Here’s something Sady wrote about going to see Kitty Pryde at Santo’s a few week’s ago.

superworse:

“I’m Kitty Pryde, and I’m here to prove that I’m a real life bitch, and not just the Internet!”

And with that, I finally realized that I was no longer one of the Young People of Today. All of us have moments, I suppose, where we realize our age. Mine is thirty. And, since that age is not “seventy-two,” it is probably painfully Thought Catalog to even talk about it. But there is a moment, where you realize that you are not A Young Person any more. A Point of No Youngturn. A Youngterloo, if you will. “I’m a real life bitch, and not just the Internet” was mine.

Also notable: I learned that I could still attract the creepier variety of twenty-something dude, should I wear a shirt that exposed the vast majority of my bra. “I love the color of your pants,” one gentleman said, at the bar I stopped in prior to the show, while sliding his hand along the greater portion of my ass. (They were purple. It was not that great.) Another gentleman congratulated me on “really getting in there” during the mosh section of the show, although by that point, I had been irritated, and was mostly just punching the creepy dudes in the kidneys. And, most telling of all: A man, who was friends with “a producer,” had introduced himself to me at the bar.

“Are you really into the blog rap?” I had said.

“No,” he said, grinning. “I’m just into teenage girls.”

I’m trying to establish ambiance for you here. Specifically, the ambiance of Santos, the night Kitty Pryde — whose real age has been withheld from the public; she’s clarified that she is not, as she says in one of her songs, actually thirteen, but other than that, it’s anyone’s guess — played her second New York show. It was an uncomfortable atmosphere to be in, saturated as it was with both “Barely Legal” fetishes and nostalgia for an era I was actually old enough to have lived through the first time around.

Opening act Lakutis, for example, was the trend-leader in terms of rocking the hot look for dudes (seriously: at least three guys sported it, including Kitty Pryde’s brother) which was exactly the same as it had been when I was fourteen: Long skater hair, cargo shorts, and a sweatshirt that no man who was not already associated with Das Racist could wear with a reasonable expectation of getting laid. One song consisted entirely of the phrase “Dennis Quaid, bitch, Dennis, Dennis Quaid, bitch,” repeated until he got bored with it. His stage presence veered between a stoned, sarcastic smirk and a more earnest, but also more disturbing, serial-killer glare at the ceiling. “Too ill for the law,” the whitest-looking man you have ever seen chanted, occasionally sticking his tongue out at the audience.

“You spend your whole life in the thrall of cool teenagers, and right when you get it, you’re over it,” my notes read. Also in my notes: “Thank God the guy in the Transformers mask is actually performing.” He was Lakutis’s DJ, and had been a disconcertingly theatrical presence at the bar.

Actually, it helped that Lakutis looked and behaved so exactly like every guy that I had a crush on in middle school, because by the time Kitty Pryde came on stage, I had spent a substantial amount of time working out my animus in re: those dudes. (SARCASM STOPS BEING FUNNY WHEN YOU ARE EQUALLY SARCASTIC ABOUT EVERYFUCKINGTHING, WHAT DO YOU ACTUALLY FUCKING THINK, IF I DON’T HEAR IT IN FIVE SECONDS I AM CONCLUDING THAT IT’S NOTHING: Sorry, Lakutis, that was for Tyler [Redacted], not you. Yeah, you heard me, Tyler, you smug eighth-grade bastard.) And I was therefore prepared to know exactly what she was talking about.

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Here’s the thing about Kitty Pryde: When she wants to, she can be very good. She has a little, breathy voice, sort of like Kathleen Hanna, and, for quite a while, seemed as if she could not rap very fast at all; also sort of like Kathleen Hanna (and I promise to stop comparing the two, because aside from the timbre of their voices, they have nothing in common) she’s managed to turn her technical deficits into strengths. You know her when you hear her. Whether you like what you hear depends on a lot of things. The baby voice and self-conscious I’m-too-young-for-this-unwholesomeness schtick — “you apologize when I see you do a line, but like, it’s fine, I’m openminded,” in a song that also features Kitty coolly name-dropping her (eesh) Bud Light Lime — are immediately and intensely grating, for the first dozen listens. But you will still listen that first dozen times; the dreamy, pretty beats and the hypnotic detachment of her delivery pull you in. Until, at a certain point, it stops being irritating, and just gets great.

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Pretty great.