I can. The similarities are endless between the two: James Murphy replaces David Byrne as the cuttingly observant frontman, Nancy Whang steps into the Tina Weymouth role of show-carrying female vocal point, and together (along with the rest of the massive band, playing all instruments analogue) they meld countless  styles of music into a whole that can be enjoyed by everybody.

The show itself was such a bombast, such a collusion of instruments and guest stars and songs I’ll never hear again, that I haven’t fully processed it yet. I might never. But I do know this — when they ended, they ended something in my life. They ended my period of acclimation to urban gay culture (the beginning of which can be traced back to their unbelievable 9:30 Club show four years ago) and — by beginning the galvanization of self-conscious hipster culture, by being among the first to identify a cultural shift from Wes Anderson twee to Pitchfork know-everything-about-music subcultural domination — they and their swan song are in the best position to finally signal the end of so-called Hipster Culture.

Andrew Fogle put it better last week than I could with three Flowers For Algernon surgeries, so you should check out his thoughts. He says that “A defining trait of hipster demeanor was a self-conscious sense of performativity, the awareness that one is in final and total control of one’s dress, speech, taste,” an idea that has never been better expressed than in the band’s breakout single, “Losing My Edge.”

An almost-8-minute ode to the paradox of knowing more about culture than 90% of the worlds population, yet still feeling the quicksand pull of obsolescence, LME set the stage for a generations worth of guilty kids with beards and taste to wonder WHY they felt the need to so often seperate themselves from a host of liked-flanneled indie clones and IF they deserved to be lumped, IF they were as annoying as they feared, IF a record player and a musical awareness outside of Coldplay made them complicit in the clouds of skinny jean locusts devouring urban centers and acquaintances’ patience with the speed and efficiency of a stoner at an all-you-can-eat gummy bear buffet.

The secret about LCD Soundsystem, though, is that James Murphy turned all his criticisms towards himself. “Losing My Edge,” “Get Innocuous,” “Us Vs. Them“: All were battle cries not against a non-culture birthed equally in the pages of Vice and the New York Times, but against his own paranoid tendencies. By taking the  bullet on his own one-upsmanship, he freed a generation to listen to that song and say “I know that guy, but its not me.” He knew that “hipster culture” was not a call to arms  (let’s fight the power!) but a sigh (you’ve labelled me and I guess I have to take it.)

Just as irony is a concept to avoid for those wishing not to fill their fists with hair, so it is a given that most normal, sane people express themselves sincerely when they need to. Andrew Fogle, in the afore-linked post, commanded us to “Get  Fucking Serious.” LCD Soundsystem’s been doing that for about four years (thats 20 years in indie time,) beginning with the ambiguous fugue of “Someone Great” and a whole two tracks later writing an absolutely sentimental song for the ages, “All My Friends.”

The latter is the reason that guys with ponytailed girlfriends and white baseball caps are as comfortable at his shows as I am. While some bands go increasingly obscure to justify their indie cred, LCD Soundsystem wrote increasingly accessible music to the joys of both the blogosphere and the actual fans. They could’ve made a career out of “Losing My Edge” spoken word anthems,  but didn’t.

In fact, on LCD’s swan song “This is It,” there are several tracks that defy anyone’s vague categorization of the “H” word. “Dance Yrself Clean” is about as raw as a successful white guy can get, “Home” is a naked homage to the unsettled domesticity of “Naive Melody” and, most tellingly, “Pow Pow” blows all stereotypes of the urban hipster wide open. Murphy juggles himself between the stances of the cool outsider and the frowning establishment. He can “make [his] peace with the man,” while also fulfilling the gentrifier’s obligation to “learn a little more about his neighbourhood, which is important, You know, there’s a lot of good places to eat.”

The whole song is about positions and perspectives, and the advantages that come with being both inside and outside and being comforable. He sings”As we compromised an arrogant person, I’m amazed at my decision to blame” which is to say, “I’ve been judgemental, but look at me.”

When a band like this bows, when a massive hole is left in the collective musical lexicon, I refuse to believe that it means nothing. That is to say, this band was both important and “important” and they are going to leave a void. The musical one is obvious, but what about the culture? No one moved the so-called hipsters to dance like James Murphy did, and no one was as self-aware and questioning about what that meant than he. We can consider it the apex of late 00′s defining sound, and as I said earlier an apex is inherently followed by a fall.

I hope, then, that what the final LCD show will mean, really mean, is that in 6 months or year hipsters will cease to be a thing. Williamsburg can be left alone for what it is, fixed gear bikes will be an unmolested (though dubious) means of getting from place to place, and person will be judged by the capacity of his thoughts instead of the width of his jeans. Wouldn’t that be nice?

If the 70s had its disco fiends, the 80s its yuppies, the 90s its ravers and the aughts its hipsters, than logic dictates we’re about ready for something else to come in and fill the void. And who knows, I’ll probably act and dress and judge the way I do until I die, but I won’t have to deal with the weight of an entire, meaninglessly labelled “subculture” while I do it.

New York City punk band K-Holes recently released the above video for their single “Short Zippers.” Though it doesn’t tickle the hoo-ha as well as Girl’s “Lust For Life” (The all-time NSFW-est dirty music video) it is pretty damn hot. I’ve written before that the commodification of gay hipster culture will lead to a whole generation “on the outside (of a Hunx show)” to lose their cachet as they become a marketable demographic.  However, a video like this makes me think this isn’t such a bad thing.

No one in K-Holes is gay, yet they went out of their way to make a video that will surely tax the right hands of their homo fan base. The more that a gay/grunge aesthetic intersects with Butt Magazine‘s “legitimate porn” leanings and the ongoing domination of indie-queers in urban spaces, the more we are likely to get art like this. XTube hero Black Spark is currently the pioneer in this area but its pretty cool to see it spread out to another medium. I don’t generally expect to see boner-inducing content on Stereogum, but I guess there aren’t a lot of music videos like this.

If a show like Modern Family decided to portray its characters exclusively in the above light, I’d be more than a little peeved. However, this is a music video. From the earliest days of MTV, videos tapped into the oldest maxim of rock music: Sex sells. By the time Tawny Kitaen rested her sore knuckles on the hood of a white Jaguar, the formula was clear: Hot people + music video = good publicity (and an incensed Tipper Gore.) You can’t really lose in a situation like that.

I could go on for hours like this, but I think the video’s (UPDATE: gay!)director, Micki Pellerano, put it best below:

In the Punk/Indie atmosphere, parodies of leather-culture are very fashionable right now, as are portrayals of homosexuality in humorous caricature. So it seemed wise to steer away from that as much as possible. It seemed more appealing to explore real guys in real erotic scenarios with just enough props, costuming, and aggression to maintain the “leather” theme that was asked for.

It also seemed intriguing to adopt a sort of 1960’s Mario Bava aesthetic than the biker-boy “Scorpio Rising” style usually reserved for leather-culture portrayals. The video was almost entirely lit by 16mm projectors lending to a climate resembling a blue-movie house.

I was unaware of the Rhianna video that had been banned, nor do I have any real personal experience in leather-scenes, so the video is pretty much a personal aesthetic interpretation. I hope that the subculture in which the video will be circulated will be more receptive than the extreme conservative tilt of an audience like Rhianna’s. Not only to the S&M motifs, but to a different form of exaggerated representation of gay themes than the obsequious and comedic ones proliferating these days.

As I understand it, the proliferation of leather culture into the mainstream perceptions of gay men is what birthed the A-list/Sweater Fag monster that currently exists in our midst, trying to win freedom by being the closest approximation to a straight person. If we’re going to be portrayed reductively, as Pellarano indicates, it’s pretty cool that said portrayal actually acknowledges the “sex” in homosexuality. The point of lies more in the crunchy punk song and “So close you can smell the cum” camera angles, but I’d take it over a million “Fireworks” self-empowerment copouts any day. The latter would be extremely important to the 16 year-old me, but “Short Zippers” is a nice affirmation. “It Got Better” for me, and a large part of that improvement was access to subculture’s like the one so lovingly filmed here.

Take a listen to the above song, Johnny Boy’s “You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve.” What do you think of it? If you’re anything like me it’s not what you think that’s the issue. If you were me, the issue is that you can’t stop thinking about it. At all. I’d heard about this song for years, but from the title I expected the kind of experimental, moralizing folk that gets played by the kid in the dorm across the quad that you only ever visit when you wanna smoke his pot. And lord was that off base.

I’ve been hard pressed to make a play list in the last 2.5 years that didn’t include this song. It begins with “Be My Baby” drums and a sweetly evocative verse that would make Petula Clark wake up in the subway with goosebumps, leads to a chorus on the perils of unquestioning commercialism and then segues into full out dance jam so that you can’t help screaming along with the closing “yeah yeahs!” and wishing it went on forever.

So what’s the problem? My enjoyment of a song like this is so pure, so special, that I don’t want to ruin it by learning anything else about the duo behind it. I don’t think they’ve done anything huge since the release of “Generation” and my musical past is littered with outfits whose left-field single knocked my panties off and whose LP put them squarely, disappointingly back on. As far back as Fretblanket’s “Into the Ocean” to The Coral’s “Dreaming of You” and The Thrill’s “One Horse Town,” or The Gaslight Anthem’s “We Did It When We Were Young,” I’ve found that a perfect song can often be tempered by an album that’s merely great.

I have a friend who likes to accuse me of being a modern-hipster-music-listener (pejoratively), in the sense that I care greatly about songs and have no patience for albums. This isn’t always the case – a great album is a great album – but I do often feel like I’m missing out on the substance of a band when I only know their signature track. So when I do find something I like I try to know everything about it. Where the band is from, when they broke up, who their inspirations are, which unknown early-period drummer OD’d and in whose pool, etc.

Which does, of course, get exhausting. No matter how much one knows about indie music, there is always someone else out there who knows more. For instance, TNG’s own Rohan has such an encyclopedic base of knowledge, and is so adept at writing about it, that in comparison I feel about as well-versed as Jessica Simpson at an aquarium. It’s no secret that indie music is big business these days. Pitchfork is about two SXSW shows away from taking over the universe. I recently read about The Pains of Being Pure at Heart in American Airlines’ in flight magazine.

Far from being something special and dear to you, most bands these days have ridden the blog wave to being everyone’s favorite band. Right now there is a 13 year-old in Denmark who is guaranteed to have found out about The Narcoleptic Dancers before you have. Whats worse is that his jeans are tighter than yours, and more flattering . I think that’s why indie one-upmanship is so prevalent. Since you’ve lost the rights to “your” band, you have to prove to know the most about them, own more of their works on LP and have seen them before anyone else did at a smaller and more obscure club. You saw them at Black Cat? Well I saw them at a group in Peoria before they were signed. I win.

That’s why I reserve bands like Johnny Boy for a special place in my heart. It’s almost a luxury to have something you can just enjoy because you like it. Not because it’s obscure, not because you got there first, not because you had your first kiss/fuck/sounding session to it and it’ll always bring you back to that day.

The only question, then — as with every other area of my life, the thing that bugs me the most — is “What am I missing by not digging deeper?”

Here, in that tradition, is the second-annual list of my top queerest indie songs released in the preceding year . They tend to fall in three categories: Awesome songs by queer artists, songs by straight artists with overt queer themes or undertones, or the rare intersection: the queer artist with an overtly queer-themed song.

Unlike last year there isn’t an awesome queer album like The Gossip’s “Music for Lovers” to anchor this list, and a couple bands were left off due to strong presence in last year’s countdown. (Sorry, Antony and The Johnsons.) And as usual, a hat tip to the many, many fantastic queer artists that didn’t make it this year:

Kele Okereke, Thao and Mirah, Chris Pureka, Holly Miranda, Vampire Weekend, Of Montreal, Sister Crayon, Kristian Hoffman, Tereu Tereu, Olivia Mancini, Unicorn Kid, Dirty Diamonds, Sugar & Gold, Laura Bell Bundy, Tender Forever, Sea of Bees and so many others: this is for you!

(And, and if you’re wondering why I didn’t put “Alejandro” on here: Great song, wonderful queer artist, but I’m sick of listening to it. Sorry.)

15. Scissor Sisters, “Night Work.”

Their live show might be a little stiff, their gimmick a little cloying, but goddammit does this band churn out some amazing singles. “Night Work, ” the propulsive, falsettoed, insanely-catchy first track off the album of the same name, highlights that familiar feeling of killing time at your daytime job, whatever it may be, until you can cut yourself loose on the weekends. Except this time the feeling is made danceable. The album’s eternal association with Jake Shear’s ass doesn’t hurt either.

14. Goldfrapp, “Rocket”

A performer in the truest sense of the word, Alison Goldfrapp is a queer woman who produced the song that is most irresistible to the pelvic areas of gay men. “Rocket,” the first single from early ’10 dance confection Head First, has an incredible pull over people’s dance bones. It’s a song that makes guys rush the DJ booth to scream “Holy fuck, what is this!!!” It’s the song that causes injuries at gay gyms because guys are powerless to stop themselves from attempting baton twirls with their free weights. It’s the song that could’ve saved American Apparel through sheer popularization of leg warmers and gold spandex. And though Ms. Goldfrapp claims to be a shy person, generally eschewing interviews, the “Olivia Newton Jon by way of 2001: A Space Odyssey” vibe of her live show certainly doesn’t show it.

13. Tune-Yards, “Real Live Flesh.”

Though I don’t believe Tune-Yards’ Merrill Garbus is a lesbian, this song fulfills “queer”in the basest sense of the world. It is bizarre and different. “Real Live Flesh,”  and its video, will never fit in and are embracing it. If I really wanted to reach I could point out the slight sapphic vibe of the video – like rejected sorority girls in a slumber party/voodoo deflowering ceremony – but the queerness of this one doesn’t really have to do with sex. It has to do with producing art that is unlike anything else and hooking me hopelessly in the process.

12. Sia, “Clap Hands”

The always-adorable Sia is list-worthy for quite a few reasons. She has never been one to take herself seriously, she is not shy about speaking with the queer press and she is dating the creator of song number 2 on this list (a fact which makes Sia public enemy #1 for many envious fans.) If you watch the above video, and still don’t feel an overwhelming urge to hug Sia, get yourself tested. You are a probably The Grinch.

11. Hot Chip, “Brothers.”

There’s not a whole lot quality entertainment about platonic male love. Whole sub-genres of books and movies exist to document the power and joy that comes from non-sexual women’s relationships, but for men we get (at best) Superbad and (at worst) Black Sheep. It’s pretty hard to shake the association that man-on-man affection inevitably leads to sodomy so, by and large, it’s ignored. Hot Chip make sensitive, intelligent dance music and their live shows are virtually a 50/50 gay/straight mix. Songs like this are why. Everyone can sing and dance along to it, the gay guys in the crowd can rejoice in a straight man admitting love and affection towards other men and everyone else can just trance out to their live show. Hot Chip, next time you come to town I wanna play X Box with you. Just saying.

10. Lovers, “Boxer.”

Combining the best parts of The Blow, The Magnetic Fields and alternative female sexuality, Lovers is a queer trio from Portland who fit solidly into the “queer band making just-an-awesome-song” category. The tempo switch at the chorus, the word play, the subtle electronic elements. I’ve been listening to this song for the better half of this calendar year and don’t intend to stop anytime soon.

9. H.U.N.X, “Can A Man Hear Me.”

I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for Seth Bogart. (Figuratively, though I’ve never gotten a chance to make it literal.) The gay frontman of Hunx and His Punx makes great throwback garage rock and has a big fucking dick, as shown in the video for last year’s number 8 entry, “Lust for Life.” Though people usually make this list for making atypical queer music (however you choose to interpret that) I have a Seth’s-dick-sized soft spot for indie artists that produce a song that could play at any club in America despite it’s man-on-man lyrics. Bogart, in this collaboration with Teengirl Fantasy, has done just that.

8. Xiu Xiu, “Dear God I Hate Myself.”

If his songs didn’t show it, bisexual Xiu Xiu frontman Jamie Stewart told me in an interview earlier this year that he is a miserable person. To make a song this bouncy about that misery, then, is pretty impressive. By the same phenomenon that makes a guy at a club pause his blissful dancing to give you the worlds nastiest stare when you bump into his drink, I think there’s a special kind of gay unhappiness that produces a lot of great art and unpleasant people. Plus I like it. And I think that little glitchy breakdown at the end sounds like the into to “Computer Games.

7. Peter Gordon and the Love of Life Orchestra, “Beginning of The Heartbreak/Don’t Don’t”

Like a Reece’s Peanutbutter Cup with an arsenic center, the disco era began in joy and ended in death. Still wish I could’ve experienced it,  though. To have the option of  being gay without all the identity politics, the struggles and health risks, and just to party. It sounds awesome to me, though I’m thankful I didn’t live through it. This track from Peter Gordon and the Love of Life Orchestra was originally released in the (I believe, though hard to confirm) late ’70s and then rescued from disco obscurity when James Murphy re-released it this October on his DFA Records label. I don’t usually like songs this long, and this instrumental, but I would have this on loop even without the vocal sax or the breathy “don’t, don’t” refrain in its final moments. If there ever was something pure about disco I think this song has it, though the Arthur Russel co-credit on one of the album’s other songs is a reminder of what came next.

6. Robyn, “Dancing on My Own.”

You know that song that is becomes a gay club classic the second that it’s released? The one that you can’t go anywhere for months and months without hearing? The one that clutters up all your gay friends’ facebook walls and ringtones until you want to move to a Safe-style retreat from the modern world? I hate that song. That is, I usually do. Straight Swede Robyn would’ve had a lock on the world’s queer dance spaces without the “guy/girl” confusion in the chorus. Though she eventually cleared up that she’s saying “Girl” it doesn’t make this song less gay, or less miraculous for the public’s ongoing embrace of its omnipresence.

5. Jenny & Johnny, “Straight Edge of The Blade”

Perennial lesbian crush Jenny Lewis, along with her boyfriend Johnathon Rice, crafted a paeon to my favorite object of fascination and derision: the obviously gay guy that just won’t come out. This song makes it clear that this guy shares love with other straight men, gets crushes on his friends and has been betrayed by a dude. Both the lyrics and the music here are patient and calm, but the message is clear: “Come out and play.” As in, dude, you’re not fooling me and you’re making yourself miserable so why not just have some fun.

Unrelated to this article: listen to Big Wave if you haven’t already. It’s really good.

4. Jonsi, “Go Do.”

In a year when the queer community’s presence in the larger world had to do with our hardships, our suicides and marriage bans and enslavement to Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it’s nice to hear someone remind us we don’t have to be limited. “We can do anything” is a fairly standard sentiment, but when has it ever sounded like this before? Jonsi, queer frontman of Sigur Ros, bundles eclectic experimentation and a flamboyant stage persona around the simplest rallying call since “Gay is Good.” (And sorry I couldn’t embed the official video here, though it is worth watching.)

3. CocoRosie, “Lemonade.”

The “coco” half of CocoRosie, Bianca Casady, says her queer identity has more to do with gender expression than sexual preference. This standout track from  Grey Oceans juxtaposes a joyful day out with Bianca’s father and the tragic aftermath of his death. It’s genius comes from switching back and forth between the extremely depressing verses and the uplifting chorus, only to be crashed down again when the cycle repeats. Bianca said in an interview I did with her that their was “no consideration of gender” in her upbringing. I can’t say my sister’s would’ve enjoyed shooting rabbits from a car more than when my dad used to take them to Chicago’s polish bakeries on weekends, but it’s cool to know that open-minded people produce open-minded children.

2. MEN, “Off Our Backs.”

Not a lot to say about this one. Every guy and girl I know wants to sit on JD Sampson‘s mustache, (though Sia gets the privilege), MEN has evolved from a post-Le Tigre DJ project to a full-fledged band and there is A LOT of coed naked flesh in this one. And the guys are hairy and there’s synchronized dancing. I’m really too busy watching it, right now, to say  much more on the subject.

1. Arcade Fire, “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains.)

Though Arcade Fire is not a band I’d usually put under any sort of queer label, they have a well-developed sense of urban geography. Their first album was anchored by four urban neighborhoods, and their most recent is wholly devoted to it’s titular subject matter, The Suburbs. “Sprawl II,” which is also my favorite non-queer song of the year, is about a feeling that is near-universal in the queer community: The desire to get out of where you’re growing up, no matter where that is, to “find your kind” and get on with your life’s purpose. That journey doesn’t end so well in this song, as the city is no more hospitable here than the the suburbs, but I don’t think song would be so incredible if it ended on a purely happy note.

I’m trying here, ok? Just read the interview and check out the album. It’s even better than my paltry attempts at copy might be suggesting.

The New Gay: When did you first realize you were straight?

Keith Canisius: I liked kissing girls from a very early age, maybe 5-6 years old, but I was a bit older before I realized what being straight or gay meant. So in my youthful insecurity, I probably played with that question or feeling in my mind, before I matured and became more secure about who I was. So maybe not before I was 18 years old for sure.

TNG: What is your least favourite stereotype about straight people?

KC: That straight people feel insecure about being around or being friends with gays, which is not true.

TNG:  What obligations, if any, do you feel that you have to the gay community?

KC: To treat gay people like I treat someone who is straight.

TNG: What are the biggest challenges faced by a straight person in today’s culture?

KC: The biggest challenge for any person is to use their time in a meaningful way.

Another big challenge is to stand strong against a crowd and do what you find best for you as a person. Meaning career, sexual preferences ect.

Collective thinking can wear you down sometimes. Listen to yourself and try not to be affected by the masses if you think or feel something different.

Not sure how else to answer this question, meaning it seems irrelevant if you’re gay or straight to me according to the answer of the question I’m giving.

TNG: If you had to “go gay” for one member of the same sex, who would it be?

KC: Rolando, that guy has soul and ambition like nobody else. He’s quite handsome to, but he should loose the dax wax, lol.

TNG: Given the seemingly endless number of “indie” artist in existence today, how do you think you set yourself apart from the crowd?

KC: I pick up on things from a very intuitive and open perspective. I’m able to express those and my own perceptions in a pure emotional way together with interesting and abstract thoughts, without making my music sound to pompous. My music is direct, surrealistic, but still simple.

TNG: Finally, why should people come out and see your show?

KC: People should come and see my show, because it’s not going to be something they’ve experienced before. It’s kind of a secret, but it’s a very personal adventure with a collective sense of connection to experience a show of mine. You have to be able to close your eyes and let go to feel something special in yourself. It’s almost religious without any religious philosophy behind it though.

I’ve been thinking back to my dark high school days as a result of IGB. I never seriously considered suicide (a rife family history set some nice counter-examples) but I did have some bad times. It’s great that people as straight and high profile as Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have chimed in, but I know that when I was 15 nothing had the power to make me feel better than a good song. So I offer these not as an opposition to the existing videos, just another way point in the conversation.

The videos generally fall into three categories: Outright empowerment anthems, explicit anti-suicide songs, and songs that acknowledge how bleak and bad things can get, but by their very existence prove that it’s surmountable. (I also left off some songs like Xtina’s “Beautiful,” Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper” and Blink 182′s “Adam’s Song” because they are fairly well-known and I wanted to bring up some thematically-appropriate tunes that might not be immediately apparent.)

19. Belle & Sebastian, “Fox in the Snow:”

“Tell someone all the truth before it kills you.”

I think that Belle & Sebastian occupy such an upper echelon of adolescent music, right up there with Morrissey, because of Stuart Murdoch’s uncanny ability to sing directly to his listener. This song works for anyone who is lost and miserable not because it offers a way out, but because it reminds you that someone else has been there and they made it out to sing about it.

18. Annie Lennox, “Don’t Let It Bring You Down:”

“You will come around.”

One of the toughest things about the “It Gets Better” project is that “better” is the best we have to offer. The world needs to change, but that onus instead falls on the ones who are suffering. Like I keep saying, if we can’t promise paradise we can at least give people some options for getting through hell. Neil Young wrote this one, but I think a bastion of androgyny like Annie Lennox carries it better.

17. Raveonettes, “Suicide:”

“Fuck suicide.”

It’s about as straight-forward as a message can be, but that’s why I love it. So many songs about depression are couched in metaphor or obtusion. This is not one of them. There aren’t many jams about suicide that you can dance to, which just makes this all the more effective. The world is bad, The Raveonettes say, but there are other ways to deal with it.

16. Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush, “Don’t Give Up”

“You have friends.”

It’s cool to let a chorus of informed survivors be the ones to cheerlead queer teens. That’s what Kate Bush does in this song. It wouldn’t be anything notable without her notes of hope in the chorus. It’s a nice microcosm of the ways that queer adults can influence the younger generation. (That said, be prepared for Kate’s haircut in this video, and the inevitable mental image that comes with knowing she and Peter used to have sex.)

15. Free Energy, “Hope Child.”

“A little while is all we’ve got… never give up.”

This, along with Jason Lytle and Patti Griffin, is one of the few entries here that is actually addressed to a young person. While it might initially seem more suited to smokin’ up in Eric Forman’s rec room than getting someone through depression, listen to the lyrics. Like so many songs, it’s not about despair, per se, but more about the amazement that waits down the line when you escape it.

14. Wilco, “Misunderstood:”

“I want to thank you all for nothing.”

What’s the other side of depression? Rage. While neither emotion is healthy I believe that expressions of anger can counteract those of futility, and help a person remember that problem lies not with themselves but with the world. This song is a good deal of dreary circumstance capped off by the most cathartic kiss-off this side of “You Oughta Know.” I used to blast it in my room in high school and use it to amp myself up for track meets in college. It’s pretty powerful and I do hope that one day some queer kids get to scream it back in the faces of their oppressors.

13. The Streets, “Empty Cans:”

“This is the start.”

A hallmark of depression, as I understand it, is hopelessness. Since you can’t even imagine how things could be different, they never will be. This song is the perfect example, as Mike Skinner actually rewinds through the shit in his life and offers an alternate history where it’s different and it’s right. It also serves a reminder that you need to be your own best friend, a lesson that’s easy to forget.

It’s worth listening through all 8 minutes, trust me. Though honestly, how the fuck did that money get in the TV? No one’s ever had a good explanation for that.

12. Suicide, “Keep Dreams Alive.”

“Hold on tight to your dreams.”

ELO said it too, but Alan Vega says it better. I searched my iTunes library for the word “suicide” and this one came up. I like it for its message, but mostly for the contrast between this band’s name and this song’s title. Because, again, things very well might not get better. But if you ever stop thinking they could, you’ll have nothing left.

11. Jesus and Mary Chain, “Happy When It Rains.”

“Talking fast on the edge of nothing…

This one goes out to any queer teens that might be reading: It might not be a comfort now, but the pain you are going through will make you a better person. Not just better, but smarter, more creative and more able to handle life’s hardships than those who sail through high school on the winds of everyone else’s unhappiness. The older you get the more the outsiders are valued. It’s not much but its good to keep in mind.

10. Team Dresch, “Don’t Try Suicide:”

“My girlfriend cuddles me…”

Not to much to say about this, besides that it clearly addresses the way that a same sex relationship can help with suicidal thoughts. I don’t know if its more or less of a comfort to people who won’t have access to such relationships until they leave their parents house, but I don’t know of a more direct song on this subject.

9. David Bowie, “Better Future.”

“I demand a better future or I just might stop loving you.”

Another song by a queer icon, I like to think that this could be sang by queers to their parents and family. As those are often the source of the highest intolerance, these words can put the power back in the hands of the beaten. Like “Misunderstood,” a good offense can often be the best defense. Maybe everyone should play this for their parents on Thanksgiving?

8. LCD Soundsystem, “Someone Great.”

“When someone great is gone…”

James Murphy staunchly refuses to say what this song is about (though my guess is that it’s a miscarriage) but the lack of definition means it can apply to many different circumstances. Like “Atmosphere,” this song touches on what a person can leave behind when they go. Imagine someone singing this about you, about the hole left in their life when you’re gone. The way that everything else, everything ordinary, in a given day is tainted by your loss. There’s someone out there will miss you no matter who you are.

7. Mercury Rev, “Opus 40:”

“I’m alive, she cried, but I don’t know what it means.

I’ve loved this song deeply since I was 16 but didn’t fully grasp its subject matter until I was 25. It’s about a woman who is unable to kill herself. She slits her wrists, straps herself into the “suicide machine,” only to find herself alive the next morning. I like to think that it’s ultimately about hope, as the verses deal with her attempts to off herself but the swelling chorus shows a beautiful, wondrous world left to those who make it through. The finality of an act like suicide can be better illuminated if you realize how much you stand to lose when the clouds clear.

6. Patti Griffin, “Tony:”

“Does anyone remember Tony?”

Suicide may seem easy, but it is not. The depths that a person has to be in to actually commit such violence against themselves, to put a gun against their head as Tony did, is only an absolute last resort. I like this song because it doesn’t shy away from the topic. Tony kills himself because he is gay, and suffering, and the people around him don’t even know it. The explicit goal of list is to reach other Tony’s out there and I wish I had known about this song before I started writing the list

5. Joy Division, “Atmosphere:”

“Don’t Walk Away.”

This song would be a powerful testament to staying in the fight on its own, but the video stands as an equally effective testament to suicide’s aftershocks: The people that are left behind. Ian Curtis’ 1980 suicide is one of the more deeply felt in the ranks of musicians who died too soon, and every one of New Order’s joyous anthems is tinged by his passing. This video, released to coincide with the 1988 compilation Substance, features hooded, mourning figures carrying Ian’s figure across a grey landscape, reminding those who need it they will be missed more than they realized.

4. Hedwig and The Angry Inch, “Midnight Radio:”

“You’re doing alright.”

While this song gains so much context if you watch the whole movie, its a great standalone piece on the redemptive power of music. Which itself is set to music. The message is similar to others in this list but it works: Things get bad but you’re not alone. Even if you’re physically isolated, actually alone, there are whole worlds out there that are as easy to find as the knob of an FM switch. If you can find some powerful women out there to help you along, so much the better. (And if she’s reading this, I wanna thank my sister Rebecca for being cool enough to taking me to see this show on Christopher St. when I was 15. It meant a lot.) Wow, who knew this song could still make me choke up?

3. Jason Lytle, “Birds Encouraged Him”

“Just one more night…”

When you’re a teen, and things seem bad, sometimes hope can come in unlikely places. Jason Lytle, former frontman of Grandaddy, zeroes in on this in the best track from his 2009 “Yours Truly, The Commuter” album. A kid about to end everything finds the strength to go on from bird calls. Sometimes its the smallest words of encouragement that can mean the most.

2. The Kinks, “Better Things.”

“Here’s to life and what it brings…”

As sunny as this song is, keep in mind that it’s not about things being great. Its about the fact that they can be great if you just hang in there. It’s not suicide-specific but its such a high note of optimism that it had to be included here. Fountains of Wayne played a cover of this on TV in the days after 9/11. It worked there and I think it works here too.

1. New Pornographers, “Adventures in Solitude” and “Valkyrie in the Roller Disco.”

“Don’t Go Home.”

My favorite band strings together a potent one/two punch of anti-suicide songs. “Adventures” is pretty clear in its theme: how close you can get to being a casualty, and how much the people around you are happy when they get you back. (NOTE: They’re probably going to play this for TNG TV soon. Stay tuned.) But I find “Valkyrie,” my hands-down favorite song of 2010, is impossible to listen to without thinking of teen suicides. I see it a sequel of sorts to “Adventures,” where one strong person sits alone among other people’s parties and wonders when their turn is. Could there be any better encouragement than “Don’t go home?”

I’ve been grousing a lot here about the arbitrary, if not insulting, recent designations of fly-by-night “gay icons” and I’m not the type to complain blindly without offering up some of my own alternatives. Granted, this is as personal and arbitrary as anyone’s preferences are, so I can’t say that this designation is universal. Just something to think about, I guess.

***

In thinking about some better figures to serve as “gay icons,” I keep coming back to Talking Heads’ bass player Tina Weymoth. David Byrne was that band’s obvious focal point, but if you can tear your eyes off him for a minute in, say, Stop Making Sense, you would be rewarded with a whole lot of Tina. She went onto her own kickass band, The Tom Tom Club, and is someone I have a lot of love for.

Ms. Weymouth will be getting her own column in the future, believe me, but if 2010′s answer to the Talking Heads is LCD Soundsystem then Tina’s contemporary analogue is LCD’s Nancy Whang. Ms. Whang handles the band’s backup vocals, synths, keyboards and general badass-ery. I was originally going to feature frontman James Murphy in this column (2010′s arguable David Byrne) but the more I think about it I think the honor goes to Nancy.

So to see LCD live is to worship Nancy Whang. Much like Talking Heads, James Murphy dominates the foreground but there is a whole lot of background support that makes the band what it is. And once you start noticing how much Nancy rocks it’s pretty hard to stop. Whether perched at the top of the stage on her synths and her mic, or flitting around taking other duties, she’s pretty hard to stop watching. Because she’s awesome.

And I guess that’s the difference between her and someone like Katy Perry. Nancy Whang will never get a shout-out on Glee, but I like to think that she has queer friends, wouldn’t call bottoming gross and wouldn’t say “You’re so fabulous!” if she met me. And I couldn’t say the same for Perry.

I posted that Shit Robot video up top because it rocks and belongs purely to Ms. Whang. Besides that strut, and the icy vocals, and the Debbie-Harry-circa-”Rapture” callback in the spoken word part (all things that are part of the gay past, whether we like them or not) I can say that the woman in that video is not someone I’d fuck with. And all that combined makes an icon.

(Well, maybe besides those pants. It’s pretty hard for me to get behind those pants. Sorry.)

So, much to my chagrin, I found an interview where alt-country dynamo Neko Case essentially admits she’s not a lesbian. This broke my heart. She sings about women all the time, her sexual tension with backup singer Kelly Hogan is thicker than Alec Baldwin’s hair and she has an unstoppable following among queer women, who are great at smelling their own.

I had found the queer-disproving article before I saw her other band,  The New Pornographers,  last night at the 930 Club. But that doesn’t mean the first woman I ran into there, a 930 employee, didn’t warn me that “Neko looks hot, as usual” before I even walked into the door. Neko’s appearance is far from my main concern, as her incredible vocal and songwriting prowess are what will make her a legend, but it’s been on my mind.

A recent issue of GQ ranked the 25 hottest women in rock (past and present) and included Ms. Case with the above photo. It always weirds me out to see her as a pin-up, especially alongside other GQ mainstays like Katy Perry. She’s gorgeous, that’s undebatable, but some part of me feels like she took some Maxim-esque shots a couple years ago and they are going to haunt her through men’s magazines until her hair turns white and she does a posthumous, late-career duet with Nat King Cole. Musicalal Sex Symbols often get written about as boobs first, music second, and that is so against the spirit of Neko that she looks as in place in GQ as a black person at the Restoring Honor Rally.

Take last night, for instance. After I got over the initial wave of “holy fuck, this is the best show I’ve ever seen” that always accompanies the sonic overhaul of a TNP performance, I was struck with what Neko was wearing. No fur bikini, no Amanda Blank negligee. Ms. Case was wearing pants and an androgynous button up shirt. Her hair was curly and wild. She looked like a woman that everyone would want to pick up at a Mautner Project fundraiser, not jello wrestling at Phase 1. My status as a dude makes me unqualified to speak exceedingly in-depth on the butch/femme dynamics of female fashion, but the sexiness Neko displayed onstage last night had nothing to do with the stick-straight hair and tank top that GQ chose for their photo.

The success of a given TNP show depends on two things: The quality of the music, which suffered only from the poor sound setup that 930 Club has dealt the band at shows past, and Neko’s banter with co-lead singer AC Newman. When one particular back-and-forth went on for about the length of the song, some members of the audience got restless and began to heckle a band that they shouldn’t have been seeing in the first place if they weren’t interested in hearing them talk. And I had to wonder: Were any of the unhappy male voices I heard there because they had read about Neko as a sexy babe in GQ and wanted to see her live? They felt to me like the kinda guys would would jerk off to lesbian porn, and then shout “Dyke!” at an older, short-haired couple holding hands in the Harris Teeter parking lot.

Even if Neko isn’t “family” (and I refuse to let that dream die) the band will always have a place in my heart as one of the rare straight, non-clubby bands guaranteed to have a sizable queer population in their audience. The legions of women who wanna sleep with her don’t need their attraction validated by a borderline spank-pic. It’s Neko singing in concert, sweating, hair in a frizzy bun — if you’ve seen it, you’ll never forget it.  It’s not shoehorning her in between pics of Marianne Faithful in her underwear and Grace Jones with her legs wide open. They are sexy in a different way. Their music is sex. Neko’s music is heartfelt emotion, or exaltant joy, or a “fuck you” that Katy Perry could be synonymous with music that gay people love in every queer blog out there.

So what do you think, readers? Especially the ladies? Does it do such an artist a disservice to only cover her looks, or does it lead otherwise unaware, potential fans to her show?

No one believes that I don’t do coke, or never have. But it’s true. All my inability to stand still, micromachine vocal-pacing and manic exuberance comes from someplace inside me, not a plastic baggie. Does coke even come in baggies? It’s kind of embarrassing that I don’t know.

My first ever real-life brush with coke freaked me out. It was at a party to celebrate the close of indoor track season my sophomore year of college, and it’s a little known fact that sprinters party like lacrosse players. One of my captains sprinkled out a small line onto a ceramic ottoman known colloquially as the “drug pedestal” and said (I thought) “want some coke?” In true After School Special form, I stammered “No! No thank you. I mean, its cool if you do it but I have no experience with the matter so I hope you…”

That’s when he interrupted me to say “No, Zack. I asked if you wanted a toke” and passed me a joint. Which I smoked, and the incident was forgotten, hopefully.

I later learned that a nice side effect of hanging out with cokeheads is that there tends to be little peer pressure to join them, as everyone wants to keep their stash for themselves. You pull out a bowl in the middle of a party, but do the coke in the bathroom with a buddy. It generally keeps it off my radar.

But the older I get the less naive I am about the fact that many, many of my homo friends have some experience with coke. And unlike my few remaining virginities, this is one I’m not eager to lose. At all. I’m already so jittery that I get accused of being on meth after a cup of coffee (true story) and I don’t need to start something, at the age of 27, that I might like so much that I’ll still be doing it when I’m 40.

Besides, I already fit every stereotype of the typical urban hipster. The more people assume that guys who look like me don’t keep their noses clean, the more I want to shun the stuff to buck trends. Though there is a thin line between not doing something because you don’t want to, and abstaining so that you can preach to your friends and brag. Ask anyone who doesn’t own a TV if they don’t announce that fact whenever possible.

So I definitely don’t wanna do coke any time soon, and am fine with this. But am I the only homo in DC who can say that? Lemme know, dear readers.

So to really do justice to the experience, I put together an alphabetical primer to the Crystal Castles’ live experience, like what Theodore Geisel would write if he was on mushrooms.

I wanna preface it by saying that I normally HATE rude dancing at 930 Club shows, but if the whole audience is into it it make the experience exponentially better. I also put in a sampler of CC videos beneath the text if you’re interested.

(And sorry for the highly irregular doggerel rhyme scheme.)

A is for Alice, last name Glass. She sings like a porcupine’s doing yoga in her ass.

B is for Boys, most of them gay. In all shapes and sizes they provided candy for the eye.

C is for Crowdsurfing, Alice’s specialty. It allowed me (and several others) to touch her thigh.

D is for Dancing in DC. Any band that can provoke it is alright by me.

E Ecstasy. I was feeling it, most others were on it.

F is for Flashing Lights, the reason for the 1200 person seizure?

G is for GHB. Is that the same thing as excstacy? I have experience with neither.

H is for HARD, the name of the festival. Also for hardrive, and the sound of a Nintendo.

I is for Injury, which we all sustained. We left smiling despite bruises and swelling in our brain.

J is Jumping around. We put House of Pain to shame.

K is for Crimewave, their best tune misspelled.

L is for LCDs, the flashing lights were cool as fucking hell.

M is for My Glasses getting knocked off my head.

N is for Nausea that night when I got to bed. (too many tequila shots, but worth it.)

O is for the Orgasm-like expression on Alice’s face.

P is for Prostate, where I could feel the bass.

Q is for queer, the makeup of the audience.

R is for Rawk! The opposite of silence.

S is for Sweat, and for taking off our shirts.

T is for Titties and Temperature. See above.

U is for Universal, the energy provoked by this band.

V is Vanished, a song I think they played but the remixing was pleasantly out of hand.

W is for WOW, the word on my lips.

X is for Xeburant, the movement of our hips.

Y is for You, if you’re still tolerant of reading this.

Z is for Zack, who thinks this column is a miss.

Combine that with a shoddy sound system — the man behind me was more audible in his falsetto than Jake Shears during “Tits on the Radio“— and you’ll hopefully excuse me for leaving after 8 songs.

The problem is that The Scissor Sisters run purely on sexuality. Their newest album Nightwork is great fun, as were their previous two releases, but the reason I wanted to see them so bad is because I figured all that musical horniness would make for a memorable night out. But sex tends to work better up close than it does in a cavern. So what would’ve been a pulse-pounding, sweat-pouring, crotch-rubbing-through-your-pants-secretly show lost its bite at DAR, and I had no choice but to focus more closely on the mechanics of the band.

Namely, some great musicianship and assumedly great vocals (had the PA not been fucked up.) More importantly, though, a whole lot of sexy posing and posturing. Lead singers Jake Shears and Ana Matronic appeared onstage last to thunderous applause, and spent their songs doing everything they possibly could to look hot. Which is easy because they are hot. A crotch grab, a fake BJ on the microphone, a couple costume changes to steadily show off Jake’s go-go boy body. But without the music sounding good, the smut gets old pretty quick.

A lot of other bands rely on sexuality to mixed results. I doubt that history will be kind to The Pussycat Dolls or Tatu. I think that Scissor Sisters’ overt queerness gives them an edge, but Dangerous Muse is a pretty crappy fish in the same water. The former kills it on their records, so I’m still trying to figure out what was lacking at the show. And I’m pretty sure it’s grit.

Emerging from the depths of Manhattan gives a band an automatic edge, but you lose it when you strike it big. You look like an overly-rehearsed burlesque show. Other bands with more success in the sex-on-stage vein do it with a more salient commentary on what it means to be attractive. Leslie Hall and Har Mar Superstar know they won’t be in Maxim or GQ, and draw their power from it. After the initial wink of someone who’s not conventionally attractive strutting around in spandex, the audience gets chances to think about what seperates a band like that from, say, Britney Spears. That makes it interesting.

But the Scissor Sisters are so damn hot. Even the backup singers looked like clones of Joan Holloway. And it’s an easy way to remember that talent won’t get you everywhere. I don’t think Sparks would pack DAR if they were there tomorrow, even though they have the falsetto and innuendo and solid grasp of glam and disco. They’re a bunch of paunchy dad-types at this point.

So readers — what did you like or not like about the Scissor Sisters live show? Do you think a group of “real-looking” people could ever pack such a huge venue, or is it all about the abs?

Though I long ago gave up on expecting much from the Seth MacFarlane industrial complex, it’s hard to ignore the effect that his random idiocies have had on pop culture since Family Guy reappeared on Fox in 2005. While most of his humor has been done better in other places (the pop culture references on The Simpsons offering actual commentary, the heart at the center of the Farrely brothers gross-out gags) one convention he deployed to the most influential effect can be called the “Meg Griffin gag:” That is, having a character on the show whose sole contribution to its humor is that every other character despises them.

One of the actual reasons I can’t watch Family Guy anymore — besides the fact that it isn’t funny — is that I can’t even muster a chuckle at the way the Griffins treat their daughter. It’s not like Meg is even a character anymore, or has nuanced enough facets to make her constant abuse move the “plot” of the episodes along. Instead, it’s easy to imagine that the frathouse meetings of the writing staff devolved into someone saying “Know who I hate? Meg. Everyone else should hate her too. That’d be funny.”

However, the central dynamic of the Griffin family is that they feel differently about each other depending on what the episode demands of them, so I shouldn’t expect too much. Family Guy is generally based around vitriol, so it’s not surprising that one character arbitrarily gets the most of it. It is, however, a little offputting that the same gag exists in NBC’s Parks and Recreation.

One of the better comedies on TV right now, P&R succeeds largely because it’s characters all like each other. While The Office has built years of uneasy laughs on its characters torn allegiance/annoyance at Michael Scott, the cast of the former show function pretty well as a unit. It makes it a much different viewing experience than The Office and, I think, is unique in its ability to mine laughs from a group of people who get along. The exception to this, of course, is Jerry. Though he is the opposite of Meg in that he’s male, middle-aged and fully realized as a character, his central role in Parks is to fuck up. And even when he’s not fucking up, every character in the show treats him as if he is.

Due to a combination of allergies and July malaise, I recently had the pleasure of watching the entire show’s run in just a couple weeks. And I like almost everything about it except for its use of Jerry. Modern Family and Community have shown that you can build a successful sitcom around a beating heart, and I’m wondering if Parks and Recreation is still unsure about where theirs is. It’s like the more sentimental arcs of the show — April and Andy, Leslie and Mark— made them fear they weren’t snarky enough, so they injected a little bit of Family Guy into the show to keep the assholes at attention.

It’s not that Jerry isnt a funny character. The show gets comic gold of of ineffectuality (such as a simultaneous fart/pants split for the ages) but it also ignores the things that keep him three-dimensional, like piano skills or near-frightening acumen with photo mosaics. Parks and Recreation is such a solid show that it is glaring to me to have one character around simply to further TV conventions, while the rest stand as three-dimensional people.

It’s not that other quality shows don’t do this, as Community and The Office have flirted with this phenomenon in the occasional treatments of Pierce and Toby. 30 Rock, especially, has relied more on this as its quality level has slipped. Since its decline in season 3, Liz Lemon et al have relied more and more on the disgusting qualities of Lutz to keep its audience laughing. I will concede that this is about a million times better than what Kenneth has been up to (especially the non-medicated Donkey lapses) but it is still glaring. Glaring, that is, becuase it feels way too much like Family Guy. Maybe that’s my problem. I like many different shows on TV precisely because they are not Family Guy. At this point, I like Charles in Charge reruns because they are not Family Guy. I would hate to think that such an annoying shows lasting legacy is to ensure that everything after it includes one Meg Griffin on its cast to use as a punching bag.

It was a skinny young man, in even skinner jeans, with a vibe of androgyny that would make a burka-clad Grace Jones look like a poster child for the gender binary. He didn’t just look like he didn’t care: I strongly suspect he actually didn’t care. About anything besides his songs, that is. It was a low key performance and a great one. And one that hasn’t been repeated in The District since.

Above you have Violator, my hands-down favorite song of 2007. It was released on an EP by the artist White Williams. His 2008 full-length Smoke knocked my pants off as well, and for a little while it seemed like he could be just the kind of indie act I’d follow till I died. It takes balls to name your breakout track after Depeche Mode, and skill not to look like a jerk in the comparison. Smoke’s lead single New Violence raised the bar even further, and a handful of deeper album tracks like Headlines and Route To Palm were brief mainstays in both my dreams and DC alt-fag parties like Taint. I was primed and ready to welcome the arrival of queer-friendly synth pop that seemed produced by a person and not a computer. But then the worst happened.

White Williams just disappeared. His MySpace blog was last updated in spring 2008. Pitchfork has a scant mention of his contribution to a charity compilation in January 2009, then nothing. A search of all the press releases in my gmail account proffered up the same. His former drummer Cale Parks released one of last year’s most overlooked albums (and catchiest tracks,) so I like to think that he would’ve at least dedicated a tour to Mr. Williams or something if the man had died. When people go away for good, even the forgotten ones, someone out there remembers it.

It’s so odd, in our current climate of musical oversaturation, when a buzz band just falls off the radar. When Animal Collective or the like even think about possibly recording a new track in the near future it makes headline news on every music blog in the country. But White’s just gone. Its refreshing in some ways to have an album stand on its own without all the hype and omnipresence that can make indie music so oppressive to follow in the first place. But I would hate to think that this low profile would swing too far in the other direction and we’d lose the guy forever.

So anyone out there have any info on what happened? Mr. Williams, if you’re reading this, I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

Goldfrapp’s biggest magic trick, though, was her ability to spontaneously shrink herself to the size of my thumb and parade around in a gray metal box. This happened several times during the show, in the middle of songs, with seemingly no rhyme or reason. I was initially thrilled at such an unexpected trick but it gradually grew irritating. Eventually I widened my field of vision and noticed that Goldfrapp herself had not shrunk, but the inconsiderate concertgoer in front of me, who must not have ever been to a concert before, thought it was ok to film long, long swathes of the show with her iPhone. I mean LONG swathes. Whole songs. And this woman was just the right height to ensure that when she raised her arms all the way up her camera was exactly in front of my eyes.

Can I ask an honest question to all the TNG Readers? Ok, then can I ask another one? Why do people think this is alright? The whole point of going out to see a show, versus just listening to the record, is that the performer’s natural talents are amplified by the energy of the crowd. A crowd, as crowds tend to be, that is made up of other people. This crowd is the reason that peopled don’t act like they are alone in the venue. When I listen to music at home I might be naked, or showering, or going number two or brushing my dog. But since I assume the people around me wouldn’t enjoy that behavior at a sold out public endeavor, I leave it at home.

Another thing about the live music experience is that it is by nature illusory. Whatever makes a show so special is virtually beyond capture. Have you ever heard a song at a show that rocked your pants off, and then watched the same thing on YouTube later and it blows? The sound is poor, the camera work shitty. It’s just not the same. So I know that people might want a souvenier, but buy a shirt or a poster. Sleep with a roadie and get crabs. Those are the kind of things you can hold onto. But filming a show just won’t do it, unless you are Jonathan Demme and in that case you probably have better equipment on hand .

Mostly, though, it’s just rude. Incredibly, awesomely rude. Having to watch a show through someone else’s mobile device, or even forty people’s mobile devices because they all seem to be lined up between you and the artist, is just the absolute worst. Would you like me to tap you on the shoulder for forty minutes straight, or whisper in your ear during the chorus of your favorite song? I thought not. So please, for my sake, for your sake, for the sake of the queen of England, just put your fucking phone down and enjoy the show. You have no idea how annoying you are.

Like an ex-lover that bugs the shit out of you because you care for them, I have recently been critical of Gay Pride’s faults because the core concept of our June holiday is simply indispensable. If it wasn’t paramount that queers everywhere had one week a year to celebrate the very idea of being gay, I wouldn’t care about all of our annual Bacchanalia’s glaring faults. So much of Pride’s irrelevancy to me goes back to our gay culture’s pervasive “hanged man” complex. We are suspended in so many ways, hanging limp from a noose of our own 20 year-old mass consciousness.

And since this column is called “The Indie Rock Fag,” you might’ve guessed that one thing I have ideas for updating is the music that gets played at the Pride Parade, and all throughout Pride Weekend. I can tell you for damn sure that I would’ve thrown myself off a high building if I had to listen to the likes of “I’m Every Woman,” “Bad Romance” or “Single Ladies,” whose level of gay overexposure is soon to rival that of Britney Spears’ pussy. While I concur that many people do love these songs, and they deserve their place, Pride might mean a little more to a wider group of people if they could just hear some damn music that they like.

So below are my picks for songs that deserve their rightful place. If you can imagine a group of angy shirtless hotties belting these lyrics out, or dancing atop a float, then I’ve done my job.

8. Sparks f. Jimmy Sommerville, “The Number One Song in Heaven”

While some songs are straight-up fight anthems, I’ve noticed that many become gay staples due to a general sense of exultance. While I prefer the version of this song without the vocal contributions of gay Bronksi Beat frontman Jimmy Sommerville, (because my boyfriend thinks he sounds like a children’s choir covering “A Different Kind of Love Song“) it scores points for sounding like the soundtrack to a million faggy first kisses or middle school dreams about what losing your virginity could sound like. It’s not all that clubby, but it makes you think that some really cool things could be on their way.

7. Peaches, “i u she.”

Peaches, that living embodiment of wanton queer sexuality, sings a lot about fucking. A lot. I will be lucky if I spend half as much time in my life actually fucking as Peaches does singing about it. This song does not stray far from topic, but it does have a nice message contained within. People might force you into boxes, but the choice about who and how you fuck is ultimately up to you. This is the ultimate antidote to people that think “bi now, gay later” is the only way it goes.

6. Pete Shelley, “Homosapien (Dance Version)

Uhh, Pete Shelley, bi frontman of The Buzzcocks, wants a “homo superior in [his] interior?” Wow. T.S. Eliot himself could hardly write such opaque verse. What do you mean, Pete? And what are these homosapiens you speak of? While I puzzle this out, I’ll just say that the fact this tune isn’t a fixture at every gay night, ever, is a travesty.

5. Of Montreal, “Suffer For Fashion.”

“If we gotta burn out, let’s do it together.”

Is there any better evocation of the mass hysteria that sweeps gay men when we get more than 600 of us in a room? The image consciousness, the body fascism, the ways we only relate to each other as surface beings. This song is way danceable, but I think that queer Of Montreal frontman Kevin Barnes knows a thing or two about the ways that we have to keep ourselves current just to stay visible. Can you picture a group of wretched couture queens singing this through the pancake makeup that drips onto their jeans with the beaded back pockets? I sure can.

4. Le Tigre, “Hot Topic”

One annoyance I have about Pride is that it doesn’t provide enough public acknowledgement of the people that got us to where we are now. And unless one of those outrageous drag queens decides to practice her simulated fellatio on Frank Kameny, I don’t see that changing any time soon. Le Tigre’s Hot Topic is  just a list of important women, queer or not, that deserve a thank you. The hot beat is just gravy.

3. Scissor Sisters, “Fire with Fire”

I really just wanna put this in the “fun” category and say its a gay arena rock fist-pumper and nothing more, but c’mon. As bombastic as this song may be, it’s hard to listen to it without thinking about the political battleground that contemporary queer life has to be. And though organizations like The HRC have their place on the inside, its way past time to be polite about our rights. So Jake Shears, any ideas of how to fight back? Oh right. Through our own damn ardency.

2. The Gossip, “Standing in the Way of Control.”

Beth Ditto, an overweight lesbian, probably knows a thing or two about the ways that the hegemony can make life difficult for someone that doesn’t fit the mold. I think that Gay Pride, at its heart, should be about showing the world that we are not content to simply stand back and be tossed around by exterior forces. This song, one of the all time best dance songs (in my humble opinion) also creates a great barrier between the queer world and “the way things are”And honestly, if Beth Ditto is our champion I think that control doesn’t stand a chance.

1. Twisted Sister, “We’re Not Gonna Take It”

Granted, there’s not a lot of depth to this song. But that’s what makes it perfect. Because we have two options, right? We can take it, or we can not take it. And if we need a man with Gerard Butler’s shoulders and Divine’s makeup to remind us of the right path so be it. There’s not a whole lot to say about this, but I would like you to picture something. Next year’s gay pride parade, instead of having 300,000 gay people smiling at the politicians and pundits that come out to woo us, imagine that crowd marching through the streets with our game faces on, screaming this at the top of our lungs. For three hours. In the places that that the straight people go. How content would we look then? It might be three minutes of depthless cock rock, but it’s on point.

Of all the frustrating technological mishaps I underwent in the recent Mercury Retrograde, nothing has been worse than my inability to transfer videos from my camera to my computer. Right now I’m sitting on some really awesome interviews with artists like The XX and Los Campesinos. The biggest loss, though, is the fact that I have two supremely gorgeous acoustic tracks from queer musician Chris Pureka — shot at sunset outside Arlington’s Iota— stuck on my damn camera with no ability to have people watch them. So until I can rescue those, I thought everyone might enjoy her new video.

Pureka’s recent album How I Learned to See in The Dark is a spare, dusty exploration of how a woman can sit down with a guitar and open her heart while sounding nothing like some of the more malodorous “folk” musicians that have given the genre a bad name. I don’t have much more to say about Chris at this time other than she rocks, her album is perfect for too-humid summer nights and I really hope to show her awesome videos to the world as soon as I can.

I guess hell is freezing over, or Adam Lambert got a Pitchfork vote of confidence, because I’m gonna start today’s IRF column with a question about Carrie Bradshaw: If Sex and The City was contemporary and it’s first episode was airing tomorrow, what do you think its gay character would look like?

I know more about the show than I like to let on, especially since its early seasons were more of an intelligent look at youth dating culture and less of of an unattainable, alternative universe lifestyle porn for delusional women and the men who love them. But last time I watched it it seemed so dated. Not just in its notions that a woman isn’t complete until she’s hitched, as that has always been an anachronism, but in it’s choice of gay archetypes. Stanford Blatch, the show’s most-featured homo, is a bald little mole in cashmere who stalks the upper societal echelons and counts a snarky turleneck monster (played by Mario Cantone) as his greatest enemy. I find it very unlikely that this character would be used a shorthand for gay in the year 2010. Instead, I think said character would fall under the increasingly pervasive umbrella of the indie fag.

I think it’s no secret that the dominant American culture these days is indie culture. Approximately 60% of last years film releases involved Michael Cera, Diablo Cody is an Oscar Nominee and Grizzly Bear has been featured in ad campaigns for Volkswagon and the lottery. Point being, we’re not a group on the outside. And as an obvious hipster homo, I’ve been very aware of the myriad ways that I’m now being catered to.

“I Want Your Love,” which we’ve featured prominently on this site, is an upcoming erotic film (or feature porn) which stars real guys in San Francisco with tattoos and body hair, and is shot with the wistful, graphic tinge of a butt fucking Belle and Sebastian video. And it’s somehow already being labelled as a Hipster porn. Until a couple years ago I almost never saw guys I was attracted to in film or TV, as buff hairless blonds don’t necessarily do it for me. Now I can find crush objects in locales as varied as the aforementioned film or the Queerty morning photo spread.

Dick pic wise, this trend was galvanized by Butt Magazine. But Butt itself is just indicative of this larger trend of a visual subculture’s rising to mainstream prominence. And mainstream prominence is conveyed through consumer power. So as people like myself continue to realize how underserved the vast majority of queer folks are, they will start publications and throw events and create clothing lines to remedy the problem. And then others will jump on the bandwagon and before you know it The Backstreet Boys and Keshas of this world will become cultural underdogs.

And god, how I would love that. Somehow, by virtue of the music I listen to and the clothes I wear (and my body type, the fact that I cycle, and a million other random signifiers) I have somehow gotten labelled a hipster. I’ll take this, because the flannel fits, but I’ve noticed there are very few people out there that actually call themselves hipsters. The term is bandied about by people seeking to disparage or dissect a phenomenon that, by and large, would’ve been dead years ago if it had only been ignored. There are always going to be people who brandish their musical knowledge or think they are cooler than you. Those people were around in the 1920s and if you think that someone won’t purchase their hoverbike as a fixie, you are sorely mistaken. It’s a relief to think that when the hipster trend finally plays itself out, the scorn of the masses will move on to something else and people like me will never have to hear the “H” word again.

In the queer community, I especially the think term has become a high order pejorative for anyone daring to question the decades old rituals that are only now becoming disbanded. Don’t like house music? You’re a HIPSTER! Wish that parties were a little more diverse? HIPSTER! Dare to have tastes, and to express those tastes in a social forum or complain when they aren’t met? HIPSTER! Like “irony,” the word no longer means anything. That’s why its space in the general lexicon is fairly guaranteed for years to come. As the distinctive few in Williamsburg who started the whole thing will move on, we’ll be left here selling and bashing and breaking down a phenomenon without a base.

The 1% of the population that gets off on being an outsider will lament the fact that something they held dear, like Nylon Magazine or PBR, has now become a fuel for the masses. And everyone else can just let the decade of the hipster pass and continue to do what they were doing, and to like what they like, without having to hear about it any more.

And for all the indie fags? At the very least, I can assure you that I’ll always fall for your bony hips and your plaid, and that I consider a discussion about the influence of Massive Attack on The XX to be a turn on. So when the backlash comes, welcome it. As soon as you’re out of vogue you might find your life a lot less annoying.

Going through the entire B&S catalogue at this point in my life had an unintended side effect, too: I had forgotten just how much queer content is laced through the early part of their career. I’ve never been able to enjoy anything post “Boy with the Arab Strap,” and even that album is pretty un-gay, so I’m keeping this list to everything between “Tigermilk” and “The Three EPs.” Feel free to suggest latter period songs in the comments and to let me know if I’ve forgotten anything in general. Thanks and enjoy.

9. My Brother, The State I Am In

“My brother had confessed that he was gay. It took the heat off me for a while.”

A veritable bible of formless ennui, the first track on B&S’ first record introduces a gay character in the first stanza. When our narrator’s brother stands up at his sister’s wedding with a sailor “friend” he comes off as being brave, but it might also suggest a hidden homo: the narrator himself. He says that the annoucnement “takes the heat off [himself],” a fact that lead my friend (and frequent TNG commentor Parker) to suggest that maybe the narrator’s listlessness is brought from being in the closet. He also marries a girl to prevent her deportation, but expresses no real affection towards her. So the brother is a definite and the narrator a possible. Either way, a pretty queer start to a great band.

8.  Hilary, If You’re Feeling Sinister.

“She was into S&M and bible studies. Not everyone’s cup of tea…”

Employing a looser definition of queer (see also Me and The Major) puts Hilary, the heroine of “If You’re Feeling Sinister” pretty squarely in our camp. Considering this whole track is about reconciling one’s internal uniquness with the demands of the church, it seems that Hilary has walked herself to death because she can’t fit in. The vicar employs a standard “take two bibles and call me in the morning” approach which probably isn’t going to help her. Stuart Murdoch’s music is so purely concerned with people on the outside, that it’s nice he has some empathy for those who might be queer no matter who they are sleeping with.

7. Judy, Judy and The Dream of Horses.

“The best looking boys are taken, the best looking girls are staying inside.”

Why won’t Judy get out of bed? It’s not clear exactly how she identifies, as she does it with boys and dreams about girls, but its clear she wants to be someplace else. When the boys you like are all taken, and the girls are staying inside (the house? the closet?) it’s not easy to figure out what you are after. Whether Judy wants to steal a horse and go someplace else, or just write a song about it that can make my pain a little better, we’ll never know. But I hope that eventually some of the best looking girls ended up in bed with her.

6. Mary Jo, Mary Jo

“The men you left for women, and the men you left for intrigue and the men you left for dead…”

What a tangled web this band weaves. Besides the fact that the last track on Tigermilk has its main character reading the book mentioned (and titled) after the album’s first track,  I often think of Mary Jo as a narrative cousin to Judy. They are both in album-ending tracks named after them, and both seem to be on the fence about what and who they want. Mary Jo has come out of some tramatic experience stronger for it, but part of that involved leaving some guy for another girl. Whether she’s still with that girl or not I always, who knows. But I enjoy that a song about overcoming hardship could end on such an overtly queer note.

5. The Major, “Me and The Major.”

“He remembers all the punks and the hippies too. He remembers Roxy Music in ’72. “

It’s not capital G Gay (See also number 8) but Me and the Major has the general effect of finding out your homophobic gay uncle used to be The Indian in the Village People. The song is all about generational clash, but it shows more of the effects on the older generation than the younger one. The Major, whose solution to “kids these days” is to throw them in the army, goes slowly insane over the song’s running time. He clearly remembers all the demimonde of his youth, and that includes Roxy Music in 1972. Bryan Ferry’s look during the release of his first album is so over-the-top glam androgynous that it makes David Bowie look like he’s not from the future. That whole era was one of the gayest in musical history, and if The Major was around for it he might not be as straitlaced as you would first think.

4.  Jane, Lazy Line Painter Jane.

“You will have a boy tonight. Or maybe you will have a girl tonight.”

Let’s just say this: No one will accuse Lazy Line Painter Jane of being a prude. The song opens with her on her knees in the mud actively trying not to please someone, and it blows up from there. This girl has a lot of sex. She suffers from Thrush and has to pick up free STD literature to ascertain which “lotions and potions” will best cure what ails her. But what ever she “hopes that they will see” from all this sexual empowerment it’s good to know that doesn’t relegate her attention-getting to dick. Will she have a boy tonight, or will she have a girl tonight? What a high class problem. Sleeping in bus stops? Less high class.

3. Everyone, Seeing Other People.

“You’re gonna have to change and you’re gonna have to go with girls. You’ll be better off, at least they know what they’re doing.”

While this song’s plot is evident in its title, the genders of the people involved sure aren’t. There are very few pronouns used in this song. The only clear one we get is quoted above. They’re making out, and the other boys are lining up to get involved. Is this a hetero sex party? Some teen experiementation among male friends? If going with girls is a change it either means you have a girl who has exhausted all male options, or a boy whose ready to stop fucking around w/ his friends and find someone willing to do more than just give handjobs at sleepovers. Can you guess which option I prefer?

2. Sebastian, Put The Book Back on The Shelf.

“Sebastian, you’re in a mess. You had a dream they called you king of all the hipsters. Is it true, or are you still the queen?

Well that one’s pretty clear. Besides being an early indicator of that unavoidable hipster/homo connection, this song is one of the most overtly gay male Belle and Sebastian characters around. Not much else to say besides the fact that being the king of all The Hipsters isn’t really something to strive for, and that being the queen is pretty impressive. I mean, have you hung out with Hipster fags? It would take a pretty stalwart soul to rule them.

1. Lisa and Chelsea, She’s Losing It.”

“Who needs boys when there’s Lisa around?”

Finally a success story! Lisa meets Chelsea in school and immediately knows that something isn’t right. She’d been abused, her coffee tastes like soap and she doesn’t want to feel abused. Lisa is interested but doesn’t want to make things worse. So tada,an easy solution: Go to another school where “the boys go out with boys and the girls with girls.” Besides the fact that I would’ve loved that school when I was 16, this song has one of the most unequivocally happy endings of any B&S number. If being denied your true desire is making you crazy, find the thing you really need and you’ll find happiness. I like to think that Lisa and Chelsea are together to this very day.

There’s no shame in the fact that even the most individual, free-thinking folks end up looking, acting or thinking like a good deal of others. So the fact that I and every other gay man is on the inexorable path from looking like a lumberjack to looking like a tablecloth shouldn’t be surprising. But it did get me thinking: we’re almost 5 months into 2010 and some clear new trends have developed amongst us.  So without further ado let’s take a look a look at what expired alongside old man 2009 and what’s been left instead in the dark smelly recesses of baby 2010′s diaper.

OUT: La Roux
IN: Robyn

For good or bad, it’s unlikely that Electro (and it’s more organic brother, Dancepunk,) will stop being the sound of  alternaqueer dance parties for anytime soon. The genre’s reliance on dance beats and strong female vocalists put it squarely in the canon of mainstays like Grace Jones and Debbie Harry, though it can frequently lack those singers soul or displays of emotion. Awesome as La Roux’s “Bulletproof” is, the ubiquitous track can still come off as being written and performed by an mysteriously autonomous “Text to Speech” application.  Swedish export Robyn has a new CD coming soon, and early singles like Fembot and the insanely awesome “Dancing on My Own” seem poised to be as inescapable this summer as pool parties and that gross slimy feeling in your buttcrack after you walk a couple blocks. Robyn can summon a lot of genuine heartbreak or brio when she needs to, and I think that emotional honesty should make her an omnipresence, at least for a couple months.

OUT: Glee
IN: RuPaul’s Drag Race

Not that I know much about either of these shows, but facebook tells me that the story of a scrappy smalltown a capella group has been supplanted by (I guess) something involving drag queens as the show that everyone and their damn mother talks about all the damn time. The discourse on Glee seems to have shifted from exaltant to defensive/explanatory at the start of their second season, which leaves another show for bars to hold nights around and for me to be confused by. Considering I’m just now making my way through Buffy I can’t say that I know much about gay TV. But I am relatively sure a reality show starring RuPaul, aired on LOGO, won’t be winning a Peabody anytime soon.

OUT: Poppers
IN: Weed

All that pride I used to feel at being the few, the proud, the gay stoner has been subsumed as part of a nationwide trend of people take a certain piece of Bob Dylan’s advice on what everyone must get. While poppers still have their utility for tightasses, and coke has too many party connotations to every really go out of style, it seems to me that pot has risen up and made a claim to being the number one homo narcotic. Perhaps its because it enhances the dramatic nature of the current queer club music (see above) or because it makes the performance elements of so many dance parties a little trippier to watch. Who hasn’t seen a 7 foot tall drag queen rollerskate around in a monster mask, eating a chocolate cake, and thought “This makes me wish I was stoned?” Or maybe its because everyone’s realizing how fun sex is while baked. Either way, expect Cyprus Hill to start doing the Pride circuit this summer.

OUT: HRC
IN: GetEQUAL

While the Human Rights Campaign has been falling out of favor for years through their betrayal of the trans community, focus on the A-list and general appearance of getting nothing done, they haven’t had much new competition spring up in some time. Recently, though, radical activism group GetEQUAL sprang up with a dedication to taking “bold action” and staging high profile acts of civil disobedience. I think this is great and I welcome anyone who realized that the road to equality is rarely paved in dollar bills and dinner parties. However, I think that having a man on the proverbial inside is a tremendous resource, and Joe Solmonese is probably more a slave to politics and senatorial fickleness than many give him credit for. So to have folks on our team, from both sides of the radical spectrum, is pretty awesome.

OUT: Adam Lambert
IN: Me Putting My Head in the Oven

This is less a trend than a personal decision, but let it be said now: I’m about three Queerty articles away from taking a Hedwig nap. That’s all.

“Brothers,” the album’s 5th track, is an unusually tender ode to straight male love. Whether about a literal sibling, or just some particularly treasured friendships, the song makes a couple pleas toward the importance of guy-on-guy friendship that doesn’t resort to any fake name calling or bro-ish shoulder punches: “I can make it if I know I’ll see my brothers… I can play xbox with my brothers…It’s a wild love that I have for my brothers.”

I find this song to be braver than a million explicit dance floor come-ons or bravado-fueled bangers. For one, how many straight guys do you know that can talk about love for another man without getting sheepish, or couching it in frat boy side hugs? A band gets only an hour every two years or so to say something, so I appreciate Hot Chip’s principle songwriter Alexis Taylor taking a chance at losing their “Over and Over” fan base. (And believe me, if you’ve been to a Hot Chip show you know a lot of their crowd doesn’t seem like the most sensitive guys around.) Even better, though, it’s nice to see a resurgence in unabashedly emotional dance music.

The current wave of electro/dance punk/whatever is pretty icy. La Roux’s Bulletproof builds walls in its very chorus and title. I walked out of a Ladyhawke show after 20 minutes for how hard it is to engage with her music, and The Faint and Dangerous Muse prove singlehandendly that no amount of eyeliner or heteroflexible angst can make you feel anything above your hips.

Those are bands I genuinely like, but they stand with some of my favorite all-time dance songs in that they usually express a shouted sentiment that can be encapsulated in once sentence. Like Goldfrapps’ “Rocket” (You dumped me so I’m putting you on a spaceship,) !!!’s “Must Be The Moonlight” (Sex can be frustrating) or The Gossip’s “Standing in the Way of Contol” (Move the fuck out of my way, control), there’s a reason these songs are among the top-played in my iTunes library and it has nothing to do with how they make me feel.

For contrast, take LCD Soundstystem. For a band whose earliest dance floor hits were exclusively about name-dropping and hipster ennui, their subsequent tracks wrap so heart much around their synths and cowbells that they could theoretically score a DeBeer’s commercial. 2007′s “Someone Great” creates a shuffling funk ode to an unnamed, but-probably-a-miscarriage tragedy and “All My Friends” is the most racous paeon to aging since my great aunt’s colostemy bag surreptitously gurgled a few bars of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” at a chinese buffet.

LCD’s newest album “This is Happening” caused some consternation when its first single, “Drunk Girls,” was released. A call and response number, in the tradition of “North American Scum, the song was a lot of fun, and made a definite statement, but it wasn’t the kind you pondered on a road trip at night. Luckily, the album is now streaming at the band’s website and I feel a lot better.

Opener “Dance Yrself Clean” not only features a subtle Kermit The Frog impression (“sometimes friends are mean”), but takes a full 9 minutes to build to the heart of the disintegrating relationship that is sullying our narrator in the first place. People have many different reasons to go out dancing, and it’s often as much about shaking off our last failed make out as it is finding a new one. 8 tracks later things appear to be fixed with “Home,” a wholly unabashed homage to The Talking Heads’ “Naive Melody.” I like to think the reconcilliation is due to the sentiments’ in the middle track, “I Can Change,’ which is a painful journey through the most difficult of all personal transitions.

There is no shortage of emotively singing men in this world, and some of them are unparalled in their talent. Conor Oberst or Bon Iver have built careers around naked sentiment, but you would never hear them at a club. Alexis Taylor and LCD’s James Murphy have created some really special music by reclaiming the kinds of emotion that a guy can express in public, and they ways that they can express it. Taking that into account with their already queerable hits like “I Was a Boy From School” and “Us V Them” it’s no wonder that these bands’ live shows so closely resemble a gay club.

I had some time to kill on the bus recently, and I was getting sick of iPhone tetris, so I made a mental list of the five best live shows I’ve ever seen. (St. Vincent, LCD Soundsystem, New Pornographers, Animal Collective, Royksopp, w/ an honorable mention for Yelle, in case you’re wondering.) And I realized that one factor united them. They came with their own fairly unique sounds, visuals and stage setups, and from different genres, but the common uniting factor is that I was baked. Like a potato. We’re talking staring at my hands, clutching a glass of water, halfway to Amsterdam stoned.  These are all bands I could spend hours listening to alone in my room or on headphones, but I know that their live shows had a little something extra that made them special. But did it come from them, or from what I smoked beforehand?

Pot and music have gone hand in hand since our cave-dwelling ancestors first haphazardly threw some green leaves on a fire and muttered “Ook never before notice how pretty pteradactyls sound. Ook now download greatest hits while wishing Ook was advanced enough to understand Flintstonian puns about ‘rock’ music.” The entire black light industry was based around this simple fact: Music, on it’s own, is art. Music plus drugs, however, is an experienc. The world around you becomes a show that complements the band itself. The way the lights and music combine with the room and the weather and your state of mind to make something both greater and more illusory than the sum of its parts.

The marketability of rock concerts is predicated on their inability to be reproduced at home, and the one-time nature of the band + pot experience means that it can never happen quite that way again. You get a show and a memory. Two for the price of one. It’s like the difference between a Renoir and a hologram of two wizards fighting a dragon. The Renior will stand for eternity as a beautiful work of art, but it might not make that little 6 year old in you say “Whoaaaaa!”

Need is a powerful word, but there are already several chemicals whose indispensability in my life goes far beyond the realm of want. I need to take antianxiety medication to not walk around all day feeling like I left a stove on somwhere. I need coffee in the morning so I don’t wake up on the couch in my pajamas at noon from an 8:30 a.m. “resting my eyes” session. THC, however, functions as more of a spice than a life support. It’s a fun addition to a Sunday afternoon, but I never lie awake at night jonesing for that one last spliff that will bring me into the blessed realm of sleep. The only place in my life where I actually feel I need it is at rock shows.

The unfortunate side effect of this is that I get squirmy at the prospect of seeing a show normal, without the benefit of anything to smoke or sip beforehand. And if I do fortify myself, its never guaranteed to go right. Too little weed can make a Beach House show seem like a nap. Too much and I’m staggering to the bathroom, trying to avoid an ignominious (though fitting)  loss of consciousness during Neko Case’s “Star Witness.”

There are enough areas of my life where the prospect of becoming an adult loom large and frumpy, wagging a finger at my silly, college-holdover bad habits. Even though music might not ever sound the way it did when I was 16 — Belle and Sebastian, then vs. now, is like comparing a sunset to a fried egg in terms of emotional impact — I hate to think that concerts may someday stop sounding like they did when I was 23.

Washington DC, for those who do not live here, is actually two cities in one. The first is the storied home of American politics, where our country’s future is decided in gin-soaked backrooms, where ambitious young men and women work their way up from congressional page to US Senator, where old boys in seersucker haunt the tony streets of Georgetown with a woman who might or might not love them for who they are. As depicted in countless books and movies, this is a city of wide, tree-lined streets, of Republican watering holes filled with the white and preppy, a city where one is as likely to be caught outside without a polo or pearls as Buffy is to be in a graveyard sans stake and cross. A city that exists primarily in Capitol Hill, and that fades into thin air about two meters above M street.

I live in the other DC. Since I moved here in 2006, I accidentally stumbled upon a much more pleasant mode of life in our nation’s capital. Though the Woo Girls and White Hatters still exist in loosely defined Adams Morgan/Mt. Pleasant/U Street/Columbia Heights/Shaw mega-hood that I spend the majority of my time in, for the most part my experience in this city has been a bunch of interesting people doing interesting things. Compared to, say, San Francisco’s “Interesting People doing things that seem interesting if you’re on mushrooms” feel, or New York/Brooklyn’s “Interesting things being done by people who would be interesting if they dropped their superiority complex” milieu, I felt immediately comfortable in DC for one simple reason: It didn’t have a scene.

While travel articles tend to focus on things like K Street’s swank coke n’ Euro lounges, or The New U St.’s cavalcade of post-college mouthbreathers, it was generally understood by most that these are about as appealing as a Snapple colonic. Instead, I tended to feel relatively unmolested in my choice of nightlife. I could dip into things like our live music culture, gay bars or indie dives without feeling pressured to identify one way or another. It was an easy way to live, and an appealing one. When someone would ask me what DC is like, the only real way I could describe it was “Well, its, uh, like DC. Just come visit and find out.”

Not that I’ve been here long enough to fully understand the ebbs and flows of our city’s long and storied social culture, but it appears that our lowkey Camelot is over. DC is heading toward a full-on hypercolor hell of Ladyhawke remixes, exclusive dance parties, and more spandex than a pack of Bea Arthur’s dental dams. In short, with the new DC Scene comes the new DCnsters.

In the blink of an eye, every weekend seems to be chock full of over the top theme parties where the jeans are tight, the fags are coked up, the straight guys all have ‘staches and every girl looks like a cross between Tegan and  the cute waitress from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. This is not the city I moved into. More importantly, this is not Brooklyn.

I never thought DC to have the kind of Second City complex it now seems to be evincing. I guess I was wrong. Personally, I would’ve moved to New York if I wanted to move to New York. It’s not that far from here to Williamsburg and I’m perfectly happy to visit Metropolitan or The Eastern Bloc on my own time. I hate that the idea of updating DC’s nightlife always goes back to making it someplace it’s not.

It’s like any TV show ever where a girl gets a makeover to be popular and then realizes she was happier when she was just herself. DC might be months away from its own kind of Jesse Spano drug freak out, where I tell DC it’s changed and I’m worried about it, and then it cries hysterically and says its”I’m fine, leave me alone”  before collapsing into a pile of its own cherry blossoms on a marble bathroom floor.

Though I have my opinions about which cultural forces are behind this shift, they’re irrelevant. A lot of people put a lot of time and energy into creating the projects that turned the tide, and I think the last thing anyone needs to be doing is de-incentivizing entrepreneurialism. This city could even use more of it. However, the product of said entrepreneurialism is that most paradoxical of social beasts: The dreaded INDIE MAINSTREAM! (Please shout those last two words to yourself as you read them.) It’s what happens when so-called indie or alternative culture grows into the very thing it sprung up in reaction to. While there will always be Michael Bolton and Applebees, the lower rung of “normal” now contains, say, Yeasayer or Aziz Ansari or a number of other truly talented artistic figures that have now come to define a massive segment of the DC populace that wants to claim these figures as there own. It is a great irony when a enough individuals come together to create a cult. (and ok, go ahead and comment how that’s what TNG is doing. I’ll get into that in a later column.)

Sure, DC is getting a fair amount of national media attention, but we all know from middle school that there are two kinds of attention — the good kind and the bad kind. In the DC I know an untold number of creative, hardworking individuals work to shape the city into a place where they themselves feel could comfortable. The end result of that, combined with the fumes of the aforementioned other DC, is a city where intelligence is a valued commodity. I’m not saying that Cafe St. Ex should start holding Pythagorus lookalike contests, but there is a certain loss in DC’s glorification of the most vapid and obnoxious parts of “Hipster” (whatever that still means) culture.

In short? There’s a lot of obnoxious parties and obnoxious people coming to define D.C. at this moment. I never dreamed that, between the twin poles of the preppy and the hardcore, this kind of technicolor mold could creep unchecked. When I moved here, DC was a city with so little style that substance could reign unchecked. And now?

What do The Gossip, Grizzly Bear and now Vampire Weekend have in common? Well, yeah, since the latter’s keyboardist Rostam Batmanglij came out you would be correct if you said “they are all bands with out, gay members.” But the real answer I was looking for is that they are some of the highest-profile and most-loved indie bands playing in America today. And unless I am sorely out of the loop, they have hardly been greeted with a loss of fans, dropped sponsorships or boycotts by the religious right. The earth beneath your local record store did not open and swallow passerbies with an assortment of writhing, pink tentacles. In fact, it would be pretty safe to say that no one really fucking cares.

Gay fans care, of course. And I care.  I think there are very few things better for us than an out, public figure. Say what you want about Ellen, Adam Lambert or Will and Grace, but the fact is that gay people in the living room every week will do a lot to inure straight people to our presence. And for a guy like me, an out indie musician just provides a solid, talented role model to show that there are a lot of different ways to be successful while still being honest about who you are.

But gay fans don’t always factor into the careers that bands’ managers and record labels have laid out for them. Fear of being labelled “a gay band, ” and thus being forever relegated to the dusty bargain bins of the world’s gay bookstores and Universal Gears, usually leads to a fair amount of trepidation in stepping out of the public closet.

So it makes me quite happy that Batmanglij has came out, in a pretty low-key way, at the height of his career. Besides the fact that his Discovery side project was a fairly unavoidable last summer, Vampire Weekend are about to tour behind their highly anticipated, and favorably reviewed, sophomore album. In DC they are playing a massive venue that has recently hosted such mega acts as Kathy Griffin and The Pixies. So Rostam’s declaration is not a late career publicity stunt or a Presets-style ambiguous  flirtation. It’s just a well-known musician telling people he’s gay.

I am not going to be so naive as to assume that there was no label or managerial input given in this matter, but the fact that it was done at all should bode well for gay acts in the future. The logic is pretty simple. Being gay is normal. Forcing acts to to hide their sexuality just reinforces the idea that it is not normal. More out musicians equals more examples that dick-sucking doesn’t equal career-killing (as long as it’s not done in a public park, Mr. Michaels) and then this leads to more gay public figures and the cycle repeats.

I also enjoy that Batmanglij has not launched into any heavy duty “I’m Gay, Bitches!” fan pandering. Instead, he’s just integrated his existing career into being gay. He wore a rainbow guitar strap on Saturday Night Live and has told Out Magazine that the VW song “Diplomat’s Son” and Discovery’s “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” (though sung by Angel Deradoorian) were attempted gay anthems.

Of course, I have previously taken Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste to task for similar actions. I still believe that the reach of musicians should be used to further “the cause” (whatever you think that it) but the more I encounter bands with confirmed gay members that are not allowed to talk about it, the more I appreciate the simple advancements of someone who is just out. Culture can be a powerful form of activism. So Ed, I owe you an apology.  If you and Batmanglij decided to have a bed-in for ENDA I’d be psyched, but if you didn’t I’d probably understand. For now, at least.

But there is one thing that Batmanglij could do do forever ingratiate himself to me, the TNG readership and the indie fag population at large: He could guest DJ our Homo/Sonic dance party on April 3rd. Rostam, I know you’re in town that day. What else do you have to do after your show? Ok, a lot of things, probably. But none of them will be as fun.

The Indie Rock Fag is Zack’s Thursday music and culture column. Please be nice to it.

Washington DC’s got weddings on the mind. As our courthouse doors flung wide open yesterday for couples with matching genitalia or gender identities to tie the matrimonial knots (hopefully around their matrimonial bedframes,) I’ve been left, again, with the realization that a real, honest-to-Fred-Phelps wedding is something I will actually have to consider in my life plans.

But I know that just because I can do it doesn’t mean that I’ll do it like everyone else. As much as I chuckle at the prospect of my best male friends traipsing around in purple taffeta groomsmen dresses, I know that my relationship still lies largely outside the conventions of society and so my eventual wedding should do the same. I don’t (necessarily) mean that I will coast down the aisle naked on a KY slip n slide, but I will make damn sure that my wedding both has my own tastes reflected and will not bore my guests to the point of hanging themselves in the bathroom with a lacy “Zack’s getting married” gift bag.

I think the easiest way to do this is to make sure that they aren’t bombarded with four hours of “We are Family” and “I Feel Good” in lieu of actual personal musical choices. At the same time, there will be older relatives in attendance and a first dance to the likes of Crystal Castles or Battles might send dentures and pacemakers a-flying. So, below, are my suggestions for romantic songs that one can slow dance to at a wedding while not feeling like you’re stuck in the preview for a Nora Ephron movie.

(Four quick notes: These are slow-ish dance songs, not drunk revelry songs. They are not gay or gay themed, as I’ve covered that already. I’m leaving out the obvious Book of Love because Stephin Merritt sings it and he can even sound sad when he’s happy. And yeah, I’m not married but do think that these songs would fit the kind of wedding I’d like to have.)

1. Talking Heads, “Naive Melody (This Must Be The Place.)”

“You’ve Got A Face With A View..”

This was my favorite love song even before I saw the above Stop Making Sense version where David Byrne dances with a lamp. I think that this song, an ode to the simple pleasure of living with someone, is all about the perfection of combination. The way that the moog combines with the lyrics, the joy combines with the everyday, and a perfectly articulated message of live combines with the wordless “oohs” at the end to just let you know that someone’s happy. Of course, I’d have to dress my husband up like a lamp for our first dance, so maybe it’s not for everyone.

2. New Pornographers, “Go Places.”

“For the glue to dry on our new creation…”

A lot of songs on this list are here because they fit my criteria for why I’d want to permanently join my life with that of another person. And this one distills it down to its essence, which is that you should add just as much to another’s life as they do to yours. This song reminds of nothing less than an outstretched hand, trying to convince the almost-believer about the awesome things ahead. And goddamn if this list isn’t getting a lot soppier than I meant it to be.

3. Kate Bush, “Hounds of Love”

“Well here I go…”

This song resonates with me in several ways, including my occasional yells of “It’s in the trees! It’s coming!” at the moment of sexual climax. While some people get into relationships with the ease of a hotdog down a hallway, or a gerbil in Richard Gere, there is something about the abandonment of self that is utterly terrifying. Instead of ignoring that fact with some Billy Joel ivory-tickling, I respect song like this. For all the people with vestiges of cold feet at the altar, it’ll say to you “Yeah, I know this frightening. But you might like it if you just let go.”

4. Flaming Lips, “Do You Realize”

“Instead of saying all of your goodbyes…”

The Jewish tradition of breaking a glass at the moment of marriage is not an exaltation, but rather a reminder that there is no joyous event in this world that does not run concurrent with someone else’s sorrow. This is also why most of my childhood birthday parties were held at cemetaries with a birthday cake that said “tick tock” in vanilla frosting. The musical equivalent of this sentiment, Wayne Coyne’s constant repetition that “everyone you know… will die” is actually pretty in place with a love song. It’s just a reminder to live every day to your fullest and let the people around you know how you feel about them.

5. ELO, “Strange Magic”

“Nothing really worth quoting here…”

While this is about my favorite song ever, I will acknowledge that there are two very unromantic things about it: The first are the LSD overdose lyrics and the second is the looming spectre of Jeff Lynne’s bearded, bespectacled visage. But when you get past those this song is just so gorgeous. And seriously — strange magic is the best damn kind of magic. Tell me you can’t imagine swaying to this with your newly betrothed.

6. Colours, “Hot Chip.”

“There’s nothing in this heart but me…”

Umm… your spouse should add color to your otherwise monochrome life? You should be confident in the things you have to offer before getting into a relationship? Ok, basically I just have a huge soft spot for this song. I’m not even entirely sure it’s a love song (it’s very much centered on the singer, not the object) but I’ve yet to listen to it without a big smile on my face. I like to think that the “bursts of color” are the kind that illuminate a life not lived alone.

7. The Lightning Seeds, Pure

“I’ve found a place I’ll never leave…”

While this one too is tinged with some sad elements, it’s also the kind of song that’s wanted to make me fall in love since before my balls even dropped. Love, and love songs, have some complications but there is something to be said for soundtracking a wedding with the sentiment that what lies ahead can be as light and uncluttered as a perfect pop song.

8. Neon Indian, Should’ve Taken Acid With You

“Touch the stars and the planets too…”

In case you haven’t picked this up, I feel really strongly that my marriage (when I embark on it) should not be the staid arrangment of “You’re Still The One” or “Just The Way You Are” but rather the beginning of a technicolor adventure that will make everything before it seem as prosaic as an episode of “Cougartown.” This Neon Indian track boasts the twin benefits of using a shared trip as a pickup line, and understanding that the line “melt our tongues and become uglued” holds as much romance and possibility as all 69 Love Songs combined.

I’m the kind of guy who always wants something else. When I’m eating pizza I’m thinking about Burgers. I’ll wake up in a guys bed and wonder what his friend’s body was like. So logically I want to eventually live someplace besides DC. What does this town have going for it besides natural and architectural beauty, my job, my boyfriend, and everyone I know and love? Nothing! Since I have too much family in New York and I grew up in Chicago, the only general area of the country that still has any mystique to me is the West Coast.

Like a transformer toy in briefs and an American Apparel henley, the Californian resources of a massive gay population and readily accessible alternative culture combine to create something intoxicating: The West Coast Homo. I’ve been in search of this pot-smoking, Granddaddy-loving, flannel wearing, dog-owning, chest-hair-having laidback adonis for the better part of four years. Not because I want him (in fact, I doubt he actually exists) but because I someday want to be him. I See California as the simultaneous home and endpoint of gay culture, like life as we know it was born when an LA beach party fucked a seedy San Francisco sex lounge and the offspring is just trying to claw its way back home.

So I used a recent ten day trip through Long Beach and San Francisco as a chance to figure out what alternative culture does or doesn’t exist in these places, and to evaluate if this supposed West Coast homo is something I might actually ever be interested in becoming.

The first thing I learned is that Long Beach is not actually in LA proper. So, to be honest, that shot the intended arc of this story to hell. So while I would love to write about excess and overly manicured people and places you can only drive to, I didn’t spend a lot of time in Los Angeles itself. The extent of my visit was spent at a place in Silverlake called Akbar, where I neither got a chance to hit on with Zachary “Sylar” Quinto (who is rumored to be a regular on days when I’m not there) nor was extremely impressed with the music selection. The first hour of perfection, where the DJ spun bands like Hot Chip, Animal Collective and CSS, died an inglorious death as soon as the night picked up. Oh well. Two disapointments in one evening, what can you do.

But I did learn that Long Beach seemed like a much more interesting place to live. Discounting the usual universal types like twink, muscle daddies and “your sequined back pockets are making me dizzy,” the sodomites I encountered appeared to be split equally two camps: First, a gay rockabilly revolution that would give Morrissey a four-day boner and secondly a tragic lot of wannabe showbiz fags whose proximity to Hollywood created some sincere (and sincerely blush-worthy) moments at a karaoke bar.

The latter were like a live version of the worst American idol episode you’ve ever seen. I’ve seen dedication to Karaoke before, but it somehow seems different when you’re a stones throw from the place where such shower-singing-dreams come true. The former were a group of guys I would’ve checked out on Chicago’s punky Belmont St. when I was 12. If horizontal stripes, long shorts and bowler hats are your turn-ons I can tell you now that your Mecca might not be as far as you think.

And in between those two poles were that thing called “normal gay life” that most of us are more a part of then we want to admit. Within it I happened to find a group of guys that were into things like The Raveonettes and tofu scrambles. Does it mean that the culture is more divergent from DC’s staples of Lady Gaga and crab ravioli, or that I chanced upon a group of people that suited me? I prefer to think its the former, as it means there is one more city out there that I can daydream about moving to on bad or boring days. Either way, these guys were as close to “The West Coast Homo” as I will probably ever find and I’m happy to know they’re out there.

San Francisco, however, is a whole different ball game. I’ve only been there three different times and I’ve gotten a completely different view of the city everytime. First, when I was 22, it seemed like a paradise of potent weed and equally potent blowjobs, and I came away smitten because I wasn’t there long enough for a single objectionable thing to happen. My second time, last year, found me instead in a beautiful waiting room. The most interesting people you could ever meet sat frozen in time at a coffee shop or in the park, living life to the narrowest while brewing amazing ideas that would never see the light of day.

This time, though, I don’t know what to think. On one end, I love the city. The food, the parks, the weather, all seem designed to lure me in like a fog in a mousetrap. But on the other hand, its jarring to realize just how many California cliches are alive and well there. If I had taken a shot for every time I heard the phrases “Prius,” “Sustainable Agriculture” and “bikram yoga” I would make John Bonham look like Miley Cyrus. I often can’t tell if I’m talking to people or collections of interests. The gay life too seems so intergrated into the rest of the city that speaking of “alternative” culture seems like a waste of time, because you’re either on Castro Street living the platonic ideal of gay life (or in SoMa getting fisted,) or your just another San Francisco resident that happens to like dick. I really can’t tell.

The end result is that the sum of the city’s whole is more than the parts its made of. The appeal of the place is divorced from any one element of it, and I can’t really even quantify it any more. The best I can do again is just see it as a destination and acknowledge that I’ll probably spend a good amount of time in my life fighting against the little dinosaur brain in my pants that slouches toward the skycraping rainbow flag to be born.