They will play your House of Vans, serenade your New Museums, climb around your Bowery Ballrooms. But LA-based dream-punk brothers No Age always find time for the little people, headlining your skate shops, your auto-parts-store attics, your Market Hotel opening ceremonies (RIP). They will do so again tonight, as the just-announced quote-unquote secret guest at Williamsburg's dearly beloved DIY space Death By Audio, before the duo runs through an Eastern string of all-age shows. Pterodactyl and the Zulus open the $10 bill. And please, kindly, observe the management's request and don't line up outside before 8pm. DBA also stands for Don't Be an Asshole.

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@UCBTheatreNY/Twitter

​Saturday night marked the opening of UCBeast—the Upright Citizens Brigade's East Village outpost, located at East Third Street between A and B—and among the people offering up monologues that evening was one Ian MacKaye. According to friend of SOTC Andrew Krucoff, who was on hand, "Ian could take any suggestion and quickly run it through his Google mind search to pick a club/bar/venue space with same name, and roll a story from that." Among the stories offered up by the DIY legend: the tale of Fear's 1981 Saturday Night Live performance, which was full of slam-dancing and general chaos and which resulted in overheated New York Post pieces overestimating the damage. A clip of that 30-years-old-this-week performance by the LA punkers after the jump. (That's apparently MacKaye yelling "New York suuuuucks!" at the four-minute mark, by the way.)

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The New York pop outfit Lavalette has among its members New York hardcore stalwart Mike Dijan, so perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising that its first single is a cover of the 1986 track "Malfunction" by scene titans the Cro-Mags. Although don't expect the remake to be all snarling and angry; Lavalette calls itself a "journey into the world of pop with a punk/hc attitude," and indeed, this take on the track seems to be more inspired by the goings-on in Dr. Luke's mansion than it does the happenings at CBGB back in the day. Lead singer Rebecca Haviland's a bit overwrought on the verses, and the "no, really, it's a malfunction effects" on the breakdown are a bit obvious, but the way the chorus blooms is absolutely satisfying. The original's below, in case you need a reference point.

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Willie Davis

It's surfing the crowd, not skating the crowd

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There was a lot of energy at yesterday's 4Knots Music Festival, and some people decided to use it to propel themselves above the crowd—to middling results. Here, thanks to the crack shooting efforts of photographer Willie Davis, are a few notable shots of people engaged in the once-again-popular act of crowdsurfing, that storied practice of getting to know one's fellow concertgoers (or at least their outstretched hands) while ensuring oneself a better vantage point than the rest of them, if only for a few brief moments.

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Stephen Slaybaugh

Bob Pfeifer.

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Cleveland Confidential Book Tour, moderated by Luc Sante and featuring Cheetah Chrome, Mike Hudson, and Bob Pfeifer plus Eric Davidson
powerHouse Arena
Saturday, April 9

Better Than: Watching the East River burn while sitting in a swank DUMBO loft.

There must have been something in the water in mid-1970s Cleveland that can account for the city's knack for spitting out the blistering bands it did. In fact, there was: the layers of crud and steel mill runoff that float atop the Cuyahoga River actually caused it to flare up and ignite several times, most notably at the tail end of the '60s. The Cuayhoga River Fire in 1969 proved to be the spark for the formation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water Act of 1972, but no amount of legislation could protect the citizenry from what was bubbling up in the warehouses and tenements along the river's banks.

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I was introduced to hip-hop/r&b collective Turquoise Jeep a couple of weeks before Christmas, when a fellow SOTC contributor recommended Yung Humma's breakout "Lemme Smang It." I expected to listen once or twice and then move on, but a month later, Humma's trademark "Mmm" is still stuck in my head, and his decision to rhyme "smash/bang fusion" with "cooch contusion" continues to astound. Thankfully, I'm not alone. The song's accompanying music video has tallied more than 1,350,000 YouTube plays, while dozens of fan videos line the sidebar. In December, they released their debut album, Keep the Jeep Ridin' (aside from "Lemme Smang It," our favorite cuts include "Fried or Fertilized," "Cavities," and "Sex Syrup"), and tonight they open for Big Boi at Atlanta's Center Stage. In an email exchange, we talked to Turquoise Jeep founding member and "Lemme Smang It"-featured rapper Flynt Flossy about the Jeep's history and direction.

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On top of our growing 2010 year in review coverage, we've asked some pals to help out, too. Below, Pitchfork/Status Ain't Hood writer Tom Breihan looks back at the year in hardcore.

OFF! at L.A.'s 6th St. Warehouse. Photo by Sean Peterson.

​Let's talk for a minute about this idea: Hardcore in 2010, in a lot of ways, has become the white suburban skate rat's version of the blues. The parallels are there if you look for them. And this year has afforded all kinds of opportunities to contemplate the genre again, as its just had one of its most fertile periods--with new records from OFF!, Trash Talk, and more--in a long, long time. Both hardcore and the blues are intense, direct, basic forms, both created by people who didn't have a whole lot else going on in their lives. You can recognize either one from a mile away, and hardcore's hyperspeed two-chord blare is as durable and distinct, in its way, as the 12-bar chord pattern. Within hardcore, plenty of bands-- Converge, say-- do Stonesy/Hendrixy things with the genre, pushing it in all sorts of directions. And actually, those restless experimenters were there from the beginning; think Bad Brains or Big Boys or X. But hardcore doesn't rely on that sort of experimentation. Hardcore records aren't typically judged on how far they push the genre forward; they're judged on how completely they inhabit the form. If a hardcore band can hammer their style hard enough, if they can play with fury and urgency and a vague sense of danger, then they're a good hardcore band.

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​Because why the hell not, we guess. You've got to give it to Steven Blush--between giving away 911 songs that didn't exactly belong to him and pulling both the legendary Dag Nasty frontman Dave Smalley and "Avenue A-skinhead-turning-notorious-author Laura Albert," a/k/a the infamous J.T. LeRoy, for a panel discussion next Wednesday at the Strand, his promotional campaign for the expanded reissue of American Hardcore: A Tribal History has hit heights usually not attained by humble music historians. Or really anybody. They even made a convincingly faux-hardcore flyer for the panel next week:

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​We mention the above since all week we've been sort of tormented by Steve Blush's decision to post 911 free hardcore MP3s to his website, in celebration of the second edition of his great book American Hardcore: A Tribal History. Because, on the one hand, free Articles of Faith! But on the other hand...free Articles of Faith (sad emoticon). Blush includes the disclaimer: "COPYRIGHT HOLDERS: I will delete your tracks at your request," and refrains from making the obvious point, which is you'd be hard-pressed figuring out to find a lot of these guys, let alone pay them. (Anybody know where the members of All White Jury are right now? Anyone?) You'd also have difficulty finding a lot of this music for download, legal or otherwise, anywhere else. Which I guess is where next Saturday's New York Punk & Underground Record Fair comes in:

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Would you use this bathroom? Photo via Viceland Today

​After CBGB's unspeakably vile bathroom went the way of the rest of the erstwhile punk venue, the truly immortally foul New York rock bathrooms mostly moved east, across the river, taking up unfortunate new residence in Williamsburg's myriad concert/communal living spaces. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most trafficked ones have tended to be the most vile: Glasslands, the Market Hotel, and perhaps worst of all, the Silent Barn. Luckily (for us, that is), some desperate videographer so desperately needed a place to shoot a music video last week that he agreed to clean the Silent Barn's ancient, flypaper-riddled bathroom in exchange for being able to shoot there. "Years of being shipped against my will to cut-rate sleepaway camps where my quiet and chubby nature had relegated me to the position of 'latrine swabber' had prepared me well for this moment," writes Matthew Caron. Then he posted the video:

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