The Beastie Boys

Seattle Worldcon 2025 Wednesday Night Dance

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As described on the Seattle Worldcon 2025 schedule:

From dance clubs in Alaska in the ’90s to being a recent regular DJ at Norwescon, DJ Wüdi spins an eclectic mix of dance tracks from across the decades. Pop, electronica/dance, wave, disco, goth/EBM/industrial, convention classics, mashups… (almost) anything goes!

Me standing at a table in front of a MacBook on a stand, in front of a large screen with fancy graphics including cover art and audio waveforms of the songs being played.
I may not have the most attended dances, but I have fun trying to make them look good.

The opening night’s dance at Seattle Worldcon 2025, recorded live at the Sheraton Grand hotel in downtown Seattle where the Worldcon After Dark programming was held, just a few blocks away from the Convention Center Summit building that was home to the daytime programming. Because this is an unedited live recording, there are a few flubs (some subtle, but some notable train wrecks right off the bat)…but hey, that’s just proof that I’m a real human and not genAI. ;) Pop it on in the background and enjoy four hours of the Seattle Worldcon nightlife!

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Norwescon 47 Thursday Night Star Trek vs Star Wars Dance

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From Norwescon 47: Are you Team Enterprise or Team Skywalker? Do you dream of the final frontier, or a galaxy far, far away? Lightsaber or phaser? The Force or the Prime Directive? Let your attire display your affiliation as we dance the night away with DJ Wüdi!

One note: Due to technical issues that plagued the start of the dance, the first 20-some minutes of this has been reconstructed at home. Everything from 27 minutes on was recorded live at Norwescon. This also means there’s one duplicated track…have fun finding it!

Costumed people, inculding Ursula from the Little Mermaid, a Starfleet science officer, and a Vulcan, dance in a circle to The Firm's "Star Trekkin'" as I stand on stage with my DJ gear in front of a video backdrop showing a Super Star Destroyer maneuvering through an asteroid field.

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Difficult Listening Hour 2023.02.12

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My usual unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants session where I’m just grabbing whatever seems right in the moment. Almost anything goes.

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Difficult Listening Hour 2021.05.01

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Since it was just a couple days before my birthday, I went a bit all over the map with this one, as I worked through some of the tracks I’ve had set aside to play but which haven’t quite fit into recent weeks. A bit more eclectic than usual, is what I’m saying.

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Difficult Listening Hour 2020.08.29

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Week twenty-six of my unplanned, unrehearsed, seat-of-the-pants goofing around. As a way of getting back into practice and doing something regularly, I’ve started doing regular Twitch broadcasts, now on Saturday mid-mornings. These are the results. Anything goes.

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 09

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Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the ninth in the series!

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 04

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Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the fourth of quite a few to come!

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Sounds From the Lost Abbey 03

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Back in February, I took up a challenge from one of my friends (prompted by the Gigs mix I posted) to create a mix based around songs that I’d have played at the Lost Abbey, during the mid- to late-1990s. To get a little help putting together the playlist, I put out a call for requests on Facebook, and ended up with something around 14 hours of possible songs, almost entirely pulled from requests by people who used to see me spin at the Lost Abbey.

Since 14 hours is far too long to do as a single mix, I’ve broken the requests up into multiple 80-ish-minute playlists. Here’s the third of quite a few to come!

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Beastie Boys are the new Bon Jovi

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The New York Times reports on a new concert film from The Beastie Boys:

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

[…] While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. “The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert,” Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

Heh. Me being a child of the ’80’s, this sounded very familiar. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like what Bon Jovi did for their video for “Bad Medicine“:

For their “Bad Medicine” video the band invited fans to the video shoot, handed out additional video cameras for fans to keep, and collected the resulting footage at the end of the night, which was cut into additional footage shot by video director Wayne Isham.

Okay, sure, so the B-Boys did a full-length concert film and not just a five-minute music video, but still…. Everything old is new again.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).

More protest songs

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Salon has posted links to six protest songs that have been released by the artists to the web as free-for-download .mp3’s:

  • The Beastie Boys “In a World Gone Mad…” (which I posted about earlier)
  • Billy Bragg “The Price of Oil”
  • Chumbawumba “Jacob’s Ladder (Not in My Name)”
  • Ani DiFranco “Self Evident” (which Kirsten quoted in February)
  • John Mellencamp “To Washington”
  • Saul Williams “Not in My Name”

Remixes of the Saul Williams track, along with two other tracks from him (“Bloodletting” and “September 12^th^”) can be found at the Synchronic Records website.

This is cool.

(Via Kirsten)