I heard that Club Rio down on the Scottsdale-Tempe border played alternative on Thursday nights, so longing as always for the Keller experience, I went. It turned out it was foam party night. Hanging over the center of the dance floor was a machine that would pour foam onto the crowd at regular intervals. The signs boasted that the foam could reach five feet, but I waded in and was completely enveloped so it must have been about 8 feet deep. Actually I kind of panicked a couple times 'cause all I could breathe in was soap bubbles.
It was basically like a sudsy version of MTV's "The Grind," with hiphop and rapcrap playing and a lot of white guys trying desperately to prove that, despite appearances, they were not actually white. I was in a good mood and just laughed it all off. I mean, poor white befuddled America trying so hard to be something it's not, trying to be "cool," something which will be forever out of reach. And then all the consequent bad vibes that emanate from these frustrated white boys--all the hostility and feigned aloofness and rejection of other human beings in order to get one step closer to cool, it all adds up to one big brutal culture with no one having a good time. But if you zoom out enough it's just funny. So that's what I did.
But inside I realize I'm still pretty torqued about this. The Disturbed concert proved to me that even with an alt crowd you can still get a bad hostile vibe, so I dunno where this comes from really. This coming Friday I'm going to see Seether and Trapt and we'll see how that goes.
Posted by Alan at June 14, 2003 02:51 PM