Because I’m getting my trade show on, I can’t offer the requisite rant level on here. All I can do is plagiarise imagery from an old ‘Wax Poetics’ article on New York’s fabled Latin Quarter, which is some lazy shit, but how impressive are these snapshots? Seeing as club night imagery became tedious, sweaty and Facebook tagged, it’s nice to see some iconic styles before they got flogged/blogged to death, raised from the dead then beaten some more every five years since. A couple of nights ago I got emotional to ‘Dipset Anthem’ courtesy of Patta and Firmament, but a photo of me perspiring to the sounds of Cam and company would be far from iconic.
These photos were the accompaniment to Brian Coleman’s assembled oral history of the nightspot that made careers and the one where a reveller apparently caused a riot with a blunted samurai sword towards the club’s conclusion. Your average character in khaki shorts and car shoes or dirty bucks doing fashion week can’t compare to the Spot-Bilts, Carhartt, Dapper Dan LV hybrid creations and Ewing Rivalrys that were getting wear here in pictures from the archive of X-Clan’s DJ Paradise, who used his extensive PR savvy to bring in and look after the punters. There’s more shots on Paradise’s MySpace, but the Tyson, Serch, Kid ‘n Play, Russell Simmons and Red Alert appearances are more vibrant than the majority of carefully posed contemporary sessions on thousand dollar equipment. Props to Paradise and hunt down the 2007 issue (#23) for the full story.
GWARIZM 