Image via Son Raw
Son Raw talks about it AND he lives it.
It’s no secret that the economics of music journalism, while never brilliant, have metastasized into a full-fledged crisis. Publications engage in painful layoffs while demanding content lame enough to have people waxing fondly about the days of peak listicle. The economics of publishing, however grim, aren’t the full story. It gets worse.
As the way people listen to and discuss music evolves and devolves according the whims of tech companies and media conglomerates, the entire point of writing about music feels fraught. A quixotic venture or a vestigial pursuit tied to an industry eating itself. Throughout this series, I hope to open frank conversations, break taboos and maybe, just maybe, convince myself that writing about popular music and engaging with the industry is still worth the time and effort. I hope we survive the experience.
Raves are not safe spaces.
That’s not to say the people promoting them want them to be unsafe, nor is this column baiting you with tired right-wing talking points. But of all the (truly) underground parties I’ve DJed, none took place in spaces that I’d describe as remotely safe. They were full of bored misfits drunk and on multiple drugs. At best, they were looking for a place to go; at worst they were looking for trouble.
Sometimes, the warehouses we broke into were full of very literal pitfalls. I saw at least one raver pull a Travis Scott wandering away from the dance floor. Once, I played a riotous grime set in an unused maintenance tunnel where the only exit was up a five-foot drop. A fire would have killed hundreds.
Whenever I promoted a party, we tried to make our attendees feel safe. We threw out obnoxious men (it was always men), calmed down people in crisis, and made sure we had medics on call for anyone who K-holed. We even hired the best security money could buy – which is to say off-duty cops able to negotiate with the on-duty cops who rolled through wanting to shut us down.
As far as I know, no one got seriously hurt at any party I’ve DJ’d. But all of these precautions reinforce an unavoidable truth: the parties I played weren’t safe and the vast majority of DJs I’ve met playing the underground circuit – the real underground circuit sans international headliners, booking agents or Function 1 sound systems – would probably say the same. When mythologizing rave’s countercultural origins, that’s not something the dance music press likes to talk about: it’s bad for business. But just as importantly, I highly doubt anyone who attended our parties was looking for safety. Everyone knew the score. So why are we now lying to each other?
Dance music in 2024 is a mess of contradictions. House music started by working-class, often queer men of color in Chicago, Detroit, and New York has been wholly subsumed into a European-led leisure activity, but we’re meant to be cool with it because (most) Black legends still get gigs. The history of raving is framed as an anti-capitalist activity of resistance when the vast majority are for-profit ventures by small entrepreneurs with a high tolerance for risk (and/or rich parents).
Underground music is mostly played, discussed, debated and supported by a small minority of people who think and care about it extremely deeply – for an audience that often engages with it to stop thinking entirely. Go to your favorite club or a packed festival and watch the crowds lose their heads. Then look to the back of the room and spot the couple slightly older vets having a serious-looking chat: you’ve just found the DJs and potentially, a writer. Their priorities are very different from everyone else in the room, and I’ve had more than a few conversations about how very weird it is to realize that everyone is enjoying your thing at the moment, and are having more fun than you are – leaning against the wall, critiquing a mix.
That’s not to say that I ever went out looking to have a bad time in a dodgy space only to bitch about the music someone else was picking. But when your poison of choice is a UK-centric bass micro-scene, sometimes you’ve got to let someone else decide what club to hit. It shouldn’t surprise you that as a weirdo writing a column about writing about music, I’m a bit of a crank and don’t do well in groups. Bring me into a random party anywhere on Earth and there’s a 95% chance I won’t have fun: if the music isn’t too commercial, it’ll be too niche, and not the right niche.
I got into Berghain exactly once and immediately discovered that no matter the hype, I could not enjoy a steady kick drum for hours on end without consuming enough substances to seriously imperil my life. I had a much better time when Sven refused to let my terminally straight, North American ass in. Outside, a bunch of white boy hippies with dreads hooked a sound system to a car battery a few hundred feet away and were serving vodka mates for a couple of euros. Their acid psytrance still had a steady kick, but at least I didn’t feel like I was surrounded by extras from Zoolander.
A surprising amount of my raving memories have to do with psytrance, a genre I do not care for. This is because it’s the world’s least pretentious music scene and if I’m going to dislike the music, I’ll choose hanging out around weirdos and psychonauts with a tenuous grasp on reality, rather than coked up graphic designers and programmers looking for the perfect Instagram post. My worst raving memory took place when I overconsumed: a bunch of Quebecois cybergoths in the gender-neutral bathrooms pointed out how fucked up I looked – a humiliation that immediately cut through whatever I was on to sear itself deep in my memory.
None of the people I ever met in a psytrance rave seemed like the type to read mainstream news. They appeared to be vaccine-hesitant, dreadlocked wooks who break into warehouses, the type who aren’t exactly prone to being concerned with the opinions of terminally online coolhunters. They’ve got their own flavor of synth-based dance music with steady kicks – one far divorced from austere minimalism. And for all the difference between those two in-groups, both seem terrified of a world without a 4/4 kick drum.
My most enjoyable raving experiences were extremely community oriented – which required flights to the UK. At grime-specific parties by Boxed or Butterz, I found 200 to 500 people willing to dance to exactly the type of music I enjoyed. All I had to do was pump 90 kg CO2 each way for the privilege. These spaces weren’t safe either. In Bristol, one drunk guy was ready to knock my head in while queuing for cider – until he heard my accent and decided anyone flying in from Canada for a Grime rave was someone worth partying with. Ultimately, what made these spaces worth exploring and these parties worth attending, wasn’t just the music, but the people I could connect with. I was a half-French Canadian, half-Jewish rap superfan turned dance music DJ; there aren’t a whole lot of people I identify with. It was great, but I highly doubt I can recreate the sense of euphoria I felt at these parties today, as a washed, 40-year-old California sober DJ.
Speaking of euphoria, one of my best sober raving memories took place at an outdoor party in Berlin, circa 2013. A pretentious group of American expats were being loud and obnoxious throughout the day, until Hard Wax’s DJ Pete took to the decks. We all waited with bated breath… only for him to start with one of Dubstep’s all time filthiest drops. The mostly German crowd lost their minds, while I got to see the yanks deflate in real time, and sulk away, defeated, realizing that techno time was over. You gotta find your kicks where you can.
Raves are not safe spaces.
DJing is great, all things considered. The pay, at the amateur level, is complete shit, but you get drink tickets, guestlist, a totally disproportionate amount of status for the labor involved, and the ability to impose your will on an entire dance floor. For an awkward lover of dance music, it’s the perfect way to enjoy the artform without having fun with the unwashed masses.
Writing about dance music, however, barely makes any fucking sense at all. I’ve spent hours wracking my head for the right words to describe a bassline or the right metaphor to explain how a drum pattern makes me feel, when I could have just shared the damn tune on social media, so that people could actually hear it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m in debt to Energy Flash and Bass Mid Tops among others, books that painted a picture of scenes long gone by the time I got involved in dance music. I hope that someday, one of my nerdy descendants will think the same of my writing (unlikely). But when I’m asked to write about dance music today, I find myself thinking bro, I’ve run out of words to convey the excitement of an amen break.
Part of that is down to dance music – at least the type I’m exposed to – not changing all that much of late. Everyone in England tried to convince me amapiano was the one, but that only works if you’re actually out raving to it – not so much if you’re tuning into a mix. Jungle, garage, grime and dubstep meanwhile are in a perennial revival, slowly merging into a UK mega-genre to compete with consolidated House & Techno Inc. The most exciting thing that I’ve heard since the pandemic is Jersey Club, but there’s barely a scene here in Montreal and I can’t be bothered to stay up past midnight. I’m self-aware enough to know that the problem isn’t the music, the problem is me.
Then again, the music industry isn’t making things easy. Streaming is absolutely terrible for DJ-led music, due to the onerous licensing required to split a fraction of a penny between rights holders – which ensures 99% of tunes, let alone mixes, never turn a profit. You can compare that to the MP3 era of decentralized file sharing and viral bootlegs, and it’s hard to not to see the 2024 “pop edit summer” as a reaction to the highly-policed walled gardens of contemporary music distribution. It turns out active DJs are the only ones that aren’t too lazy to download MP3s.
Nevertheless, ravers can only resist the top-down oligopoly of music consumption so much: we’re a far cry from the days of daily blogs paying writers to cover the newest dance track premiered on Rinse FM. Take the human element out of dance music and it really is just mechanical noises. The problem isn’t me, the problem is the music.
As I was getting ready to hand this in, Resident Advisor posted an Op-Ed on the death of revenue sharing platform Aslice. I’d like to emphasize that the following is not a criticism of this piece: it’s well meaning, earnest and doesn’t deserve my cynicism – not that it’ll stop me. Go read it.
You back? Great. ‘Cause this part threw me for a loop:
It’s yet another blow that questions the vague notion of dance music as a united community with progressive ideals. How long do we have to wait before admitting that these platitudes are usually little more than marketing spiel?
(…)
“Classic house DJs who spent the pandemic shouting ‘pay Black people!’ didn’t sign up. Festival DJs posting endless tour schedules didn’t sign up. Fame demon influencer DJs didn’t sign up.”
(…)
Compounding the disillusionment is the fact that many of the DJs in question have cultivated a supposedly inclusive, politically conscious online persona.
My reaction, after years of raving, DJing, writing about dance music, hobnobbing with industry folks and generally dedicating more time in my life to dancing than would be considered healthy is… yeah, we probably should admit these platitudes are marketing spiel and drop these personas. 90% of the time, they have no basis in reality.
Raves are not safe spaces.
DJs are short-term contractors who spend most of their working hours losing sleep on Ryanair flights to play a couple of hours of music before repeating the process and going home. The expectation that anyone was going to tithe 5% of their meager income to someone else – even someone deserving – when they didn’t have to, was fanciful at best and deluded at worst. None of the DJs I met are bad people: they’re passionate music fans aware of how fortunate they are to make a living doing what they love. But most of them had no illusions of being Marxist guerillas in a fight against an evil empire – and the ones that did think that were frankly, dickheads.
None of the ravers I played for were perfect, either. Many of them were people running away from their problems via drink and drugs and the ones who were truly committed to changing the world, to a fault, all realized that their time was best spent organizing in their community and not staying out until 6 a.m. There’s nothing wrong with any of this: people have varying beliefs and varying life stories and most of them are just trying to get through the week any way they can, and dance to some tunes along the way. But framing your worldview around the idea that someone is going to uphold leftist (or even egalitarian) ideals just because they like to party, is a recipe for completely misunderstanding the world around you.
Raves. Are. Not. Safe. Spaces.
I did read one other essay recently, that captured how I feel about dance music. It was in The New Yorker of all places, not exactly a publication with its finger on the pulse of the nocturnal community. In it, Emily Witt chronicles the dissolution of her relationship with her DJ boyfriend, and how their nightlife romance didn’t survive a global pandemic, mental illness, idealistic politics, and the ever-encroaching spectre of adult responsibilities. It’s honest, and messy and most of all, full of unsafe behavior, hypocrisy, hurt feelings and memories of a simpler time. It’s better than whatever I’ve written here, so go check it out.
Most of all, it illustrates how I feel when I go raving these days: it’s like thinking of past loves, but not quite being able to remember the feeling. I’ve accepted this. When I was starting out, I was having the time of my life while 90s Jungle fanatics complained about how I missed out on the golden years. I don’t want to be that guy to a young up and coming raver. Not when I can be the weird modular synth guy doing live sets at a more reasonable hour instead.
