Photos: Alaska @ Town

Name: Brandi Carlile (First Night Sold Out! Second Night Added!)
Start: 2018-5-20T18-18-30-00
End: 2018-5-20T23-23-55-00
Location: The Anthem

Brandon WetherbeeOctober 18, 2016LGBTQPhotos

LGBTQPhotos 06 min read

Photos By Katherine Gaines

All hail the Queen. Alaska Thunderfuck, winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars season 2, graced D.C. with her presence. Bow down to the Queen and her Anus. She has an album called Anus.

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20may6:00 pm8:00 pmFree Weekly Bar Bingo w/ O’Sullivan’s Irish PubEVERY SUNDAY AT O"SULLIVAN"S6:00 pm - 8:00 pm O'Sullivan's Irish Pub

20may6:30 pmBrandi Carlile (First Night Sold Out! Second Night Added!)w/ Darlingside6:30 pm The Anthem

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For our upcoming 2018 spring and summer tour, each online ticket order will include a digital copy of our new album, By The Way, I Forgive You. We absolutely can’t wait to be with our friends and fans on the road and play these special songs for you. Instructions on how to redeem your album will be emailed when released on February 16th.

By The Way, I Forgive You is not an album about forgiveness in the easy sense—where someone has hurt you and then suddenly there’s a great reconciliation and a remorse- lled scene with two people running across the golden wheat eld towards an embrace that somehow undoes a lifetime of pain and damage, as if the past has no meaning. It’s about radical acceptance (not to be confused with complacency) and unconditional love.

****Whoever is reading this, your parents will die. You may have been hurt or loved by them, probably both. But can you forgive them for leaving in the end?

We are a powerful generation witnessing war and division like never before, yet somehow this is the safest time to be alive in human history. Can we love one another as ourselves? More importantly, can we love ourselves at all?

The songs alone aren’t universal messages, they are personal stories of our parents and childhood, our divorces, oppressive religion, the fact that marriage is hard and having children is fucking terrifying, even the sting of death. It is the story of forgiveness, that despite all this keeps us innocently climbing out of bed every morning open to love—big terrible trembling love.
I don’t love you because you’ve done what I think you should do with your life. I love you whatever you do, but I’ve got a life to live too.

And, by the way, I forgive you.****

Time

(Sunday) 6:30 pm

Location

The Anthem

901 Wharf St SW Washington, DC, 20024

Cost

$38

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20may7:00 pm10:00 pmBedlam’s “Saint Joan”7:00 pm - 10:00 pm Folger Theatre

20may7:00 pmAndrew W.K.Moluba 7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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It all began with a feeling.

Of being alone and wanting to belong.

Of wanting to share that feeling of belonging.

And experience the euphoria of bonding with others.

The feeling became a dream.

To make the most exciting music imaginable.

Music that embraced and celebrated life in all its facets, electrifying and uniting everyone who heard it.

The dream attained reality in major chords pounded out on piano, an unrelenting four-to-the-floor beat, a set of dirty whites, a bloody nose.

And found its voice with these words:

“When it’s time to party, we will party hard.”

It’s safe to say, nobody has partied harder, longer or more fervently than the undisputed King of Partying himself, Andrew W.K.. A one-man music machine possessed of a single-minded, monomaniacal focus to spread a singular message:

That to party is to exist.

And to exist is to party.

This mission he embarked upon in 2001, with the release of his debut single and signature tune “Party Hard,” and has never swerved from since. Released the same year, his debut album I Get Wet, an instant, ageless classic, was a full-throated declaration of that hedonistic intent. Twelve songs, no ballads, delivered at breakneck speed and with maximum intensity from beginning to end. All the bluntness, passion and classicism of rock ‘n’ roll, boiled down and purified to its base elements.

Power. Movement. Melody. Emotion. Noise.

A sound simultaneously life-affirming, enervating and overwhelming.

A sound that obliterates ego and bludgeons self.

As an artist, he seemed to have emerged out of nowhere, fully-formed right out of the box, with an image, a style, and a sense of purpose that set him far apart from his peers. If that seemed to good to be true, then maybe it was. Andrew W.K., the critics opined, was either the savior of music or its biggest fraud. Either deadly serious or an elaborate prank. None of which bothered the fans who took up the mantle of the Andrew W.K. ethos, to live every moment as if it was simultaneously their first and their last. Live shows, backed by a six-piece band of hard-driving musicians, became a collective celebration of unbridled joy that often turned entire dance floors into a giant, whirling circle pit of jostling bodies, with sweat and hair flying, and ended in a mass stage invasion that tore down the boundary between artist and audience.

Two years later came The Wolf, an album that doubled as a manual for self-realization, blending the personal with the philosophical, drawing on the past to forge a path towards the future, then folding back on itself like a Möbius strip, invoking an existence with no beginning, no end, seamless. From this point on, his fans became his friends and allies in a cause undertaken purely for its own sake; an idea explored further in a 2004 MTV series, Your Friend, Andrew W.K., where he offered himself up as cheerleader and life coach, helping others to realize themselves and their dreams.

A third album in 2006, Close Calls With Brick Walls, as ambitious in scope and sound as it was oblique in theme and tone, suggested an artist who seemed to have freed himself from all the restrictions placed upon him, by himself and by others, who had peered into a looking glass and seen… his mirror image, staring back. Everything that he was and everything that he wasn’t, merged into one. A series of reflections arching backwards into infinity. Multiple images of a face with the same forced smile. As if Andrew W.K., the performer, had been replaced by a different person entirely.

The rumors that had persisted since the very beginning of his career, began to multiply and take hold, begging the question: not who is Andrew W.K., but what is Andrew W.K.? A person, a persona, a wig. An entity, a corporation or a symbol. An enigma behind a set of initials.

That question would remain unanswered as, over the next decade, Andrew W.K. adopted a dizzying array of roles that took him into virgin territory for a rock ‘n’ roll musician, establishing a unique place for himself in popular culture, as a ubiquitous celebrity presence, while at the same time calling into question the very nature of that celebrity. Advice columnist, university lecturer, and children’s game show host. Nightclub impresario, talk radio personality and talk show guest. Motivational speaker and cultural ambassador. Performance artist and magician’s assistant. Party philosopher and weatherman. He was all these things and more.

Now, as he readies the release of a brand new album of rock music, his first in over a decade, and prepares to embark on his first full-band tour in five years, Andrew W.K. has come full circle to celebrate a party still raging strong.

A party that is now and forevermore.

Because the party never dies.

Time

(Sunday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$25

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21may10:30 am5:00 pmThe Barmecide Feast Exhibit10:30 am - 5:00 pm National Air and Space Museum

21may7:00 pmTune-YardsMy Brightest Diamond7:00 pm 9:30 Club

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$1 to Fractal Feedback Fund

“What should I do?” That’s the question Merrill Garbus asks herself halfway through “ABC 123,” the stunning centerpiece of the new Tune-Yards album, I can feel you creep into my private life.

In 2014, Tune-Yards released Nikki Nack, which NPR called “dazzingly imaginative,” while the NME hailed it as “easily Tune-Yards’ finest work,” and New York Magazine dubbed it “possibly the catchiest record of the year.” The album earned Tune-Yards performances on The Tonight Show and Conan in the U.S. and Later… With Jools Holland in the U.K., along with sold-out international headline shows, support slots with Arcade Fire, The National, and Death Cab For Cutie among others, and festival performances everywhere from Pitchfork to End Of The Road. The album followed her similarly acclaimed 2009 debut, BiRd-BrAiNs, called “ingenious and often irresistible” by the New York Times, and their 2011 sophomore release, w h o k i l l, which landed on nearly every major outlet’s Best Of list and topped the Village Voice’s prestigious Pazz & Jop poll as critics’ favorite of the year.

The new album is an unflinching examination of modern identity, intricately rendered in the manically infectious way that only Tune-Yards can. Drawing on a recent foray into DJing and inspired in part by C.L.A.W. (Collaborative Legions of Artful Womxn), her radio show highlighting female-identifying producers, I can feel you creep into my private life finds the band flirting with the dancefloor more than ever before, as four on the floor kickdrum underpins wild polyrhythms and slinky bass grooves. The atypical arrangements seem to defy gravity, bursting like fireworks one moment and retreating inwards the next as the band blends pop, hip-hop, soul, folk, rock, 80’s house, African, and Caribbean music.

While the album was written prior to the 2016 presidential election, it’s not difficult to hear hints of political anxiety throughout the record. On album opener “Heart Attack,” elements of vintage soul crash into frenetic drum machines as Garbus frets over the unraveling of progress, and the swirling “Coast To Coast” imagines a New York swallowed by rising seas.

In addition to being the band’s most pointed work to date, I can feel you creep into my private life is also the most fundamentally collaborative, with Garbus’ long-time partner Nate Brenner co-producing, heavily influencing not just his basslines but also the shape of the songs themselves.

“This album is the most writing that Nate and I have ever done together,” says Garbus. “The first iterations of Tune-Yards were just me by myself, but this really feels like a true collaboration between us, and it’s the first record where Nate is listed as a producer. These songs are the result of what we’re each bringing to the table.”

If there’s an underlying thesis to I can feel you creep into my private life, it’s that uncomfortable questions often come with uncomfortable answers. Garbus has always been known for pushing the limits of pop musically, but here she tests just how much weight the genre can bear lyrically, too, challenging herself to look inwards rather than simply point fingers and assign blame. It’s a radical act of accountability, a candid self-examination delivered with ecstatic energy that calls on the audience to take their own long hard looks in the mirror. In the piercing silence after the record stops spinning, only one question remains: What should I do?

Time

(Monday) 7:00 pm

Location

9:30 Club

815 V ST NW, Washington, DC 20001

Cost

$30

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21may7:30 pmKaveh Akbar & Kazim AliSilence and Breath7:30 pm Folger Theatre

21may8:00 pm10:00 pmFree Weekly Bar Bingo w/ Kingfisher DC8:00 pm - 10:00 pm Kingfisher DC

Photos: Alaska @ Town

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