The Dallas nightlife scene has never been more interesting, or more appealing. It’s also never been quite so funny. In a time where it’s become a trend to take our fun very seriously, turning enjoyable evenings into shows of coolness, where smiling reveals weakness and a laugh is akin to surrendering to some strange order of things, it’s nice to see cracks in the skin of the machine. Dallas has always seemed poised for this, ready to question how things are done, or how we look at things, in order to make the world safer for the community here. This is one of the things that makes it such a splendid place to visit, and the hotels in Dallas always offer a graceful entrance into this lively city.
It’s all rather graceful here, in its own way. There is certainly a local style, and there are local flavors. In a city this size, there are always plenty of new players on the scene, and this isn’t just true in the nightlife, but can be found in music, art, and standup comedy. Poised on the edges of all of these is Honchie, one of the rising music groups. They list their influences as Andy Kaufman, and he singularly added a plurality of dada techniques to live comedy, and changed the way we thought about laughing in public. There is certainly a similar aesthetic going on here, and it looks like they’ve been at this for some time.
They’ve been compared to Tenacious D, Frank Zappa, and Ween, and these are also apt comparisons. It’s not that they’re derivative of anything, but they are simply hard to classify, because for one thing, they don’t seem to take themselves very seriously. In the world of rock, where attitude is everything, this might be bolder than anything Lou Reed ever considered as oppositional. This is very funny music, where the songs are a collapse of quotations from arena rock, hip hop, funk, pop, and alternative. The live shows are hilarious send ups of rock tropes mixed with performance art we haven’t seen since the Tubes. And, they also happen to be pretty fantastic musicians, which makes the joke go on for longer than one line, and, it looks like it might be long enough to sustain a career, if there is any justice.
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