Song of the Day: !!! “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)”

While being notoriously difficult to google, NYC-based underground dance band, !!! (pronounced and sometimes spelled: “Chk! Chk! Chk!“), are responsible for one of the most compulsively listenable dance anthems of the last 20 years. “Me and Giuliani Down by the School Yard (A True Story)” (its title, a tongue in cheek riff on a Paul Simon song) has basically everything you would want out of a dance number: house beats, sinewy basslines, psychedelic post-punk inflected guitars, and lyrics which, while politically pointed, still manage to quote Footloose.

The song, which was released in 2003, is ostensibly about then New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s revival and ruthless enforcement of the 1926 Cabaret Law and how it seriously impacted the New York dance scene at the time. This law wasn’t repealed until 2017 (after the term of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who is also mentioned unfavorably in the song). Over the course of the track, !!! propose throwing a dance party at City Hall as they are prohibited from doing so in the clubs. Thus, the band seamlessly merged a compulsively re-playable dance anthem with a protest song.