What’s Wrong with “What’s Wrong With New York?”
Harrison Patrick Smith, better known by his party-boy alter ego The Dare, is relatively unknown. However, those who know him know him, either loving or hating the stripped back sleazy electronic pop he’s been serving up since he released “Girls” in 2022. What’s Wrong With New York? translates this sound into a full album, replete with the highs and lows of New York’s party scene in 2024.
Much of the album is sonically uniform, taking cues from electroclash and bloghouse to produce a fairly steady 27 minutes of party music; the subject isn’t so much the parties themselves (although there is much of that) but rather the self-conscious way in which youth culture finds itself assimilating into its own past, like a coked up ouroboros.
In this sense, What’s Wrong With New York? perfectly encapsulates the Gen Z post-pandemic condition, contrasting the alienation young people feel with the lowered inhibitions of a perpetual Brat summer. In contrast to the pop star luxe of Brat, the partying on What’s Wrong With New York? is a sleazier affair, the kind of party which has to overcome barriers, be they financial (“Good Time”), geographic (“All Night”) or mental (“You Can Never Go Home”). For being a record about having a good time, suicide is invoked on at least three different tracks — if the recession pop girlies were merely grousing about being broke, The Dare is hinting at a deeper sort of despair.
THE DARE LIVE AT WIDE AWAKE 2024 // PHOTOS BY MAY ROBBINS
It may seem a bit of a reach to attach such deep socioeconomic analysis to an album that has been compared to LMFAO and an artist who has been labelled “STD Soundsystem” by the internet. At its core, What’s Wrong With New York? is meant more than anything else to be fun. The centrepiece of the album is Smith’s breakout hit “Girls,” an instantly polarising song which cribs from 3OH!3 to paint a shamelessly horny — any other adjective would make the song seem more eloquent than it is — image of just how much The Dare loves girls. “I Destroyed Disco” is another highlight of the album, the lyrics filled with a stupid braggadocio which only works due to Smith’s total commitment to the bit. To attach a secretly deep meaning to any of this is to deeply overshoot the mark.
Then, of course, there’s the “Indie Sleaze” of it all, the aesthetic commitment to reviving late noughties party culture replete with American Apparel, flash nightlife photography, and the sort of decadence which is impossible in a culture where everyone can be photographed and put online at any moment. Of course this trend revival isn’t rooted in one particular reality or style of dress, but is rather the blurry amalgamation of past influences young people have cobbled into a singular aesthetic in the present. There is no shortage of writing on fashion and musical revivals, but What’s Wrong With New York? is heavily steeped in the same sort of referential (yet never reverential) nostalgia as the rest of the “Indie Sleaze” revival, evoking LCD Soundsystem sonically and past iterations of New York party culture lyrically.
The Dare live at Wide Awake 2024
In an increasingly online world, there’s certainly a power in evoking physical exclusivity of past parties. On “Good Time,” Smith flexes that he’s “in the club while you’re online,” in a stark contrast to the COVID induced zoomification of the world. He equally rejects the meritocracy digital platforms have brought to subculture, crowing that his “set sounds good outside.” However, the sleazy pastiche is balanced by a fundamental sense of unseriousness, as though Smith is playing a highly exaggerated version of himself. “Perfume” is where this tendency is felt most strongly, bringing back the campy unseriousness from “Guess,” the Charli XCX song he co-wrote. His sprechgesang delivery on the track ends with a “Guess”-esque beat drop — when performed live, The Dare typically hits a single cymbal over and over and the song would have been stronger if this element was retained.
Smith has come under substantial criticism for presenting a “rootless” view of New York nightlife, one encumbered by the weight of its own postmodern pastiche of the past. However, Smith rejects ironic detachment and instead embraces a more complicated sort of melancholia which is far more meta-modern in its scope. The coolest New York was the one that existed ten years before you got there, and Smith is fully aware of this. What Smith is evoking is the rootlessness itself, the mythology of the party that can only exist in the lens of retrospect. It is an album that is “marked by a yearning for past innocence while ironically capturing life’s dreadfulness,” constantly contrasting the urge to “grab the third rail of the subway train” with the hope that “[we]’ll be all right, we can feel alive.”
The Dare live at Wide Awake 2024
So what is wrong with New York? There’s the obvious: rising rent, higher bills, less funding for artists than ever before, all of this to the detriment of the creative output of a once iconic city. Smith is, on some level, aware of this, with much of the album trying to capture that “party at the end of the world” energy that recession pop classics exude so well. The album isn’t trying to reinvent the musical wheel because it doesn’t have to; what is “wrong” with New York is what has been wrong with it for at least three decades. The Dare’s musical response to this climate is steeped in nostalgia for another era of the city, but there’s something almost reassuring about this, the notion that the youth of today aren’t the only generation to have grappled with these problems before.
There’s a blurry sort of magic at work here, an almost melancholic understanding that at the present you exist in someone else’s retrospective fantasy. The album closer “You Can Never Go Home” understands this, the notion that our nostalgic attachment to the past has no “home” to roost within, because this home was always a figment of our cultural imagination. The times might be bleak, we might be “close to suicide” or “lead up like a junkie,” but there’s a hidden optimism to be found within the life of the party. The title of the album itself, What’s Wrong With New York?, is both an interrogation and a defence all at once: New York is simultaneously everything and nothing, a real place and a flimsy fantasy, a fiction we can collectively manufacture into a reality, one which will be far more interesting in twenty years time than it is at this present moment.
