Tomás Ford
The Bakery
Saturday, July 19
There is literally nothing better than arriving in a club and hearing music that you pump out in your bedroom when you know no one else is home. Literally nothing better than when you’re bumping and grinding on the Bakery’s dance floor to trashy pop songs, nostalgic ‘90s dance music and nu-metal that stinks with nostalgia. Welcome to the Crap Music Rave: Boom Shak-a-lak!
With heavy rain the return of these cowboys of cool (host Tomás Ford and guest MC Ayden Doherty) threatened to be a bit underwhelming. For a good while, there was a very minimal crowd of people who just seemed to want to sway awkwardly at the back like they were at a school disco. This wasn’t no school disco, baby. Pumping out “cool music for cool people” and armed with some seriously cool person dance moves, these two had a packed dance floor fist-pumping to Ricky Martin’s She Bangs in no time – even getting everyone to really boogie with two separate host-vs-audience dance-offs.
In the wake of a sold-out show in Adelaide, and before an upcoming four-weekend tour with the Edinburgh Fringe, Ford and Doherty gave us a very special Crap Music Rave, 100% audience requests. Whether you posted it to Facebook, tweeted it, or wrote it down at the event, all the requests went in to the melting pot. While this did produce some sick tunes, some people hadn’t even thought about since high school, it made for a bit of a disjointed experience. However, the hosts did compensate for this, encouraging a crowd vote if a song didn’t give the right kind of vibe and just plain skipping some that were really too awful.
I do have to congratulate them for the departure from the expected tirade of synth with a short but nonetheless powerful segment: Frat Music Rave. It gave people a chance to let their hair down and thrash around in the tamest circle pit ever to a bit of Limp Bizkit (and to even get deep with some Avril Lavigne).
What I did really love, and what seems to be a feature of Crap Music Raves, is the wide range of people who come – crap music is really universal! There were people dressed like they had come from nearby Metro City, people who were rocking some faded ol’ jeans, and everyone in between. All pulled by the siren song of such musical masterpieces as The Hamster Dance, for example.
Young or old, with home-improvised PCYC-level light displays, the sickest breakdance moves since the late 1990s, and even party poppers, Ford and Doherty gave us some seriously crap music that I never thought I’d hear in a social setting since I left high school. But did I mind? Non, je ne regrette rien.
CAROLINE STAFFORD
