No. 1: THE DIY, MISANTHROPIC, TOTALLY INTENTIONAL IDGAF DFA AESTHETIC

You’re probably not in client services if the strapline on your business card reads “fuck off you cunt. go away.”

But that was the raison d’etre for the early DFA ethos — “misanthropists” as they put it — a bootstrapped production duo of James Murphy and Tim Goldsworthy who were living and working out of a basement in the West Village, taping pillows to drum kits to generate their characteristic thud-not-clap live-drum sound.

Nominally, they really did not give a fuck what you thought.

But they of course did when it came to the product, the sounds.

The visual accouterments — the five-dollar disco ball crudely Xerox’d directly from the package, the lightening bolt logo that seems stolen from the refuse drawer in a vintage printing press — served only to enhance the “we’re not like the other guys” mentality that set DFA apart.

It’s stupidity-by-design, but it hid (and still hides) the incredible complexity and thought that goes into their unique fusion of dance and punk that moves bodies en masse.

Ultimately it works because it feels like you could do it with your friends in thirty minutes with a six-pack.

More things should feel like that.