Feature: I have glimpsed hipster utopia: Chic-A-Go-Go
I have glimpsed hipster utopia. And I don’t mean that as an ironic statement.
So-called “hipster” or “indie” culture is often hard to embrace because to participate almost always feels like becoming part of a solipsistic, cynical marketing demographic. 5oo Days of Summer, American Apparel, Pitchfork: these are the icons of the culture within which I operate and I can only engage in this stuff by maintaining some critical distance, lest I become another mindless consumer. But it’s so damn tiring. Sometimes you just want to love something, wholeheartedly, with no ironic detachment. And I’ve found that something to love: It’s called Chic-A-Go-Go.
Chic-A-Go-Go is a public-access television music show based in Chicago. Its production quality is not dissimilar to what you might find on Channel 31. Taking its cues from dance shows such as Soul Train and American Bandstand, each show consists of music interviews conducted by a not-so-well-crafted puppet called Ratso and the human host Miss Mia and features dancing sometimes accompanied by the artists lip-syncing to their own songs. The dancers are not professionals but anybody who walks off the street.
The show has featured amazing artists such as Beck, Butthole Surfers, Neko Case, Dan Deacon, Girl Talk, Grizzly Bear, GZA, The Hives, Daniel Johnston, The Sea and Cake, Shonen Knife, Patti Smith, Snoop Dog, Sonic Youth, Spoon, Stereolab, Iggy & the Stooges, Le Tigre and TV on the Radio which is amazingly cool given the willfully amateur nature of the show which is, in essence, a children’s program.
We don’t get the program here in Australia but thankfully there is an abundance of clips at the youtube channel. Here is an introduction to the joyous celebration that is Chic-A-Go-Go:
SMITH WESTERNS ON CHIC-A-GO-GO
This was the first Chic-A-Go-Go clip I ever saw. I was struck by the beauty of the crappy set. It looks like it was designed by primary school children. Not in that whimsical Gondryesque sense that has been commodified by Flight of the Conchords and Lawrence Leung’s Choose Your Own Adventure. It literally looks like something you would see in a primary school musical production. The interview situation is patently ridiculous, certainly not cool in any commercial sense, but the Smith Westerns in this space say more beautiful things than in a thousand pretentious Subpop press releases:
Ratso: So how come you guys made a band?
Smith Westerns: Uh we were like real losers in school and we wanted to be cool so we played music and it really panned out.
No pretension. Just very human anxieties transformed into pure joy.
The real highlight though is the little girl with the orange wig, dancing awkwardly during the performance (at 1:55). Chic-A-Go-Go seems designed to capture beautiful moments such as these.
SEA AND CAKE AND RYAN PITCHFORK ON CHIC-A-GO-GO
In this clip you meet human host Miss Mia and her awesome tattoos which speak volumes about Chic-A-Go-Go’s approach to creating a children’s program. There is no sense that the program condescends to children by presenting sanitised role models such as Hi-5. The highlight of this clip is at 3.14 where Miss Mia is introducing the song “Crossing Line” with a little girl who decides to go off script and climb over the set.
What’s really enchanting about the world of Chic-A-Go-Go is its sense of community. The dancers are not a bunch of twentysomething hipsters who’ve just finished a stint at American Apparel. There are children and elderly people. Mums and dads. People of all sizes and types. At 3.55, during the actual song, a father dances with his preschool-aged kid while a girl stops mid-song to put her shoe on properly. That these people are not ushered off-screen, that these are the moments lingered on, shows the generosity of spirit in this show.
GZA MEETS LIL’ RATSO
Wow. Just wow. That’s GZA on a community television program talking to a sock puppet. It’s absolutely adorable how these artists embrace the spirit of the show. Seeing GZA coo over how cute Ratso is at 3.58 just makes me giggle. Wu-Tang is for the babies!
DAN DEACON ON CHIC-A-GO-GO
The interview with Dan Deacon here is fun, if only because when Ratso and Miss Mia get around to asking Deacon their regular question, “Do you have any positive messages for the kids watching?” Deacon replies:
“Don’t ever get a real job. And realise that money is the root of everything evil in the world.”
The song begins at 3.06. This episode features the “El-Train” whereby the dancers form two lines and take turns dancing down the middle. This episode doesn’t fail for strikingly emotional moments. Following the first dancer (a bizarre hyperactive adult with a hat shaped like a wolf’s head), a tween girl walks down the aisle accompanied by a skinny tie-wearing hipster. Embarassed, she walks down arms crossed but with the sure trace of a smile on her face. The camera here perfectly captures that coccoon-stage of growing up, when your insecurities are not yet ready to let you experience the joyful abandon you want to feel.
The beauty of Chic-A-Go-Go is so fragile. If the sets were a little better, the participants a bit more generic, the dances a bit more choreographed, the show’s charm would die. It would become something like this:
Have you seen anything so heinous as this bunch of fucking Brooklyn hipsters re-enacting the bratpack mashup of Phoenix’s ‘Lisztomania’? It’s almost as if they read Stuff White People Like and mistook it for a manifesto instead of satire. A bunch of white twentysomethings who look as if they raided the wardrobes of Fox Searchlight Pictures and created this video as a shrine to how beautiful and cool they imagine themselves to be. That this video isn’t actually a commercial for something is perhaps the most depressing thing of all.
This is one of the saddest things of all about the world we live in, that everyone is potentially up for sale. Almost everything that is beautiful eventually gets eaten up by capitalism, almost every moment of creative individuality becomes transformed into cultural capital, almost every struggle against homogeneity becomes a niche-marketing ceasefire.
At least, when it all gets too sad, you always have Hanson on Chic-A-Go-Go to make things better.
HANSON ON CHIC-A-GO-GO
Adam Christou
01/10/09 - 5:14 PM
god I love chic-a-go-go.
But let’s be honest here, public access dance shows are the pinnacle of awesome low-budget television.
Take this gem for example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QanAzoI3B_w
Brad Nguyen
01/10/09 - 5:16 PM
Public access dance shows are the pinnacle of television full stop!
Tim
02/10/09 - 1:01 AM
Hey Brad,
I was really pleased to read your take on Chic-a-go-go. You totally nailed the essential charm of the show. We did the show a year ago and it was really one of the most fun gigs we’ve ever done. There is an innocense at play that makes you forget all the crap of trying to appear cool. As a performer, you’re free to be dorky, to dance like a child – to BE a child again.
There was one moment when our guitarist nearly fell over and I was laughing so hard I forgot to lip synch. But that was perfect.
Thanks for spreading the word about one of my favorite things about Chicago.
Best wishes,
Tim Ferguson
The Red Plastic Buddha
miss mia
02/10/09 - 3:41 AM
hidy ho from chic-a-go-go land! thanks for the great blog, brad. i’ve hosted the show for over 11 years (!) & it’s simply the best thing, ever. there’s an innocence with CAGG that’s pure – no pretenses, no irony, no agendas but to have fun. it’s all love & i’m lucky to be a part of it.
we hope to get full episodes on line, soon.
i’ll be down under in march of 2010 & hope to check out the cool side of melbourne, as well. please be in touch with neat things to see & do in melbourne & i’ll be sure to check ‘em out.
we were once interviewed over the phone for an australian tv show called “recovery” quite a while ago, too..ever hear of it?
thanks again for the post!
miss mia
mia@miapark.com
Adam Christou
02/10/09 - 3:42 AM
you know what, I just realised what the more commercial, mainstream version of chic-a-go-go is.
It’s not those self-parodying, horrible Brooklyn hipsters. It’s Yo Gabba Gabba – which to be honest, is pretty good too.
It’s a commercial product sure, but it has its own charms and endearing qualities about it too.
it’s hard to hate a show that lets Amy Sedaris guest star as the tooth fairy.
Jessie
02/10/09 - 8:19 AM
Chic a go go IS great, and that lisztomania clip IS awful, but as someone who produced TV for C31, has voluntarily made screen based art events for the last 7-8 years, and is now at the wrong end of my 20s- let me tell you that the “fragility” and “beauty” of super low budget practice wears you down after a while. Do you think that the people who make Chic a go go wouldn’t love to get paid for what they do? And if they did, would that somehow ruin it for you? How long do you think that show will last without some financial support mitigating all that hard work at some point? And should artists never be paid for what they do, so that they can retain their fragile purity for consumers like you who prefer them to be indentured waifs, to live up to your romantic notions of how art/film/music/tv is made???
Regardless of the fact that this is a well written piece about something that deserves celebration- implying that art/film/music is better when the artists (in this case, the producers of the show) are not getting paid is infuriating and is one of the reasons that our society can get away with not funding them properly.
And yes, you hit a sore point!
Brad Nguyen
02/10/09 - 11:33 AM
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m against artists being paid…
I’m against artistic practices (paid or not) that pander to demographics imposed by capitalism. I’m for artistic practices (paid or not) that demonstrate unique beauty and offer a different perspective.
Noone was paid to make the Lisztomania clip either. That the people in the clip seem entirely concerned with conforming to a highly controlled “indie” image is my problem with that video.
If the producers of CHIC-A-GO-GO were billionnaires I would be the happiest chap in the world.
Brad Nguyen
02/10/09 - 11:36 AM
Thanks for the kind words Miss Mia. And thanks for CAGG!
Man, Recovery was my childhood. Everyone knows that show. I can’t believe you were on it!
I’m sure you’ll love Melbourne when you get here.
Brad Nguyen
02/10/09 - 11:59 AM
Yo Gabba Gaba is great. So is Sesame Street.
Adam Christou
02/10/09 - 12:19 PM
oh please oh please do an episode of chic-a-go-go here, so I can dance in it.
Jessie
02/10/09 - 12:32 PM
Fair enough- like I said, it’s a sore point (I got chips on my shoulder as big as the Irish Potato Famine).
I know you are not actually saying that artists shouldn’t be paid- BUT you are perpetuating a romantic notion that art should exist in some kind of vacuum away from audiences (or capitalist demographics, if you will)- because these things will sully it’s purity.
There are many different kinds of art- TV and film are primarily commercial practices where the relationship to capital, demographics, audiences is explicit and ineluctable. No-one makes a film without someone putting up a significant amount of cash, and expecting it to be returned in some way at a box office somewhere. No one makes a film or television show that they can’t imagine anyone wanting to watch.
It can be true that awareness of these factors can lead to mediocrity, but it’s not a given- and encouraging that view just reinforces the idea that art is some kind of holy practice that exists outside the material world.
Having said all that (exhale), it IS shit when other people co-opt a culture you have investment in and do things with it that make you vom. BUT this shit is cyclical, and out of the decaying carcass of hipsterism, something else will be born, mark my words. And one day our children will despair of IT, too.
Jessie
02/10/09 - 1:37 PM
U must be so sick of me btw- I try to shut up, but it doesn’t work!
Adam Christou
05/10/09 - 2:58 PM
I’m actually excited (and terrified) to see what will come out of the remains of the hipster-culture that’s currently bubbling.
It’s at least a good 3-4 years away though.
Maybe we’ll all embrace the goth scene again.
Jessie
07/10/09 - 7:38 AM
Haha- I think that might already be happening….
http://thexx.info/