Hot Snakes - I Hate the KidsThe first time I heard "I Hate the Kids" was at a party DJ'd by Arch Stanton in Richmond, VA. House party at a huge house way down on Monument Avenue--one of those old places that has a different type of column (doric, ionic, corinthian, swirl) for every exposure. When I arrived, there was just CD music--someone had on a mix that went from Superchunk to Phil Collins to Spiritualized, i.e., it was all over the map. No theme, no key-matching, no beat-matching. A mess. People weren't paying attention to the music anyway, they were just standing around exchanging complaints and platitudes, some of them were even reading old copies of the Economist that I gathered belonged to the house's owner, who, it turned out, no one knew. Later on, Arch Stanton set up his equipment and started playing. It was as if someone had actually yelled "Hark," such was the change in the attitude of the party-goers. We all gathered around the speakers. Tentative dancing at first: joke-dancing, dudes clowning for girls. Then it was in earnest, people were going for it. Stanton's set was eclectic but entertaining, incorporating everything--at one point I thought I heard a quick hit from the end of Anton Webern's Marcia Funebre thrown in between Khia and Basic Channel. Later on, there was this song, Hot Snakes' buzzy lament, which lead into Iron Knowledge's "Showstopper," dithering music for the dissipation at the end of the night.[Buy Suicide Invoice]