I was a raver
In this MetaFilter post linking to a collection of photos about the North Carolina rave scene Unicorn on the cob shares her experiences as a raver and growing out of it.
Wow at this link.
Um… I was a raver in 1989. It was my senior year of high school. I can attest to the immense sense of freedom and future social benefits that this culture had on me.
I attended my first warehouse party in November 1989. I remember every fiber in my being telling me that this sound, this music, was the future. I was listening to “Welcome to Techno City” by the legendary Juan Atkins. At this time, ecstacy was legal and pharmaceutical grade in Dallas and I ingested it. Not frequently, but still…
I began funding and throwing parties out of my own pocket around 1994.
Joined a DJ collective in 96.
And subsequently lost somewhere in the neighborhood of five grand, while also helping throw one party that netted 20 grand.
Imagine if you printed up flyers, set up three tents in a field that was three acres big, made $20,000, and eight thousand people showed up.
Imagine if when the sun came up, your body flooded with ecstacy, surrounded by friends, you were dancing and the entire body of people felt like it was levitating.
A rolling wave of sound, then literally, several hundred people’s hands, filled with sunflowers, shot into the air at the same time and everyone screamed the word YES. YES. YES.
Look around. Tears are streaming down everyone’s faces. You genuinely feel like the vibrations from eight thousand people dancing will draw the Earth’s energy into a light-beam of pure goodness and shoot straight up. People cannot ignore it. You have CHANGED THEIR LIVES FOR THE GREATER.
An informal survey of the party reveals that people from as far away as Scotland have come to your party… without being paid or booked to play. There are famous people there (at least, famous to you).
Shyly, Roy Davis Jr. asks if he can play a sunrise set, even though he isn’t booked. You laugh and agree, asking your boyfriend to wait an hour to play The Orb, et al.
Imagine opening XLR8R magazine a month later and seeing photos of your parties. Your dj collective is world famous now. You are putting out records. You are all going to be a cultural force that is going to make a positive impact on Texas, and maybe, just MAYBE, the world.
You marry your DJ sweetheart and enjoy 10 years of parties, events, nightclub ownership, your own record label, and you see your friends disperse and tour the world. You see them open their own record labels in different cities.
Now, imagine that slowly, everyone gets married. Has kids. Become alcoholics. A vast amount of them become addicted to methamphetamines. As in, sixty percent. Including your husband. He turns into someone you don’t know and leaves you in crippling debt. Your “friends” are suddenly protecting him and lying to you. You are forced to flee everything you know and, with a good credit rating and a decent job, have to start over your entire life from scratch. Your identity doesn’t exist any more; but then again, there is opportunity in that, too…
Suddenly you don’t like house music any more. Rave is a four-letter word. Anything with a 4/4 beat brings back bad memories for you; your former compatriots, when you see them, look nocturnal. Shifty. Diseased.
You stumble upon the occasional post online or link to photos of parties thrown by “new ravers on the block” or “neo-ravers.” Your youngest friends were maybe 6 years old when you were raving; to them, it’s “retro night.”
You look back on the past and realize that for a while, you had it. Shangri-La. Nirvana. You had respect, community, music, freedom, love, a real family made by choice.
But the thing about being part of a zeitgeist is, that moment passes. I’ve read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and I know that I was part of one… and now, it’s been superceded. It’s a joke, like disco was in the mid-80’s.
Oh well. I have my memories, and I look forward to Life 2.0.
But I can’t look at anything with the word RAVE in it and not feel saddened and tainted by it.
If you were there, you know. If you weren’t, my god, I wish I could show you what it was like.
We can never have that moment again. But me? Je ne regrette rien. (#)
