KEEP IT LOUD!

            There have been far stranger bedfellows in the world other than the relationship between bars and music. Both are wed to each other as necessary components for a good time. Have you ever walked into a bar/café where the music is low? It’s like walking into a strange wax museum, except all the eyes turn to look at you when you open the door. Yikes.

            Here at The Bartender Knows, we are dedicated to the sanctity of drinking to the point of exhilaration/intoxication to the beat of whatever music that may suit folks to their taste and conscience. As a bartender for over 10 years, I can’t think of a time I wasn’t concerned about the music that gets played at my bar while I tend it. Horrible music, meaning music that doesn’t make people want to smile/dance/fuck, is thoroughly unacceptable at the bar. Yes, your selection of 8 Meatloaf songs in a row is prohibited. If you want to jerk-off, do it at home.  

If there’s booze pouring, there must be good music. Half of you were conceived because your parents met through a song they both liked at a bar (and the rest smashed to Jimmy Hendrix records drunk in a duplex in Santa Ana, California in ‘77).

            Going back to my point. Music is the ingredient. Always. But guess what the geniuses over at the House and Human Needs Committee decided to push here in the music cathedral that is New Orleans, Louisiana? As of late, there have been several bills send down the pipeline regarding noise ordinances for The Quarter, American’s far most musical headquarters and destination point for all of the world. And because some nouveau riche cocksuckers moved a block from Bourbon Street are complaining about the noise! In New Orleans? In the Quarter? Off Bourbon Street? The absurdity is frightening. But even more frightening is that its gaining ground. And from whom, do you ask? What people in their right minds would try to proverbially ‘turn down’ the volume in the French Quarter?

            None other than the same fucking culprits that always ruin everything:

            Rich. Bourgeois. Pigs.

            This argument has been going on for a million years. Now if anyone finds my rhetoric to be a little aggressive that fine. Let’s have a small vocab/history lesson real quick from someone smart.  

“Karl Marx said that the culture of a society is dominated by the mores of the ruling class, wherein their superimpose value-system is abided by each social class (the upper, the middle, the lower) regardless of the socio-economic results it yields to them. In that sense, contemporary societies are bourgeois to the degree that they practice the mores of the small-business “shop culture” of early modern France.” (--someone smart).

            That’s a fancy way a saying: dumb, rich, tasteless fucks. It happened to my fine neighborhood as well, the mecca of neo-bourgeois hipster zombie fascists in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Hell, you couldn't even get a cab to take you out of Manhattan over the Williamsburg Bridge. Now you can barely get anyone to smile and converse without a look of sheer terror crossing their socially retarded face. 

            It’s hard to hide my class hatred. Now, I’m not anti-money (we’ll discuss the penny incident in the future, not yet…). I love money. Especially crazy rich people. The kind that fund theater groups, produce short films, open dive bars, work for the Red Cross in their spare time; these are my kind of people. My people are not the people trying to turn down the music in America’s cultural church. No. A hater in New York recently told me: “You don’t even live there. Why do you care?”

            “No, I don’t, but I am a citizen of this country, and I’ll be damned to see the most interesting anomaly of a city in America lose its shining jewel: LIVE MUSIC. And by the way, go fuck yourself.”

            Do we want New Orleans just to become a mini-mall-ridden nightmare? Orange County already exists.

            Well, I’m happy to inform the readers of The Bartender Knows that the people of New Orleans fought back today. In the ‘11^th’ hour, the City Council withdrew its sound ordinance bill this morning, just before an army of protestors and musicians stormed city hall, trumpets and clarinets in hand, playing classic tunes as “Down By The River Side”, “Liza Jane”, and “When The Saint’s Go Marchin’ In”. They were given speech privileges and plenty of press to grieve this gross manipulation by the rich, condo buying, pedestrian newcomers who obviously ‘don’t know what it is’ to live in New Orleans. 

             You don’t like music, move to Tucson, Arizona. You don’t like parades, go live in Irvine, California.

            Please people, can we just leave New Orleans alone to be what is.

            And if you don’t know what it is…I ain’t gonna tell you.

            PS. If you wanna link to what’s up (READ HERE).

OH WHAT?

CITY HALL. NEW ORLEANS. 3.17.14

DO YOU KNOW WHAT IT MEANS TO MISS NEW ORLEANS?