Adult Problems - I Sat Through Battleship With Dances With White Girls And Mark Ryan From Supertouch

The internet needs content. Without content, we’re left with substance and pornography and a significantly more emotionally and physically trying work day. I don’t want you to have to cum like some sort of animal or think like some sort of human animal, I want you to be entertained. I also want to promote the artists that amidst the cultural wasteland I feel are still worth giving a shit about.

I ran into Frog aka Dances aka Dances With White Girls at cartoonist Nate Turbow’s birthday party. I told Frog I wanted to write about him but, on principle, didn’t want to do a straight profile. He looked at me over his sunglasses in a dark club and said,

“Let’s go see Battleship.”

We decided, for the sake of diversity, to take Mark Ryan from Supertouch. If you haven’t realized that New York is a pretty neat town, you probably maybe should.

Dances was late to the screening on account of JMZ train wildness combined with cab drivers being surprisingly 1993 in 2012. Mark and I, both being almost hysterically neurotic about film start times, paced in circles until the Halal cart next to us caught fire from the friction and we had to stop. Eventually Dances arrived and we went to the 6:10 showing of Battleship. The duration of the Sorrow and the Pity later, we left the theater, shaken and bored to our core. Fuck. What a not-very-good movie. And crazily enough, there were, like, dozens of people in that theater and there is no way they were all writing for music blogs.

All three of us agreed that Battleship was maybe the worst movie we’d ever seen. Dances pronounced it “worse than Pearl Harbor” and the whitest (despite Rihanna and a couple other tokens) action movie he’d seen in years. Mark said that it was the sort of movie that just made him feel bad about “everything”. He said it was “the people-who-go-to-Ludlow-Street-on-the-weekend of movies”. I, being a generally positive person, saw a couple pluses: I appreciated the high elderly mortality rate in a mainstream action movie and, having seen Armageddon repeatedly on whippits, was deeply grateful that it was AC/DC rather than Aerosmith for all the “Let’s kick alien butt” parts. It's a game of inches, you know? But we all felt like we’d taken part in something ugly and shameful, like we were prison guards or late night comedy writers. I feel bad that I made them take part. Sorry, Dances With White Girls. Sorry, Mark Ryan from Supertouch.

To make it up to these two stalwarts, I want to tell you guys about some of the opposite-of-Battleship-esque, end-of-empire soul crusher-y that they’re up to. The darkness is so real and enormous that I’m glad they rage against it in their separate and distinct ways.

Dances just came out with a video for his newest track, "It’s About The House." I fucking love this song. I know exactly jack-shit about house music (except for that Dirtbombs cover album…which I dig), but I know what music moves me. When I DJ, I mix "It’s About The House" out of Fad Gadget and it works just fine. The video was directed by LastNightsParty’s Bronques, who took a break taking pictures of boobs in bathrooms to shoot a video both way hep and massively life affirming. It’s also totally safe for work. Seriously, watch it with your mom. Stop being such a wimp. Or get a cooler job. “You should be the president of your own life.”

Mark Ryan, who a severely high friend once swore up and down was “the first guy in hardcore to wear Adidas” (I chose to believe it), is the singer for Supertouch. They, along with Sheer Terror, make up the entire “Actually, I’m glad they got back together” contingent of reunited hardcore bands. They’ve also distinguished themselves by making new music that equals their initial output. They recently upped the stakes by adding Chris Daly of Texas is the Reason/Jets to Brazil/Too Many Voices on drums. I saw them on Record Store Day at Generation Records and it was perfectly grand. I should also add that throughout the entire 5-million-hour run of Battleship, Mark was on his iPhone looking like he was going to physically expire. I tried to give him an M&M, but I think he was choking on his own tongue. I can’t wait to see Rock of Ages with him.

So there you have it, people who read opinions on the internet. Babylon is still burning and Mamon got my $40.50. I think Dances summed up the market that makes Battleships run best when he said he DJ’ed radio hits for money sometimes because he “likes clothes,” but that he eventually had to stop because he was buying new clothes to justify the money he was making DJing music he wasn’t really feeling. The monster eats itself, but there’s still the monster. Battleship was even worse than you can imagine. Don’t even think of liking it ironically ‘cuz irony is a dead scene. Only house music and hardcore can save you.

Here’s the Dances With White Girls video, a live video of Supertouch covering Agnostic Front, and an unmastered Supertouch song from the forthcoming album. And follow Dances on Twitter. My only sources for news are the first five pages of The Economist in the bathroom, Ta-Nehisi Coates at The Atlantic, comic book blogs, and the running arguments on twitter between @dances and his pal, @slutlust. I’ve come to the realization that that’s pretty much all I need to get by.

Dances With White Girls - "It's About The House"