Dev Hynes in a Strip Club, Brodinski on the Sound System
Berlin in 2014 had a way of putting things together that shouldn’t work and making them feel inevitable. Blood Orange performing in a table dance club is a perfect example—Dev Hynes and his devastating R&B in a room built for something considerably more transactional, and somehow the combination landed as more interesting than either thing alone would have been.
The lineup that late summer was genuinely good. Mykki Blanco was doing something with hip-hop that most of hip-hop was refusing to do—dragging it somewhere uncomfortable and queer and brilliant—sharing a room with Brodinski, the French producer whose sound always felt one tempo change away from collapsing into industrial noise. Blood Orange and Kindness in the same set: two artists who both understood that the best pop music is always slightly too sad to dance to without thinking.
Dev Hynes has always struck me as someone making music for a version of the 1980s that actually existed but that most 1980s pop was too scared to inhabit. The Bowie comparisons were lazy even when they were apt. Cupid Deluxe had come out the year before and it still felt new in September 2014, the way certain records do when they’ve been quietly getting better since you last played them. Hearing it live in a room that smelled like cigarettes and questionable carpet choices didn’t hurt.
That particular moment in Berlin—before the city started to feel like a theme park of itself—had a specific texture. You could be watching something important without being told it was important. No context, no curator’s note, no one explaining the significance. Just artists working at the top of their ability in rooms that weren’t designed for it.
The table dance club detail stays with me. There’s something almost philosophical about it: the gap between the room’s intended purpose and what was happening inside it, the music filling that space and making it mean something else for the night. Berlin was full of those moments. Most cities aren’t.