Monthly Residency: Dawn Golden and Rosy Cross (Week 3)

Oct 18, 2012 by     3 Comments    Posted under: Features, Monthly Residency  

I usually write these at night, which is usually when I feel the most desire to sit in front of my computer with headphones on and zone out for a while, but today I’m out on my back porch and it’s like 5:30 and it’s a clear day and you can see the mountains across the valley pretty clearly which is rare. I moved to Los Angeles a few months ago from Chicago where I was born. I’ve lived here before, but it was a little over 6 years ago and it was under very different circumstances, and I did not like it at all and always said I’d never come back. Isn’t it strange how that happens? Isn’t it strange how certain places absorb certain feelings? It took coming back a few times on tour to realize that LA isn’t such a bad place and in fact it’s a place that has places inside of it that I really like alongside a lot of places I really don’t like too much. I feel like that’s a good sign of growing up. Being able to say ‘I don’t like all of this, but I don’t have to. I only have to like parts of this.” That goes for almost anything these days. Nothing/no one/no place is ever exactly the way I would have it and that’s perfect in and of itself. I will find my pocket in this place. I will find the things I love and I will hold onto them with everything I have. I will sew them together, carefully cutting off the excess until I’ve made a perfect world to live inside. I guess recognizing the impermanence of people places and things is one of the beauties of being alive. Nothing has to be forever if you don’t want it to be.

Speaking of cutting off the excess, last night I went down to the Echoplex to watch internet hip hop people perform and it was something impossible to sum up in a general description. The bill was a few people I wasn’t familiar with and then Lil’ Debbie, Kitty Pryde and Riff Raff.

Later, I had found out that Kitty Pryde‘s DJ was my friend Nick from Hot Sugar, who is also a really great internet person and someone I’ve been in contact with for a few years now and have found to be enjoyable every time we’ve hung out. I called Mad Decent and had them list Me and Megan for the show. We showed up a little too early.

What we walked in on was basically everything I hate about my generation and made me embarrassed to be the age I am in the place I was with the people who were also attending. It was basically a white kid wearing a neon green poncho yelling the words ‘swag’ and ‘ham’ and ‘rare’ repeatedly while his friend played sub par bay area youtube rap. Then a few real rappers rapped and weren’t special and then Lil Debbie did something that resembled trying to freestyle while on a fuckload of xanax, except she wasn’t freestyling, she just couldn’t remember any of her own lyrics. It was again, embarrassing, but she only held out for two songs before saying something like ‘you motherfuckers aren’t feeling me, I’m going to go get high’ and walked off stage to minimal fanfare.

Kitty Pryde came out on stage next. I was interested in seeing what her set would be like but at the same time was still cringing from the previous two hours of the show and kind of just wanted to go home. To my surprise, she opened the show with exactly what I needed to hear.

“Hi, I’m Kitty Pryde and I don’t know anything. Hi, I’m Kitty Pryde and I don’t even care about hip hop and I don’t even know anything about hip hop.”

It was genuine and funny, and juxtaposed against Lil’ Debbie lip-synching the words ‘Bitch, I gotta ball’ it was a huge breath of fresh air. She played the rest of her set and had a friend blowing bubbles onto her and Nick was swaying behind the dj table not really doing anything, but adding a good creepy vibe to the show and Kitty apologized after almost every song and talked about Justin Bieber’s dick and it was messy, but it was honest and highly entertaining and I guess I see what all the fuss is about now. Also, Nick shot off a confetti cannon and that’s never not exciting.

We watched like two songs of Riff Raff and then left because Odd Future showed up and it was loud and there were more people on stage than in the audience and that always makes me feel like dying. Not to say there wasn’t anyone there, there were just a lot of people on stage. Add it to the list of things I don’t understand I suppose.

I didn’t really mean for this to turn into a concert review, and I feel like I just got a little too chronological, so I will try and clarify why I told this story at all. With music and the world being the way it is, and the internet allowing as much anonymity as it allows voyeurism, I feel like we’ve wound up with a really blurry version of what is real. I don’t think that it has as much to do with perception as it does with peoples own lives getting less and less real. Or maybe it is our perception. I don’t think I can make that call really. What I do know is that I take notice when something is honest. When someone presents themselves in an unabashedly true way. When someone’s art is who they are and not who they want people to think they are. We’re all trying to find something on this earth to carve our names into, to leave behind something that represents who we were. Let that be real. Speak lots about what you know and speak nothing about everything else. There’s a lot to learn if we would all shut the fuck up sometimes and listen to someone who shut up and listened to someone who shut up and listened to someone who shut up and listened to someone who shut up and listened to someone who shut up and listened to someone…

- Dexter Tortoriello

Week 1 | Week 2 | Week 3 | Week 4

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  • Terry

    key phrase…….When someone’s art is who they are and not who they want people to think
    they are………
    well said…….

  • pyrex

    your points about how everything is getting less real and how people’s art should be about who they are and not who they want you to think they are great but you’re way wrong if you’re implying that kitty pryde is an example of someone who’s art is real and about who they really are. you quote her as saying she knows nothing about hip-hop and not caring about hip-hop, which is just her lying to a crowd to make them have lower expectations for her performance and to make her seem apathetic about her own art and give her an aura of being too cool and hip for anything which consumers today seem to like in their idols, in this era where artists now like to brag about how their song/video/album only took them a couple of hours to complete and how this somehow is supposed to be impressive when it used to mean a person was lazy and shouldn’t be respected for doing this. kitty obviously knows a lot about hip-hop if you look at her beat selection from her earlier work, her references in lyrics and even in her interviews where she name drops hip-hop artists she has been a fan of through the yrs. she also obviously cares about hip-hop since she now always talks about how she is trying to write better songs and lyrics and gets upset when ppl hate on her songs. i mean this is a girl who started out having everyone thinking she was 13 yrs old when in reality she was 19 and yet you want to act like she’s real and genuine in her art. sure she throws in truths every now and then thru social media and lyrics and she’s realer than rick ross but in the end her art is mostly about a well crafted image that is far from her reality and people like you are easily fooled and soak it all up because you see an everyday looking white girl who really just fakes innocence, naivety, and kawaii behaviors to get fans.

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