Alice the Club

My sources are on stage with Alice Longyu Gao

For most of the day Johny is violently hungover and I’m sparring with Tom in the groupchat about what to do this evening and when to get to the show tonight. Tom wants to go to dinner at 9, ideologically because he still lives on New York time but logistically because he has to commute back up from Stanford and it will take him a while to get back to the city and ready to go out. I actually don’t have a big problem with going to dinner so late; it’s the vibes of the places he’s suggesting that I’m picking a fight with—first, Bar Jabroni, the new Palm City sister restaurant in Lower Haight, and then Tartine Manufactory, a boutique industrial bakery on the western edge of Portero Hill that’s a hot spot for artisanal pizzas, and then Okaeri, a sushi spot also in the Mission that’s marked $$$ on Google. Tom and Sawyer fit right in at those kinds of places—expensive and stylish restaurants—so I don’t know how to break it to them that I don’t think that’s the vibe to get us hyped to go to an Alice Longyu Gao DJ set, that I need to be around regular San Francisco freak people and not the corporate clean girl crowd. Like a coward I end up bitching about needing to get to the club earlier than when a 9 p.m. reservation would let us get there, since I’d have to go home to change between dinner and the show. I’m not wearing club clothes to fucking Tartine.

Around 4 Johny is finally alive again. He decides that we should chill and have dinner separately and just meet at some bar within walking distance to the club in SOMA later tonight. He’s the peacemaker, that’s his lot in life, with his basic lack of urgency and soft handsome face that puts everyone at ease. I could’ve roused him awake earlier to talk me down, stop me from ripping on Tom, but after all he does for our crew, he deserved some peace and quiet for all his morning suffering. So we do that, have dinner as couples, and then we all meet at the Rumpus Room, a dim little dive bar at the bottom of the Tenderloin on Market and 6th. Past the petite security guard wearing sunglasses and a luxurious fur coat and through the saloon doors, the red lights inside wash all the color out of my red makeup and red dress and pink wig and I look totally gray. Before we left, Johny and I were trying to get ourselves excited to go out after sitting around all day—me, too cold and lost in my phone to go outside into the gray ocean wind coming through the Haight, and him, yacking every hour—so we painted little playing card symbols on each others’ faces with eyeliner and lipstick and ended up as the Jack of Spades and the Queen of Hearts. Once I put the wig and fishnets on we decided I’d become the Queen of Sluts, and that really made us laugh, and by the time we sat down with Sawyer and Tom we were in goofy moods, and I really didn’t care that I looked insane.

“You’re late to your own party,” Tom scolds me, half kidding.

The Rumpus Room is playing Depeche Mode, which prompts Sawyer and I to start talking about how there’s really an ‘80s wave in pop at the moment: Chappell Roan and Charli XCX and even the new Vampire Weekend album and that one Ariana Grande song that sounds like Robyn. Sawyer goes on for a while about Billie Eilish’s new album and about that Zane Lowe interview she watched, and Sawyer and Tom agree again and again that Finneas is the real genius of the duo. They tell me I’ve gotta listen to the whole album because they think I’d actually really like it. “Sure I will,” I say, even though I think listening to music from mega-celebrities is more like reading the news than experiencing music. We finish our drinks and head back outside into the night. From his pocket Tom pulls out a little tin case with a joint inside, and we pass the joint around on the curb in front of the bar before heading on our way down 6th toward 1015 Folsom.

Walking through SOMA at 10:30 p.m. in a red dress and fishnets is not something I’d recommend, having done it now. In SOMA it’s grim and quiet, trash blowing around everywhere, and I feel a lot of eyes on me, though no one actually catcalls at me or gets in my way. Still, we’re hustling. My dress is blowing all over the place and the cold wind makes me feel even more exposed. Johny wraps his arm around me and we walk quickly in lock step, and the article I read earlier from the Gazetteer, the new local alt on the scene, floats through my mind: The reporter describes taking a walk through SOMA at night, after a tweet from some tech guy visiting from Austin said it was the sketchiest walk of his life. It was this walk basically, the one I’m on right now, and the article’s general takeaway was that people are doing drugs and sleeping in doorways but no one’s really going to mug you or hurt you. The reporter, Eddie Kim, put the story up on X and got all the expected reactions from e/acc tech guys and conservative PACs in the replies, saying how deluded he is for thinking San Francisco in its current state is anything but a total shithole, and this is where progressive politics get you, and calling all the poverty just “city problems” is just step two on the “San Francisco Cope Loop,” all the classic SF online discourse bait. Eddie didn’t bite, and I thought good for him; I think the article was a realist take on what it’s like to walk down these particular blocks at night. Then I think how I should pitch something weird and meaty to the Gazetteer while they’re still experimental and unentrenched, but I also think the Gazetteer’s whole thing of taking a stand against algorithms messing in journalism by not having any social presence is sort of hollow, since its reporters with thousands of followers tweet out links to their articles anyway, and that kind of disproves its own MO. . . and by the time I’m coming up on the end of that train of thought, we’re coming up on our destination, a nightclub called 1015 Folsom. As we approach the first thing I see is a girl in a mini skirt so short I can see her whole ass from half a block away. I point her out to Johny, relieved. “Oh thank god! I’ll fit right in.”

There are three main dancefloors inside 1015 Folsom. First there’s the long breezy room you reach upon entering past the box office, where you can still feel the air blowing in from outside. Down a few stairs from there is the main stage, where there’s dry ice and lasers and the DJ is way up on a platform, silhouetted in front of a huge screen playing hyped-up graphics. Then there’s the upstairs, a cozier, spookier room, with low ceilings and red-lighted hallways leading to who knows where blocked off at the back. Each one has its own DJ and its own bar. The four of us spend a little time dancing in each one, feeling out the vibes.

Of course Tom was right about getting to the club so early. People are still settling in and no one seems quite drunk enough to find the music exciting and not just repetitive. Every room is about half full, with people concentrated around the DJ booths and spreading out more and more from there, until there are big gaps between different groups and no one is dancing, just hanging out, lightly bobbing side to side. None of us are totally sure which stage the show will be at, but upstairs the graphics say No Bias, which makes us think that’s the stage ALG will use whenever she’s ready to spin. The tickets said No Bias x Alice Longyu Gao. Anyway, upstairs is the most intriguing. Compared to the echoey main stage, upstairs feels more organic and wooden, and there are a few furries walking around in neon light-up costumes and people wearing long green wigs and go-go boots and sexy pirate getups. Something about upstairs gives me the impression of a dark, kinky tiki bar.

After a while No Bias starts to bore us, so we go downstairs to check out the main stage. A DJ called Knives is spinning super generic beats, and we decide he’s our new god. We start dancing hard, really giving it up for Knives, and Tom keeps starting chants, “Knives! Knives! Knives! Knives!” just to see if other people will join in, which they always do. Between moves I open my eyes and there’s a dude on stage next to Knives filming content on his phone, trying to make Knives look as important as he possibly can, pushing the phone in close super fast, pausing, pulling it back out fast again.

“Oh shit look, the Knives content guy is going off,” I shout to Johny. “I gotta find that video later.” I know exactly how it’ll look. I can picture watching it, laying in bed in the morning, holding my phone right up at my face, and I know it would somehow feel cooler than what it felt like to really be there, with all the empty space on the dancefloor. Man, I think, social media really has messed up my standards for what’s cool. Knives is up there with his content guy and I start to wonder if content is really the primary objective, if the whole club is just a set-up to look cool on Instagram, if Knives gets introduced to people as a “famous DJ” because he has a big social media following and everyone buys it and no one cares that his shows are actually kind of lame. I start to wonder if anything about this is real. “Ha! Actually, no, just kidding,” I say out loud to no one. “I don’t wanna bring this online.”

After a while we all follow Sawyer over to the bar to get water, and now that we can hear each other more easily I admit that I’m ready for Knives to go away now. Tom agrees it's too fratty down here, and we all go back upstairs to Margaritaville. I can tell it’s gotten a little more crowded because now it’s too hot to keep my jacket on, but ALG must be coming on soon and the energy is still kind of weak. Where is everyone? I wonder. Do other clubs feel like this? The last time I was at a club it didn’t feel like this. The last time I was at a club in San Francisco was in late 2019, right after graduation when I was living in my first apartment in Nob Hill; I went with a friend from high school and her friends from the University of Wisconsin to a spot called Halcyon. I remember it being a club, a rave, standard, unqualified—not an empty-ish club, not a San Francisco club. Going to the club was just going to a club, and they were always packed. Back then, too, we were all right out of college; more people were single, and going out had a lot more to do with finding someone to flirt with, make out with on the dancefloor, pay for your drinks. I look around 1015 Folsom and I wonder if that still happens, or if everyone grew out of it when COVID happened, when the little life that was left on earth went online and DJs started performing for their content guys instead of the crowd. I wonder if everyone is just here to dance and do a little fashion show, like we are; I wonder if everyone’s a voyeur, or if there’s still real drama and intrigue I’m just not part of anymore.

I’ve almost forgotten why we even came to 1015 Folsom until I spot Alice Longyu Gao peeking out from behind the DJ booth, setting up their tech. They have their hair in two braids with spiky fringe, and they’ve got this schoolgirl look going on: a dark blue overall dress over a white shirt with big puffy sleeves. I point them out to our group; I’m the only one who recognizes them. Alice Longyu Gao is still pretty underground, making hyperpop-death metal-carnivalesque EPs that are not palatable for the masses. They called their last one Let’s Hope Heteros Fail, Learn, and Retire and dropped it last year. It’s not an everyday listen, but they have a true world-building creative vision, and the EP is seriously funny, really sardonic stuff. I’d been following them on Instagram for a couple months and specifically checking up on them more often since I got tickets to this set a few weeks ago. At one point, I was considering pitching this set as a story to the KQED culture editor who liked the story I did on the Whatever party at The Stud a few weeks ago. The pitch would’ve said that this set is the first stop of “Alice the Club,” a sparse cross-country tour of DJ sets from hyperpop internet icon Alice Longyu Gao. I didn’t end up pitching it—I didn’t want to work the show—but I’d searched around to see what other coverage ALG had gotten over the years. They’re obviously a name that people know if they’re deep in the art editorial scene; they have write-ups in big pubs like Billboard, Pitchfork, and PAPER, but it was mostly brief Q&As and new EP listicles, nothing meaty, no coverage of any performances or deep lore or anything with an angle. I kept scrolling the search results. I was kind of surprised to find they had a Substack, ALG the Mind. It doesn’t seem like they’ve kept up with it since around when Heteros dropped, but I ended up reading into the archives. The posts are short and Alice’s writing is straightforward and earnest. There’s one called “It’s pretty cringe they call my food ‘Girl Dinner’,” one called “I don’t want waif-thin to be trendy again,” one called “The CEO tour so far.” They didn’t feel forced or self-conscious. It almost felt like I was reading something they’d forgotten was still online, but it humanized them against their brash internet persona. It made me ride for their project even more. I love finding artists at this level of success—raw, imaginative, all momentum, ripe for creation. . .