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When previewing Main Attrakionz's August 26 show at the New Museum, I noted how in recent months the city has become a gathering point for many of the rest of the country's rap weirdos. This trend is likely to continue now that Das Racist's Heems (whose group is bringing Detroit's Danny Brown back to town for a Knitting Factory gig on September 12) is teaming up with Despot (also on that Knitting Factory bill) and True Panther Sounds co-founder Dean Bein to throw a new party series at Santos Party House. Fitting, since that's where Lil B made his incredible East Coast debut last summer.

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all photos by Rebecca Smeyne

Trash Talk bleed for their fans

OFF!/Trash Talk/Cerebral Ballzy
Santos Party House
Saturday, March 26

Saturday night at Santos, hardcore-elders OFF! played alongside Trash Talk, one of their more ferocious descendents. Stylistic nuances aside, both bands are characterized by a raw aggression that explodes in live performance, and it's a sight to see. The show was sold out and the line snaked around the corner (Cerebral Ballzy: from the sidewalk, bros, you killed it).

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Out of the shadows, sort of. Pics by Puja.

​Win Win
Santos Party House
Tuesday, February 15

Better Than: The Odd Future show (SORRY ROB).

Win Win is a big name to live up to. The project consists of ex-Spank Rock producers and DJs XXXchange and Chris Devlin, along with their video-collage artist/producer and Fully Fitted label-mate, Ghostdad. After years of producing for artists and remixing countless more, their self-titled debut album, out now on Vice, is an attempt to step out of the shadows and, well, throw all-in and make whatever the hell they want. The result is a 15-track grab bag of dance music, grinding rock, and ethereal interludes that features a handful of friends -- Hot Chip's Alexis Taylor, Gang Gang Dance's Lizzi Bougatsos, Andrew W.K., and, yes, Spank Rock -- on vocals. A few of those people even showed up last night.

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This man will jump on your head at a moment's notice. Pics by Santiago Felipe.

​Odd Future
Santos Party House
Tuesday, February 15

Better than: Being wherever Earl is right now.

Well, that was hostile. You will all have your own highlights from this, the second live NYC appearance from everyone's favorite stupendously inappropriate underage L.A. rap collective, but as for me and my house, we'll stick with the latest chapter in mastermind Tyler the Creator's ongoing compendium of asthma humor. "Who the fuck got asthma here?" he demands, toward the end of this bruising, seething, intermittently thrilling hour-long affair, when we're all indeed out of breath, emotionally if not physically. He holds up an inhaler and starts howling like a baby: "SWAAAAAAAG! SWAAAAAAAAG!" We laugh. We are grateful for the chance. These guys are not funny in the traditional sense. Seconds earlier, Tyler had introduced a new song with "I plan on getting on Bill O'Reilly and having a bunch of white parents hate me for this motherfucker"; seconds later, he notes, "I just wanna slap the fuck out of all parents, and bloggers, and fuckin' ugly people." The guy knows his demo.

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​Uh oh. When last we saw teenage L.A. scandal rap collective Odd Future, it was in the basement of Webster Hall, where the entire evil axis of New York rap critics gathered to watch frontdemon Tyler the Creator take emphatic hits off an asthma inhaler. (Once he got his breath back, he told us to all go fuck ourselves.) It was an uneven and exhilarating debut from a group who are even now racing to stay ahead of their own hype, and so back again they come, this time to the top floor of Santos Party House, on the day after Valentine's Day, no less. Tickets are on sale now; expect the scene to look something like this:

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​Bad news for those who had their week in nightlife all planned out: Friday night's Noche de Los Muertos fete at Santos, to have featured Munchi, Maluca, DJ Comrade, DirtyFinger and Cobra Krames, has been canceled, (Not by any police action, though -- the MNDR show there will go as scheduled.) A particular bummer in the case of Munchi, the "moombahton maestro" (per our own Puja Patel, who's paid to know about these things) who was dropping in from his home in, uh, the Netherlands. Apparently they'll still looking for an alternate spot to do the show this weekend, so stay tuned; the MNDR-show flier is below, if you're looking for consolation. Which she'd be pretty great at providing, we reckon.

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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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Natalie Storm, cheering up the inadvertent crowd. Pics by Chris Klassen, more below.

​Everyone was very, very excited to hear that Mannie Fresh would be headlining the grand re-opening of reOPENed this past Friday night. The weekly celebration had been on hiatus since Santos was shut down and had left several hundred party-goers without their Friday-night go-to. After weeks of hype and anticipation (and bouts of drowning ourselves in Mannie Freshness), we were just as ready as everyone else to go back. Unfortunately, we all had to a wait a little longer. Three or four hours longer.

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​It's been a tumultuous few weeks for Santos Party House, but the downtown spot is back in action, and finally welcoming back perhaps its finest weekly attraction: reOPENed, the Friday night fete hosted by Just Blaze and DJ Soul. To celebrate their rebirth, they'll be welcoming a special guest: none other than Mannie Fresh. Which is all the excuse anyone needs to revist DJ Eleven's 2009 tribute mix, 50 Minutes of Fresh, a fine pregame soundtrack that heartily and repeatedly advises you to lock up your wife, your teenage daughter, and any other ladies you'd rather not see fall under Fresh's spell. Take all of this very seriously. Tracklist and Santos flier below:

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Crass in 1984. This photo was taken by a man named Trunt, of course.

​See the update below...

It doesn't get any bigger or more important than Crass, the Essex-born collective that helped integrate radical anarchist politics with punk rock, a bond that endures--insofar as the genre does--to this day. Their records from the '70s and '80s are deliriously weird mixes of Dadaist poetry, militantly pacifist hardcore, bad jokes, and weird noises; like any band worth anything from that era, they survived prosecution from their own government and any number of bans of their records. The collective faded as a musical entity in the mid-'80s and hasn't been heard from much since, retreating to the Dial House in Essex, where various former Crass members have since come and gone, frequently while nude. Three years ago the band's Penny Rimbaud sat in on Japanther's Dinosaur Death Dance at PS122, declaiming spoken word poetry and smoking lots of weed. But that, barring a reissue here and there and performances by various affiliates (Steve Ignorant, the Crass Collective), has been it. Until now, anyway.

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