Irony. Utility. Pretext. Algiers, July 17, 2017

Last semester I co-taught a course at Evergreen called Race & Rage: the Civil Rights Movement, the Counterculture, and the Turn to the Conservative Right. Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time, until, thanks to various alt-right anti-PC groups, Fox News, and the actions of one super-entitled white man, by its end it turned into actual performance art where we had to live out everything we were teaching. Evergreen is all about learning through doing, but having to battle domestic terrorists on campus last quarter was taking that idea too far.

Finals week at Evergreen State.

Prior to the riot police and Tucker Carlson shutting down our campus, however, one of the things we studied in detail was the Black Panther movement, so you can imagine my joy when I found myself sitting in Huey Newton’s former residence in the Oakland Hills. My friend Tim, who lives there, has  kept a fragment of the old brown shag carpet in the closet as a memorial to the 1970s aesthetic.

Huey Newton's carpet. No joke.

Tim and I were on our way to see Algiers, a new band on Matador that's named after one of my favorite movies, at the Starline Social Club in downtown Oaktown. Tim and I both really liked what we’d heard of Algiers, particularly “The Underside of Power,” the single from the record (if there is such a thing as a single), and the rave reviews we’d heard on the drumbeat of the internet. Also, we like going to dive bars, so there’s that.

The Starline Social Club isn’t even a dive bar, really, it’s just on a divey corner in Oakland, right next to that tent city I wrote about a few weeks ago when I went to Burger Boogaloo. In the Bay Area, you know you’re in a super dicey area when you can park right next to where you’re going. I could tell instantly, however, that it was the kind of club I love to go to. To begin, the music venue was on the second floor – just like at the I Beam, the Fillmore, and various other beloved nightspots , and that’s always cold because you can feel the floorboards shake. When we got there, the show had already started, and we could sort of see the band through the upstairs windows. Lights were flashing and shadowy people were moving up and down, and the sound was bleeding out of big picture windows: I could see the shadows of the performers cast against green and pink lights on the ceiling. It was highly inviting.

The bar part of Starline Social Club looks very nice, but Tim and I made our way upstairs, through a groovy downstars area, and thus came upon Algiers mid-set. They were playing “Cleveland” – a song about Tamil Rice -- led by the arresting sight of bassist Ryan Mahan’s frenetic right hand. At first I thought he was some kind of dancing-mc thing, like in the Stone Roses, or that homeless guy in Hazel but then I realized his right hand works independently while he plucks his instrument’s strings with his left.  I once said about someone else that their hips needed a separate suite at the hotel, and the same is true of Ryan Mahan's hand. It seems to have a life of its own, tapping autistically on his chest and his head, curving outward heiroglyphically, actually speaking, in its own dumb way, to me, the listener…and here’s the thing. His hand doesn't just dance along to the beat, it helps one understand what the beat is saying. I’m not even joking when I say that his right hand is the star of this show. It drew me to Algiers in a way that sewed up my reservations about the band. Whatever else I say about them from herein out, I hope and believe that Algiers are going to be stars.

As I said, when we hit the Starline Social Club, Algiers were in mid-set, and much of that middle part was somewhat experimental. On the very next song, the band started to do what I’d call ‘space out’ – that is, the music got slow, there was lots of repetitive stuff that would be super fun to do, but not so great to listen to, and, as Tim noted, the Black Power “Power To the People” poster started to fall imperceptibly off the wall behind them. “I hope it’s not a metaphor for the show,” he said anxiously, though later we felt it was. Clearly, the Black Panthers were the theme of the evening: we were only blocks from their old HQ, and the band has a song, “Walk Like A Panther,” which uses as it’s intro a speech by Fred Hampton, the BP leader who was murdered by the Chicago police while he was sleeping next to his pregnant wife, an enraging event which makes my blood boil whenever I think about it. )

The problem with being my age, and the reason that many people my age don’t go out to see new bands, is that you feel so jaded. Example. When Algiers guitarist Lee Tesche pulled out a violin bow and started playing his guitar with it, we both looked at each other with a giant invisible thought bubble of Jimmy Page appearing above our heads.  We kept saying things like, “Oh look – a new tuning!” And, “thank god, a capo.” (A capo implies a tune is forthcoming, because/singing.) Singer Franklin Fisher was often hunched over a keyboard; he rarely straightened up, and we were puzzled by the anvil case he had in front of him which blocked much of the view. It was frustrating, because I could feel, coiled up in this band, a powerful core that could burst into flower at any moment. I was dying for them to do so. But this was not that night, I guess.

Algiers has a new record out, which showcases what the rock writers of the world are pleased to call their “experimental” music. Presumably “experimental” is code for, “blend of styles,” or, ‘not catchy,’ or, potentially interesting, or something like that. There is certainly something incredibly compelling about this band, enough that Depeche Mode asked them to open for them in Europe recently; it’s hard to imagine what that must have been like, since Algiers and Depeche Mode are practically diametrically opposed musically, and Depeche Mode’s audience couldn’t possibly intersect. Tim, who was in a band for many years and therefore should know, says that opening for huge acts like that is such a thankless task that it hardly matters who opens and that it ought to be an opportunity for a band to hone its chops.

Me: not the biggest depeche mode fan

So we waited patiently for “The Underside of Power’ to blow us away, but it never happened – not because it wasn’t a great song, but because, as we found out later, they had already played it before we arrived.

That was our bad, however, not theirs, and I still trust Algiers to become a great big band. I know it like I knew it about others before them: there is something you can sense in the atmosphere. Anyway, those of us who still go to clubs like the Starline on NoisePop night are like Christians, waiting for the new Messiah. I no longer really remember why we want to be in on the birth of that thing, but I suppose neither did those kings and shepherds. Or  Joseph. Or the asses.