Busted in Brooklyn

Five Ways to Get Your Illegal Brooklyn Loft Party Busted by Midnight. (1) Do send out an e-mail from several different sources to every New York scenester, media agency, and music mailing list. (2) Do advertise that there will be free booze. (3) Do book two popular acts way too big for a small loft party (in this case, 2ManyDJs and James Murphy). (4) Do hire an obnoxious door guy to yell at everyone that they can't come in, and who turns back the press (including The New York Times). (5) Do let people congregate on the sidewalk in a residential neighborhood where most of said people would never otherwise be.

Yep, that "cool" loft party in South Williamsburg two weekends ago was a bust. We all knew it would be—we were just placing bets on when the police would show, not if. After being yelled at by the door guy, we all slumped across the street to the Southside Lounge, a neighborhood hangout that's got a cozy, bare-bones feel. Soon the bar started filling up with hipsters. (How does one quantify the number of hipsters in a place, you ask? Why, just count the trucker hats in the room.) The Southside is decidedly untrendy, so when the trucker hat quotient went up threefold we knew the party across the street was over. And then the unthinkable happened: The Southside became the "in" place, with a line forming outside the bar of people just dying to get into the new hot spot (I'm telling you, the Southside is the next Pianos!). It got so packed they weren't letting people in after a while.

That was funny but not as funny as the fact that after only one beer, the table of fools I was sitting with happily sang at the top of our lungs all of the words to Bon Jovi's "Livin' on a Prayer." We weren't the only ones who revealed our true nature; the rest of the bar was screeching along, and the bartender, who was incredibly amused by this show of affection for a has-been hair band, turned down the volume during the chorus, so that the bar hoppers were singing a cappella.

Shortly after our Bon Jovi star turn, I got a call saying that the loft party had moved to Luxx. We hoofed our way back up Bedford and found Murphy spinning to a buncha gay boys and a few straight ones (in trucker hats, of course). The evening's host, Larry Tee, told me excitedly how he now has a Top 20 song. His hit, "Supermodel (You Better Work)," was covered by Taylor Dayne for The Lizzie McGuire Movie's soundtrack, and the CD is in the Billboard Top 20. I know he's hoping his W.I.T. girls will have the same success (though it might "take" more than "whatever" to get them anywhere near the top of the charts). While the club was obviously enforcing the smoking ban (the sidewalk was a royal carpet of butts), one guy ran around with "stuff" and prefaced each deal with "Are you a cop?" as if this would somehow give him immunity (not that I would know anything about that). Oh, oh, oh, the irony.

Remember how, like, months ago I told you that the Strokes were gonna work with Nigel Godrich, the producer known for his epic, sweeping style as seen on Beck's and Radiohead's albums? Of course you don't. Well, I did, and I was right—that was a mismatch made in heaven. The Strokes broke off their engagement with Godrich and are going back to their original producer, Gordon Raphael, who they never shoulda left in the first place. (By the way, I'm ripping this information, which I got as a tip and never followed up two weeks ago, from NME, who stole it from Billboard.)

I'm only writing about the next item so we can run an image of the guy: Iraqi Information Minister Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf (M.S.S.) is such a huge cult figure that not only has he spawned our favorite new Web site, WeLoveTheIraqiInformationMinister.com, his hilarious sound bites are being put to good use on British dancefloors everywhere thanks to producer Les Molloy. Soon, snippets of M.S.S.'s surreal statements like "There is no presence of American infidels in Baghdad" and "We will kill them all . . . most of them" will be blasting over a dance music beat, praise Allah. No, I am not scared and neither should you be!

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tromano@villagevoice.com