Photo: Dakota Fine
DC is a seriously weird place. Take a walk through Downtown on any given day and watch while the city wags its giant dick of power at you. From the Washington Monument to the Capitol building, it is impossible to ignore the absolute cockiness of American brute force. The downside to all this is an abject humorlessness that pervades the entire district during business hours.
We dare you, however, to keep up with the coke snorting, beer swilling, and orgiastic fuckmongering of your average Capitol Hill staffer. They may not have one ounce of style, but they achieve the sublime through intensity. Go to Dewey Beach, Delaware, in the summer if you must find out for yourself. A lot of these rabid DC narcotic hounds go there to copulate frantically on the weekends. We found it exhausting, to tell the truth, until we realized there were enclaves of normalcy in the armpits of the city.
None of the neighborhoods that define the city’s culture, like Georgetown, Adams Morgan (save for a very few oases), Dupont Circle, Capitol Hill, or Downtown, offer much more than really expensive drinks to the tunes of Hoobastank and Velvet Shitvolver, a veritable Applebee’s culture that gives us the shudders. You will never go anywhere that lays as much credit on cover bands as Arlington, Virginia. It’s sickening.
That said, there is no way a pressure cooker like DC doesn’t boil over into brilliance at times. Go-go is fucking fantastic. We don’t care if you grew up on Devo or Morrissey, go to a DC go-go show and you will experience something. If you’ve never been to a Fort Reno show—where on any given weekend, you could roll up to a free Fugazi/Dismemberment Plan/El Guapo/Q and Not U show and sit on the grass with hundreds of people hiding their tattoos under blue button-downs, you’ve missed out. DC has given us all the things you already know about but cannot be unmentioned. C’mon, the Bad Brains, Minor Threat, Fugazi, Ian Svenonius, the whole Riot Grrrl scene; unmistakable talent of the most innovative sort.
These days, DC is finding itself again in little ways. One of the great things about powerful, dynamic cities is that there are areas that are always ripe for reinvention. Chinatown and its eastern neighbor, Atlas, are bringing the dirt, grime, and scumbaggery back to the city with too much polish on its shoes. Sticky Rice (a Richmond transplant), the Red and the Black, Rock and Roll Hotel, and Palace of Wonders stand in perpendicular opposition to the countless power-suit-and-TJ-Maxx-sneakers happy-hour joints littering the region. Rattler, New Rock Church of Fire, and other bands are leading a vaguely Guns-N’-Roses-era Los Angeles-like foray into gutter-drunk rock.
There are few things more satisfying than changing the face of a stone imperialistic God. DC is that God and there are many chiseling at its dour countenance. It’s a good time to be in the thick of it.
