The Bocker.com

Last night, the Cool Kids, Kid Sister and A-Trak set up shop in New York’s Museum of Natural History, providing the jams for a hipster-laden crowd of thousands beneath the Hayden Planetarium. The show was part of the Museum of Natural History and Flavorpil’s concert series One Step Beyond. I happened to miss the majority of Friday’s “Coolest Party in New York”, but still managed to still arrive fashionably late as my entrance coincided with that of Kanye West.

kanye west - stronger [live] from kelly reeves on Vimeo.

Frankly, I wasn’t sure, even after getting to the museum, if I was going to stay at the show or not. Though I wanted to see A-Trak and knew that the crowd would definitely be young and interesting, it seemed as though a series of events had been conspired to keep me from going.

For starters, my dinner plans with my friends ran late, as did some after dinner drinks. This is what happens when you make plans that you really want to do while the rest of your crowd is less interested. This turned out to be smallest hurdle I would encounter.

Once I arrived at the museum with my friend Danny, we were informed that tickets were no longer available at the door. Therefore we would have to get on the phone and hustle some to get a pair of tickets. Another one of our friends, Amos, was already there and had extra tickets but communicating with him and the sound of the concert inside was tough to do. After securing a pair of tickets, I made my way through the I.D. check as this was an over-21 show, only to find Danny lacking the proper identification. Every excuse in the book failed to get Danny in the door. Lucky for me he was nice enough to let me go ahead and enjoy the concert while he met up with some of his boys from back home.

With a near clear path to the party I was ready to enter, when I ran into two girls I knew from high school that needed a set of tickets. It had been years since I’d seen Sara or her sister, who’s name I can’t recall. I had one extra on me and knew that Amos had another one waiting at Will Call, but that would involve the surprisingly long Will Call line. Against my more selfish motives, I let me inner-Samaritan get the best of me and got the extra ticket.

After arriving at 10:30 pm, these shenanigans had cost me an hour of the concert as it was now 11:30.

I missed Cool Kids, who I was geeked up to see after listening to them throughout the day. Kid Sister was about done with her set, which left A-Trak to perform. I was about to begin my search for Amos, no small task seeing as how I was looking for one average sized white guy in room full of thousands, when who should walk in but Kanye West.

Mr. West came out and kicked off the set by joining Kid Sister on her Kanye produced song Pro Nails, a song that pays homage to girls and their nail polish. The room is absolutely wild at this point, which is odd to me because its the atrium of a science museum. In the space below the planetarium, there are thousands of New York Hipsters bopping along to Kanye.

The attendees were plenty of entertainment in their own, as seemingly all of Williamsburg had made their way to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. My favorite outfit of the night was the the 1995-96 Damon Stoudamire Toronto Raptors jersey and flat brimmed Raptors cap. I also saw another fella dressed a la Dan Deacon.

Kanye continues one with A-Trak on the turntables, going through his singles from Graduation, first perfoming Can’t Tell Me Nothin’, before moving on to Good Life and the Daft Punk driven Stronger. Kanye flew through the songs and was gone as quickly as he had arrived, but just him showing up jumps the party up a notch. A-Trak takes over, cutting great hip-hop tracks the rest of the night, including Baltimore’s own Young Leek with “Jiggle It Shorty”.

At this point, I finally meet up with Amos who informs me that we need to go see some other friends and get to the planetarium where the museum is showing a Robert Redford narrated show at midnight. Understand, that at this moment the people in attendance are absolutely hyped up on beer (which had sold out), music (Young Leek!) and mob mentality crazy, so a space show featuring Robert Redford sounding like just the thing to keep the trip going.

The Space Show was not Kanye West, but it did not disappoint as its visuals and its opportunity for dumb humorous comments were ample. At this point, someone could yell “And in the Eastern Sky, is the Death Star” or “TIE FIGHTERS” and under most circumstances the crowd would hysterically laugh. This is a vast departure from my last trip to the planetarium, as a 5th grader eager to learn about quasars.

Once the Space Show ended, the concert was winding up, but the energy just spilled out into the surrounding streets where many of the concert goers (myself included) found bars and the like to go and spend some more of the night.