by DCist contributor Dave Weigel

A good rock show does not induce you to cross your arms or check your smartphone. A good rock show inspires you to dance uncontrollably, to ask — out loud or in your head — what the hell you just saw. Edie Sedgwick gives good rock show.

For nine years Justin Moyer has occasionally put aside his work in minimalist, brittle bands like El Guapo and Antelope to write and perform as Edie, the resurrected spirit of the Warhol scenester. Moyer splashes on eyeshade, glitter, a blonde wig and a silver-spangled skirt, and sings about celebrities over four-minute chunks of insistent bass-and-drum looped pop songs. The songs get their titles from movies (“Red Dawn”) or celebrities (“Molly Ringwald”), but the lyrics usually focus on a freak event or scandal. “In a dream today, I shed 50 lbs. of baby fat,” sings Edie in “Mary-Kate Olsen.” In “Anthony Perkins” (which is played live in front of a looped video of the cross-dressing Norman Bates running with a knife), Edie discourses on homosexuality and AIDS: “Just give me a little bit of fraternity, especially when accompanied by sodomy.”

Is this all a stunt? Well, yeah. That’s the point. Moyer is an in-on-the-joke journalist and small label head who named one of his bands El Guapo after the villain in The Three Amigos. “I remember a time,” writes Justin Moyer in his decade-old manifesto, “when a [monument] could be made that seemed to stop short of hegemonic history-making. A record — or rather, a recording’s site — became a transparent mirror of the past and a gateway to the future… an objective moment subjectively presented and subjectively interpreted… a fusion of meaning and its dissolution.”