Ah M.I.A., it just wasn't your year, was it? Photo by Rebecca Smeyne.

​In 2010, Vampire Weekend and Arcade Fire both had #1 records. LCD Soundsystem, Spoon, MGMT, the National, M.I.A, and Sufjan Stevens all had albums debut in the top ten. Kanye West joined Twitter. Drake started a riot in New York. Converse opened a recording studio in Brooklyn. M.I.A. went to war with the New York Times. Pavement reunited. Juggalos went mainstream. From our vantage point, this year in music was one of the most lawlessly entertaining--purely ridiculous, even--in a long, long while. So in the spirit of the deluge of year-end lists even now beginning to rain down upon us (don't forget to vote in Pazz & Jop!), we figured we'd look back on our ten favorite storylines of 2010. They weren't necessary the biggest, but they were the ones that SOTC had the most fun with, and the ones we cared most about.

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The door at Coco66, circa October 26th.

​When last we checked in with Greenpoint's Coco66, the club had been raided in the midst of CMJ, shuttered for the crime of having 350 people crammed into a 75 person capacity venue. The venue first told us that "we were misinformed by the NYPD" and that they "didn't have to close at all"; later, that story changed to them taking "couple days off and make some renovations to just kind of move forward and become a better venue with more space for people." Whether this was a genuine statement or the words of a club trying to comply with a NYC Department of Buildings complain in a hurry ("a couple days" stretched to a couple weeks at least), we never quite ascertained, but the club has been closed--even for non-musical activities like brunch--since October. But according to Brooklyn Vegan, they've been open as a bar since this past Tuesday, and for the first time since October 25th, live music is on tonight's schedule.

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Last Friday night, in the midst of CMJ, cops raided the Greenpoint venue Coco66, shutting the venue down for the weekend and necessitating a hasty week's worth of construction to get the place up to code. On Thursday, the police hit Santos Party House, using months-old drug charges to shutter the popular venue on the eve of Halloween weekend. And on Saturday night, north Brooklyn's 171 Lombardy was hit, as cops arrived in the middle of the Pelly Twins and Todd P-presented Mischief Night concert there (featuring the Smith Westerns, Dom, and new SOTC crushes Sweet Bulbs) and broke the party up. Luckily, the show found a new home at the Silent Barn, and Dom went on there in the venue's kitchen, circa 4 a.m.

Still, that makes three in a week--four if you count the West Village's Love, which was reportedly shut down recently as well. Was 171 Lombardy part of a pattern of potentially Halloween-fueled, stepped up nightlife enforcement by the NYPD? Or was it an isolated incident, business as usual at a venue that is only quasi-legal to being with? Promoter Todd Patrick--one of the people behind Saturday's show--leans toward the latter. "These three shutdowns are a suspicious coincidence," he told us, "but I see a lot of evidence that they originated from initiatives by three very different agencies within the police, and under very different circumstances." One man's conjecture, but no promoter is more active in Brooklyn than Patrick is. The rest of his take:

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Yesterday, a manager at the beleaguered Greenpoint club Coco66 promised us that despite a police raid on Friday that momentarily closed the venue, they were reopening at regular capacity this week--"we didn't have to close at all," they told us. But this morning, we noticed that every show booked this week at the space seemed to be cancelled or, more accurately, and in the words the club itself, "moved to a different venue." Huh? We reached out for clarification and later received this message from Josh, the club's manager:

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That's Coco66's address alright. Photo via

​Update: Says the club's manager: "We're reopening at 4 p.m. today." See more below.

Lost in a weekend's worth of CMJ-related chaos was the fact that on Friday night, the NYPD raided the Greenpoint venue Coco66, halting the Tamaryn/Frankie Rose & the Outs show that was underway and reportedly shutting down the venue indefinitely. The above photo, just posted to Tamaryn's Facebook page--the show was ended during her set, after she'd only played three songs--would seem to bear that theory out. (The venue's address is indeed 66 Greenpoint Avenue.) We've reached out to both the venue and its manager, but have yet to hear back. In the meantime, the man who put on the show, promoter Seva Granik, says Coco66 is in dire trouble. According to him, the "NYPD apparently has been showing up for weeks, warning the venue about various things that the owner was supposed to go take care of." We asked what went down on Friday, specifically:

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Alexis from Sleigh Bells, upstaging M.I.A. All photos by Rebecca Smeyne

​Really, we could use a word for it, that New York area show in which a variety of factors combine--imminent album release, absurd amounts of press attention, fervent old guard musician co-signs, a sold-out room, a novel sound, maybe--to make one of the thousands of shows that take place every night in NYC into a kind of special event you can't ever really duplicate, though everyone is always trying. This was one of those: stadium-punk duo Sleigh Bells, who took the stage after midnight, and later bowed out doing "Ring Ring" (from Treats, out at long last tomorrow), with a little help from their label boss, M.I.A.; and the lo-fi murdering, Bleach-honoring, White Zombie-checking BK trio Mr. Dream, who've been due to play in front of this many people for nearly two years now. The only Brooklyn bill we can imagine liking more than this one right now would've had LCD Soundsystem on it. Photographer Rebecca Smeyne was there:

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All photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Blondes

Tomorrow marks the release of These Are Powers' highly recommended five-song EP World Class Peoples/Candyman, so the trio had a release party this past Saturday with Blondes and MNDR. TAP were reportedly very very good. "Oh my god. @thesearepowers is raping the shit out of @coco66. What THE fuck," quoth one Tweeting spectator. Rebecca Smeyne's photos are below; let it be known that Coco 66 has lasers!

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