At this party, everyone is friends with Tom.
An event at Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg on July 25 will harken back to the glory days of Myspace — a time before the dull blue uniformity of Twitter and Facebook profiles, when glitter text, animated cursors, and angsty profile photos ruled the social web.
“It was an early era of internet heathenism,” said Russ Marshalek, a DJ from party collective adventure[s], which is organizing the show. “You could impose your personality on them — you could play My Chemical Romance, your background was bleeding hearts.”
This will be the fourth MySpace-themed party that adventure[s] has thrown. Marshalek and fellow soundtrack spinners Chris Choyce and Marley Magaziner originally wanted to create an event dedicated to the music of Myspace-era bands such as Dashboard Confessional, Saves The Day, and the Killers, but eventually decided to extend the bash to the whole website.
“One of the first genres we agreed upon was the pop-punk-screamo-emo genre,” said Marshalek, who lives in Greenpoint.
In that spirit, attendees can pre-request the songs that auto-played on their own Myspace pages back in the day.
Party-goers are encouraged to dress the part — think heavy eyeliner (for men and women), white belts, wrist sweatbands, and comically long bangs — and MySpace itself (yes, the site still exists) has donated some Ashton Kutcher-esque snap-back hats to be given away.
And for those who want to take the Myspace look beyond clothes and makeup, there will be a contest to see who can do the best “duck face” — the popular profile-image pose that saw users pout so hard, their lips looked like a duck’s bill
A sentimental celebration of Myspace might seem a bit premature — after all, the site was still going strong less than a decade ago. But Marshalek said it is able to evoke a sense of nostalgia because it represents a more innocent time in our digital lives. Today, internet privacy is front-page news, while teens in the Myspace era felt free to spill their inner-most thoughts and secrets online — written in neon-colored text and punctuated with emoticons, of course.
“The younger generation used Myspace the way the generation before them would have used a notebook for really bad poetry,” said Marshalek.
