Bootie LA celebrates its 8th anniversary June 1 at Echoplex.
Twice a month, the Echoplex hosts Bootie LA, a neon-infused dance party with performers of all shapes and sizes dancing on stage as DJs play wildly divergent mashups, pairing Swedish House Mafia with Bryan Adams or Run-DMC with Creedence Clearwater Revival in one song, for example.
The pioneering duo behind the Bootie phenomenon, which first debut in San Francisco before moving to LA, is Adrian and Mysterious D (aka A plus D). We spoke with Adrian just before a flight to Rio de Janeiro for another huge Bootie party. Bootie LA celebrates its 8th Anniversary in LA on June 1 at Echoplex.
How does it feel to fly around the world and throw parties as your job?
It’s great to be able to bring Mashup Culture around the world. I kind of feel like D and I are mashup evangelists. We started Bootie 10 years ago in San Francisco. Next thing we knew we were in LA and then New York, with a growing community of people who loved mashups, and then suddenly there’s parties all over the world.
LA was your first party outside San Francisco?
Yeah, we just saw nobody was doing a 100 percent mashup party in LA, so we decided to come on down and start one. New York was the next step. I gotta say, though, LA is kind of my favorite. Don’t tell San Francisco.
Why is LA your favorite?
There’s a special vibe to LA. I think part of it is because the Echoplex is so great. We have a good East Side crowd. It’s almost like an anti-Hollywood scene. I get emails from people asking, “What’s the dress code for Bootie LA?” and I’m like “What? Of course there’s no dress code!” Also, I like having the whole stage for our dance crew to do their gogo antics, which is a lot of fun. We don’t have that in a lot of other cities.
Where do you hang out when you’re in LA?
Silver Lake, Los Feliz and Echo Park are our haunts. It’s interesting to watch those neighborhoods grow. It’s hipster runoff, but it’s like, damn, hipsters drink good beer and eat good food, so there’s all these great new restaurants and bars and cafes opening. Bootie LA feels very much a part of that scene. In August, for example, there’s the Echo Park Rising Festival that’s put on by the people who run Echoplex. Bootie LA is going to be an after party for that event.
Any specific bars or restaurants that are your favorites?
We always end up at Home and then when Home gets too crowded we go to Alcove.
What type of mashups does Bootie specialize in?
What we try to showcase at Bootie, and what we kind of specialize in, is the real extreme genre-clash of eras and styles—taking something from 20 years ago and mashing it up with something that came out twenty days ago. It’s kind of a celebration of pop culture, but past and present. People feel actively engaged when they hear the instrumentation of one song, but they’re singing another song on top of it.
How do you deal with the legal connotations of the promoting mashups?
When the mashup scene started in London in the early 2000s, the Brits called them Bootlegs. That’s why we’re called Bootie. There’s a reason why there’s a pirate flag in our logo, it’s because bootlegs are a legal grey. We would like to think that it’s fair use.
It’s funny though, record labels technically go on record as saying, “people should not be doing this,” but they’re more savvy than they appear. I’ve noticed that they leak acapellas and instrumentals of upcoming records to producers and DJs as a way to guerilla market their artists, especially up-and-coming ones. For example, we got leaked a copy of a single of an up-and-coming artist a few years ago by the name of Lady Gaga—perhaps, you’ve heard of her? For the first year we had those CDs, we could not give them away because nobody knew who she was. But that sort of seeding of the underground, through mashups and remixes of the song “Just Dance,” eventually she broke through. Now these CDs that we couldn’t give are going for $50 on eBay.
Where did the idea to accompany the mashups with that sort of circus-style stage show come from?
Well, actually the dancers are all RAID, which stands for Random Acts of Irreverent Dance. They adopted us as much as we adopted them. It started off as a dance troupe of only four people and then it just kind of mutated. It happened extremely organically. They pride themselves, in the same way that Bootie prides itself, on being very inclusive. We like to say that at Bootie the crowd is as mashed up as the music is. And RAID represents that too.
What do you see as the next steps for Bootie?
The parties are going great. Right now, we’re a party that has a website, but we’re in the process of becoming a website that has a party. We’re basically doing a whole redesign and relaunch of bootiemashup.com. We’re going to be the mashup website on the Internet. We want to be the one-stop shop for quality mashups, not just mashups that are posted because MP3 blogs are desperate for content, but mashups that are posted because they’re actually good. There’s a lot of crap out there and Bootie’s job is to sift through all the crap to showcase the quality of the mashup scene.
Follow Isaac Simpson on Twitter at @Isaco525
