Who says D.C. isn’t good for music? Sure, you can’t find a club on every corner, and for the most part you’ll have to venture pretty far outside that damn “bubble” everybody’s always talking about to get there, but the District has plenty of good venues for live music and DJ sets, and here we give you a nice little rundown of where to find it:
U Street Corridor: D.C.’s fabled center for arts and music, this neighborhood, located on and around U Street in the Northwest, is home to some of our city’s best concert halls, dance clubs, and restaurants.
The biggest and most popular of the concert venues is 9:30 Club, which has upcoming shows from the likes of The Hold Steady, Bright Eyes, and Peter Bjorn and John. Bigger names are known to cost a pretty penny and sell out pretty quickly, so it’s best to get tickets early.
As for smaller concerts, Black Cat is another favorite among Georgetown students, with smaller shows and more manageable ticket prices. Black Cat is also known for its themed dance parties, which it throws virtually every night there isn’t a musician headlining.
Even smaller is DC9, which shows a lot of local acts in addition to national ones. One caveat: Someone got killed there last year.
If DJ’s and dance parties are more your thing, look no further than the still relatively new U Street Music Hall. The foremost of D.C.’s DJ-centric dance party venues, this club is dark, underground, and all about music and dancing. For the most part, shows are 21+ at the door and 18+ if you order tickets online.
Think about the number of female drummers you know. Can you count it on one hand? Kiran Gandhi (COL ’11), senior, manager of local record label Rhythm & Culture, and drumming extraordinaire, thinks that’s a problem, and tonight she’s doing something about it.
“I think it is so important to give female drummers a place to shine and be recognized for how unique their craft is, and [for] the type of vibe they bring to something that for so long has been so traditionally masculine,” Gandhi wrote in an email.
So tonight, from 6 to 9 p.m., Gandhi is hosting Rad Ladies that Drum, the first all-female drumming showcase that D.C. has ever housed. The event is being held at The Fridge DC, which defines itself on its website as an “art gallery, performance space, music venue, and classroom.” All of the night’s proceeds are going to Tom Tom Magazine, a publication entirely devoted to female percussionists.
Mike Seander, a graduate student on Georgetown’s baseball team, caught the attention of the Washington Post yesterday. Not for his on-the-field talents, though.
You see, Seander raps. (His rap name? Mike Stud.)
“It’s absurd,” Dan Capeless, his teammate, told the Post. “People are going nuts. DJs are screaming his name. Very outlandish.”
I was quickly corrected when I referred to A Million Shetland Ponies, in which Georgetown freshman David Benedetto (SFS ’13) is a musician, as a one man band.
“So, there are two members of A Million Shetland Ponies. It’s me and my best friend, Maxwell Q. Maxwell,” Benedetto explained. “The band’s been together for three years now, and Maxwell actually writes the music. Although I’ve tried my hand at that.”
It’s a little confusing, because Maxwell is a life-sized doll that dances with Benedetto’s help.
“Actually, I’d like to point out that he’s a person.”
Again, my bad. This Georgetown musical duo is little-known around Georgetown’s campus (“We have almost 90 fans on Facebook!” Benedetto said sarcastically), but it is very talented. Armed with about 17 songs in their repertoire that they’ll play in public, A Million Shetland Ponies has run the gamut of on-campus open mic nights. They took second in the D.C. Funniest College Comic competition, and in January, they came away from America’s Next Great Star, a traveling talented show which made a stop in Gaston, with $500.
Most recently, the group has put out a quirky, cute music video of the song they played at Next Great Star, called “The Argyle in My Socks.” Filmed on one of the upper levels of Healy Hall, the lovesong-video, above, features Benedetto dancing with and serenading Maxwell, (sometimes from inside a recycling bin), who’s dressed as “a lustful woman.”
Last week, the Voice‘s Tim Shine profiled Chris Tiongson (COL ’89), an alum and pediatrician from Fargo who records delightful songs celebrating Georgetown basketball players and great moments in Georgetown basketball.
How’d he get his start?
“It started, I think, Roy [Hibbert’s] freshman year,” Tiongson told Shine. “There was a Starbucks commercial … the guy’s name was Roy, and they started chanting his name: Roy, Roy, Roy. I think it was at one of the McDonough home games the students started chanting this, doing the ‘Roy’ chant to ‘Eye of the Tiger.’ Then somebody on HoyaTalk said, ‘Well wouldn’t it be funny [if someone] did a song to that.’ So then I did.”
“That would be ‘Heart of a Hoya,’” Shine writes, “a simple acoustic guitar effort that began what is now a 26-song catalog.”
Tiongson posts his songs on HoyaTalk under the username nodak89. Shine’s whole article is a terrific read, but for our listening pleasure, he has picked out his top five favorite songs:
The Georgetown Programming Board—the same people who brought you T-Pain—sent an e-mail to the student body last night asking for Georgetown’s input on the Spring Kickoff Concert.
While the Voice doesn’t necessarily agree that an April 10 concert can “kickoff” the Spring, we’re intrigued by some of the options they’re offering. Vox has been trying unsuccessfully to contact members of GPB for a few weeks now, so it’s unclear if GPB concert planners have looked into the feasibility of booking any of these acts. Regardless, if you’re looking for someone to guide your musical sensibilities—or argue with in the comments section—the Voice‘s veteran music critic Dan Cook has ranked musical acts in the order he would like see GPB try to bring them to Georgetown:
1) Flaming Lips
Let’s make a short list of elements that the Flaming Lips usually incorporate into their live shows these days:
1. An enormous digital screen that projects a hypnotic vagina at the onset of the show
2. Wayne Coyne’s inflatable, crowd-surf-ready hamster ball
3. Confetti cannons
4. Colorful, beach-ball-esque orbs
5. Lasers
6. “The world’s biggest mirrored ball”
7. Fog
8. Oh, and music
Just take a look at the clip above, and I’ll spare you the details about their critically-acclaimed discography and a groundbreaking career that spans nearly three decades.
The Walkmen, a popular mainstay among the indie rock set who played at the 9:30 Club this Tuesday, is no stranger to D.C.—four of the five band members were classmates at the St. Albans School. Their latest release, 2008’s You & Me, was a stylistic departure from the group’s previous work. With more brass parts that incite visions of a far away mariachi band, the group embraced a more reflective sound. On Tuesday the band solidified this direction with a deluge of new songs featuring a more acoustic sound and horns-a-plenty.
Almost half of the set consisted of new songs, not unlike their new iTunes EP. Before the show we were able to meet with Kevin Moehringer, a member of the group’s brass section, to talk about the band’s recording process. The band’s brass section debuted on You & Me, and has played an increasingly larger role in the group’s music. This summer the Walkmen went to Gigantic Studios in Manhattan to record new material for an upcoming album.
Cool enough to date Rihanna? The cigar-cross-handkerchief combo says yes.
Who’s been keeping Rihanna company since her split from Chris Brown? According to gossip site Bossip, it’s someone close to us—Georgetown Law student Janero Marchand:
Our source says the two have been spotted at various NYC hot spots during fashion week and were last spotted getting comfy cozy with each other at Da Silvano’s for what was deemed as a business meeting … The two arrived and left separately to avoid the paparazzi as Janero does NOT want to be in the public eye, but it’s a little too late for that homie.
While Marchand didn’t respond to a request for comment, he has been tweeting that the story is false:
How do you get your shyt taken off a blog? My shorty just called me whilin out on some made up story on a blog that is false.
Man Bossip be making up some bogus ass stories none of that is tru ya’ll it’s not EVEN a pic with me and Rihanna. Don’t believe it!
Before everyone gets excited about the possibility R&B starlets trolling Georgetown for bachelors, even if this story is true, it wouldn’t exactly be Notting Hill. Apparently, Marchand already travels in hip-hop circles, to the extent that he introduced Kanye West to that almost-bald woman he’s dating. But take heart, ordinary Hoyas–you can still get whisked away by a dreamy governor.
I don’t know if it’s possible to come across too many good songs in the span of a week, but this week I came pretty close. Mash-ups of David Guetta, remixes of Bone Thugs, and so many others.
Sadly, I had to narrow down our selection to a couple fabulous party tracks for the weekend: a new DJ Earworm mash, and a Dskotek remix of Bone Thugs N Harmony.
DJ Earworm in front of a giant fly’s eye.
The former’s mash of Sean Kingston’s greatest hits “hits” the mark. It’s a smooth and rather deadly combination of many of Sean Kingston’s greats including “Beautiful Girls,” “I Can Feel It,” and “Sean Kingston.” Say what you will about Kingston as an artist, Earworm’s rendition will make any party bump in sweaty ecstasy.
Real Thugz Jump Wallz.
The second track is a remix of the classic “Foe The Love of $.” You need to let this track grow a little bit on you, let it slowly intensify until it peaks at around 0:49, then shit gets real, real fast. I find songs like this are ideal for groups of drunken college students: most of them will be too drunk to notice the build up, but when it hits they trip balls and get dirt nasty.
Starting Thursday night and rolling on through Sunday, Washington D.C. will be treated to a series of free (FREE!) concerts, courtesy of the Kia Soul Collective Tour. Yes, that KIA, better known for mediocre motorcars than music, mirth, and mayhem.
No comment on the cars, but as for the music, they brought the goods: five of the rockinest, the groovinest, and the dancinest acts in the world, including MGMT, Wale, and Dan Deacon. Just check the lineup, pick your night(s) and show up!
Tickets are free (FREE!) but, fair warning, the MGMT show may cost you your dignity: to get tix, you’ll have to test drive a KIA car. And for the Thursday show, you’ll need to RSVP and have an ID that says you’re 21. But for all the rest, just show up to 3330 New York Ave NE and get on with it!
Vox Populi is the staff blog of the Georgetown Voice, a weekly newsmagazine at Georgetown University. Opinions expressed in posts are those of their author alone unless otherwise stated.
Who says D.C. isn’t good for music? Sure, you can’t find a club on every corner, and for the most part you’ll have to venture pretty far outside that damn “bubble” everybody’s always talking about to get there, but the District has plenty of good venues for live music and DJ sets, and here we give you a nice little rundown of where to find it:
Cool enough to date Rihanna? The cigar-cross-handkerchief combo says yes.
DJ Earworm in front of a giant fly’s eye.
Real Thugz Jump Wallz.
Starting Thursday night and rolling on through Sunday, Washington D.C. will be treated to a series of free (FREE!) concerts, courtesy of the 
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