Jun 29

Jun 29 Nostalgia Check: Jelly NYC Pool Parties

Social media is always heavily rooted in nostalgia. I saw a TikTok the other day that said that kids today look at the ‘90s the way that kids in the ‘90s looked at the ‘60s in that “wish I had been alive then” sort of way - which is pretty insane to me (the 90s WAS 30 years ago) but also makes a lot of sense! Then I recently saw a post on Instagram with a prompt to find and post your favorite photo of yourself - and I knew what I wanted to post right away.

The photo is one of me taken in 2008 in my bedroom in Brooklyn. In it I’m sitting on my bed listening on headphones to an ipod (a real relic of another era). When I posted it, my friend Jinners commented asking if I remembered what song I was listening to - and it surprisingly came to me right away. The track was “No Sex For Ben” - a b-side cut by The Rapture, one of my favorite bands of the “era” and I knew that because the guy I was hanging out with kept raving to me about it and how he was going to DJ it - and had me listen to it right then and there.

Thinking about that song took me down a Spotify playlist wormhole and soon I was deep into all of the music I listened to those years living in Williamsburg Brooklyn and a big part of that era was the Jelly NYC Pool Parties. The pool parties were - in my opinion - truly the culmination of the music scene in Brooklyn at that time, free shows held every Sunday in the summer in an abandoned swimming pool in McCarren Park. And literally the audience was IN the swimming pool, all concrete everywhere - with hoards of hipsters getting high off the chipping lead paint and immaculate vibes while we poured Brooklyn Brewery beers down our gullets and sweated and danced to an array of local and up and coming indie artists of the time.

*jelly nyc pool party 2008 © nora walker*

Jelly NYC Pool Parties felt different for so many reasons beyond just their unconventional location and the fact that they were entirely free concert on a huge scale - they were in many ways symbolic of an era that was on the cusp of ending for good and while many of us couldn’t fully see what was to come at the time, the hindsight of how Williamsburg soon after transformed into a hyper developed luxury condo filled landscape where thousand dollar strollers, big box retailers, and Whole Foods would replace margs to go in styrofoam cups from Turkeys Nest, dime bags littered outside Glasslands Gallery and the “sort of creepy but I definitely shopped there” American Apparel - makes everything that happened at those pool parties even more nostalgia packed for those of us who attended them.

It was A TIME and even though I had little to no money from my meager temp jobs and my wardrobe consisted of the latest and greatest from Forever21 and Raspberry - I felt like I was living it up every Sunday afternoon.

Revisiting this time inspired me to put together a special radio show on BFF.fm this week featuring music from those Brooklyn summers, including many bands who played the pool parties and tracks that DJs would spin there and at the bars we poured into afterwards like Enids and Matchless. Go give it a listen and be transported.