THE PAST < PRESENT > FUTURE OF RAVE
A retro-futurist investigation into the strange state of nightlife
Welcome to RAVE NEW WORLD—a newsletter on the intersection of parties and protests. This newsletter is written by me, Michelle Lhooq, a counterculture journalist who also throws a cute lil party called WEED RAVE. Your paid subscription helps to keep this gonzo journalism project chugging, and also lands you a spot in our dank virtual green room: the sub-only Discord group <3
PS: Sometimes it feels like I’m screaming into the vortex—show me you’re alive by clicking the ‘heart’ button up top!
Recording an IG video about pandemic rave culture in NYC while waiting for the Uber to take me to the next rave lol (Photo by Andy Egelhoff)
Sup sis! I’m back in Los Angeles after three long months on the protest trail, and I’ve never been happier to take a shit in my own bathroom. This summer has irrevocably changed my perspective on the new counterculture fermenting on the streets—after dropping into protests and autonomous zones in Seattle, New York, Philadelphia, DC, Minneapolis, and Hollywood, my mission for the next few weeks is to figure out what they really represented, while continuing to connect the dots between protest and rave culture. (I just spoke to my simulatrix sis Signe Pierce on the phone, and she gave me a neologism I’m embedding into my praxis: RAVE-OLUTION. The revolution will be a party, we said, because we won’t be cucks for doom.)
While I crawl into my writing hole and figure out what this summer can teach us about the tumultuous road ahead, I’m also dipping back into my freelance writing game, and just realized that I published three essays this week that trace a timeline of the nostalgic past, strange present, and uncertain future of nightlife. So for today’s newsletter, I’m going to try something a lil different, and give you the REAL TEA on the stories behind these stories:
THE OLD: “LOSING MY RELIGION” (ELECTRONIC BEATS)
You ever mourn for those blurry nights you’ve long forgotten? I’ve been wanting to write an unofficial history of New York nightlife in the 2010s for a long ass time, but couldn’t quite figure out where the story ended—until the pandemic hit. Has there ever been another time in history where the end of an era has been so clearly cut off, like a head on a guillotine block? Only when it all came screeching to end can we look back and say, damn—underground New York nightlife in the last decade was really KUNT, and the best part was that (at least for a while) it felt like our little secret.
“No one remembers the details, but it doesn’t really matter—the unofficial version of club history is always better. All I remember is how the soft morning light felt filtering through the plants of Nowadays’ ceilings, the cool breeze blowing through the single red curtain behind the DJ at Unter’s apocalyptic warehouse. In the end, the morass of chaotic energy converging on these streets night after night birthed a new golden era, giving New York back its crown as a nightlife superpower.” - Losing My Religion
Parts of this essay actually came from a discarded draft of a feature I’d originally written for The Cut last summer. In the typical chaos of journalism these days, my editor left for another job halfway through, and the new editor decided to kill the piece. (I think they wanted something more salacious, and I was trying to do the whole historical thing.) I was pretty bummed, because New York Magazine’s nightlife journalism in the 90s is a huge inspiration. But there’s always a second chance!
When my slaysian sis Whitney Wei, the new editor-in-chief of Electronic Beats in Berlin, hit me up and asked if I wanted to contribute a personal essay on what nightlife means to me, I was excited for the opportunity to revive some of this work from the dead, while writing a requiem for a pivotal rave scene that has yet to be properly historicized. In a sense, it felt like closure—I even went back to ground zero of Bushwick techno, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and said a silent farewell. But then, I looped back to New York a few weeks later, had one epic night of pandemic party hopping, and realized the rave scene isn’t dead—on the contrary, it’s evolving into even more accelerated and mutant forms. New York nightlife stops for no one.
Electronic Beats recorded an audio version of this essay! You can listen above.
THE NOW: RAVE TO THE GRAVE
An outdoor rave under a bridge in a forest in Brooklyn (Photo by Andy Egelhoff)
In a strange way, this plague has created the perfect set of conditions for the formation of a new rave scene: many established promoters and DJs are choosing to sit this time out for a myriad of reasons—fear of getting cancelled, the conviction that social gatherings are irresponsible, the lack of financial compensation, or the idea that reckless raving right now is only delaying the timeline for when official nightlife will return. Suddenly, there is a lot more room for less-established DJs and promoters to shine, and there are already new stars of the pandemic rave circuit. (The old guard grumbles that many current party-throwers are D-list opportunists who always threw lame parties, but are thriving now because so many people are desperate to party… that said, I’ve discovered a slew of really sick DJs at both protests and raves this summer.)
My last trip to New York was specifically intended to untangle the complicated and messy politics of pandemic rave culture, which the media has largely painted in an overwhelmingly negative light. I knew there was more to the story‚ but had to experience it in-the-flesh in order to understand how I really felt about it. One night, the rave gods fully delivered, and I used my experiences at three separate parties to illustrate how I feel about rave culture’s place in this pandemic:
In order for raves to remain relevant, rather than dismissed as selfish hedonism, they must evolve. Rave culture can go further than throwing livestreams and fundraising to support this movement. There is an intersection between rave and protest culture that can be mined to the benefit of this revolutionary moment. Throwing a party is an engaging means of community mobilization—by organizing people with shared values into a physical space, their efforts and energies can be channeled to explicit political gains.
The social culture around them must also adjust to the new norms of mask wearing and social distancing—as difficult as this can be when you’re on drugs. In fact, the way I view pandemic raving is similar to my stance on drugs. Prohibition simply does not work—and if people are going to engage in risky behavior, the best way forward is to focus on harm reduction, rather than drive this culture further into the shadows.
THE NEXT: COVID TESTING AT MUSIC FESTIVALS (BLOOMBERG)
My editor at Bloomberg (who is a raver in his own right) hit me up recently with links to two recent music festivals called Utopia and Elements that managed to take place in the middle of a pandemic by COVID testing all of their guests. “Is this maybe the future?” he asked, while flagging the company that provided the testing for these festivals as potentially sketchy. Obviously, I knew some of the people throwing and attending these festivals through the New York nightlife scene, and knew that the gorls back in Brooklyn would be discussing it. So I decided to get to the bottom of what the fuck was going on.
To me, this story hinged on whether the accuracy COVID testing can be trusted, so I started by doing some deep dives into the various types of tests that are currently on the market—rapid “antigen” tests are less accurate than molecular “RT-PCR” lab tests (which are highly accurate), but recent data suggests that even rapid tests are still pretty damn reliable, especially for symptomatic patients. But that’s the issue: they’re much less effective at diagnosing asymptomatic patients, which are presumably what most people attending a music festival would be at risk of being.
Next, I wanted to know what the official stance on COVID testing at music festivals would be, so I hit up New York’s Office of Nightlife, a department created by NYC Mayor DeBlasio to much fanfare in 2017, and overseen by New York’s first Night Mayor. TBH the Office of Nightlife has been mad quiet during this pandemic, and I’ve been pretty frustrated with the lack of guidance overall from the “authorities” on how nightlife operators and businesses are supposed to weather this crisis. When I asked the Office of Nightlife whether they thought COVID testing was a viable solution for reopening nightlife, they sent me this statement, which I didn’t even include in the article because it doesn’t even address the question:
“Our office is working tirelessly to help venues operate under State and City regulations, by sharing information and resources,” said the Senior Executive Director of the Office of Nightlife at the Mayor’s Office of Media and Entertainment, Ariel Palitz. “We want to get all hospitality businesses open as quickly and safely as possible.”
So I called the spokesperson to complain that this statement doesn’t even mention COVID testing, and they told me they couldn’t comment further because this was a “science question,” and I should ask the Department of Health!
So I hit up the DOH, and their statement literally said:
“While a COVID-19 test result can be a great way for New Yorkers to know their status, people should still adhere to the Core Four: wear a face covering, maintain proper physical distance, wash your hands regularly, and stay home if feeling sick. You’re only as safe as your last exposure.”
Smdh. None of this really gave me much faith in government bureaucrats to solve this crisis, tbh. It felt like they were all too scared to say something concrete, in case their asses would be on the line if more festivals or nightclubs started to look into testing. So I finally hit up Vibe Lab, a European nightlife consulting group that was started by Mirik Milan, the former Night Mayor of Amsterdam, and Lutz Leichsenring, the current spokesperson for Berlin’s Club Commission. Lutz was a lot more helpful—he directed me to a recent German concert where all attendees were tested for the virus, as well as offering to send me his research into rapid testing. According to Lutz, testing seemed like the safest option out of the other technologies that nightlife could employ to reopen safely, such as industrial ventilators and contract tracing.
Ultimately, I do think mass and frequent testing is more important than accurate testing at this point (the experts think this too!) and if it takes the incentive of a super sweet festival to indoctrinate this behavior, let’s do it. The experience of one Utopia attendee has really stuck with me as a foretelling of the lingering PTSD—and euphoric freedom—that we will be overwhelmed by, once we’re all able to party again.
The first night felt a bit awkward, he said, because no one knew wtf to feel or how to act—it was like they were the guinea pigs of a controlled experiment like Big Brother or the Truman Show. “But once you got past the fear of getting sick, getting too close, becoming human and natural amongst friends and strangers again,” he said, “There was a real sense of ‘utopia’ to finally let go.”
RAVE ALERTS
Fast becoming one of my favorite livestreams, this New York-based virtual party is welcoming the vogue icon KEVIN AVIANCE (!) for a performance, alongside one of my fave pandemic-era breakout stars, TT (who also smashed my last party, Healing Garden), NYC nightlife stalwarts The Carry Nation, Sao Paolo star Amanda Mussi, and Herrensauna’s CEM.
OK this isn’t a rave, but my friend Dave July from the LA rave scene is involved, and there are musical performances from the persecuted Uyghur minority group and Egypt’s protest-rock scene, so it kinda counts? This FREE virtual conference features a slew of talks and panels with Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Taiwan’s Digital Minister, North Korea defectors, LGBTQ+ rights activists, award-winning journalists, and lots more. It’s a rave for your brain.
If you’ve ever tuned into one of Octa Octa and Eris Drew’s magical forest throwdown livestreams from their cabin home deep in the woods, then you already know these two psychedelic soulmates go deep. Next weekend, they’re collaborating with Un/Tuck, a queer trans femme collective based in Kansas City, for a virtual rave with a stacked lineup of trans and non-binary DJs that’s got me SCREAMING. This one will be for the books.
enjoyed the stories-behind-the-stories! and now i've found the work of Signe Pierce, double bonus