Is The Dare Inescapable, Or Do I Just Need to Make Better Choices?

Some thoughts on the "downtown" "New York" "music" "scene"

The Dare.

[Note: yeah, sorry, I started writing this like 3 weeks ago and it probably would have made more sense to send it out then. But, whoops, turns out grad school is actually slightly more work than being unemployed? I’m finding that I’m busier than I expected, especially if I fiercely maintain writing fiction as my top priority, and I do plan on fiercely maintaining that. So don’t expect me to be too regular of a blogger anytime soon, lol.]

I think The Dare is haunting me.

The dance pop artist has 2.6 million monthly listeners, which is an objectively large amount. He just released his first album. It makes sense I’m hearing about him. It makes less sense I’m hearing about him so personally. He seems to be everywhere I look. His songs play at parties. Half my friends seem to know him. I go to a local show to see my boyfriend’s friend from preschool play drums and the band, who also apparently know The Dare, do a cover of “Girls.” There he is on the cover of PAPER; there he is, partying next to Charli XCX. Like a doppelganger of Germanic myth, or an alternate-universe comic book character, he shares a name—Harrison Smith—with one of my best friends from college. People seem surprised when I say I haven’t met him. The last straw was when my third cousin from Athens, Georgia, who plays bass in an actually fairly successful metal band called ENOX, announced he has a new gig: he’s The Dare’s tour driver.

What is going on?

To be fair, I (mostly) brought this on myself.¹ No one made me hang out at Clandestino in 2021 or make friends with girls in the ~downtown lit scene.~ And no one made me go to The Dare’s album launch “activation” in Chinatown.² I went because Megan Nolan was reading, along with Natasha Stagg and Zans Brady Krohn, as part of an opening act hosted by Forever Magazine.³ Why was there a literary reading at an album launch event? I have no idea. The readers themselves seemed mystified as to why they were there. (Nobody actually likes reading their work out loud, but everyone says yes when they’re asked to do it. This is a fact of life that I plan to use to my advantage as I attempt to launch a reading series.)

On the way over, I tried, again, to like The Dare. If I went to his event knowing I didn’t like his music then I was guilty of being a degenerate clout hound; I was, in real time, going to the opening of a can. So I queued up “Guess” by Charli XCX, which The Dare produced. But unlike the rest of Brat, which I love, something about “Guess” repels me. Like a lot of The Dare’s output, it’s blandly repetitive; the lyrics, to me, manage to be both aggressively sexual and aggressively unsexy.

But “aggressively unsexy” can be funny, and, to be fair, some of The Dare’s lyrics are funny. He’s been called a Zoomer James Murphy⁴; I’ve joked that he’s more like cis guy Kim Petras. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Few musicians are truly original. It’s okay to be unambitious. I recognize that complexity, authenticity, and emotional payoff are not the artistic aims of The Dare. What I do find bad—unforgivable, really—is the overarching, mystifying absence of fun. The Dare doesn’t do melody. He has the vocal delivery of a novelty rapper. Club bangers are club bangers, but does anyone actually want to sing along to any Dare song besides “Girls”? And you sing along to “Girls” because the lyrics are pleasingly crass, not because the song actually gets stuck in your head. Isn’t half the point of silly pop music the hook? If you can’t be musically interesting, shouldn’t you at least be catchy?

So I failed in my mission to like The Dare. Still, I was already on the F train, so I slipped in with the readers and drank my Bud Light.

I had a moment of Getting It when The Dare took the stage. I admit it: I had fun shouting along to “Girls.” I was carried into ecstasy by the enthusiasm of the multipolar organism known as a “crowd” flailing around me, yelling in one voice that, yes, we do like girls who do drugs, girls with cigarettes in the back of the club, girls who hate cops and buy guns!⁵

And then there was one other moment that made me feel an emotion. I was both impressed and depressed by a line from “I Destroyed Disco,” when The Dare sneered “What’s a blogger to a rocker?/ What’s a rocker to The Dare?” I was like, okay, good one, I can’t argue with the first part, I am a blogger and I am lower than a dog. But the second part made me feel sad. So much of The Dare’s aesthetic project is reaching for the early 2000s “indie sleaze” era, which correlated with the last gasp of rock music as a relevant cultural force in mainstream America. I get that there’s a kill-your-father logic to his tongue-in-cheek dismissal of rock—The Dare started as an indie rocker, playing in a group called Turtlenecked—but that almost makes the sneer more cynical. And not in the cool, anti-establishment way; more like in the corporate initiative way. Shoot me, but I still believe in guitar music.

The “downtown” “New York” “music” “scene” is a million different things, most of which I’m unaware of. Of course there’s cool shit happening. There always is. But I find it demoralizing that the stuff that’s currently popping off—the stuff that gets treated as meaningfully and identifiably part of a generalized New York scene, not just “the New York metal scene” or “the New York hip hop scene”—doesn’t seem like it’s about the music at all. Instead, it’s about the event you can imagine the music playing at. When you listen to The Dare or Fcukers⁶ or even something more obscure like The Life⁷ that’s just shamelessly, categorically derivative and bloodless, it’s not meant to make you feel anything besides: Wow, it would be cool if I were invited to a private party at the River. It would be so awesome if I were smoking a cig on a roof in Dimes Square. I would like to be photographed by Matt Weinberger. I would like to wear big pants and shaved eyebrows to a fashion week party at Jeans!

Of course all art evokes—creates—an experience. But in this case we’re talking about an “experience” the way the Museum of Ice Cream is an “experience.”⁸

But does it matter what I think? Almost certainly not. Look, no one has ever accused me of being in touch with my generation. I am not a trend forecaster. I bought chunky Filas in 2019. I mostly⁹ listen to alt rock from the 80s and 90s, the kind of music that earns a begrudging, horny respect from men pushing 50 but gets me nowhere with anyone else. I have been a committed hater since I was 11, when I conspicuously refused to listen to the Jonas Brothers at a Jonas Brothers-themed birthday party and instead played the White Stripes on my iPod Nano (can you tell I wasn’t popular in high school?). It doesn’t matter what I think. The Dare has already won.

Unless he’s actually lost? Maybe the real point of this piece is that there doesn’t seem to be a future in guitar music unless you want to do something strictly in the acoustic, folk-adjacent, Adrienne-Lenker-type space, and that’s depressing. If you want to get loud, you have to go electronic. Like The Dare, Fcukers started as indie rockers (the guys played in Spud Cannon, a band my friend Caroline once booked to play a basement show at our college radio house; the girl was the vocalist for The Shacks); they’ve also heartily rejected indie as “nimby kimby indie rock bullshit” that they’re “over.” Indie does feel a little limp right now—too many Phoebe Bridgers imitators whispering wan little husks of autofiction over indifferent chord structures—so I get it. I hope that just means we’re primed for a garage rock revival revival sometime in the next five years. (Or like, some neo-grunge? I have to believe at least four to six of the millions of teenagers I see in Nirvana shirts are actually listening to Nirvana.) But for now, I wonder how much The Dare believes in what he’s doing. I’m not sure it sounds like he does.

1. I still don’t know how the third cousin thing happened. Roy, if you see this, clue me in!

2. “Activation” is the right word for it. It definitely wasn’t a party. If it were a party there would have been something to drink besides a single thirty rack of Bud Light.

3. I have never met Zans but often see her at events; I like some of her fiction, but I had to unfollow her on Twitter after I realized she was the primary reason I kept getting suggested tweets from accounts with names like Raw Egg Nationalist.

4. To whom I feel great loyalty because we went to the same high school.

5. I do enjoy how “hating cops and buying guns” could be radically leftist, distinctly criminal, or a simple description of the activities of an undecided voter in Nebraska.

6. Who I actually like.

7. “Grace,” The Life’s biggest single, sounds like a Jesse McCartney demo dug out of the closet and produced by someone who thinks rock and roll peaked with The 1975. I would pay $$$ to find out who paid for that Times Square ad.

8. Sophie Kemp also made this point in a smart and generally positive review of the new Fcukers EP for Pitchfork.

9. But, like, not exclusively. I like stuff besides plaintive wailing over an electric guitar!