I love electronic music. Been listening to it for 30 years. Mostly drumbass, dubstep, some house. Groups like subfocus. I used to listen to tiesto, bt, etc.
One, I hated the term "raving". I was thought raves were finding an abandoned house, playing music and drugs. I just like the music and don't need the dance clubs or the drugs.
But with the said, I think the "club" scene has dropped off. Expensive drinks. Expensive covers. Who wants that.
Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.
This exactly. I've been to "raves", they were just giant parties with $3 beers in an abandoned or semi-legal building somewhere in Brooklyn. I was surprised when I started hearing people call giant corporate venues with dancing "raves".
I went out to one of those giant clubs in Brooklyn not too long ago to see a friend DJ (Brooklyn Mirage). I was on guestlist, but the cover would have been $50. I bought a round of drinks to say thanks, and for three drinks I paid $75. Plus they made me load a credit card on some stupid wristband to even get the drinks. What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity? Their rent is already 2-3x what I paid when I moved to Brooklyn nearly 20 years ago.
I don't buy the "young kids don't want to go out late anymore". They just never encountered scenes that were consistently relaxed, fun, and cheap.
A lot of entertainment is priced in and the powers that be lament that young people aren't falling for it anymore.
You like sports? Well, you need a subscription to see their away games, a subscription to see their home games, and a separate subscription to see their games in season, and a subscription to see their off season. You want to see them in person? well.....
You like music? Well, the cost of a ticket to see your favorite artist is $80 + $60 in fees. Online purchase fee. Printing fee. Seat Reservation fee. etc.
Wanna go out for a few drinks? That'll be $8 for shitty beer on tap
Want to go anywhere? Time to reserve your parking spot, or pay your parking ticket. Public transport outside NY? lol. Can't really get drunk or high now either since you need to kinda be sober enough to get back. Or fuck it! Uber and pay an extra $50 in surge charge fees!
Want to go to the museum on the weekend while you visit a city? Well, too bad, it's very congested so the museum has surge charged the price of the ticket to $70 (the Shedd Aquarium special in Chicago).
> I'm good I think I'll just stay home and jerk off
Exactly. There's a fine line between convenience and the cost of doing it yourself, like getting a decent smash burger or firing half of the devops team.
The most ridiculous thing is having venues trying to casually extort you at every possible opportunity, without the implicit advantage of a few very subtle but 'approved' dealers lurking around while making sure everybody is having a safe but very fun time.
> What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity?
Practically every 20-something (and just as many 30+ somethings) I know in NYC DO do this very regularly, especially if they already live in wburg/bushwick. If they're not there, they're mixing it up at nowadays.
I guess the 20-somethings I know (and knew when I was also 20-something) are broke artists and models. They don't have $200 to spend on a night out every weekend. Nowadays certainly is affordable and there are others of course. People make it work.
There were definitely expensive clubs that kids with money went to when I was young -- a friend ran sound at The Box and that was always wildly priced. But there was no shortage of illegal parties in warehouses with cheap drinks and no cover on the williamsburg waterfront and out in Bushwick in the early 2000s for the weirdos. Even met my wife at one.
I think a lot of those illegal warehouse parties died with the DeBlasio administration. At least, that's when I stopped hearing about them so I am open to the possibility that I'm no longer plugged in to the right scene.
The DeBlasio administration was the first to add a "night mayor", and they made it easier to open legit venues in the same neighborhoods that used to host the illegal warehouse parties, like that triangle just west of Flushing avenue centered around the Morgan L train stop, where Elsewhere and The Brooklyn Mirage among a few other big, high priced venues are now.
In exchange for making it easier to open more venues and have more legal dance parties, they cracked down on the illegal parties pretty hard. This had the effect of pushing the prices up, changing the scene and crowd, and introducing more regulations. Before, you had to be a little more plugged in to know when and where the parties were because they were "underground" (but only a little). You could also reliably dance until 6 or 7am and buy all the alcohol you wanted whenever.
Now, these parties are way more mainstream so people who are less enthusiastic about dancing show up because it's something accessible to do, and everything must legally shut down at 4.
I remember being excited that things were going legit because I thought it would make the parties that I frequented better, but now with the benefit of hindsight over the past 8 or so years, I think it's had a negative impact on the scene, along with all the other issues related to the ubiquity of cell phones and the changing gen z tastes.
I still long fondly for Bushwick circa 2012, but it might just be more "Back in my day..." nostalgia.
I think pervasive (invasive?) social media and the "always-potentially-on-camera" reality, paired with cancel culture, has also killed a lot of "underground" scenes (and counter-culture in general but that's a whole other topic).
If you haven't read it, you might like Emily Witt's recent book Health & Safety. She writes about her experiences raving in Brooklyn (and Berlin) from roughly 2015 to present day and many of the changes that have occurred (as well as dropping in her own personal story which may or may not be interesting to you).
Those underground parties still exist for the most part. I've aged way out of all this, like you have, but I'm aware of their existence through many friends in the music scene in NYC. If you're enterprising and skilled at navigating Instagram and similar platforms as they rise and fall you wouldn't have too much trouble figuring out where they are.
I can tell you living in south america that this is true. Three drinks esp. caiprinhas even at the expensive places would be about $13, $8 or $9 on promo. Cover for the fancy place is $17. Bottle service is $34.
Plus the bombed out building post war Berlin industrial feel is 1. Real, and 2. free for the promoter and the drinks are cheaper there. Yes, that's real barbed wire, and yes, its really electrified.
Yep, "back in my time", you could go to parties with then relatively famous DJ's (from gigi d'agostino, gabry ponte, etc., to our locals like Umek and Sylvain) for the entry fee equivalent of then ~2 street kebabs, and "club dj's" (local dj, playing other peoples popular music) for a price of ~1 kebab.
Drinks were a lot cheaper, but for most of us, it was drinking store bought drinks outside, then going in and having one or two drinks inside.
Now, an event like this, 60eur+ (~15 kebabs) for less known DJs, and you can't even sit down at a table/booth, you need to reserve those in advance and pay like 300eur (+ tickets.. but you get a bottle of cheap vodka and like 4 redbulls in the price). And it's a night club, a few tables and benches were always a must for those who either drank a bit too much or took a bit too much of the happy pills.
Brooklyn Mirage is hardly a rave place, just a club. Went last year it was pretty terrible. The sound was so quiet I could talk with my gf without yelling. There was also a food vendor inside the venue for whatever weird reason. Paid $300 for tickets and 2 drinks. I heard basement is a good place but never been. Europe's techno parties and raves are still going strong and no food vendors inside ofcourse we are not that lame.
My understanding is that Brooklyn Mirage was engineered specifically to be both loud and at the same time permit a conversation with the people next to you, so your experience is a feature, not a bug. I think we’re all just not used to having that level of thoughtful engineering with that design criteria, so we just associate “too loud to talk” with “good.” I found the experience to be remarkable.
There were clubs in lower Manhattan and Midtown before 9/11 that had those kind of sound systems. The kind of THD that costs money. Jungly kind of beats were still exotic.
Its definitely not a feature. This sound system would be laughable in europe, where the techno culture is thriving. The point is to get lost to the music dancing. Not much talking should be going on. I think they designed it that way so as to not be noisy to the surrounding area since its an open space. Also, having a food vendor inside the club is extremely lame. Can't americans go a few hours without food? Do they have to eat everywhere they go? Its so weird every cocktail bar in NYC also serves food, this is not the case in europe. You go to a bar to drink, food is eaten at a restaurant.
Oh for sure, Brooklyn Mirage is the worst. And there are definitely great parties still happening all across NYC that are reasonable -- I literally just bought tickets a few minutes ago to see Dlala Thukzin [1] spin at Silo in Brooklyn for $25. Perfectly fine cost to pay the artists.
Completely agreed on the terminology. When I got into the scene (late 90s, Philly and Baltimore), everyone legit totally avoided saying "rave" or "raving" when talking with other folks in the scene. We all just said "party", and it was clear what you were talking about based on context (and, for better or worse, clothing style). No one said "ravers" either, it was always "party kids" instead, at least among the younger end of the crowd.
"Party" could interchangeably refer to either a "one-off" event or a club weekly/monthly, and similarly made no connotations as to whether or not the venue was licensed/above-board. Unlicensed one-offs were referred to as "outlaw", "warehouse party", etc. There were also unlicensed venues which threw regular weekly/monthly parties and these were absolutely amazing, so I'm a bit perplexed by the folks here saying a "real" rave is only an unlicensed one-off.
In any case, in my area, as a term "rave" was largely only used by news media, law enforcement, and outsiders who completely misunderstood what the scene was about. The only major exception was internet discussions – web sites like ravelinks.com, newsgroups like alt.rave. But even there, "rave" in the name just helped people find the sites, and still wasn't a term thrown around much in actual discussions.
> Has the music droppped off?
No, it's better than ever in my opinion, especially for non-mainstream house-adjacent music. There are a ton of talented producers who are seamlessly merging many genres and influences... folks are combining classic UK rave synths (well, really from Belgian New Beat originally) with Italo-disco, or taking trance and adding in happy hardcore elements, etc. Many classic samples and sounds, but given a new twist, it's great.
That said, I used to be a major drum and bass head back in the day, but largely lost interest in that genre as it became less danceable over the years. Not to mention my knees aren't what they used to be...
That's especially interesting since Joi Ito is often credited with introducing the scene to Japan, and prior to that he was very involved in the US scene in Chicago. I wonder if he brought the terminology over too!
Exactly, the organized events are just too expensive; when I think of "someone who goes to raves", they have the means to do so every weekend or at least once a month, but who can afford that kind of thing nowadays when prices have gone way up while income has stagnated?
Electronic underground is still well and alive. Sure there is lots of mainstream electronica now but if you look a bit you’ll find tons of new fresh stuff.
Sure you can organise raves in illegal locations but a club can still be about the music and can be a more sustainable “home” for the music.
Sure it’s a lot more expensive but then again everything is - the clubs just need to survive somehow.
Tbh I live in Berlin, where rave culture is most alive probably
Some of the best events I've ever been to have been where a collective has organized the Nth annual event etc. which has taken over an entire location or venue and brought in a really diverse but very friendly crowd with them from all over the place.
But yes, every other day of the week, it's like a restaurant that serves music, the machine must go on, rent gets paid, food in bellies etc.
Glad you brought up some of the musicians (Tiesto).
Looking back on "Trance" and "House" as genres they seem really vapid, vain, and dare I say it, decadent. Reading about the "mecca" of these genres, Ibiza, makes me wish I'd never listened to this stuff growing up.
One, I hated the term "raving". I was thought raves were finding an abandoned house, playing music and drugs. I just like the music and don't need the dance clubs or the drugs.
But with the said, I think the "club" scene has dropped off. Expensive drinks. Expensive covers. Who wants that.
Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.