WELCOME TO D.C.

Honestly, we're trying really hard to be patently offensive.

Hey now, excuse me for not noticing until today that Thievery Corporation has booked five straight nights at the 9:30 in late January, but I rarely look at the club's schedule these days, because it's usually anchored by novelty acts and faux trustafarians. If there's an actual reason to rise from the Cess-Dungeon and traipse over to V St., I'll usually hear about it from a tangential source. Thus, 930.com, I gaze upon you about three times a year, if you're lucky. And today I was looking only because the ol' Christmasburn/Newyearsblood always makes me feel like I'm missing something awesome. So when all of that hoopla dies, the Poppa doth rise.

And there they are, the Thievery dudes, with their XPN-approved album and their unflagging good taste -- and they're blazingly recession-proof, at least in D.C., where lots of youn'ins still apparently have lots of disposable income and want to do things that are more "benignly stylish" than "dangerously interesting." Granted, the Garza and/or the Hilton are known to stretch a little (I'm thinking about their still-nascent garage-rock love and their surprisingly easygoing Marvin), so it would be unfair to slap them with an adjective like safe or complacent. But I'd also never-ever call 'em weird, either. (And, for the record, it seems wholly inappropriate to call Radio Retaliation "angry" or even "cranky.") So what happens when you're tasteful and popular and not weird in Washington? You become an institution, and people will show up every day and pay $40 to see you.

ADDENDUM: Cherkis calls this piece "hate." I suppose in a binary "hate/not hate" construct, it's closer to "hate." But in my mind, I classify it as "grudging respect" or perhaps "jealousy" -- at least as far as Thievery is concerned. The 9:30? Hey, well, everybody has bills to pay, and we all grind in our own way. Cheers.