Why Is Everyone Trying To Kill The Dare?

And other questions about New York City

Earlier this summer, Kyle was hanging out with his co-workers, talking about music in the way that I imagine people who are Normal About Music talk about music. “Guess” by Charli xcx–which features The Dare’s production–was already out. He was officially a celebrity. Someone brought him up, and Kyle texted me asking what I thought. 

And then I, promptly, lost my f**king mind. 

I responded with an essay of a text, a quote from Quinn (who I sidebarred with to discuss the insanity of being asked ‘What do you think of The Dare?’), and a six-minute voice memo. (I will not be sharing the voice memo.) If nothing else, The Dare, the moniker of Harrison Smith, has the divine power to short-circuit a music critic like me. 

From the moment his first song, the 2-minute rager “Girls” came out, it was never just about The Dare. It was about what he represented. And, what he represents is a false promise: that the exclusivity of New York’s nightlife scene still exists, but you’re invited because you’re Brat/indie sleaze/cool; that a version of the city without a Sweetgreen and Blank Street Coffee on every corner is real; that community, artistry, and debauchery is just downstairs from your apartment, and the cover to get in is only $5. 

A brief history: Smith started a band called Turtlenecked in the late 2010s. One of their albums was reviewed/trashed by Pitchfork in 2017. As the pandemic eased up in 2021, Smith started DJing under the name The Dare. Every Thursday night, he’d play at Home Sweet Home, a grimy club on the Lower East Side, with a party called “Freakquencies.” 

Here’s where things start to get knotty. In 2021 and 2022, The Dare was associated with a Substack-er/promoter/aspiring social media network (??) called Perfectly Imperfect. The premise of Perfectly Imperfect was this: a person who the newsletter deems “cool” would share a quick, bulleted list of things they like–items, art, practices, ideas, anything. Think New York Magazine’s What I Can’t Live Without  but shorter, snappier, and less committal. 

Perfectly Imperfect was the breeding ground for Dimes Square and its self-fueling myth. Its early guests were not celebrities but “creatives:” models, artists, writers, publicists, DJs. They fed into the idea of a “Downtown New York Scene.” If you took Perfectly Imperfect at face value, you’d believe that you can live in Manhattan as an aspiring artist, model, or writer. You’d believe there was a coffee shop or diner somewhere on the East Side where all the artists hang out. You’d never even consider that anyone is getting help from daddy. 

Dimes Square has been so overwrought on places like this (small Substacks) and by people like me (transplant writers who have the gall to live in New York City, as embarrassing as it is). But, for better or for worse, I saw it play out. I moved to New York in 2021, right around when everyone seemed to move to New York after the pandemic. TikTok was full of videos like “Top 5 Places to Go Dancing in the East Village.” And, how convenient!, here was this “scene” that knew the bands at Baby’s All Right and what to wear to Nowadays. They liked techno and indie rock and techno-indie-rock. They seemed to be out every night.

I went to plenty of Freakquencies sets in 2022, when it was a Hot New Thing but not quite a Cobrasnake party. The Carpet Guy was there. Smith is an excellent DJ, a populist at heart, unafraid of a trashy reference or an obvious song. While everyone else tried to out-cool each other, he seemed happy to play Benny Benassi’s “Satisfaction.” I even saw him play Baby’s, probably the last time he’ll play that venue with publicly accessible tickets. He was profiled by Spin, Paper Magazine, Office Magazine, GQ, The Washington Post, Dazed, Uproxx, W Magazine, One’s To Watch, The Face, New York Times, Dork, V Magazine. It goes on, I’m sure. 

The Perfectly Imperfect parties were the worst. Expensive drinks; bands that the owners were friends with. Dorian Electra would be there, in the corner, obviously. Some guy was pissed at me because my friend took too long doing coke in the bathroom. People were not unfriendly in a New York, impatient way. They weren’t unfriendly in an LA, “Who are you again?” way. They just weren’t there. Wherever the party actually happened, it wasn’t here, on Mott Street. This was theater, put on for our benefit and our money. It was not a “scene.” It was a newsletter. 

Indie sleaze, Dimes Square, The Dare. It got publicized and blogged about to infinity. Major publications swooped down like vultures to observe the front-facing flash culture of New York’s newest scene. This was bringing New York Back to something people can tangibly remember before phones did all the remembering for us. The supposed “Meet Me in the Bathroom” era of The Strokes and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. No, wait. Not Meet Me In The Bathroom. We’re just like the Britney Spears era of paparazzi shots and low-rise jeans. No, wait. Not that either. We’re just like The Rapture. No, no. This is so LCD Soundsystem, but before he got too old. When he was “losing his edge,” but he still had his edge enough to know he was losing it. No, wait: what is this in reference to again? 

The newsletter got bigger, and people got madder at it. It became a way for celebrities like Charli xcx or Mac Demarco or Michael Imperioli to show they knew “What Was Cool In New York.” The Dare got bigger too, playing fancy Fashion Week parties. He became someone to gossip about. Freakquencies was less often, more crowded. 

I think that Smith did what most of us would do in the situation, certainly what I would: he became a pop star. He signed to Republic Records and started partying with real celebrities, instead of “creatives” pretending as such. And now, it’s 2024. He’s posted about on Pop Crave. Gays thirst after him in the retweets. Charli says he’s the next big pop producer. The Dare has divided us musically-inclined and terminally online into two factions. There’s one side: idealists, Brat Summer forever, people who want to believe that he’s “cool.” They want to believe that indie sleaze is back because, if it is, they’re here for it. Thank god, they didn’t miss the part. And then there’s the older, more jaded people who…want to kill him. 

Obviously, it’s a joke. Tweet got deleted, but it had 1K+ likes. There’s some sentiment at play. Whatever The Dare is selling… there are some that are not buying it. 

From the acid-y first notes of “Girls,” The Dare has been divisive. Not since Matty Healy has there been a more discourse-baiting (I fall for it every time) white boy in indie. And unlike Matty, it’s not really because of anything he says in interviews, or that his music is all that audacious to begin with. (The single-most controversial thing The Dare ever said was that he didn’t like girls in Doc Martens.) Now, after three years of hoopla, The Dare’s debut album What’s Wrong With New York? (to name it that…on top of everything) is out today. 

I like the song “Girls.” I liked it when it came out. I put it on my AOTY list for 2022. I showed it to my friends, and they thought it was funny but didn’t really care about the indie sleaze stuff. I still like it. “Girls” balances its outrageous horniness with irony and pretense. You’d forgive it for being ridiculous because it’s posturing as ridiculous. It knows it’s not cool. You know it’s not cool. But it plays “cool” so well that it’s damn convincing. Its unsexy lines roll off the tongue and its bass synths warble the floor. Plenty of critics whose work I read and whose opinions I respect fucking hate it. That’s fine. 

For a while, I’d defend that song, but not him. He’s a good producer, deep bass synths and scuzzy vibrations. Yes, it’s very LCD Soundsystem. But it’s sharper, scuzzier, and dirtier. Murphy came at this NYC flavor of dance from punk. Smith attacks it from electronic. Murphy was a rock nerd making dance music. Smith is a DJ making rock. 

I’ve spent the last 3 days listening to The Dare’s debut album. I don’t like it. At least not yet. Whatever balance existed on “Girls” has been lost. I kept thinking: “Oh, this is what people who hate ‘Girls’ hear when they listen to ‘Girls.’” “Perfume” drives me crazy. It tries to tap into that same shallow but winking attitude. Instead, it’s just shallow.  The whole album gestures towards those sweaty nights at Home Sweet Home, but it’s smoothed over and twice-removed. “You’re Invited!” Smith promises on, you guessed it, “You’re Invited.” There’s just no way that’s true anymore. 

He does live up to the promise on “I Destroyed Disco,” the only new song here that’s cocky enough to live up to his name as king of the sleaze. It’s bass trembles like a jackhammer, deeper and deeper into the ground. “What’s a blogger to a rocker/What’s a rocker to The Dare?” he barks. Honestly? Fair enough. The line roles off the tongue and rebukes all the damn bloggers like me. That’s the kind of line that Smith needs more of. If we’re going back to 2007, give me a lyric that’s gonna make me go, “Sick diss!” 

In the book Pretentiousness, Dan Fox describes the link between urban living and identity: “Aspiration is the sense of dislocation between our present state and what we hope will make life easier, more tolerable. To close this gap, we play roles that might help us feel we are living a more ideal life.” For a very brief moment in New York City, The Dare made that dislocation feel a little smaller. It was fun for that one moment. 

As a culture, we are playing at indie sleaze because we’re grasping at straws: that Manhattan streets are full of local businesses and interesting places, not ghostly, glass-windowed buildings for an ungodly rent. That breeding grounds for new bands, like the iconic Rockwood Music Hall, are not slowly and surely dying. That you can go to a club and get a little drunk and maybe make a new friend. That you’re not there out of an unnerving sense that this is what New York is supposed to be. 

I’ve seen a lot of division about What’s Wrong With New York? People are mad because it’s a blatant LCD Soundsystem rip-off or because he’s drawing “too much” from his influences. On  Reddit, I saw someone refer to him as “Greta Van Soundsystem.” That’s not quite what’s wrong here. Besides, the argument that an artist is too much like their influences is short-sighted music criticism. Unoriginality isn’t quite the sin people think it is. It’s that they’re cosplaying without any commitment to the bit. They’re playing dress-up without embracing the performance of their costumes. 

And that’s not what’s wrong with What’s Wrong With New York. What’s wrong is that it claims New York so unselfconsciously and without any regret. “LA to New York/New York to LA/All the other states.” “Doesn’t this represent you, young person?” The Dare got lost in the sauce. “Indie sleaze” became too fabricated, too distant from what’s actually wrong (or right) with New York that now it’s just a cheap dream that maybe NYU first-years are still innocent enough to buy into. 

When you read the countless articles about indie sleaze-revivalism, you won’t find very many other artists besides The Dare who are actually consumed on a mass-market level. You’ll see Frost Children mentioned a few times (who I’ve quite warmed to! Their song with Danny Brown is great). Maybe Blaketheman1000 (not for me). Are there no other artists in New York worth mentioning on this scale? No wonder we’re so mad at him. To no fault of his own, The Dare is the only guy to suck up all that press, money, and attention.  

The Dare is also certainly not the only artist of 2024 to sell you a false promise. The cultural shitshow of “Brat summer” rests on the assumption that, even without the money for a little key/line, you’re Brat too. But it was only after the album came out that its momentum snowballed into something deformed (and unforgivable). Plus, where Brat succeeds and The Dare fails is, of course, in the songs. Isn’t this guy supposed to be h**ny? For a sleazeball, it lacks filth and sweat. 

This may sound crazy, but I honestly feel a bit bad for Smith. He barely got a chance to just be The Dare before everyone propped him up as a Poster Child. That’s probably why What’s Wrong With New York? feels so half-baked. For a while, he felt somewhat…ordinary: a DJ thrown into the world of fashion events and partying with Charli, off of one chance single. Everything about indie sleaze is about posture: seeming like something you’re not. That includes Smith as well. 

Back to Fox’s Pretentiousness: “We live in an era of ‘mass indie,’ the assimilation of once alternative and independent forms of youth culture into the mainstream and that personal; expression through fashion or music taste no longer carries the subcultural weight it once did.” I’m pretty sure that there were a few really fun nights at Home Sweet Home, The Dare behind the decks, before everyone decided to make a “movement” about it. The speed at which he went from any semblance of an “alternative and independent forms of youth culture” to a mass-market, bloated marketing fad was too fast. The Dare is a martyr for this disappointing orgasm of a “culture movement.” The songs don’t live up to the hype. He’s selling us a myth that no one in their right mind believes anymore. And so, amidst the churn of our perpetually-unsatisfied bottomless cultural pit, Harrison Smith is getting Inquisitioned: confess that none of this was cool to begin with, or die.