Welcome to the MSTRKRFT Concert

Oh, this crowd. My roommate and I are here because she called into the radio station and won tickets, and now to my right is a girl who has taken her shirt off, wearing just a leopard print push-up bra and jeans. This is what we won. Her dance move of choice is some sort of fist-pump/vadge-thrust combo and I spy thong straps. Within moments she’s been hoisted up onto the shoulders of a tall blond boy and she’s doing the same move minus the legs. All that thrusting against the nape of his neck makes it look like he’s suffering from whiplash. “She’s going to fuck his head off,” I worriedly think to myself as I run for cover.

In the process of fleeing the hell away from this two-headed tower of human promiscuity I accidentally bump into another collegeish boy who has decided to take his shirt off. It feels like walking in on someone else having sex, er, not just walking in, more like tripping and collapsing into bed with them; in other words, sticky and horrifying. He’s “in the zone” or whatever and doesn’t notice me, meanwhile I can’t decide whether it’s a good idea or a sort of kamikaze of body parts if I use one of my hands to brush his sweat off my arm.

I escape to the bar where water – poured from a bottle of Crystal Geyser into a plastic bathroom cup – is five fucking dollars; beer is three. I ask for a cup of ice (free dollars and ninety-none cents) and wait a minute until it’s melted into ice water. Feeling satisfied with my resourcefulness I re-enter the crowd, only to have the cup snatched out of my hand and flung into the audience. The song playing has only one or two audible lines of lyrics: “All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha,” and back to the bar I go for attempt #2 at hydration.

Speaking of concerns of hydration, here’s where I really slip into being a geezer, because fuck it: The band, or DJs, or Apple store Geniuses or whatever they are up there, is called MSTRKRFT. Or MKRJFJRTKFRT or FKTFBLARKMARKFART or something, but it is pronounced “Mastercraft.” Despite how energetic the music is, this whole genre is a bit of a shrug for me. It’s fun and explosively dancey but usually lacking in the structure that I think makes a song a song. What? I like melodies. With this, you can’t exactly tell when one is starting and another is ending except for when they change the color scheme of the iTunes visualizer projected behind them; it’s constant thumping and sound effects. All 7,000 of us are facing the stage but there’s certainly nothing to watch if you’re more than 30 feet away, or, if you’re like my roommate, you’ve danced your contact lenses out.

But I’m still having fun. I vacillate between just sort of going with it and seeing this whole event like a festering bacterium under a microscope; sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I have no idea what I’m doing, sometimes wondering if everyone there knows I know they have no idea what they’re doing. Some people say they’re there to hear the music live (live…from…laptops….) but this whole scene is full of people making out and dry humping, like a multi-county middle school dance where every patron has a rocket vibrating in his ass or something. While dancing with one guy, I endured a swipe at my crotch so forceful I think I sustained an instant urinary tract infection. All I do is party, ha, ha, ha, ha.

As the show ends I realize just how drenched in sweat I am and how randomly crunchy my hair feels (crunchy! AAH!) and decide that this experience has been close enough to athletic activity to merit a Gatorade. We go home and retreat to our rooms. I put on fleece pajamas and turn on Feist like a fucking sucker.