Review: Fuck Youth Brigade

“That band said a lot of dumb shit,” Nick said.

“For example?” I pressed, curious because I had no complaints about the Youth Brigade show earlier that evening at the Triple Rock. They were a blast and got the crowd whipped into a pretty decent frenzy with their old school punk rock. I was smiling the whole show. Hell, I even liked a lot of the new songs they played.

“Like when the singer said something about how their parties are five times better than ours or something like that. That seemed kind of rude.”

The blue and reds of the police cars outside shined through the window. They were busting up the party that had been thrown by the dudes in the downstairs apartment, which had vomited dozens of “retarded MCAD freshman,” as Nick called them, onto the front yard.

With the men in blue so close, Nick and the upstairs folks weren’t in a hurry to get crazy.

“Yeah, but I think they were talking about their bowling tournament vs. this bowling tournament, and their’s has been around longer,” I argued.

“Don’t get me wrong, when they were playing music, they were cool. But when they opened their mouths between songs…” Nick’s rant about Youth Brigade’s stupidity slowly grew in intensity.

“Speaking of which,” I interrupted, as the band’s bass player walked through the door.

Oh Fuck, I thought. I hate interacting with people in bands that I like. For the most part, I don’t want to think of them as anything other than musical robots, existing for the sole purpose of entertaining me. I don’t want to find out if they have personalities, because then I will inevitably find out that some of them have personalities that suck.

Enter Youth Brigade.

As I chatted with my friends, I observed the actions of the band members. The drummer and the bass player pretty much kept to themselves. The singer/guitar player did the rounds, flirting awkwardly with the ladies.

Example: Darci danced around the middle of the living room for a few seconds. When she stopped, Youth Brigade Dude gave her the creepy stare and told her to keep dancing. Told her it was cute and he wanted to see more. Some gay dude – at least, I assumed he was gay by the way he later danced shirtless on a chair, but that may be ignorant of me – told Youth Brigade Dude that he should dance instead. Of course, Mr. Youth Brigade declined and scurried off to the corner.

I sat down for a minute to talk to Nikki. I pointed out one of the older tattooed punk ladies that had arrived with Youth Brigade. Her boobs were constantly on the verge of falling out as she bounced around and constantly took pictures of herself and her friend, all “look at me, I’m at a party with some band!”

I wondered how the boobs managed not to fall out.

“Do you think they look good?” Nikki asked.

“Not really.”

“But you still want to see them?”

“Well, yeah.” I made the comparison to explosions. There are no really bad explosions. Sure, a cheap fourth of July firecracker isn’t as cool as a car blowing up, but that doesn’t mean I’d miss it.

Someone mentioned the quantity of Wisconsin people in the house and, failing in his quest for ladies, Mr. Youth Brigade decided to attack the Pack. He made some very loud comment about how the Jets were going to use Brett Favre and come back to take the Packers down. I laughed at him and he stopped talking about it.

Youth Brigade Dude, boob chick and her friend, and a bunch of other party-goers that had appeared with them went outside to congregate in front of the house. By this point, the downstairs party had been completely reined in. Now, the upstairs party barfed out geriatric punkers.

Nick, knowing that the police had just left a little while earlier, went outside to clean up the puke. As he went to do so, he mentioned that he had a lot of violence in him at the moment, so I thought that maybe he was going to throw down. Nate and I stood at the top of the stairs to watch and also to talk about how Nate was excited at the chances of the apocalypse hitting on his birthday.

Nick sent everyone back inside in a very polite manner. Mr. Youth Brigade stomped back up the stairs and, all 5-year-old-being-punished-for-not-eating-his-vegetables-style, yelled “This party sucks!” as he walked back into the apartment.

Hmmm. I don’t know. This party had:

• Cute chicks (albeit cute chicks who paid no attention to the geriatric punkers in the house)
• Fat gay dude doing the splits without his shirt on
• A dude with a board tied onto his torso in place of a shirt (Robin, who was pissed that fucking Youth Brigade woke him up)
• A soundtrack by the Misfits and Anthrax
• Drugs and alcohol (hippies and drunks)
• Police intervention
• Me farting a lot (although I couldn’t smell my bombs over the BO in the room)
• Vomiting
• Old punk dudes standing in the corner looking sour

The obvious missing ingredients, and my favorite ingredients, violence and destruction, were a bummer, but I didn’t consider their absence to be tragic. If you can’t have fun with the list above, you’re a lost cause in my book. Of course, I say that even though I’ve acted like a dick at and stomped gloomily out of some fairly decent parties, but I like to think I did so much more gracefully than the Youth Brigade pricks. And shit, I’m still young. You’d think they’d have had enough time to really perfect the role of “assholes at the party.” Dickheads better get to work.

(Youth Brigade played at the Triple Rock Social Club in Minneapolis on 8/30/08)