Dave Chamberlain

Let those loud mouths talk it up all they want.

When you get right down to it, New York City, and especially New York City's music fans, suck more than an amped-up vacuum cleaner in a sawdust factory.

As the known music world descended upon the Big Apple for the CMJ Music festival -- including a crush of Chicago bands -- the city hardly blinked an eye. And if you ever start to get down on Chicago's music fans for their typical apathetic behavior during rock shows, trust that the population in NYC makes the average Empty Bottle show look like a Rwandan race riot.

At the Wetlands, a rock club on Manhattan's Lower West Side, Chicago's Blank Theory and Monkey Paw play to a basement of punk-rock kids, most of whom look more interested in the gum on the floor than loud rock music. Couches in the back are laden with two types: those smoking pot, and those in a pot-induced coma. I ask the bartender for the cheapest beer. "Miller Lite," she says, rolling her eyes. "$4.50." Clearly I heard her wrong. "Yeah, that's our cheapest beer," she says again, before lazily lighting a cigarette and rolling her eyes again. In between acts, silence dominates the venue. No one talks, no one even whispers. Just kids milling around, looking bored, smoking pot. Monkey Paw comes to the stage: "We're Monkey Paw," says lead singer Eric Amir Hemmat, "and we like to fuck."

Someone in the back screams with glee. I jump, startled to learn someone was awake.

(2000-10-26)

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