Out on a School Nite

The last class let out of the Long Island City schoolhouse in 1963. Last Thursday MoMA PS1 put a stage in the courtyard and launched School Nite, a new after-hours music series.

The courtyard filled early, as did a photo booth and a row of clear inflatable flower chairs by the stage, courtesy of the dating app Hoppy. Everywhere else, the workday had been left at home: a cookie-print dress over white tights, a corset over a pinstripe vest, lotus-printed legs in pointed-toe heels, hair in every color the drugstore sells, accompanied by piercings in equal numbers.

Ali rq opened. She’s twenty-one, a New York kid playing clubs since seventeen and at Boiler Room by nineteen, and she deals in edits: Y2K pop pitched up and chopped into texture, nothing under 140, no intros, no outros. She warmed it up and then some.

B0YG1RL went on around eight. June Vinette and Angela Rio, the Haitian-Honduran duo out of Miami, build their sound from Miami bass, konpa and dembow, and live it arrives shredded, vocals chopped past the point of language. You catch none of the words and still leave knowing exactly what they meant. June sang most of it in a lavender bolero and white lace tights, a siren in both senses of the word. June was never not moving: jumping, dropping, twerking. She danced through her own set like she was at somebody else’s party.

The set kept answering itself, vocals thrown out and thrown back until the courtyard started answering on its own. Hoppy’s beach balls stayed airborne over everyone’s heads, green and blue, nobody keeping score. Some people loved getting hit. Some not so much (hi).

Before they got off, June said it plainly. “We are B0YG1RL and so are you.” It landed like something everyone had agreed on earlier.

Isabella Lovestory came out just after nine in a silver breastplate with spiked shoulders, a grey tutu, glitter tights, a feathered headpiece. The outfit is the thesis: prima ballerina, barbed. Princess Peach if she were armed.

Lovestory was born in Tegucigalpa, moved to Virginia at thirteen, Montreal at seventeen, and built her perreo-pop out of all of it. She sings in Spanish mostly, French when she feels like it, throwing teases in between songs, accompanied by a DJ in a bedazzled clown mask and a shot of tequila requested and granted. She even brought a fan up to sing, and the fan she picked had come dressed for exactly this: periwinkle beret, beaded fringe, pearls. She got a verse, a hug, and a few hundred phones pointed at her.

“Where my fashion freaks at,” she asked. The scaffolding held them. She played an unreleased track to the sold-out courtyard, then told everyone to fucking dance—generously, the way a host tells you to help yourself.

June came back out for one song near the end, and side by side the resemblance was obvious: soft materials over something with edges, dance music made from pieces of other things, neither of them interested in a clean take.

And for about three minutes the bill stopped being three separate acts and cohered into the perfect group project. The next School Nite is in session November 19th. I’ll be there, probably on the scaffolding.