Escort, Darcy James Argue's Secret Society
World Financial Center Plaza
Saturday, August 25

Better than: Screaming "Disco sucks!" in a crowded Studio 54.

"Disco snuck up on America like a covert operation," wrote Alice Echols in Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Dan Balis and Eugene Cho's Escort—a 17-member live disco fantasia—likewise snuck up on New York's dance scene. But it took an inauspicious party argument to plant the seeds of Saturday night's feverish fusion of Darcy James Argue's Secret Society with its disco equivalent—the finale to New Amsterdam Records' adventurous Ecstatic Summer Festival. "I am one dumbass," concluded Argue of the night he found himself touting Chic to Balis as disco's single great act.

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via Great GoogaMooga

Daryl Hall and John Oates. Check out more photos from GoogaMooga

The Great GoogaMooga
Prospect Park
Sunday, May 20

Better than: Eating anything in my fridge.

Vineland. Field Day. All Points West. New York is littered with the acrid corpses of past festivals, a perpetual tease giving hope to the most jaded music fan that maybe this year, someone will get it right. Figuring out why New York hasn't had a long-running festival has been a parlor game in the music industry for years, but the Great GoogaMooga, the new food/music hybrid festival organized by the people behind Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, seemed like a front-runner to break the curse.

In theory, it's a great idea: Collect 75 food vendors from disparate parts of New York, book energetic groups like disco revivalists Escort and retro-soul group Fitz & the Tantrums, and turn Prospect Park into one giant tasting menu. The best laid plans...

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Escort.

This weekend Prospect Park will host Great GoogaMooga, a festival that brings together some of New York's best restaurants and musicians from New York (disco technicians Escort; bouncy Brooklyn rockers Fort Lean) and outside the city (Saturday's headlined by the hip-hop polyglots The Roots, while Sunday will be closed out by Daryl Hall & John Oates). How should you plan your day so that your foodstuffs are well matched to the on-stage entertainment? Here's the Sound of the City/Fork in the Road guide to suggested pairings for this weekend.

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Tami "Making Friendz" Hart.

For New York City, 2011 was the year local musicians proved that RSS feeds didn't kill old-school ideals like "scene" or "community." Every great band seemed to come tied to three or four like-minded bands you could love for the same reasons, often on the same bill. Maybe we read (and wrote) enough trend pieces to believe it ourselves. Maybe bands are just using Facebook connections to write the narrative before writers could. Maybe retromania has led us to think everything is back in a big way?

Don't get too excited. Bloggos still continued to rally deep and hard around the cleverest, firstiest mash-ups of hypester runoff micro-genres (good luck in 2012, A$AP Rocky, Light Asylum, CREEP and Caveman). But while so many jockeyed for positions and pixels, larger stories emerged that felt refreshingly like the street-level phonecall-and-flyer scenes of yore. As, I wrote in SPIN the new hip-hop fraternity of Das Racist, Mr. Muthafuckin' eXquire, Action Bronson, Despot and a newly keyed up El-P represent the most energizing force in New York indie-rap since Def Jux's heyday. And as I wrote in the Voice, a beercan-ducking, sweat-gushing, feedback-obsessed swarm of new pigfuck bands have been laying waste to 285 Kent, including The Men, White Suns, Pygmy Shrews and Pop. 1280. Often pushing the boundaries of what modern metalheads can play and wear, there was a downright onslaught of forward-thinking, critically acclaimed extreme metal releases (Liturgy, Tombs, Krallice, Hull, Batillus), which helped turn New York into the most important metal scene in the country for maybe the first time ever. Hell, if record labels still had the money to fly people out here, they'd be swarming!

Below, the 2011 edition of our annual Yes In My Backyard mixtape—this year's encompasses 18 tracks, over nearly 80 minutes—which collects this year's greatest music from New York City.

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Has it really been three summers since we swooned over Escort's "All Through the Night" video? The clip, which cagily synched their "If you wanna sex me, give it up" sentiment to the Muppets, led our own Rob Harvilla to write, "Jim Henson is doing the Hustle in his grave" (a compliment, we think). But soon afterwards, they disappeared off the scene entirely. Which is kinda hard when you're a seventeen-piece disco orchestra. Turns out that Escort, helmed by keyboardist Eugene Cho and keys/guitarist Dan Balis were shoehorned into a room somewhere, recording a full-length. And while its tantric pleasures remain unknown as yet, this week we did get a taste of the band's new single, "Cocaine Blues," which is an upbeat, tingly, fun time. In anticipation of Escort's show at the Highline Ballroom tonight, we caught up with Cho and Balis to see what took so long.

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So NYC disco non-revivalists Escort -- recall their Muppet-assisted clip for 2007's "All Through the Night" -- have returned with their own tense, swaggering version of "Cocaine Blues," putting their own spin on the long-mutating track by "making the groove harder, adding more hooks, fleshing out the production with horns and strings, and putting an aggressive vocal that gives the song immediacy," as member Eugene Cho explained to Nick Sylvester this week at thirteen.org, explaining both what's retro about their sound and what isn't. (No "bombs" in their set, for one thing.) The 12-inch is coming soon, but the free radio edit will certainly tide you over in the meantime:

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Any YouTube file with the keywords "escort,""video," and "all through the night" is gonna get a remarkable amount of Web traffic, but the viral success of Escort's "All Through the Night," "a Technicolor blast of dance-floor dynamite," wasn't due to the clip's perviness. It was, as you likely recall, the singing Muppets:

For this week's dead-tree version of this publication, Brumpster Harvilla hung out with Escort one week into their "fame" to find out the story behind the Hensonized story:

Irvin Coffee, a jovial filmmaking friend of the band who's worked on The Chappelle Show and a documentary called The Beauty Academy of Kabul, sat down with eight DVDs' worth of raw Muppet material and bashed it out. "Discounting all the technological bullshit, it took three days," he recalls.

Harvilla also went to see Escort at Stuyvesant Town Oval and came face-to-face with one member of Escort's self-appointed septuagenarian street team:

Everyone in the Oval is hella smiley, onstage and off, from the pogoing young 'uns to the twentysomething beanpoles carrying Other Music bags, to the nearby dancing queen who informs me several times that she is (a) 78 years old and (b) really excited. "If they can bring this out in me—a 78-year-old lady!" she marvels. "I haven't felt this good in ages!"

Perhaps it was "All Through the Night"'s lyrics?

When you wanna sex me
Give it up
If you wanna freak me
Give it up
You don't have to take me out
Just pick me up and turn me out
Give it up

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Down in Front: Muppet! at the Disco