Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog Home
Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog

When Good Grups Go Bad: Artistic Pedophilia In The Grup Community

Grup‘s revenge; the cynicism of our obsessively narcissistic culture comes home to roost:

Magnolia, like other bands on the Union Hall bill — Care Bears on Fire, Tiny Masters of Today, Fiasco, Hysterics — is more than a novelty act. It is developing a following on New York’s burgeoning under-age music circuit, where bands too young for driving licenses have CDs, Web sites and managers.

“Oh my god, there’s like a huge, huge kid-rock scene here,” said Jack McFadden, known as Skippy, who booked the show at Union Hall. “It’s really very indicative of Park Slope, since so many of the parents who live around here are hip and have these hip little kids that they dress in, like, CBGBs T-shirts.”

. . .

More than a few of New York’s baby-face rockers have famous parents in the entertainment business, who have encouraged their children’s artistic streaks and served as role models for professional success. Lucian Buscemi, 16, the son of the actor Steve Buscemi, along with Julian Bennett-Holmes and Jonathan Shea, both also 16, have become something like the kingpins of the Park Slope kid-rock scene, ever since their band, Fiasco — previously known as StunGun — became the first youth band to play the Liberty Heights Tap Room.

. . .

The most prominent band on New York’s junior-varsity rock scene is Hysterics, a “psychedelic” quartet founded at the artsy St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn. The week after performing at Union Hall at the CMJ Marathon, the band members gathered at the studio of Jeff Peretz, their manager. Mr. Peretz also guides the Tangents, whose bass guitarist, Miles Robbins, 12, is the son of Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins.

Members of Hysterics discussed their coming gig, a party for a new Valentino perfume, which was organized through a friend of the fashion photographer Pamela Hanson, whose son, Charlie Klarsfeld, 17, is the group’s guitarist. The evening, at 7 World Trade Center last Thursday, turned out to be a pileup of celebrity children with music careers, including the DJs Lola Schnabel and Mark Ronson.

“Are we going to get swag?” asked Josh Barocas, 17, the quiet bassist, whose enormous Afro speaks of a somewhat louder interior personality.

. . .

On a Friday evening in November, Ada, [Tiny Masters of Today] bassist, 10, a slight girl with a heart-shape face, was reading “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” at Piano’s, a Lower East Side bar, while waiting to go on with her brother, Ivan, 12, the lead guitarist. (Their father requested that the family name not appear in print to protect the children’s privacy.)

After the set, during which they performed, among other songs, Ada’s mournful “Pictures” — “It’s about my friends in second grade and how awful they were to me,” she said — an adult in the audience called the band “the new Raincoats,” a reference to an experimental British act of the late ’70s.

These people make Open Air Stereo look like middle-class heroes . . .

Posted: November 20th, 2006 | Filed under: Sunday Styles Articles That Make You Want To Flee New York
Parrot Poachers . . . I Hate Those Guys »
« And When The Revolution Comes My Comrades And I Will Turn It Into The Biggest, Smelliest Dog Run In All Of Manhattan

Recent Posts

  • “Friends And Allies Literally Roll Their Eyes When They Hear The New York City Mayor Is Trying To Go National Again”
  • You Don’t Achieve All Those Things Without Managing The Hell Out Of The Situation
  • “Less Than Six Months After Bill De Blasio Became Mayor Of New York City, A Campaign Donor Buttonholed Him At An Event In Manhattan”
  • Nothing Hamburger
  • On Cheap Symbolism

Categories

Bookmarks

  • 1010 WINS
  • 7online.com (WABC 7)
  • AM New York
  • Aramica
  • Bronx Times Reporter
  • Brooklyn Eagle
  • Brooklyn View
  • Canarsie Courier
  • Catholic New York
  • Chelsea Now
  • City Hall News
  • City Limits
  • Columbia Spectator
  • Courier-Life Publications
  • CW11 New York (WPIX 11)
  • Downtown Express
  • Gay City News
  • Gotham Gazette
  • Haitian Times
  • Highbridge Horizon
  • Inner City Press
  • Metro New York
  • Mount Hope Monitor
  • My 9 (WWOR 9)
  • MyFox New York (WNYW 5)
  • New York Amsterdam News
  • New York Beacon
  • New York Carib News
  • New York Daily News
  • New York Magazine
  • New York Observer
  • New York Post
  • New York Press
  • New York Sun
  • New York Times City Room
  • New Yorker
  • Newsday
  • Norwood News
  • NY1
  • NY1 In The Papers
  • Our Time Press
  • Pat’s Papers
  • Queens Chronicle
  • Queens Courier
  • Queens Gazette
  • Queens Ledger
  • Queens Tribune
  • Riverdale Press
  • SoHo Journal
  • Southeast Queens Press
  • Staten Island Advance
  • The Blue and White (Columbia)
  • The Brooklyn Paper
  • The Columbia Journalist
  • The Commentator (Yeshiva University)
  • The Excelsior (Brooklyn College)
  • The Graduate Voice (Baruch College)
  • The Greenwich Village Gazette
  • The Hunter Word
  • The Jewish Daily Forward
  • The Jewish Week
  • The Knight News (Queens College)
  • The New York Blade
  • The New York Times
  • The Pace Press
  • The Ticker (Baruch College)
  • The Torch (St. John’s University)
  • The Tribeca Trib
  • The Villager
  • The Wave of Long Island
  • Thirteen/WNET
  • ThriveNYC
  • Time Out New York
  • Times Ledger
  • Times Newsweekly of Queens and Brooklyn
  • Village Voice
  • Washington Square News
  • WCBS880
  • WCBSTV.com (WCBS 2)
  • WNBC 4
  • WNYC
  • Yeshiva University Observer

Archives

RSS Feed

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog RSS Feed

@batclub

Tweets by @batclub

Contact

  • Back To Bridge and Tunnel Club Home
    info -at- bridgeandtunnelclub.com

BATC Main Page

  • Bridge and Tunnel Club

2025 | Bridge and Tunnel Club Blog