by Hazel Anna Rogers for the Carl Kruse Blog
I went to a day rave a week ago in Hackney Wick, London. I had invited a few different people but no-one wanted to come or they said I should have told them earlier or they said they were too tired because spontaneity is a dead art in London Town.
No matter. I was meeting a couple people there anyway. And I knew one of the DJs. I’d met him at a party in a park in mid-August. I remembered that he was a good man, easy to talk to, but I couldn’t remember what he looked like.
It was achingly hot and I was dressed in a short-sleeved pale linen shirt and long denim shorts. I wished I’d left my shoulders exposed. There was a football game on when I left the overground station, and when I was walking to the rave venue I went past numerous pubs that were throwing up hoards of drunk football men in football shirts with football haircuts and football language.
Maybe it was a good thing I hadn’t dressed a little more sexy.
I got to the event at around 4:30pm, and the DJ that I knew was halfway through his first set. He was good. The music made me want to move my feet, but most of the people there, sat outside on wooden benches, hadn’t quite reached the dancing stage – they were sitting around chatting and drinking, which I did too for a short time, at least partly because there was only one or two people on the dancefloor. Then I caught myself; what matter if there be a hundred on the dancefloor or but one? So up I stood and across I walked and thus the dancing began, and I danced and danced, and then they all came and danced and then it was thick and hot and loud and I danced still, and I did not stop. I must have danced for about five hours before I made my swift French exit, because that is the only good way to leave a night out.
It was one of the best nights I’d had for a long time, and actually one of the first times in recent years I’ve gone out and not like gotten completely f**ked up. It was good because it seemed as though everyone was feeling the same thing. We were all IN it, going wild in the late summer sun and thinking we could do it forever.
That night got me thinking. Post-COVID, in this rampant social media era, in a time where regulation and laws around club and rave licensing have become seemingly unsurmountable – what has happened to the rave and dance scene? How different is it from what it was when it started? Has it died, to be found no more? Or are we seeing a resurgence in dance and rave culture? Or did it never REALLY go away?
I did some digging, and landed initially on the Reddit forum r/unpopularopinions, where a person had argued that ‘rave culture is dead’. Responses to the titular comment included some arguing that rave culture is being gatekept by 500+ dollar festivals which have killed the underground scene.
This is a tough one, because in some ways I’d agree – notably the part about the expense of it all (a survey conducted by UniHomes in 2023 showed that Londoners spend on average more than £75 on a night out), because no, I’m not gonna buy a £45 ticket for an event in Brixton then spend 30 quid on three beers – but I’d also argue that raves are NOT festivals, so they’re incomparable.
However, there is something to be said for the current shift towards ‘experience’-led events, such as festivals, rather than random one-off events, such as raves. ‘Werkhaus’ Manager Luca Pilato speaks to this: “people’s habits have changed. They are only going out once a month or maybe once a fortnight and want more of an experience now. With so many clubs closing, it means that everyone else has stepped up their game. Everyone’s changing their sound system, investing in high-calibre DJs.”
I listened to a podcast a few weeks ago where the interviewer was speaking with Beatrice Dalle, a French actress who was catapulted to fame through her titular role in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s 1986 feature ‘Betty Blue’. Dalle spoke about Paris in the 70s, and how, despite being utterly penniless at around age 16, having run away from home, she would go out partying every night in this tiny punk club and meet all these cool people, and would live in random squats around Paris. She spoke about how she could get by, even with next to nothing, but how no-one could do what she did back then NOW, because you have to be rich to live in Paris, now.
She’s right, and I think the same can be said about London. Squat culture is dead, despite the innumerable empty properties lying in every corner of London (34,327 “Long-term-vacant” – 31st March 2022, and 87,763 empty homes altogether across London) due to strict squatting regulations. There is a desperate shortage of housing in London, leading to rocketing house prices and rent. Many of us simply haven’t got the money to go out regularly anymore, or else we have the money, but so much of our time is spent working to earn that money that we haven’t the time nor the energy to spend researching cheaper underground events to frequent more regularly. Either that, or we’d prefer to get an early night.
This also speaks to the current trend amongst young people to prioritise their health – since Covid, health anxiety has been on the rise, and young people are drinking less, smoking less, and taking fewer drugs. Amy Pennay, senior research fellow at the Centre for Alcohol Policy Research at La Trobe University, Melbourne, says ‘Gen Zers tend to opt to recharge their batteries during time off from work, or work on furthering their study or personal development’ – rather than going out on a mad one, I presume. In 2022, multinational professional services network Deloitte asked 15,000 Gen Zers around the world about their most pressing concern, and 46% said they lived paycheck to paycheck. Megan Carnegie recounts the experiences of a 24-year-old man:
“Like most other 24-year-olds, Jason’s social life is centred on coffee shops, restaurants, sports games and nights in with friends. He likes trying random activities that don’t require drinking – the most recent being yoga with goats. “I go to sober parties and parties where people are drinking. I just like being active and hanging out,” he says. “It’s been eye-opening for me to realise you can be young and sober and have very full friendships.””
(Catch me rolling my eyes at ‘yoga with goats’, and the fact that this guy’s probably not living paycheck to paycheck – but that’s beside the point.)
There’s also the fact that, for many of us, going out in a big city like London poses many more risks than just an empty wallet or a hangover (or a soul-crushing comedown). More than 100 drink spiking crimes occur in London every month and an average of 25 rapes per day (of men raping women) was recorded in London in 2022. When I go out alone, I have to reckon with this, just like all women and queer people do. When I return home late from a night out and have to walk up to my house from the station, I take my headphones off and steer clear of any men walking near me on my path home. It doesn’t stop me going out, but it makes me more careful about how much I drink when I do go out (even though I have written an ode to alcohol elsewhere). It is always in the back of my mind. It is why I avert my eyes and walk quickly past the sports pub near my best friend’s house, because I can feel their eyes on me, and it makes my heart drop into my stomach.
I too was living paycheck to paycheck for the last couple of years, and only in the past four months have I had a little more disposable income to be able to spend on going out and not worrying whether my card was going to be declined the next day. I still went out, though, because, if you search a little deeper, there are free gigs every day, cheap DJ sets just around the corner, and discounted cinema tickets at little movie theatres nestled in side streets. I think it isn’t always about money, too. I think it’s the current sentiment of young people. It’s like Carnegie said – young people want to stay at home and ‘further their study’, or maybe they’re fed up with ‘people’ after spending too long socialising on virtual third spaces, like Instagram, TikTok, and WhatsApp messaging groups. We’re all starved of community, partly as a result of the ongoing impact of Covid on our workspaces – a lot of us work at least partially from home now – and social media has generally led to less socialising, less going out, and less raving, aided by the rising prices of everything, from housing, to the prices of events such as DJ nights and organised raves, the price of alcohol, and the price of public transport.
Plus, as I’ve discussed in other articles, we can have everything we want delivered to our doors – food, alcohol, drugs – and we can watch anything we want via streaming platforms, and listen to anything we want on Spotify or YouTube. The impetus to leave our houses has been decreasing steadily, year upon year – where previously our ‘third spaces’ were parks, cinemas, and field parties, our ‘third spaces’ have become virtual landscapes made up of group chats, discord channels, instagram DMs, and the wormhole of TikTok (Mina Le discusses this extensively in her video essay ‘third places, stanley cup mania, and the epidemic of loneliness’). We feel, somehow, that we have a community, that our digital community is equal to our previous in-person communities. And it’s easy, too – if we get bored, or tired of people online, we can just mute them for a few hours. We can avoid conflicts, live in echo-chambers with other like-minded people, all from the safety of our own homes.
But that isn’t the whole story – far from it. Isobel Dyke for The Standard says that illegal and underground raving is still very popular, if precarious. Over the past few years, more queer rave spots and nights and festivals – Fold, Adonis, Body Movements, Pxssy Palace, EQ50, Sexy Lady Massive – have opened up, spaces that allow women, people of colour, and queer folk to rave with less fear of being targets of violence on nights out. And rightly so: queer folk and people of colour were the ones who BROUGHT US rave culture in the first place.
Newcastle-based DJ Renok900 says of the UK Northern rave scene: “Up here, our underground music is robust. It feels like no matter what, this type of music will endure — no matter what the odds, the club scene here will always be booming.” Andrew Finch, who curated an exhibition in East London about UK rave culture – ‘Carousel’ at South London’s Merton Library, says that increased interest in raving is ‘a search for greater autonomy in the face of larger social, economic pressures’.
Vivian Host for MixMag also reports on the topic of rave resurgence: “The ’90s scene was extremely male-dominated and had a super aggressive edge … it was common for promoters to call the cops on each others’ parties, DJs were often at battle, and theft and violence could sometimes be rampant at events. Our corner of the underground has taken to heart the discussions of how dance music culture could be changed for the better. There is more femme/queer representation and recognition behind the decks and behind the scenes. There’s more building community, sharing resources, looking out for one another, working together; more drug awareness, information, and testing. Less snobbery and gatekeeping. Overall, there is more intentionality in the rave spaces that people around us are creating.”
Finch is right: in the face of economic crises and increased financial insecurity, coupled with the impending catastrophe that is global warming, wars occurring all around the world, and the end of Covid, it seems only natural that people would want to head out and ‘Just Dance’ (yes, it’s a Lady Gaga reference) all their worries away. Look at the recession pop of 2009 – Gaga, FloRida, David Guetta – and now we have ‘BRAT’, the album of the summer by CharliXCX. Jordan Theresa, in her YouTube essay ‘Brat Summer, Indie Sleaze & The Death of The Clean Girl’, discusses at length on the topic of fast-paced, carefree-lyriced music resurfacing during times of financial uncertainty, and how this translates to fashion and lifestyle in turn. Trends are turning away from the ‘Clean Girl’ aesthetic – neatly parted perfectly styled hair, spotless skin, barely-there makeup, and mindful morning routines – to makeup under the eyes from the night before, tracksuit bottoms and vest tops, and falling asleep on the tube.
Theresa notes the difficulty for brands and fashion outlets to capitalise on the ‘Brat Summer’ trend, because, as CharliXCX says, [paraphrased] ’all you need [for Brat Summer] is a white vest top with no bra and a pack of fags’. But we are seeing the resurgence of bright neon colours (a la BRAT lime green), sportswear, y2k silhouettes and adornments, and ‘ravewear’ on the catwalk for AW24; at MiuMiu, we saw a lime-green skirt with large fuchsia flowers printed onto it coupled with a fleece under which a beige cotton shirt hangs (perhaps a nod to the death of the clean girl and her perpetually beige wardrobe), a sports jacket and sunnies to top it all off; at Alexander Wang, we saw hotpants, long flared jeans, thick kohl around the eyes, greased hair, and double denim; at Louis Vuitton we saw sequins (f***king sequins!) on see-through dresses (bra visible, leggings – LEGGINGS – beneath), luxury tracksuits, and beanies.
Listen. It’s true. We’re all fed up with constantly having to ‘hussle’, with always trying to keep up appearances, with evenings spent watching Netflix and getting an early night. We want to see LIFE, we want to LIVE life outside of our stupid little screens and our home offices. That Redditer was wrong, I think. Rave culture never went anywhere; it’s always been alive, in the warehouses and fields and undergrounds of our cities. We just needed to look for it, and maybe we felt less inclined to look for it when everything felt so pent-up, when it felt like everyone was either at work or working from home or too tired to go out or not drinking this month or going for a work dinner or having a Skype meeting or going to the f***king gym. But now, now that it’s all been let out, now that Brat Summer has lit the way, we’re entering a time of great fun.
I’ll see you on the dance floor.
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