The Rawness

As I mentioned before, I went to see the Cool Kids last week.  And it was really the first time where, at 33 years old, I actually felt old for a bit.

I got into the Cool Kids from music blogs and their Myspace page, and once they got that Rhapsody commercial I knew I had to act fast and see them before they blew up and their shows got huge and impersonal.  I’m big into catching acts before they get too big, because otherwise their shows become bigger, more expensive and more impersonal and are never quite as good again.

So we show up to Studio B in Brooklyn and I’m shocked at how young the crowd looks.  The show is 18 and older.  We get those wristbands that mark us as 21 and over.  As we’re on line my boy Grip talks about seeing Rakim recently.  The little young white girls behind us on line are increasingly leaning into our conversation in quiet awe and trying to hear the conversation.  They talk to each other (a little too loudly) about how much they know about rap, an obvious ploy to impress with cred.  I started talking about a Nice and Smooth show I saw recently, and how I saw them before 18 years ago.  Then these white girls come up again and seem to really be trying to impress us with their hip-hop knowledge.  They looked so young and hipsterish that it really caught me off guard that they’d be so into 80s hip-hop rather than Fall Out Boy.  That’s when I realized that the hip-hop I grew up with is to today’s hipsters what late ’70s New York punk was to them in 2001: a long gone golden era of creativity that they mostly missed out on the first time and want to research obsessively and recreate today.

I started checking out the rest of the line and there were all these young looking hipsters wearing fat gold ropes, baggy acid wash jeans, leather bombers, and Yo MTV Raps! shirts.  These kids had to be 5 years old or younger when this stuff was out the first time, yet the astounding thing was how accurate the outfits were.  One thing about retro movements is that they try to dress in an old style, but it ends up being filtered through modern fashion sensibility.  For example when the electroclash movement was big a few years back, it looked more like a parody of new wave fashion than an authentic recreation.  Or when you see a modern movie that’s supposed to flash back to the 80s, but the track suits and shorts are being worn baggy the way we’d wear them today rather than outrageously tight and borderline homoerotic like they used to be worn back then?  Same goes for modern movies set in the 70s.  Actors only go so far, but don’t go all out for fear of being embarassed, so they have a big collar and some bellbottoms, but shy away from the truly garish and ugly fashion insanity that dominated the era.  So the accuracy of the retro stylings these kids had really impressed me.