Skip to content
Wednesday, May 29, 2019
6:30 p.m.

The Bad Society: Xenia Rubinos, Public Practice, and Blood Club

Murmrr Ballroom
17 Eastern Parkway
Brooklyn, New York

MAY 29, 2019—THE BAD SOCIETY continues! Please join The Baffler for the next installment in our ongoing series of concerts and talks, this time at Brooklyn’s Murmrr Ballroom, following the release of our most recent issue, “Chronic Youth.”

To commence our spring event, Baffler contributing editor and “Downstream” columnist Liz Pelly will lead a conversation on the music streaming economy, our new era of artist exploitation, and how independent artists in particular are threatened by the depredations of the contemporary music industry. She’ll be joined by fellow music streaming critic David Turner, publisher of the newsletter Penny Fractions, and Xenia Rubinos, who will also perform. 

Music will begin with Blood Club, the dissonant experimental solo project of Liana Hell Lean, also front-person of NYC hardcore band Decisions. Their latest recording, A Wood With Knots, was recorded in their bedroom at The Silent Barn and released via Sister Polygon Records (Priests, Gauche, Flasher, etc.) who called it a testament to “continuing to learn and unlearn how to perform.” We’ll also hear from NYC four-piece Public Practice, a group comprised of former members of WALL and Beverly, whose debut EP on Wharf Cat Records uses deadpan post-punk to meditate on perception and our distorted realities.

The night will be capped by a performance from avant pop master Xenia Rubinos. Across two full-length records, 2013’s Magic Trix and 2016’s Black Terry Cat, Rubinos has drawn from funk, soul, indie rock, hip-hop, R&B, and a prism of other influences, deconstructing every melody with as much nuance as she applies to the topics she takes on in her lyrics: identity, politics, undervalued labor, borders, and more. In 2016, she described Black Terry Cat as being “about uncovering the way white supremacy infiltrates our personal lives, and finding the weapons to fight it.”

Entry to the show can be yours for a mere $15; but for $40, you’ll also get a full year’s subscription to the magazine. And as always, subscribers will get some drink tickets courtesy of The Baffler.