Thunderheist – Nov 18 – Wild Buffalo
“Booty rockin, show stoppin, everybody back poppin, knees jerkin, girls workin. Work it till your stomach hurtin. Don’t stop: gotta get it, get it, shake it off till your body sweatin. Everybody watchin, but that don’t mean we stoppin.” And that pretty much describes the scene from my vantage point center stage at the Buff on a recent Wednesday night when Montreal’s twitchy electronic music crew Thunderheist hit on their heavy-rotation danceparty fave, “Jerk It.”
My glasses were fogged, then sweatily palmed, then placed under the protective angle of a stage monitor.
My dancing partner and I tried to follow the directions of the song, back poppin, knees jerkin, booty rockin, even though I was never hip to the patois of its title. As it happens, whether it’s the inclement affective disorders or Vitamin D deficiency or the malignant influence of Canadian power pop, this town isn’t quite jerkin enough to fill the Wild Buffalo on a Wednesday night for the more cosmopolitan fare (lets call it, like the polite white Nor’westers we are).
Canada’s Thunderheist, socialist or not, seem to be on the populist upswing, to the point that they might soon be able to climb to the top of the Canadian subsidy heap–”Jerk It” just made it on to the soundtrack of the Wrestler. And there I was, oblivious to all but the beats and my lady friend, oblivious to the semantic distinctions (hoping it was nastier than it turned out to be), oblivious to the meaty ghost of Mickey Rourke slobbering at silverscreen g-strings, oblivious to any more than one body beside me, in the sweaty throes of our interpretation of jerking it. In Bellingham, on Wednesday nights we get away with these parochial interpretations.
That is until a bona fide disco diva with a name like MC Isis battle cries “everybody watchin, that don’t mean we stoppin” pointing down with a long manicured nail toward the slovenly pony-tailed bar-clingers. You can tell by her swagger, followed by a prancing stomp in those 7-inch healed boots, a shake of her shawl-hung t-shirt, that she’s been rocking parties in Brooklyn, where the real estate forces a bit more intimacy. She reached deep down into her stretch jeans (no room for us in there) to find her affinity with these pale imitations at left stage, “I’m a black girl with a white girl’s ass. YOU know what I mean girls, hah?” Then she hops off into mid-crowd and shows us how.
