Seattle Subsonic

Avalon, Nasty, and Beardo along with Andre Legacy make up the Hollywood based Dyslexic Speedreaders, the messiahs of trashy chic. The crew has built a dedicated fan base with their obscene charisma and even more obscene lyrical content. They are frequent performers at the 80s Hair Rock Mecca the Whisky a Go Go as well as the Troubadour and The Roxy and once a year like clockwork they roll through Seattle with their unique blend of shit bag rap.
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A couple years back I was in attendance for Avalon’s first Seattle performance at the High Dive in Fremont and I was blown away. Mickey’s tattooed-heroin-thin body, flowing hair, and guyliner really sold his tales of living on the streets of Hollywood working as a street hustler and “selling cock for rock”. Fast forward two years and the whole package is comical in a sad way. Gone is any notion that the 33 year old Avalon (government name Yeshe Pearl) had done any of the things that made his first record listenable. It has been replaced by the crippling realization that it is all just an act. “You didn’t know that?” you may be thinking. I knew it wasn’t real but I was able to suspend my disbelief which is the watermark of any true performer. Now I have seen too many videos and comedic shorts from Avalon and Dirt Nasty (also known as former jerk-off pornstar/MTV VJ Simon Rex) to respect them as rappers and now have to look at them solely as actors, which quite frankly they aren’t that good at.
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Doors for the show opened at 7:30 we arrived at 8:15 expecting the show to be minutes from starting and were treated to a 45 minute wait for the night’s opener Beardo. The strangely beardless Beardo or as he likes to be called the Trailer Park Hero took the well dressed stage and performed the song “American Anthem” a completely derivative gut bucket rock jam that left me wholly unimpressed with his ability to play guitar. As he stumbled through his set of uninspired rapping and singing I began to look around me. The crowd was weird, not in the Live Action Role Play sort of way but more so in the “How are there 1500 people here to see this shit” vein. The bar was filled with sad looking date rapists who reeked of the tepid stench of defeat lingering in their replica Tatupu jerseys. The all ages section was teeming with teenage girls in revealing clothing trying so hard to be the trashy sluts Mickey and Dirt glamorize. Disgusted with my surroundings I had to try to focus on the music, big mistake. I can handle bad rap music, I have listened to enough good music to know that the majority of contemporary hip hop sucks but I can still enjoy it. Unfortunately Beardo is nearly unlistenable and when the intro to The Clash’s “Straight to Hell” started the music blog bubble I’ve been living in burst. The crowd went insane for Beardo’s take on MIA’s “Paper Planes” which he has changed to the oh-so-clever “All I wanna do, is Sex and Drugs” and I was asking myself, “Why are people still so hyped on this song? Didn’t it come out like two years ago?” and I realized that the kids these days get their music from limited sources and songs that broke on blogs didn’t break for them until much much later, none the less Beardo gets a major fail.
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Dirt Nasty took the stage in slacks (which weren’t even Dickies) a plaid shirt with the top button buttoned and Locs. He was the epitome of a poseur, an actor acting like a rapper, making a mockery of the art I have been actively involved in the last decade plus. Usually this wouldn’t bother me but for some reason I was extremely offended by the 1500 people in attendance laughing along with Dirt Nasty at the joke that is hip-hop. His performance was stale, a rehash of his much more refined music videos, and his interaction with the crowd was poor, 3^rd world poor. It was clearly an all-ages show; he saw all the kids on the floor and all the adults at the bar, so why did he keep asking the underagers if they had any whisky? Is that where the kids are at these days? Are they shitting their shorts for mentions of cocaine and whisky? The answer is yes. The reason these fucking goofballs are so popular is because what they are portraying fits in with what these kids are used to. What shows like “The Hills” and “Gossip Girl” (and whatever other shiteous program you want to lump in here) are selling, privilege and manufactured celebrity.
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