Postmodernism has inflicted endless problems upon the world, but the one that seems to have affected the music scene the most is nostalgia, which has two issues: 1) it distracts entirely from any sort of innovation, relying instead on memory and imitation, and 2) it flattens the past, only sampling from the most popular elements, deleting anything viewed as mere obscure detritus.
Nostalgia has become a complete lifestyle that one can live inside to escape the Current Year, and most of all, it has become an extremely profitable industry. After all, you can play with the Masters of the Universe action figures you bought off Ebay as soon as you clock out of your shitty office job, and even immerse yourself in the MOTU reboot movie, featuring the same gorgeous actress who starred in the Archie Comics revival series, Riverdale. Delicious memberberry smoothies all around!
Who better to bring this to our attention than Adam Rahuba - one of the Pittsburgh scene’s most persistent gadflies, other than possibly myself. Two decades ago, he was known for the Pittpunk local bulletin board, which having started in 1996, long preceded its more politically correct rival, NeverTellMeTheOdds. NTMTO still exists today in a cliquish, rather hamfisted form, but Pittpunk closed up shop in 2009.
More recently, Rahuba (who helped me many years ago with some promo efforts, so I credit him for that) remade himself into a party promoter, starting “Pop Punk Night” at the now-defunct Smiling Moose on the South Side in 2014, which quickly evolved into the wider-appeal Pittsburgh Emo Night and settled into a long run at the Squirrel Hill Sports Bar.
Rahuba spelled out the nostalgia overdose problem succinctly in a recent City Paper piece which was essentially an editorial, lambasting corporate entities of horning in on his long-established party institution. Just like they’ve done in many other secondary markets, companies invaded from both coasts: from Los Angeles came Loud Village, the promoters responsible for “Electric Feels”, a 2000s “indie-sleaze” playing hits from the likes of MGMT, Cut Copy and Yeah Yeah Yeahs.
Were those bands really “sleazy”? Did they measure up to the heroin-drenched Lower East Side bands of the 80s, or the “Dope, Guns, and Fucking” Midwest terrors of the 90s? Not really. But when millennials discovered hipster danceability in the early to mid-2000s, all they had to compare it to were the squeaky clean boy bands from Orlando. So, sure, Electric Feels dispenses a Doctor Fauci-approved amount of sweaty dance grooves, I suppose.
Divebombing our town from the even hipper East Coast was Brooklyn’s Burwoodland, which recently celebrates a large round of investment from none other than Mount Lebanon High alumnus Mark Cuban: he of Shark Tank fame who styles himself a Maverick. Owned by core millennial buddies Ethan Maccoby and Alex Badanes, this company bombards America with a wide range of DJ parties (not live music tours) targeted specifically to their own age bracket: Gimme Gimme Disco (ABBA/1970s), Broadway Rave (show tunes), All Your Friends (oddly similar to Electric Feels), Emo Night Brooklyn (self-explanatory), House of Heavy (moshable metal/hardcore), and Love in the Club (2000s R&B).
Most of these franchised events stopped in our area just in the past few months: Gimme Gimme at Roxian on March 13, Love in the Club on July 10, All Your Friends on July 17, Emo Night Brooklyn on July 31 and Broadway Rave on August 15 - all at the Thunderbird, which seems to be doing an awful lot of these parties when it isn’t presenting jam bands.
Rahuba isn’t sure whether to be angrier at Loud Village or Mark Cuban, but he knows one thing for certain: huge ticket vendors like Ticketmaster, an arm of Live Nation, collaborate to place these parties at large venues where the beers are expensive and the admission price even more so. Rahuba notes $20-$30 as the entry fee for these corporate nostalgia nights, and he’s right on the nose - the Electric Feels event at Mr Smalls this weekend is a whopping $30 to watch people DJ on laptops, while Rahuba’s Emo Night, on the exact same date, is free to get in.
Nonetheless, it’s all just bullshit anyway (Rahuba himself admits it’s “silly and niche”), and my nostalgia fever hit 103, so I figured I’d get a less-than-neutral opinion from another doctor: the extremely busy Brian Sikes Howe. Between running the door at Smalls, playing in three disparate bands (hiphop hybrid Normal Creatures, goth-pop Some Faith, and metallic Greywalker), running the most comprehensive music scene podcast (Start the Beat) and his own studio production work, Brian concocted his own incurable sickness and spread it across the land: Taylor Swift Night, affectionately known as “TSN”, which he kicked off in 2021, right as the Roxian was retooling after Covid.
Howe staked the middle ground between the $30 touring parties and the local ones that Rahuba stages for free. “It was post-pandemic, so a lot of bands weren’t touring yet, but the rooms were looking for anything that could fill them,” he recalls. When a subsequent TSN event sold out the 450 capacity Spirit Hall, he thought, “Well, maybe we have something here. So I started reaching out to other venues in other cities, and since then, we’ve been all over [the continent], including Mexico and Canada.”
A collaboration initially with Josh Bakaitus (Live Nation) and Steve Soboslai (of the band Punchline), Brian rode the wave of nostalgia-itis which was sweeping the nation as Gen-Y was reliving their childhood vibes and Gen-Z was getting accustomed to leaving the house again.”The demand peaked and valleyed, and more recently, we’ve pulled back in general to just a handful of parties, when we used to go out to multiple cities every weekend.”
“Since we started, some other companies moved into that same [space],” he adds, “it would be a bit innocent to say that people weren’t imitating us, but we don’t own this music. Everyone has the right to be a DJ. I don’t get upset about it, but others might.”
Why? “There’s probably some level of ego attached to it, and it’s also financial. People want to say ‘I’m a big DJ’. They see how much money is made when DJs do it, so they want to jump in. But it’s a matter of supply and demand.”
As with any other growing phenomenon, there are benefits to be gained, but also compromises to be navigated. Besides working with Josh, Brian has had his share of dealing with Live Nation, which places it onerous fees on some events. “We’ve also worked with local promoters who books shows. I’ve dealt with all kinds of companies. [For example], we can draw 2000 at House of Blues in Orlando, and that’s definitely Live Nation, but we can also draw 200 in Winchester VA, which isn’t Live Nation at all.”
For Brian, promoting the TSN parties is like navigating the animated Spiderverse. “It’s an intricate web of all of these things, when you do events on the scale of rooms that big. From the perspective of other companies and financial investors [like Cuban], that just shows you there’s money to be made.”
Filthy lucre, though, isn’t really the point of Brian’s longest-running DJ event: Myspace Night at Brillobox, the first Saturday of every month. Although it’s another celebration of the early 2000s, he makes it simple with a $10 charge at the door. And he’s seen a shift in attendance - it’s no longer just the audiences approaching middle-age who recall the music directly, but a younger crowd in their early 20s who only know the songs vicariously, and this is where the “flattening” of the past comes in.
“So, it’s the Gen-Z equivalent of a Gen-Xer going out to 80s or 90s night - the same psychology. So they’re not going to know the deep cuts. If you want a consistent turnout, you have to cater to those people. I love taking requests - I’ve seen how the generations have shifted by the songs they want to hear.”
Playing in local bands and interviewing many more local artists for his Youtube channel (Start the Beat), does the whole thing seem a little counter-intuitive when smaller concerts sometimes struggle to draw audiences, while nostalgia parties run rampant? “Is it a little weird? Sure. Is it a problem? Maybe. But then again, a lot of people who go to [TSN parties] are not going to smaller shows anyway. And for those promoters who tie up their identity so deeply in the events they throw, I can see how they’d take it so personally.”
But overall, Brian’s advice to everyone trying to cash in on chasing multi-generational memories? Let go of that ego, especially if it’s the size of a Living Planet, and just give the kids what they want. “Looking at it as a night for them, and not for me, helps keep it successful.”
Pittsburgh Emo Night. Fri., Aug 28. 9 p.m. Free admission. Squirrel Hill Sports Bar.
https://www.yinzemo.com/
Electric Feels. Fri., Aug 28. 9 p.m. $24.96/$29.30. Mr Smalls Theatre, Millvale.
https://mrsmalls.com/
Myspace Night. Sat., Sep. 5. 10 p.m. $10. Brillobox, Bloomfield/Lawrenceville. https://www.brilloboxpgh.com/events/
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