The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

I didn't even get my shorts down. With five buttons and a zip, it takes a reasonable 20 seconds for me to accomplish this. Within this time, two bartenders busted in to kick me out. OK, I might have been in the men's restroom. This was only because I waited approximately three to five minutes at the ladies' and made the logical conclusion that the woman in there was dead. I checked to make sure no one was inside the men's, and then made my move. Obviously, I'm not that slick.

Such boldness by a pissing revolutionary is not tolerated at the Uptown Bar. Run by the rock and roll gestapo, the establishment, with its horrible acoustics, date-rape lighting and faulty equipment, is inherently anti-fun. But just like the poetry escaping the war-torn regions of Israel and Palestine, tonight's musicians still found a way to eke out some artistry and excitement in this godforsaken shit hole.

Perhaps this is why visiting Nebraskans UUVVWWZ seemed semi-insane. Singer Teal Gardner could rightly be the second coming of Lydia Lunch, with her feral, braying alto and tribal thrashing. But the band, with a definite Velvet Underground influence and hidden penchant for noise music, exceeds Lunch and her Teenage Jesus and the Jerks in that they understand the need to pull back before your eardrums explode. They get the delicate balance between pleasure and pain, friction and whatever the form of anti-friction is called, or apocalypse and ultimate salvation, if you're into that kind of thing. The four piece throbbed in one aural spasm and unleashed a colossal wave of frantic emotion with their strange droning. UUVVWWZ was also visually stimulating, dancing like those puppets on Shining Time Station that lived in the jukebox. Even a brief listen to the band's self-titled full length proves they ought to be on an indie watch list, with their blend of blues, noise and the dark side of 60's psychedelic. A line lifted from their record jacket explains it best: My mom told me I've got a dead sister lifestyle. Do you know what it's like to listen to that? I'll tell you what it's like: It's like your record.

Fellow Nebraskan Darren Keen of The Show Is The Rainbow was even more spastic and frightening with his 100 percent total chaos. Writhing in the middle of the crowd, this one man, one laptop tour de force was part metal mayhem, part punk rocker reject and most assuredly techno's bastard child. His music was the epitome of mash-up-all played out in front of an epileptic shock-inducing video screen blaring violent, neon colors and some rather unattractive photos of Johnny Rotten.

MC/VL's buoyant old-school beats came as a relief to the evening's top-quality, but nevertheless neurotic, rock and roll. The local duo carried the allure of 80's hip hop, back when it was fun, and far less bloody, and face-sized clocks seemed like passable fashion accessories. Mighty Clyde and Vicious Lee mused about such timeless issues like partying and sucka MCs, while updating this classic approach with poignant modern samples from the likes of Air and Interpol. This isn't to say older samples like Metallica, AC/DC and a particularly well-placed reference to Joan Jett's cover of "Crimson and Clover" weren't equally effective. Like most things brilliant, MC/VL's music is slightly drunken, slightly stupid and pure gold. Live, the high-energy duo shatters the notion of a "stage" show, constantly penetrating the crowd and turning it into a sweaty mess.

Vicious Lee lives out his daylight hours as his alter ego, David Hansen, a CityPages' music writer. One would think this would give Lee/Hansen a particularly keen insight into operating a band, or at least a severe vinyl addiction. But, let the record show (cue screeching record sound bite) David Hansen hates music.

"This could potentially incriminate me as both a musician and a music writer," Hansen says. "Both my musical journalism and musical career are equally informed by my hatred of music."

Maybe Hansen chooses to express himself through music because he thinks music is "the least bad art form, with the possible exception of literature." Regardless, he pardons the old-school hip hop that so influences his style.

"I love what it once was," he says. "But it has been perversely high-jacked by intensely talented literary minds who have no flair for performance, which bothers me. This used to be dance music. It's just not anymore."

Hansen's first exposure to the genre came from his apparently hip older brother. He brought home LL Cool J's Radio.

"I still listen to it, and I still hear amazing nuances in it and this amazing bravado and this really great assertive form of arrogance that is very benign, which I think hip hop has lost a lot of," he says. "A lot of the arrogance and the bravado that goes on with hip hop now is this incredibly malevolent, toxic form of confidence. It's really alarming. Before rappers just rapped about how awesome they were, and now they just rap about how many girls they fuck and how much money they make. Rap should be essentially meaningless"

MC/VL, however, does have purpose. Poetry has its place, and so do those tearjerker Hallmark commercials. But the power to get bony, drunken indie kids to dance like it's 1986 could be the best power of them all.