Good Riddance (The Time of Your Life)

For those of you in Iowa City who may not be aware, Mikko Rodney Kuusisto-Wolf, the guy behind the Yacht Club Tuesday dance parties, is up and moving to Chicago at the end of the week. The final dance party that he’s personally over-seeing is tonight, with Beat Resonance and DJ Paradigm.

Most people would take this opportunity to say something nice and meaningful about Mikko, but I’m tempted to say otherwise.

Temptation wants me to say something along the lines of:

‘Fuck you Mikko Wolf.

You’re an asshole. You will not be missed. Iowa City will be better without you. You like terrible music, you book terrible music, you ARE terrible.

Your humor is so deadpan that I’m shocked you even have a pulse. It’s clearly an indicator of your cold, hollow shell of what those who do not know you would call your soul.

Mikko is the type of person whose idea of promotion is creating a facebook event page four hours before the actual event. These pages typically consist of gibberish, mass repetition of meaningless words, and boasting about DJs that no one has ever heard of.

Working with Mikko Wolf is like working with a stable Gary Busey: all of the drug-fueled craze and furious ramblings about nothing with none of the fun antics.

Mikko is a hipster of the worst kind: a hipster that hates other hipsters and previous incarnations of his own hipsterdom. He is the neo-proto-archetypical hipster. If he were funny, I’d half suspect him of being Carles from Hipster Runoff, but he’s not. He’s just an asshole who thinks he is.

Fuck you, Mikko. I’m glad you’re leaving and I hope Chicago burns to the ground in another great fire upon your arrival and that it’s your fault.’

However, I usually try to resist temptations when possible, so I won’t launch into a diatribe about his countless negative qualities.

In total and complete seriousness, Mikko really is a stand-up guy and a wonderful person to work with. I’m am quite saddened that I will not have a chance to collaborate with him in the foreseeable future.

While he’d probably be among the first to downplay his role in the massive resurgence of dance music scene in Eastern Iowa, he is single-handedly responsible for turning a sparsely attended night in a dive bar into a destination for international dance acts.

He went from iPods plugged into a soundboard to mash-up guys on laptops to DJs from labels like Trouble & Bass and Fool’s Gold demanding chances to play at Yacht Club. Furthermore, he did this on fucking TUESDAYS, with people turning out regardless of the horrendous weather or finals they may have had the following day.

Beyond the dance parties, Mikko has proven himself as a promoter who knows his shit better than anyone else I’ve yet worked with, all without displaying hubris. You would never guess from a simple conversation with the guy that he’s bro-noodled with Chuck Inglish (of The Cool Kids), Database, The Hood Internet, Deathface, Flosstradamus, and probably more people I don’t even know about.

Mikko’s commitment to bringing quality acts to Iowa City, regardless of his personal taste, is something I greatly respect and aim to emulate in my own scouting endeavours.

Plain and simple, anyone who has had the immense pleasure of working with Mikko in any capacity should feel incredibly lucky. His bizarre sense of humor, brutal honesty, and commitment to always pushing the envelope one step further has left an indelible mark on several music scenes in our college town and I can only imagine him leaving the same mark on Chicago in a few years time.

The dance parties will be continuing without Mikko’s personal presence (he’s still organizing them through the web and with help from fellow IC promoters), but they will never be quite the same. If you’re out in Iowa City tonight, go buy that man a drink.

So, Mr. Kuusisto-Wolf, farewell.

As Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day once said (probably while applying eye-liner and thinking of ways to further sell out his no longer relevant 90s pop-punk band), “I hope you have the time of your life.”

9 months ago  /  1 note