He puts in work every day to keep energy up: booking shows, emailing music blogs, and selling one-off merch pieces via Twitter DMs. Within the scene, Lucas is like some combination of coach, starting forward, and team mascot. Some of their songs seem to want to be taken seriously, and there are plenty of earnest moments in the Dark World catalog alongside all the jokes. A lot of their music is just as ambiguous, not just defying genre but also frequently defying normal standards of taste.
It’s a label and a collective, though its members don’t often use those words, choosing instead to call it a “syndicate” or resisting classification entirely. It’s catchy and a little bit dumb, an unpolished afternoon project that sticks with you.ĭark World is a group of 20-plus boys, most of them from the woodsy towns of Western Massachusetts. Filmed on VHS then crudely edited in iMovie, the video is a no-budget, vaguely gothic posse showcase that happens to be set in a barn. The stumbly beat was made by Nick Atkinson, 20, who goes by Ghost, and the song features Cooper’s angelically reverbed voice too. DJ Lucas - is probably the closest thing Dark World has to a “hit.” Lucas raps on the track, his flow growl-like.
With nearly 47,000 YouTube views at the time of this writing, “Creme De La Creme” - a murky earworm by 22-year-old Lucas Kendall, a.k.a. It’s avant-garde in an innocent way: the production is tinny and cheap-sounding, and something about Cooper’s vocal just feels off, as if English wasn’t his first language. In the clip, he sits backwards on an old wooden chair and exaggeratedly mouths the words: She say she wanna dance with me/ But she don’t know how. Handy, a baby-faced singer who records as Lucy. For a portion of the video, he wiggles around in a down comforter, like a lumpy caterpillar with a human head.Ī few dozen clips later, there’s an unhinged ballad called “She Say She Wana” by Cooper B. When the song starts, Gods Wisdom’s delivery is coarse and phlegmy and slurred, sounding sort of like chopped-and-screwed screamo or some kind of evil, bedroom-pop approximation of crunk music. It opens with footage of sitcom legend Roseanne Barr talking about the CIA mind control in Hollywood. There’s a homespun video for a sort-of rap song called “Christian Dior,” for example, that was made by a 22-year-old named Ruvi Ender Arnold, who records as Gods Wisdom. It’s wonderful how all our gay activists over the years have fought the good fight and won so much for all of us and future generations of gays.Dark World’s YouTube page is easy to get lost in. I knew a guy who once told me that he only could feel alive in summer on fire Islan, the rest of the year in upstate New York where he was a teacher, he had no social life, no outwardly gay experiences or appearances. So as you smugly criticize these guys in the film, I urge other viewers to try to place yourselves in their shoes, and imagine what gay life was in 1976. mere suspicion of being gay, or even unmarried beyond a certain undefined age, could be grounds for loosing government jobs, and of course, no security clearances for gays. These Fire Island frolicers were all born during the gay bashing and gay witch hunts of the lavender scare, under Sen Joe McCarthy and NY asshole closet case lawyer Roy Cohen. The military was weeding out gays left and right.
Gay marriage was not even on the radar screen yet. If a pair did become known in the non-gay world, your partner was known as your “friend” or your “roommate”. It was the era of “couples” always having separate apartments, not talking about the other at work or school, or among straight friends. Society didn’t like it, families raised eyebrows. In those days, many guys wee gay on weekends, straight acting Monday through Friday.
Society was very anti-gay, the gay community had lots of internalized homophobia, and whenever and wherever pockets of freedom existed, of course there were excesses that cover compensated for what most of their lives were previously, and for the majority, off of Fire Island. They did not get to have boy friends in junior high (now called middle school), high school, any many even in college. Aren’t you prissy and sanctimonious? In 1976, most visitors to Fire Island had never known the freedom and self-acceptance of living “openly gay”, “Out”, in their daily lives wherever they originally came from.