EPISODE 10: LONELY/IRL
Last year I was trying to find a way to tell you that I had fallen out of love with rave, but I couldn’t. It came to a head just over a year ago, when in a last ditch attempt to combat forces that were making me want to escape to a far away universe I took ascending underground star Mosca to a gay urban music night in South London. Lex – who is gay by the way, which is why he’s my good looking Stanford – and I conceived it as a real and legitimate mission: to taken on the stereotypical hostility between gay people and urban music. This was the reason with which we convinced Mosca to come with us to a night called Work at Hidden in Vauxhall, on a Wednesday night in the middle of Frozen Britain. ‘Us’ was meant to be me, Lex, and a gay couple called Tim and Oscar.
Mosca is hot on the London bass scene. I met him the summer before last at Night Slugs in East Village (where the headliner was Christian Martin), was then near my flat in Shoreditch. He introduced himself as the founder/editor of Bruk Magazine with Unknown Soulja. I politely turned down the opportunity to write for them unless it was for £££$$$. Four months later I was swooning to the sound of Mosca’s Square One and (oh the irony) Gold Bricks. These came out in early 2010 as the first Night Slugs label release and via Fabric respectively. Slick hybrids of house, garage, and dancehall, these were tunes that seemed as predictive as they were articulate in rave trends past.
The night we went to Work, in February 2010, Lex was ill (standard) and Tim and Oscar were too busy to come but Mosca had taken the evening off his work shift especially to go to a gay urban night with me. So I felt I had to go ahead. He brought Unknown Soulja with him and I brought Braiden to take some photos. Braiden decided he wanted to try an experiment with a disposable camera. We met under a bridge in Vauxhall station and walked down Albert Embankment. The diachronic spectacle of the Thames at night, when dirty walls and the monuments of other eras loom behind striking modern light displays and sharp architectural angles, never fails to give me heartache. Here is a photo Braiden took on the way to Tinworth Street:
Mosca (Photo by Steve Braiden)
We decided to go to a pub on the corner of Tinworth Street and Mosca ate a couple of sandwiches he’d bought at a garage we’d passed. I think there was some general talk about production – Unkown Soulja had just started producing and Mosca was claiming he really didn’t know what he was doing. Braiden was also as yet to unleash his ubiquitously successful debut The Alps. Meanwhile I was quietly realising I had no plan and starting to feel queasy. I had turned up late because I started feeling strange (cold, dizzy) when I was meant to leave the house and the task of gathering keys and wallet and all that felt like too much of a challenge. Only now I began to think, what were we gonna be doing in a gay club without any gay people? I had almost literally dragged myself and Mosca there. Once we’d left the pub and got past the trans-sexual door person and met the apparently legendary and very nice Patrick Lilley, it was not a lot more than slightly embarassing. We instantly became the straight white misnomers in the black gay club. No-one paid us any attention. I only had enough money to buy one round. Unknown Soulja said he felt like a voyeur.
We had a gossip though and drank tequila in the main room by the bar, where whoever was DJing played 90s RnB (my favourite music, if you don’t know me). The crowd was a younger than us – late teens, mostly – and stuck together in groups. I enjoyed the gay urban style: boys in hip-hop fuck-off baggy trousers and the neatest hair tattoos flapping their hands at each other and semi-vogueing, girls in the tightest funky-house style dresses chatting each other up, and such. I had problems taking my eyes off two lesbians in baggy khakis and white vests, their short hair gelled, slouching by the speakers. They were not speaking to anyone, or each other. Just slouching, arms folded, deliberately disinterested facial expressions on. When the main room opened, where the DJ played the cheesy funky house tunes of the moment, they seemed to just appear there at the front again. Immobile and detached. The idea of going out clubbing just to stand there and be sultry and all night amazed me. (Though that particular brand of negative attention seeking is not unlike what people used to do at FWD, even if they were just zoning out to some new dubplate).
People watching aside our night at Work was nothing like the episode of Sex and The City where the girls go to gay club Trade and they all have a ball, and then each of them has an experience which catalyses the revelation of excruciating underlying tensions in their life. Instead it was the beginning of a difficult and lonely year. For months and months, I tried to write the episode of Decks and the City where I took Mosca to a gay club. I always just ended up staring at the tower block that comprised the view from my N1 flat, with its views of cheap white netting and stains running down each of the square windowframes on the neverending wall outside. Here is some of what I did end up writing:
‘Dear reader, etc., blah, I confess. I have gone about jokingly myself The Carrie Bradshaw of Rave but I’m not sure I’m a raver anymore. It’s not just because of my other commitments. I feel like I am maybe no longer driven by an inexplicable desire to find a barely explicable euphoria, a moment, a collation of bodies. Or maybe I just wish I could erase myself into a nobody.
I am no longer intrigued by the minutae of cycles of decreasing/increasing bpms, bright/dark moods, masculine/feminine beat patterns, and trans-Atlantic reappropriations. I am jaded by ‘friends’ disappearing into self-hype, myopic egos, and people who think, without irony or self-criticism, that a small corner of the world aka the London rave scene is absolutely the only important thing in the world
[… here there were some significant omissions, including the words ‘slut’ and ‘spinster’ and jokes like have I slept with everyone in dubstep, etc … this omission also includes an amazing scene where my friend Mr Beatnick enacted the idiocy of scenesters who commonly complain about the lack of girls in raves while simultaneously harassing every girl who does spend a lot of time in raves with idiotic gossip about who they've slept with, calling them weirdos, and such…]
And who am I to this anyway? I’m not a critic. A parasitic blogger? Bandwagoner? I have studied all the great authors, and know how much there is in the world to write about, and how many great works have been written in so many forms, and having always somehow had a sense I had to write, I am writing about music. Which other people make. And so, when the first big glossy magazine syndicated my blog, I froze, rabbitlike. I have been sinking among the everybodies who have links to their blogspots in that little box on the left on their facebook pages. Where they occasionally post up a link to a music video.’
I can’t remember exactly when I wrote this but it was somewhere in the middle of an unfortunate span of strange and stressful events that included walking down the street one day and thinking a bomb had gone off before realising I had blood all over my face, mental illness in people proximate to me, borderline harassment, increasingly forgetting what I was saying half way through saying it, let alone being able to concentrate, passing out when I got home from work, heart palpitations, anxiety, nausea … During this time I kept track of the Debates Surrounding Lady Gaga. The main arguments of the anti-Gaga camp (spearheaded by Camille Paglia and Mark Dery) seemed to be that Gaga’s narrative about embracing her misfit fans is banal and meaningless, while her compulsive hyper-referencing is nothing more than a product of the over-saturation of a digital generation of social networking and text message romance. I’ve never read anyone complain about a male pop star being coercively oversexual. Paglia rails against Gaga for being fake after beginning her article quoting the pop star describing herself as a lie. Thus obviously self-contradictory, Paglia was, to me, more articulate of a disparaging and patronising attitude to a new generation. Lines like ‘generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions’ say far less, to me, about anything that might be wrong with Lady Gaga than Paglia’s attitude towards people who are younger than her. And have a future. With similar lack of self-awareness Mark Dery’s flashy reference-dropping, combined with a shallow argument, does exactly what he berates Gaga for doing. When he name-checks Susan Sontag’s ‘Fascinating Fascism’ it escapes him that Sontag concludes her essay (where there is an analysis of The Night Porter, which Gaga name-checks) with a concern that Nazi fetishism is symptomatic of the increasing detachment of sex from love. So instead of asking what Gaga does in this casual and extreme sex context, he just dismisses her as stupid. Moments where heretosexual assumptions such as those where women and not men are acceptibly described as ‘lobotomised’, unsurprisingly then, seem to escape Dery. What about when in the ‘Telephone’ video, in the diner scene, a shot of Beyoncé’s pronounced cleavage positions the narrative via the masculine-positioned gaze that dominates so many pop videos? Perhaps it deliberately escapes Dery that Beyoncé poisons the man behind that gaze.
Work @Hidden.
In my increasing social and physical withdrawal, then, I was less interested in Lady Gaga than in what people’s complaints about her said about their own assumptions. People complained that she wasn’t pretty, as if this meant she should not be a pop star. (These people included M.I.A.). What did being pretty consist of, anyway? A feminine style? A certain type of pose? Body shape? To me, Gaga is quite obviously a product of the gay scene – gay and fetish gone straight and mainstream. But she is widely berated for failing to be all sorts of female standards (pretty, sexy), including the revelatory end point of a kind of feminist/post-englightment idea of progress (Paglia’s ‘exhausted end of the sexual revolution’). Doesn’t Paglia repeat an ancient and misogynist trope that projects everything that is wrong with the world onto the female body? Doesn’t expecting one woman, let alone a set of fictional characters (like the girls in Sex and The City), to embody the successful end-point of a feminist trajectory unconsciously reiterate this misogyny? I always thought feminism was anti-idealist…
Among the reasons for my increasing social and physical withdrawal was someone who deliberately chose not to see the real me through his own over-identification with the heterosexual norms of hip-hop. As I watched the world polarising over Lady Gaga, I realised that by taking Mosca to a gay rave I had been trying to gender bend my way out of some personal pains that had stained my love affair with rave. I wanted to bend my love. But what I did felt shallow because it wasn’t real. Meanwhile, elsewhere online, Night Slugs were accused of being bandwagoners, mainly for their reference to juke. This was funny because they’ve all been interested in all kinds of global bass for years and years, and even funnier for the idea that if you engage creatively in a musical scene that isn’t ‘yours’ you are a fake. Doesn’t that mean we are all just faking it?
12 months later I know that I had not only taken up a joking comparison some of my friends had started making years and years ago between me and Carrie Bradshaw, in order to parody contemporary journalism ( ‘I’m the Carrie Bradshaw of rave’…), but that I had taken it way too far. I was trying to turn my life into an episode of Sex and the City.* I was probably using this identification to try and escape my loneliness. It was a case study in the role of dubious on-screen icons in self-delusion. Have you seen Paris is Burning? It broke my heart, because the fallacy that Venus Xtravaganza adopts, to try and claim a place in a society hostile to her, ends up in her death. And here I was, a straight person wanting to be queer. Yet all the while that I was living this fail, I achieved some not-small intellectual ambitions that I set myself years and years ago. And while I was in the darkest throes of not-going-out-much not just because I didn’t want to see certain people, or types of people, and the things that used to excite me didn’t excite me anymore, but also because I simply didn’t have time because I had so much work to do, an overwhelming amount of work do to, I forgot about watching Sex and the City. I watched Buffy The Vampire Slayer instead.
Later on in the year my friend Dan tweeted that Girl Unit’s IRL was being played during the London student protests. If the term IRL isn’t an argument about the influence of fiction I don’t know what is. IRL, I had been experiencing a loneliness in part induced my body being the object of other people’s issues about themselves, at the same time as Lady Gaga seemed to be the object of a large chunk of western intellectuals’ issues about themselves. If that’s not an argument about what culture means to our lives, I don’t know what is. IRL Night Slugs was one of the biggest things in rave last year, because even if they are fake they have the realest sense of what makes a big tune. If genre is dead they embody it. IRL I met Night Slugs co-founder BokBok 6 years ago through Dan and have only known him to take one consistent path. You could call it the path of true rave. IRL there was and has never been one feminism. Or one end point of feminism.
IRL on NYE 2011 I was able to go out and rave for the first time in years without having to worry about being able to focus on complex psychoanalytic/political theory the next morning. I spent most of the night next to a really really high dude with dreadlocks who gave me a massive zoot and I met and accosted a guy that looked IRL like The-Dream. This was an IRL example of the kind of release through rave that I had given up on. IRL in January I discovered my grandma’s mink coat and took it to the Gilles Peterson awards and people didn’t recognise me cus I looked so ‘glamorous’. IRL Martelo aka Marty Party took me out raving with him, which was IRL a whole month ago oops, and we discovered that IRL raving in Dalston is as dead as genre. The next day Marty sent me a couple of tunes I’d asked about that night – Digits by Melé and Don’t Stop by Voltron – digitally, instantly. IRL, that doesn’t mean he can’t do facial expressions. Here is the facial expression he made at Dalston Superstore, plus what Beatnick was doing for a large part of the night, which says a lot about what he thought of the crowd. Beatnick, by the way, has described himself the Larry David of wonky.
Martelo at Dalston Superstore.
Mr Beatnick at Dalston Superstore.
In spite of the preponerance of fake wannabes (a particular brand of fakes you can identify because they wear stupid clothes which they think look cool but actually have no idea about style and are clearly confused and disorientated by good music) Braiden played a banging set spanning Drexciya and jacking house to Sicko Cell, and then we headed off drunk on whisky, Paris DJ Manaré and friends in tow, to Fabric, to join Oneman, Jackmaster et al for an IRL rave up behind the DJ booth. Try telling me me IRL to my face my friends don’t experience emotions, and try telling me that even though they were part DJing off digital Oneman and Jackmaster weren’t killing it. IRL Last Friday night I saw Mosca and he told me he’d just been to New York and done the Sex and The City Tour, but he didn’t win the prize dildo. I was at a warehouse party. Because IRL I am me, the Melissa Bradshaw of rave. And the next night I went to a house party with my gay friends, ate five pieces of cake and ended up in the corner youtube DJing 90s RnB. I was right in place.
Martelo at Fabric.
Oneman (Pitchfork DJ of the Year 2010).
Manaré (handclap).
Jackmaster, DJ Mag Breakthrough DJ of the Year 2010 ( Braiden in the background).
Spotted on the wall at Fabric.
UPDATE: when I was editing this a line got lost that read ‘Mosca is now an international jet-setting DJ who remixes the likes of Gucci Mane, and is newly married’.
* This might be a nice place to mention Decks and the City is proudly listed in this year’s edition Da Capo’s Best Music Writing (under ‘other’, lol).
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Good to have you back Melissa, your blog is the best.
Comment by Angus — March 5, 2011 @ 1:29 amexcellent to read a lengthy text of yours once more. always impressive how u work them words.
as someone who’s still in adoration of raving, i picked up this the other day. thought u and beatnick’d make prime candidates to join me in a game sometime:
Comment by ben v — March 5, 2011 @ 2:29 amhttp://www.fantazia.org.uk/Scene/ravegame.htm
Wonderful piece.
I’ve been going out clubbing since 1980 (I started early!). People have been arguing about the fake / real divide all the way through, and long before then too. A lot of it is just “London”, you know. Since I actually am from London (east) / Essex I’m less bothered by all that. But it’s always been there.
There’s still plenty of life in rave, generations invent their own revolutions, unless we’re in a post teenage era, which I don’t think we are. I’d have liked to hear a bit more about the gay r’n'b rave you went to. One of the disappointments of the post-garage era is the separation of gay and straight clubbing scenes, it never used to be like that.
Oh, apparently my Move Down Low tune got played at the riots too
Comment by paul meme / grievous angel — March 6, 2011 @ 6:00 pmHey
Well, I don’t know that I have that much more to say about Work… I’d just say it was catering for young gay people who like urban music, I guess some of the expressions of sexuality in there would normally have to remain suppressed at your average funky or rnb night so it felt kinda fun and free. Also like there were a lot of regulars there. From what I’ve gathered Patrick Lilley does several nights at Hidden, he seems to be a bit of a legend for providing for various musical styles in gay clubbing.
Comment by decksandthecity — March 7, 2011 @ 11:31 amYour blog is the best. Happy to see other women in rave and in academia like me! Been meaning to say this to you for a while.
Inspiration motivation.
xx
Comment by Magda — March 23, 2011 @ 4:27 am