Girl Talk/Max Tundra/Wiz Khalifa @ Williamsburg Waterfront, Brooklyn 8/23/09
Graeme Flegenheimer
Yesterday there was a free outdoor Girl Talk show in Williamsburg, so naturally it was a nice, quietly controlled time where everyone wore an appropriate amount of clothing. Just describing that show sounds like the punchline to some unimaginative hipster-hating zinger, but there it was, and it was real, and it was about as insane a scene as legally permissible on state property. To JellyNYC's credit, the lineup was perfectly picked and paired: Max Tundra's Twitter jokes, prodigal keyboard/synth-pop, and songs about finding love via social networking sites warmed a crowd that seemed only to half-know him, and Wiz Khalifa's party-popping hip hop served a smart middle course to prep for the hybrid hooks Girl Talk was loading onto his laptop (let alone that Wiz's "Say Yeah" is one of the many samples on Feed The Animals' "Don't Stop").
Then it was time for Gregg Gillis, playing to a park that stopped admitting people an hour before his set and saw its massive lines for admission splinter into ill-advised attempts to scale the perimeter fences (which ended in at least three arrests, from what I saw). There was a line of state patrolmen keeping people from rushing Gillis's table head on, but still plenty of people onstage dancing. The music stopped twice: the first time Gregg fixed it quickly and also revealed the inner workings of the Girl Talk laptop software magic ("Brooklyn can I get real with y'all? My backstage pass hit the space bar and the music stopped."), the next was because the dancing nearly broke the stage. It was fixed, then it started raining, just enough to convince the Jefferey Dahmer via Bedford Ave looking bro to my left to mercilessly strip off his tank top and anchor a big pocket of not-so-dry-humping danceheads. Perrrrfect. We had photographer Graeme Flegenheimer there to show you a bit of what I'm talking about.
Next week the series ends with Grizzly Bear/Beach House/Vega.
Posted at 2:13 PM by amrit in Concert, Photo
Tags: Girl Talk | Max Tundra | Wiz Khalifa
Has he decided if he's Daniel Faraday or not?
Score = 0