the love/hate parade

I'm not at all a fan of techno music, nor of the narcotic-induced feeling of everything-is-wonderful that seems to pervade the music's accompanying culture. I'm too much of a hip-hop fan to like that kind of music, and I'm too much of a realist to believe that bullshit neo-millennial hippie ethos.

So it was a bit odd that I found myself wandering around in the final destination of the 2005 S.F. Love Parade this past Saturday, Sept. 24th. This was the second year of this event in S.F. (it's been going on globally for several years now), and it's is basically a big fucking rave in the middle of the day in Downtown S.F. at the Civic Center, with tons of shitheads on psychotropic narcotics dressed like fucking cartoon characters dancing like cracked out hippies to music no one else understands. And I saw pretty much exactly what I expected:















After an hour or two of this mainey shit, we—Rez1, Leanna, Faydog and myself—had just about had enough of all the colorful crap and relentless bass bombs being dropped at any of two or three stages that were within earshot at any given time, so we decided to retreat a bit. As our small crew of brave rave adventurers made our way back to where we had started on our fantastically terrifying journey—the steps of the Capital Building—Rez grabbed my shirt, pointed at the back of a pickup truck we were walking around and said, "Hey, isn't that Prince Paul?!"

And sure enough, standing over a CDJ1000 in the back of a Ford F250 was Prince Paul, one of the greatest hip-hop producers and DJs of all time. (Can you tell I'm a huge fan?) We hung out by the side of the truck for rest of our time at the Love Parade, and listened to Paul play great hip-hop to ravin' bitches. Too classic. My homie Rez got a shitload of video of Paul and the rest of the Love Parade, as well as a protest that was sorely under attended a few blocks away, and he'll probably have that stuff posted over on his blog site soon. Until then, here are my pix of Paul DJing, and one of Dan The Automator standing along side the truck while Paul doens't pay attention to him, making it an official Handsome Boy Modeling School sighting...