My rough life as a groupie, Or how I only break my glasses at awesome concerts

For me, it's the end of an era.
The glasses I was wearing when the photo above was taken were more than 5 years old.
I bought them after my last pair met their untimely demise when someone crowd-surfed onto my face during the NOFX set at 1999's installment of the Warped Tour.
For purposes of self-aggrandizement, I'll point out that they were purchased before thick black frames were the height of emo hipness, and that I stuck with them even when that genre sank to depths of incoherence and lameness previously thought impossible.
By a conservative estimate, during those five years they helped me see more than 120 concerts with greater clarity, and without incident.
Since I've always thought that the most basic joy of live music is the physicality of the crowd, that's no small potatoes.
Which isn't to say they weren't slightly the worse for wear.
Through five years of rowdy shows and various bonehead moments, they'd taken enough beatings that they struggled to stay straight on my face, or even to stay on at all.
On Friday night, they took their final plunge.
Fittingly enough, they died in a mosh pit at Friday's The Situationist International concert at The Continental, which was the most punk fucking rock thing I've seen in years.
Let me back up a little to put the show in perspective.
Though I've been a music nerd since middle school, I was never really friends with musicians until I came to NYU.
So while I spent an inordinate - some might say unhealthy - amount of time listening to, thinking about and discussing bands, I'd never been party to the process in any way.
That sad fact abruptly changed last September, when my new roommate Pablo arrived at our Lafayette penthouse and deposited his drum kit beneath our spiral staircase.
Before I knew it, he was banging away with surprising prowess while fellow roomie Solomon riffed variations on the bassline from "House of Jealous Lovers" and resident madman Matt did offensive things with a keyboard.
They sensed chemistry. I sensed an impending headache.
Now I know that what I was mistaking as aural abortion was actually the gestation process that all music requires.
Solomon and Pablo had both been in bands of varying seriousness before, so they knew how it worked; Solomon even played first-chair upright bass in the New York Youth Symphony, which is as rock 'n' roll a credential as you can get.
Before long they'd found a lead singer and started in on the long process of finding their creative niche in this big ol' city.
The travails of musicians who want to create collectively have been so extensively documented that they are beyond cliche, so I won't discuss their battles over their band name - International or Internationale? Do we want people to think we're Communists? - or their struggle to find a guitarist with the chops necessary to rock with them.
Nevertheless, being their friend and house mate gave me a new and better perspective into the at-times-torturous process, and a much greater respect for all musicians. Except for Creed. They still blow.
It's brought me a surprising amount of happiness to see the band refine its crisply rhythmic, brashly hooky sound and begin to build a citywide reputation.
Even though I don't like everything they do, I take pride in being privileged to observe them do it.
At one of their first shows, in a state of rather sodden disappointment I muttered to a mutual friend that The Situationist International was a shitty band. "Yeah," he countered. "But they're our shitty band."
Several months on from that acoustically challenged gig, it's my unexpected pleasure to say that they're no longer a shitty band at all.
Since they can inspire a mosh pit rowdy enough to shatter my cherished specs at a hole like The Continental, you might say that they're already a rather good band.
I'm glad that I'll get to continue to see them fulfill their potential.
When I get new glasses their bright future will come more fully into focus.

Let's chat about Lady Sovereign

It's not just an incomplete familiarity with grime that makes me want to call her the female Dizzee Rascal. She's works melody into the harsh structure of the genre in a similar way, and she has a similar knack for slang; her flow has the same sort of whathafuck quality, although she's much easier to understand initially.

I can't wait for more tracks from her forthcoming LP Cheeky to leak. Of the ones that are floating around, "Sshh" is probably the best - the squeaky, barely-there half-rag-time piano figure is an incredible hook in itself, but on a more general level the song works because it demands to be listened to both lyrically ("A little bit of SHHH for me") and sonically. That piece of greatness is followed by "Chi-Ching," which has been pretty extensively blogged about. Natch, the two singles are the best. I can't find a good-quality version of "Boys and Girls," but the staccato orchestra that bleeds into the badonkadonk bass is great. It's certainly dancier/more garagey than anything Dizzee's done, in a good/maybe it'll break the states/ha! kind of way. "Sad Arse Stripper" is a rip on UK popflop Jentina, and it fucking owns her, which isn't too hard because Sov's ninety billion times the wordsmith she'll ever be.

Oh, did I mention she's an 18 year old white girl, all of 5'1'', who also has a quite good song called "Midget"? Which effectively blurs the line between Dre-ish g-funk and Dizzee-like post-apocalyptic crunk, while making lemonade out of genetic lemons?

Peep the good shit ya'll.