THE POLITICS OF DANCING
Deconstructing toxic techno culture with investigative journalist Annabel Ross
Hi sweeties!
I’ve been following and documenting Singapore’s secretive underground nightlife and drug cultures for years, and it’s been a dream to create a short documentary about my beautiful, weird, and kinda fucked-up hometown with some super talented raver-friends. Our 15-minute film is about a queer, cyberpunk rave in the business district of Singapore called Bussy Temple, and it will debut on October 24th at Canal Projects in New York City. We’re also gonna screen The Last Year of Darkness—a documentary that follows a group of DJs, drag queens, and other assorted club kids as their lives revolve around a nightclub in Chengdu, China. It’s the best depiction of contemporary techno culture I’ve seen in a long time, and I’m super stoked to share it.
Spots for our event are already overcapacity (lol), but we’re working on solutions to get everyone in! RSVP here, and if the screening is too lit, you can always just join the afterparty at Montez Press Radio’s studio a couple blocks away, where DJs will be spinning weirdo tunes and music from the Asian underground.
PS: We want turn this into a docu-series on raves around the world, particularly in politically fraught and unexpected places. If you can think of a possible collaborator or supporter for this kind of thing, please feel free to forward this on to them!
THE POLITICS OF DANCING
Annabel Ross is an investigative journalist who’s broken some of the most important stories about sexual assault in the dance music industry. Her reporting has uncovered long trails of rape and assault charges against some of the biggest DJs/producers in the game, including Erick Morillo, Derrick May, and Kamaal Williams. Annabel recently launched an excellent Substack, called The Politics of Dancing, which covers the intersection of raves and politics. She recently reached out to me for advice, and I suggested that we just cross-interview each other, because I wanted to know more about her work too—particularly what price she’s paid for speaking up, and the costs it’s had on her mental health.
Annabel ended up sharing some pretty real (and sometimes shocking) details about what goes on behind the scenes of her reporting. We also chatted at length about the recent passing of Jackmaster—another dance music giant who faced sexual harassment charges, and whose legacy many are now struggling with.
Check out my convo with Annabel below, and head over to The Politics of Dancing to read her interview of yours truly. (I also recommend reading the rest of her posts—including this one on how Tel Aviv’s nightlife scene has been “glitter-washing” Israel’s occupation of the West Bank.) As always, thank you for supporting independent journalists like us!!
Michelle: You went viral a couple years ago when Carl Craig got you banned from Movement festival for writing two bombshell reports on Derrick May, who was accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women, and is mentor to Craig. Are you still banned from Movement?
Annabel: Ugh, god. They did let me go and review it last year, so no, I believe I am no longer banned.
I thought of your reporting while watching Craig’s avant-garde jazz set at Movement this year. It was transcendental, but I have such ambivalent feelings. Trying to silence journalists to protect your bro code just reeks of this Detroit techno cabal of powerful men who’ve been historized as icons—and somehow in this narrative, an idea has emerged that these men are also untouchable, which is dangerous.
Look, I understand wanting to protect the myth of Detroit techno. When you start to criticize someone like Derrick May, who is one of the Belleville Three, there is the fear that the whole foundation will crumble. I know there are a lot of people who are rolling their eyes like fuck, can’t we just enjoy the music? Why do you have to kill the vibe?
One of the most asinine perspectives of dance music is that it’s an apolitical, one-love kind of culture. Scooter Braun, the former manager of Ariana Grande and Justin Bieber, produced this immersive art exhibition about the Nova festival attack, where they are displaying bullet-ridden porta-potties taken from the massacre site in Israel, as well as fake voice messages from Hamas terrorists bragging about killing Jews. It’s currently showing in Los Angeles, and people were protesting outside when it debuted in New York. But Scooter’s like, “this exhibit is not political.” He tried to compare Nova festival to Governor’s Ball or Coachella, and position it as being about music as a universal language. It’s so dumb, there’s no way else to put it.
The Nova exhibition is fucking mental. Grief and mourning is valid, but to turn it into a traveling trauma porn exhibition that functions more as Israeli propaganda than memorial… it’s fucking weird.
As far as the sexual assault stuff goes, I hate that I can no longer enjoy Carl Craig or Derrick May’s music. I hate that I groan every time I hear “Strings of Life.” I hate that I haven’t listened to Omar S voluntarily in three years, especially not after his alleged assault of [Detroit singer/songwriter] Supercoolwicked. The number of DJs that I’ve heard things about, whose music I can no longer appreciate… it’ sucks.
There's still a lot of fear about speaking out against these people who have the backing of powerful institutions. For example, at Movement, I wanted to interview a Black female DJ and discuss some of the stuff we’ve been talking about. The publicist said no, they can’t do that, because they’re playing on Carl Craig’s stage. How do we tell the full picture if we’re ignoring key details about what’s going on behind the scenes?
But I think there's more public acknowledgement now of the complexity of the techno origin story. There’s more of a discussion that some of the pioneering DJs were quite homophobic, and the early Detroit techno scene in the 80s came from an upper-middle class milieu that was quite self-conscious about the music not being portrayed as too “hood.” So there was a bit of elitism involved as well.
I don’t know if the complexity of the Detroit techno origin story is widely acknowledged. It’s become this myth that people are reluctant to dig deeper into. We want the Black innovators to be recognized, and for that not to be taken away from them, but at the same time, there's more to the prevailing story.
There is a post-woke reckoning in the culture right now—a bit of a recalibration going on, like let’s complexify instead of painting everything in a purely identitarian framework.
I’ve been thinking about Jackmaster, who passed away over the weekend. There was an outpouring of grief, but it was different to when Erick Morillo died and everyone was posting glowing tributes, ignoring that he was due to face court on rape charges in three days. I still don’t know exactly what happened with the assault allegations against Jackmaster—it was pretty murky and handled badly. I’ve heard a couple of other rumors, but I haven’t spoken to anyone directly so I can’t confirm anything.
But we do know that after initially denying his bad behavior at Love Saves The Day in 2018, he eventually owned it and apologized to everyone involved. He went to rehab and seemed to genuinely want to make amends for what he had done, but his career never really recovered. Why people didn’t go out to bat harder for him, I don’t know. Maybe there was more to it, or they were worried they’d be tarred with the same dirty brush for sticking up for him. He had a substance abuse issue long before the 2018 incident, but it can’t have been easy for him going from being king of the world to being this kind of stained person who fell from grace.
Now he’s dead at 38 and that’s really tragic. If people say sorry and own up to their shit and are genuine about it, I’m all for rehabilitation and rewarding that kind of accountability. I believe in restorative justice.
You’re one of the only journalists doing this kind of investigative work, and I imagine it can be quite lonely sometimes. A lot of journalists don’t want to write these kinds of articles because they want to hang out backstage and be cool, right? They want to be friends with the artists they love. But once you start doing articles like this, you get banned, you get blacklisted, you get smeared on trashy gossip websites. So you have to give up some of the fun, clout-y things about being a music journalist.
Fortunately, I've been doing this for a while. I just turned 40. Back in Australia, I was an arts and entertainment reporter and did the whole celebrity thing. When I moved to Paris in 2017 and first started writing about electronic music, I was excited to go to all the festivals and parties. But that fun stuff comes at a cost—you get flown to cover a festival, and they expect a good review. That’s not journalism, that’s PR. And the more I learned about how things really work and what’s going on behind the scenes, I was like, well someone needs to talk about this. I think I’d already had my fun when I first fell into reporting about sexual assault in 2020. And look, as a freelance journalist, it’s not like I was thriving to begin with. So it’s sort of like, fuck it, if this means that people will avoid commissioning me for work in some cases, I’d rather be able to tell the truth.
Your most recent investigation into Kamaal Williams, how did that come about?
I can't go into too much detail, but basically, it was quite a few years ago that I started investigating and speaking to people. There was a roadblock that stymied reporting on it for a while, but the piece that came out for RA found a way around it. After the publication of that piece, I've never had so many women come forward saying that they had a similar experience with this guy. What you read is just the tiniest, tiniest fraction of what's been happening. There are so many details that can't ever be published for various reasons. Kamaal is an example of a serial offender who has been getting away with it for over a decade, and that's largely because the industry has protected him.
What do you mean by “the industry has protected him”?
A big part of the problem are the teams of enablers willing to overlook and minimize bad behavior for the sake of their clients’ career. When I was investigating Derrick May, his female manager at the time sent me all of these crazy explicit photos and videos of women who had allegedly sent them to Derrick. Exactly what she hoped that would achieve, I don’t know. She knew full well what Derrick was like. So many women in the industry who protect predators, and I’m just about ready to name them because it makes me sick.
People have known for years about Derrick May and Kamaal Williams. They heard stories or witnessed something or it happened to their friends. But they continue to support these people, book these people, manage these people, and allow them to enjoy this celebrity status. It’s all about the money.
We’re seeing it now with Diddy. This guy is a fucking monster — and he was also very close with both Morillo and Guy Gerber, who, by the way, has also been accused of rape. Diddy has gotten away with truly depraved, evil things, because no one around him did anything to stop it. In many cases they helped make it happen.
How do you even go about unpicking such a complex web in the music industry that fosters this kind of complicity?
For a long time women were just seen as fair game, because there were so few of us in positions of power in the industry. There are thousands more women and femme DJs today than there were ten years ago.Gender parity and representation does matter. Straight white men are still running things to a large extent. And a lot of women feel that they have to play the game to get ahead and that means not rocking the boat and staying on side with the boys. If there was more diversity, especially in senior positions in the industry, it would encourage a culture that would be less accepting of that kind of thing.
I saw an interesting take on Twitter that abusers don’t just groom their victims—they groom everyone around them to become reliant on them for favors. It’s all about power, so that when the allegations come out, people are afraid of toppling this one figure, because it would also reduce their own power.
That’s absolutely true. People are generally self-interested — just look at Palestine and how few people are willing to speak up about it so as not to risk their careers in any way. Why do men who attain power feel the need to abuse it? I'm not sure. But you do also see that the more fame and money people have, it buys them a lot of protection.
I want to come back to your mental health, because I’m confident that doing this work is pretty grueling. Do you feel dispirited, disillusioned, cynical? How do you take care of yourself?
I do feel all of those things in waves, yeah. How do I take care of myself? I don't know, probably not very well. Honestly, there have been a couple of times where I’ve just broken down crying hearing these women’s stories… I don’t think most people realize that this trauma can last for years, and sometimes for a lifetime.
People also don’t realize the enormous amount of work that goes into investigating and reporting these stories. I’ve been working on a few of them for years, and as a freelancer, I may never get a cent for any time spent on them. So many people come to me for help, but I just can’t do it all, especially when I’m not getting paid for 90% of it.
But it’s rewarding to be able to help survivors tell their stories in a way that they’re comfortable with and feel good about. There is a feeling that hopefully all this work won’t be for nothing, and we’ll start to see some change, even though change is very slow. Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back. Or even one step forward, two steps back.