Zombies! Organize!!

Whereas my last adventure in live music took me to the depths of North Miami’s ghettos for the International Noise Convention, this weekend found me in the upscale consumer’s paradise of West Palm Beach for the politically radical 80s kitsch techo/rap of Zombies! Organize!! and Freeze Pop. Full disclosure: one of the members of Zombies! Organize!! is my student Laura, who was one of my undergraduates and has since enrolled in our Master’s program and taken two graduate seminars with me. I had no idea that Laura was even in a band until a few months ago, but I’ve since discovered that they have quite the following among hipster kids in South Florida.

I’ve never had any reason to visit West Palm Beach’s downtown shopping district, so I don’t know my way around. I find myself stuck in the Saturday night traffic of something called CityPlace, which in truth is neither a city nor a place (discuss!), but instead an expanse of lame high-end boutiques and shitty mid-priced restaurants. Then again, while crawling through the Manhattan-paced traffic I watch some cops maliciously eyeing a handful of black teenagers who are aimlessly loitering in front of one of these stores, and I think to myself that maybe that this is a city after all.

The cover charge tonight is 15 bucks, and I’ve driven over 50 miles to get here, so this better be a good fucking show. I chat for a while with Laura, who is outfitted in a black tank top and a pink tutu, and she introduces me to the other band members, who as it turns out are her sister and her sister’s husband. Yes, this is a family band.

Zombies! Organize!! take the stage and all the hipsters rush in from the bar to start dancing. Their sound is composed of rudimentary keyboard beats and deadpan white-kid raps of the sort I haven’t heard since Lambda Lambda Lambda’s triumphant performance at the end of the first Revenge of the Nerds movie. I am filled with a teacher’s pride when I listen closely to the lyrics that sound like snippets of Marxist theory and Situationist sloganeering being rhymed at a high school pep rally. It’s like Judith Butler became a member of Devo. No wait, it’s like Le Tigre schooling Grandmaster Flash in queer theory. I mean how could you not love a band that uses “hegemonic masculinity” in a chorus or rhymes “Spartacus” with “lick my robot clitoris”? Adorable!!! Now I got it: It’s as if the little girls who once comprised the Shaggs had been abducted and forced to bear children for the benefit of a techno-socialist cult led by the members of Kraftwerk, and then said cult decided it was now time for their children to form a band that could de-program the exploited and pacified masses of late capitalism and its culture of the simulacrum with hypnotic retro hip hop beats and mallrat accents.

Freeze Pop are the main draw tonight, but it’s a tough act for them to follow. They are a more grown-up band featuring a sexy female singer and two guys who are masters of the key-tar (you know, a keyboard that is slung over the shoulder and played like a guitar with an extraordinary amount of ironic posturing). It’s a good show finished off with some totally bitchin’ covers of “The Final Countdown” and “Don’t Stop Believin.’” I stick around for a while longer because I am inexplicably struck by the urge to keep dancing with some friends I have run into at the show. It’s almost 2 AM now and time to go home. On the way back to I-95 CityPlace is deserted with the exception of security guards and police officers. I indulge the fantasy that they are there to restore order after all the consumers have had their brains eaten, or better yet, decided to go get organized.