Concert Review
Sara Cao
On a late Thursday night in New York City, hedonists, nihilists, and fun-havers clumsily jumped up and down in frenzied euphoria. Kicking off his “I’m Coming” tour with a sold-out show at Webster Hall, The Dare debuted his latest album, What’s Wrong With New York, against a backdrop of flashing lights and rows of Marshall speakers. The Dare donned his uniform Gucci suit and Celine sunglasses. His signature IDGAF attitude dangled like a gleaming golden medallion around his neck. Two standalone soundboards flanked his left and right. Behind him, a single cymbal. A mic stand stood dead center. This was a one-man show.
The audience wore microscarves, baby tees with “I heart [insert noun]” text in American Typewriter, and an array of black sequined items. The Dare kicked, screamed, clashed his cymbal mid-air, and danced in fits of hysteria. There was no shortage of lewd lyricism, obnoxious beat drops, strobing drum kicks, and distorted synth sounds. While he had yet to release eight of the fourteen songs on the setlist, the audience sang along to the ones they knew and screamed alongside the ones they didn’t. In his performance of “I Destroyed Disco,” arguably the best song on his new album, The Dare gritted out, “What’s a blogger to a rocker? What’s a rocker to The Dare?,” before the audience erupted into a cheer. None of The Dare’s new material felt innovative or unfamiliar, and he certainly did not beat the James Murphy impersonator allegations. Everything was raunchy and in your face—right where he wanted it to be.
Overloaded with obscenity, The Dare’s performance felt like the sonic counterpart to a particularly online brain rot. The concert was an addictive guilty pleasure, like any 2 a.m. descent down an Instagram Reels rabbit hole. Neither experience leaves me satisfied in the long run, but I cannot break free from the pattern of short-term dopamine fixes. After each song, I wanted more.
But at what point does The Dare’s commitment to the bit become too tacky or too much? The audience’s infectious energy never reached a climax. An inundation of flashy media and ostentatious production generates hollow grandiosity. This is the danger of extravagant maximalism under the guise of purported minimalism. The indie sleaze revival and electroclash aesthetics depend on consumer culture and microtrends, rapidly growing with our shrinking attention spans.
Even if we try to grasp the problem of inauthenticity in indie sleaze revival by understanding who—or what—The Dare is, it doesn’t get us very far. Behind The Dare is Harrison Patrick Smith, a twenty-eight-year-old former substitute teacher from Los Angeles. He is aware of his critics but shrugs them off. The Dare is both an enigma and entirely predictable. If Harrison Smith is an unbothered Bruce Wayne, The Dare is Batman. But instead of fighting crime in a bat mask, he’s in a Gucci fit shackling New York twenty-somethings within the confines of faux individualism.
Through all the artificial silliness, sleaziness, and fun that The Dare represented at his concert, I am tempted to keep my seat at the electroclash circus to see where the theatrical mess of it will lead. So when The Dare asks What’s Wrong With New York? perhaps it’s that all faux individualism will get you in the city is a plastic participation trophy engraved with “I was at The Dare show.”
Album Review
Oscar Heller
I am alone in my room. In front of me are two Sony speakers and an Aiyima power amp with wires intertwined like blood vessels. I find my phone, take a quick glance at the narrow black tie and white button-down on the album cover, and click play. Everything throbs. I listened to What’s Wrong With New York? for the first time a few days after going to the concert in New York last Thursday, so maybe I was already inclined to imagine the songs being played at a club. But the point still stands, even if you hear the songs through cheap wire headphones on your way to class. It feels good. And not in the way that it feels good to be riveted by an exceptional writer or painter or sculptor or director. The Dare is primal, and there is an instinctual flavor to his album.
In its entirety, What’s Wrong With New York? is an exercise in surrender through an erasure of all types of meaning: physical and metaphysical. The first track quite literally invites you to “Open Up” to the project—stop whatever you’re doing, grab the metaphorically present hand of The Dare, and join him on a trek through an album rife with jokes, sex, and synthesized bass lines. If the first song invites you into his world, the fifth dismantles yours. The first line on “I Destroyed Disco”—“I break records, glasses, faces, kick the whole world in the teeth with my untied laces”—seems like an enraged response (albeit, one laced with irony) to a condition The Dare ascribes to both the audience and himself on the second track: “We’re all on the brink of suicide.” Here, he points to a real sense of cultural desperation, a desire to feel something a little beyond whatever’s being shoved down your throat by advertisements and the televisual entertainment that dominates your day. “I’m in the club while you’re online,” he tells us.
His solution, in one sentence, reads as follows: “I got no money, we got no money, we got a good time.” But the Dare doesn’t just present you with a good time. Yes, the music is intoxicatingly catchy and might even prompt you to turn up the volume dial a little bit and move around, but the most intriguing part of The Dare’s whole shtick is irony. Here’s a hyper-individualist guy who, with his sunglasses and generic haircut, blends in public settings and never actually tells us who or what The Dare is. He’s a one-man show, sure, but he’s also a faceless symbol (at least on the album cover) who likes “girls who give it up for lent” and “girls who so fuckin’ kinky that they’re bent.” He’s also someone who, on the last song on the project, remixes the beginning of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All,” turning Agnetha Fältskog’s lyrical dejection into euphoric transfixion. Hell, even the album itself, which represents a never-ending night at the club full of desire and sex and drugs and ecstasy, is ironic—the joke being that it’s only 27 minutes in length. But the funniest and longest-running joke is that The Dare’s answer to individualized, mechanical consumption is to consume the album. To give into an explosion of immediate desire. So, if What’s Wrong With New York? is Fight Club, the Dare is Tyler Durden: comically unhinged, powerfully seductive, and just so fucking fun.
