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Raves, The Scene, Community and Belonging
A common refrain is that third spaces are dead. There's no where to go and meet people outside work and school. This applies to both romance and platonic friends. You can go and try to meet people at bars, but most people are there with the friends they already have. You can talk to women, but they're default closed off. Any conversation feels like a blatant advance. When I moved to my city a few years ago this was the situation I found myself in. I had some friends, but I wasn't making more. And I was hardly ever meeting new women.
Enter raves. I had always been a hard rock/heavy metal sort of guy[1], but I was open to EDM. I was no stranger to drug use either. So when an electronic music enjoying friend invited me to a club night with a famous DJ, I went. Long story short, I made nice with other attendees and got invited to an underground event.
The median underground event sits somewhere between a house party and a proper nightclub. Half the time it's at someone's house. The other half the time it's at an issolated location on public land. Nominally we're all there to dance to music, but it's normal to spend half your time chilling on the sidelines. That's where the socialization happens and The Scene is formed.
It's hard to convey how much better the vibe is than a standard bar/club. Events are either free or charge a small door fee. You can almost always bring your own alcohol. You know nobody is making real money off you, and that changes the dynamic. Instead of being a resource to be extracted you're a desired guest. And that changes how people act. People fall over themselves to help with the physical labor of setting up the event. Someone's always bringing free food to outdoor events, and gifting trinkets to strangers is rampant.
The other nice thing is it's not atomized. The space and crowd is small enough that you'll run into the same guys repeatedly. This gives you more chances to connect. On a broader scale, the same people generally come to underground events. You'll frequently see people you've met before. At a normal "popular" bar you defacto have one chance to make such a good impression on someone that they decide to contact you. It's an uncomfortably high threshold. If you're having a bad day or the other person is distracted, the chance is lost. At undergound raves, you can run into the same person multiple times and slowly build up to friendship or romance.
Once I got into this, I started dragging my friends along to every event. I had two friends who were single and unhappy. Within a year they both got gfs through the scene. I've had a little less luck, but there have been some dance floor makeouts and numbers exchanged. Infinitely more than what I had before. And I've made deep platonic friendships. Less concretely, even people outside the scene seem to respect me more. The fact that some crowd likes me proves I'm not a total loser I guess.
My broader point?
Third spaces are in decline, but this scene remains. EDM isn't my favorite kind of music. About a third of the ravers I talk to admit EDM isn't their favorite but they love the community. I honestly believe this is the only community available to me. Where else do I regularly meet people 18-35 in a social setting when I'm out of college and I work from home? The stereotypical advice is meet up groups and hobbies. Well meet up groups are alright. Most hobby groups have the problem that they're either gender lopsided, or small. You're not guaranteed to find someone you vibe with deeply in an 8 person knitting club.
I wonder how this will progress. Gen Z drowns in ennui and isolation. I saw a meme a while ago of a picture from the early 2000s. It showed a nerdy guy and a cute girl making strong eye contact, holding beers at a house party. The caption was "This is what they took from you". I don't know if the average zoomer knows they can still have that. That was me a few days ago. It's not lost.
Other sub cultures and scenes have been destroyed by the internet and modernity. Raving continues somehow. (I'm young and not super knowledgeable about the history of electronic music. Older mottebros please chime in). Part of this I think is all the drugs. You don't have to do drugs to be a raver, but you absolutely need to tolerate people being high around you [2]. This provides some level of costly buy in that separates it from mainstream culture. My tentative theory is that the desire for a space where you can semi openly use drugs provides a constant incentive towards holding underground shows. This could be a load bearing part of the third space's continued existence. The other factor is ~40% of scene members are broke. The need to save money drives people to the cheaper house shows. I had rich tech bro friends once that liked electronic music. They'd go to expensive festivals and exclusive clubs, but they never got community out of it and complained of alienation.
Another strange thread to pull on is the scenes relationship with the internet. Internet culture is super prevalent, but it co-exists neatly with the scene. Anime inspired fashion is everywhere. Animal ears and tails proliferate. BDSM and other fetishes well represented among the chronically online are out in the open. It's common for people to go by a nickname, which is often their instagram handle. I know a girl who answers just as quickly to "Sunsprite" as her given name.
I know roughly that ravers were early adopters of the internet. Right now the core organizing infastructure is Instagram. If you ask for someone's contact info that's what you get. Flyers for events are posted there. They all say "DM for address". Once you do, they scan your follows list and pictures to make sure you're "in the community".
As a closing thought, there's ongoing tension about "gentrifiers" and "frat bros". People who come into the scene for the drugs and music, but disrespect the underlying culture. There's a strain of thought that "raves are for everyone". I generally adhere to that. When just a few frat bros show up, I make an effort to initiate them into the culture. They're almost always receptive. When a large group of them shows up though, they're not interested in assimilating and they tend to hijack the vibe of the party. This is just the immigration debate lol.
[1] Why not join the punk/metal scene instead? I gave it a try. At least here it's all rich kids cosplaying as poor, militantly far left, and filled with prodigious amounts of coke and rum. Somehow raving is better for my life expectancy.
[2] From the rules on a recent house show: "No open hard drug use inside. There are woods out back. Have some fucking class."
They're still around if you know where to look. I found plenty adjacent to bike culture (NSFW for nudity), and most large cities in the USA have several annual bike rides/budget bike workshops with afterparties and social scenes. Swing dancing, the performing and visual art scenes, cottagecore groups and community gardens, certain pickup sports all had vibrant social scenes. Most of them just have people that (no offense) you and others here probably detest and wouldn't want to hang out with.
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I agree with the broad strokes that raves are a great time, and a wonderful place to meet people. I just worry for the currently young and hip generation that the gentrification has already happened in many cities and what is currently being touted as rave culture is often just the shambling corpse of a once amazing time.
Back in my day (cue sepia tone filter and film grain) there was a lot less dangerous shit to get into going to wild type parties like this, the street drugs back in the 2010s were a lot less likely to contain stuff that could kill you to the point that many people consumed pressed pills, often of indeterminate exact composure, rather than powdered drugs. The suppliers were so ubiquitously high quality that fakes would easily get called out/shunned and the remaining danger was in normal type overdosing. These days i couldn't imagine having such a lassaiz faire attitude towards the procurement of mind altering substances because A- so many research chemicals exist that can nearly mimic the high you want but with wildly different safe dosages and interactions with other drugs and B- as rare as it truly is it really really fucks up your day (maybe all of them) if the guy selling the molly also does heroin, because the heroin dope heads use nowadays can kill a fuckin buffalo and all it takes is a little tear in a bag or, ya know a teeny lil bit of cross contamination.
Heavily scene dependant but you get what i mean. Im sure any city that has a vibrant electronic music scene still has ample supply of good drugs in NA but its a layer of headache that was wildly ameliorated before the overall drug consumption habits of our country shifted.
Beyond that, and this is its own culture war bubble, i think the membrane between the underground scene and the big shows used to be way more permeable and less hassle to interact with. There used to be giga giant touring artists constantly rolling around the country doing giant shows for absolute peanuts compared to todays prices, and unless you live in like one of the 5 states that draw in big shows like that regularly, it seems like the frequency of above the board events is way down. Maybe i feel like that because i no longer live in a big city but the 2 nearest cities to me have kinda skimpy edm offerings when i put the feelers out. Somewhat related but im mad to this day that they cancelled Bassnectar, truly put on some of the best shows of a whole era. The super woke scenes in 2 particular cities essentially ran him off of the east coast forever and reduced his status from ultra headliner to like, mid sized auditorium. His crime? Banged a 17 year old he thought was legal, who then tried to extort him for cash money, he said no. She releases phone recordings and the rest is history, the hoes have been scared off the bassnectar scene en masse even tho they were all tripping over eachother to fuck him a month prior.
I know there are other mega big acts these days but i don't really see anything with the ubiquity of bassnectar springing up to take his spot, most of the people who threw him under the bus to save their social media clout rarely even do big tours and just chill in colorado or cali all day. boo
Last complaint, the ubiquity of social media has made the chances of some moron taking pictures of people doing illegal shit way too likely, and this increases the level of trust someone needs to have for you from "not a fed or narc or informant" to "all that and also not a dumbfuck and also probably not a giga drunk", no fun for all our alcoholic bros and hoes. I cant imagine needing an instagram account to get into a party that sounds fully fucking lame to me.
kinda glad i got old enough to not feel like im missing out anymore when i did, i can just tell EDM costs more and has faced its own enshittification over the pandemic years. If youre one of those people that says "no way dude its still as good as it ever was" i just wanna know whether you live near boulder, socal, nyc or miami.
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What do you have in mind? As far as the metal scene is concerned which you already mentioned, it's not exactly destroyed but is greatly transformed for sure, and the usual explanation that I'm familiar with is that it's completely mainstreamed and gentrified, to a point where old rock stars get knighted etc., and is thus no longer a fitting avenue to express teenage rebellion. This is why relatively few youths and much more adults and middle-aged people attend metal events nowadays. Also, much of its popularity was generated by a hostile Christian conservative right-wing milieu, and that has largely lost its relevance by this point. I guess that does count as a consequence of modernity but only in a rather wide sense of the word. Regarding the Goth scene, on the other hand, I've seen accounts that its members were prone to practising rather strict gatekeeping and exclusion due to an overall strong antipathy and concern regarding 'posers', which meant that rather few youngsters were entering the scene and eventually it withered away. Not exactly the fault of modernity, I think.
The internet surely has a corrosive effect on all of this, but I think only in the sense that teenagers and young people no longer feel compelled to meet in person whenever they merely want to chat. I'm guessing this was a big factor in the demise of malls, although I'm also guessing the mall is an institution that is particularly vulnerable to any social pathology.
It seems then that from a sociological point of view, the rave scene sort of hits the spot - it scares the normies away, as open and massive drug use is technically illegal, which prevents gentrification, but at the same time it's sufficiently acceptable to the mainstream so that large numbers of people are attracted to it: the police are apparently willing to generally look the other way, rave music is not seen as countercultural or fringe, and the drug consumption is of the sort that is not seen as a serious social problem by most normies.
One example: Science-fiction conventions were huge in the 70s through the 90s, but barely seem to exist in the cultural zeitgeist any more. ("Convention" in popular parlance nowadays translates to anime, furry or whatever Dashcon was.) The ones that still exist all have woke codes of conduct that are seemingly aimed at eliminating fun and spontaneity. No -isms or -phobias, no flirting with women, etc. Plus they're a hell of a lot more expensive to attend than they were in their heyday.
And they are more expensive to boot?!
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I used to be in a circle of friends that formed over the shared attributes of being shiftless teenagers who liked drinking outdoors until nightfall and then hitting the local antifa club. I consider it a third space because practically anyone was invited and accepted, and it was always very public. But the drinking gradually gave way to weed, which was still illegal at the time, and the people slowly grew old enough to move out of their parents' homes, so the whole group shifted to staying indoors, smoking up the place until the walls grew yellow and the windows couldn't be seen through, and discussing very little other than where to get more weed, and which underground rave to go to where other drugs could be obtained and consumed. I trundled along for a while because of residual friendship, but eventually checked out. The drugs never did it for me. I'd rather be alone than clean black snot out of my nose and listen to UNZ UNZ UNZ UNZ all day and night.
A few years later I stumbled into Historical European Martial Arts, and found a new third space. It's a niche sport, so you end up knowing every practitioner in a 500km radius. Almost useless for meeting girls, since there's very few of them around, they're usually shacked up already, and the social norms are very, very woke, but that was never my goal to begin with and it does the job for recurring social interaction in general. Of course, it's also very time-consuming, requires travelling a lot, and the friends you make live hundreds of miles away, so YMMV.
I've somewhat noticed that as well, but that "Historical European Martial Arts" are woke is so weird on its face. You'd think that it might be full of RETVRN types, or at least chill conservatives. But nope. I guess it's just too far from anything practical, so it appeals almost only to the neuro-atypical, which are very disproportionally woke.
Doing something unusual (unless it is locally usual in the place/subculture you grew up in) implies high openness to experience, which is correlated with political liberalism (and also IQ, education and whiteness). Any weird hobby will be full of WEIRD people.
Also one or two woke types getting in tend to be far more militant about spreading their preference, especially if rare women in a male dominated space
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I guess the RETVRN types, or at least chill conservatives are to be found mainly among the Viking/Gladiator reenactors instead. I admit I have no idea what "Historical European Martial Arts" are.
Somewhere in between the outright RETVRNers and the chill conservatives (who would never do such low-status things as HEMA or reenactment) are the much more populous pagan LARPers, and those are well-represented among reenactors.
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So it is. Now to be sure, there are lots of people around who just want to
grillfight, and those are my crowd. Hell, I can even gel with the openly antifa guys as long as we're talking shop and they're not trying to shoehorn their political jokes into everything. Doesn't mean I approve of their wearing flags and banners to tournaments, quite the contrary, but I know well enough to keep quiet on that. And yes, HEMA is primarily nerds doing nerd things. Open conservatives, even chill ones, are actively pushed out. RETVRNers show up sometimes by accident, and are usually given sufficiently cold shoulders to get the message. And the "neuro" crowd is indeed practically everyone present.I'm strongly considering switching clubs, since my old club (from which I have moved away geographically anyways) has really fallen off in terms of tournament focus and has gone far more woke since the generational shift following the "pandemic", and there's a closer one (it only costs me about 2,5h and 30€ to get there and back rather than 4h and 50€) in which people are much more motivated to actually go to competitions and spend far less time taking tiresome potshots at the political outgroup. Can't quite get myself to pull the trigger, loyalty is a bitch, but the option seems more appealing by the season.
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Dovetails with my own bemoaning of the seeming demolition of any 'spontaneous' happenings where people with similar interests can, on a shoestring budget, throw together an event mostly on the backs of volunteers and without much centralized organization have an 'organic' gathering of people who actually just want to be there and are, if indirectly, invested in its success. Since Covid disrupted ALL in-person gatherings, I've seen a decline in house parties, block parties, and pub crawls in favor of corporatized events that charge increasingly exorbitant ticket prices and have the most blasé, sanitized entertainment options on offer, often tuned for maximum family-friendly mass appeal. It is very hard to build a 'scene' around these because they don't actually have anything distinct on offer. The profit motive (I think) prevents them from staying in their niche appeal, which requires being somewhat repellant to normies.
I'm not a drug guy myself, especially not hard drugs, but there's absolutely more 'authenticity' in an event where you have people ripping lines of coke in the bathroom and shotgunning Natty Light with Vodka chasers than paying 20 bucks for a domestic beer, 30 for a watered down cocktail, and then shuffling around in a crowd of people to whatever amusements the organizers could get on their budget. The whole thing is, when money/profitability is on the line, the objective is to provide as little of an experience as possible without people actually feeling they wasted their money.
The Ur Example of failing to produce that minimum viable experience would be that Willy Wonka Experience. Well no, actually its Fyre Festival but that one is a class of its own. In contrast, with the organic events, its very very hard to feel 'cheated' when there's no cost of entry and the event is supported by the efforts of committed fans and enthusiasts, yourself included, and people are thus more aligned towards creating good vibes than moving money to the organizers.
In my case, the remedy I've found in the short term is car meets. I bought a 1970 Chevelle a few months back, it is VERY fun to drive, but there's not much you can 'do' with it (legally) unless you go to a racetrack, and the nearest one to me closed down right around when I got the car. So I looked into 'official' car shows, and those are neat but... they feel just like those corporatized events, where the goal is to put money in someone's pocket in exchange for that minimum viable experience (you can LOOK at the pretty cars, don't touch. And definitely don't drive. And if you even THINK about breaking a traffic law we will boot you out). That said, safety and insurance regs basically demand this approach, and the risks to participants would be pretty sizeable otherwise.
But I also discovered that various enterprising individuals will organize a 'meet', usually in some industrial park after dark or a large parking lot after business hours that's somewhat distant from residential zones. And dudes with their tuned up, pimped out, and otherwise kitted out vehicles will ride out to admire each other's cars, posture up a bit about the superiority of their preferred make and model, leave a few skidmarks and take tons of video to edit and post to instagram.
Unfortunately they're rarely as exciting as the movies make them seem. The women in this area also tend to wear jeans and baggy t-shirts instead of high heels and clubwear. Vin Diesel may have lied to me. Cops often show up but generally they will let things be unless it gets rowdy and then they can just politely get the people to disperse. I assume they vastly prefer this to kids doing takeovers or racing around the streets. (The kids still get up to mischief, mind, there's been a number of arrests and a couple deaths in the local area due to street racing. Florida's new Super Speeder law is aggressively enforced)
But it is authentic. People showing up with cars they built by hand, food trucks with various options on offer, 3 different genres and languages of music blaring from sound systems around the parking lot. It becomes whatever the attendees make it, not what the organizer creates. Occasionally a head-turning supercar or some RIDICULOUSLY built out ride rolls through and Mogs everyone, and on occasion they actually do a revving or burnout contest if they can get permission from the property owner.
I'm not the young guy who feels the need to puff out my chest and prove my masculinity anymore so I sort of keep a low profile (although the car draws a LOT of attention) but I've also never seen an actual aggressive interaction at these meets, which is interesting because there's no gatekeeping whatsoever, other than the need to own a car with decent specs to be worth showing up. And THAT is what I like best about them. Even though there's no organized security, no bag checks, no strict rules enforcement, people are on good enough behavior that everyone feels safe to come back each week, and people even bring their kids out for fun. It could very easily devolve and crumble if there were just a few dedicated bad actors.
The culture itself is pretty positive. Mechanically inclined, skeptical of traffic laws, some lacking a certain amount of common sense but generally not malicious about anything. Its been a fun thing to participate in and reminds me that we haven't completely gone over to the dark side where ALL social interactions are monetized and marketed and every spare dollar is squeezed out of your joy for a hobby or activity.
Which of course means there is SOMEBODY out there scheming to find a way to capture all this spare surplus and enclose the commons to funnel that value to themselves. Here's hoping they don't succeed any time soon.
Great post about a subculture I know nothing about and the corporatization of everything. I'd guess it's a function of lack of social trust and liability law plus the general collapse of community but it seems like organic events like this have been dying off for decades until there's barely anything left.
Liability plays a large role.
Such events can persist until there's a mass casualty event or one (1) child is seriously injured or dies and then public attention and outcry will demand they be shut down.
The big 'appeal' of an organic gathering is that there's not technically any person 'in charge' and thus liable for the actions of the whole. A true "flash mob" (remember when THOSE were a thing?) is a bunch of random folks gathering at a given Schelling point to do a thing that they've all individually, peer to peer, agreed to do with no single person guiding the decision to fruition. Its a semi-random mass cooperation event.
In practice, there's usually someone or someone(s) who is the actual ringleader and can be singled out for legal prosecution, and that disables the event from organizing, or once THAT person serves as an example, the rest will opt not to put themselves at risk too.
The lack of social trust is a subtler problem. Covid itself didn't kill all the social trust. At least, my perception is that governmental institutions took the brunt of the trust hit there. BUT, we also learned that one defector can out you TO said governmental institutions and get you fined, prosecuted, possibly imprisoned.
So generally such a social group will have to be SO secretive and careful about gatekeeping that none of the members are too worried about being betrayed, or your group's activities are innocuous enough that they're beneath the notice of the local sovereigns even if a turncoat goes and reports you.
Car meets thus far occupy the second category. I am pretty sure at SOME point some incident will occur which will bring them under greater scrutiny, it still something very enjoyable while it lasts.
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I guess it's pointless to ask this but are they generally just tagging along or do they also do some of the driving that happens? Because that'd partially explain the lack of high heels.
lol its a mix of that. Some women drivers, although there tends to be more even gender ratios amongst the bikers, I've noted. Mostly tag alongs.
But I went to one event that was put on by the local college's car club and even the college girls who were just wandering through to check things out were generally dressed down.
And look, I'm not expecting most such women to be dressed up like skanks to flirt with the car guys, I just notice the overall style is usually not in the "I'm here specifically to grab attention" mode. Which on net is probably a good thing, but it'd be nice to counterbalance the greasy-looking guys hanging around.
My guess is that the scene around Miami feels a little closer to the Hollywood ideal.
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That's honestly sick. I didn't realize people still did that. If you don't mind me asking, do you live in a rural area?
Not at all, I'm in Coastal Florida. There's rural areas about 20 minutes inland, but its one of the fastest growing metro areas in the country.
And check instagram, that's how they usually organize.
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I have extreme noise sensitivity (not a simple preference, it sucks) and no real interest in drugs and stuff. If raves are the only hope, it never even began...
I stay away from all clubs and live-music venues, because they're just too loud, and because I don't care for most modern music. (I like Lehar, Johann Strauss, and C.M. Ziehrer's output, and also pre-rock&roll pop music from across the globe. I despised Run Lola Run because the soundtrack, as I remember it, was just screaming with hardly a trace of rhythm or melody. How far has fallen the land of Walter Kollo and Paul Lincke. And seeing the film's music get praise in most reviews I've read is simply inexplicable.)
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Unfortunately for your sort (which includes my wife and eldest son - I know how much it sucks), it looks like music, dancing and intoxicants as social lubricants are pretty lindy.
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Me too.... It's so over....
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From my limited experience with rave culture, I agree with you on the vibes. Makes me wish I'd gotten into it in my 20s. Unsurprisingly in retrospect, the scene I wrote off as braindead is super chill, and the indie music scene I gravitated towards as cultured and intellectual attracts utterly rancid people.
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How do you actually talk to people there? My problem is that the music is so damn loud that it's aggressively anti-social. You have to scream into people's ears to be heard, and sometimes even that doesn't work. A lot of long-time ravers end up with hearing loss, even if they wear ear plugs. I hate it.
That sounds more like a nightclub problem than what underground events are like. In a house the music is generally in just one room. If you want to chat hang out in the kitchen.
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The solution is, usually, the outdoor smoking/vape area. Which is gross, but you can be heard.
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Is being an aspie a detriment to participation? My stereotype of "proto-netizen" is "neurodivergent" but for all my unfamiliarity that stereotype might be unrepresentative.
I've also tried the "hobbies" route to socialization, and while I do have a few in-person groups I enjoy, my experience with them is just as you described.
Poor social skills are a detriment anywhere but the raver scene tends to be more accepting of neurodivergents. You'll find plenty of other autistic types, but they tend to be more extroverted than the median autist.
Is there any hope of entry without existing connections in my region? My web presence is pseudonymous and I know no one involved.
How old are you and what region are you in? I'd say lots of hope. The underground scene is a subset of the above ground one. Almost everyone in the underground scene will go to big public events in your area. Find a place where there's ravey vibes (rough estimate, presence of cat ears and people on drugs in colorful outfits). Go there and talk to people. Ask "Do you know about any smaller stuff coming up".
If you want more personalized advice, happy to help. Shoot me a DM
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I agree with you, it's pretty shocking how well-preserved underground music scenes are in many cities. Sure, talk to some oldheads and they'll explain how things used to be better, but the superficial elements and structure are well intact. I've spent my fair share of time there, and I share your assessment that they can be a great place to build community. However, there are some notable diminishing returns that have prevented me from really investing:
My general belief about third spaces is that they are only dead because we've killed them. People aren't going to them because they don't want to. Despite it all, music scenes have remained a desirable place to be. I think it's because they interface well with online identities, as you suggest. You can post yourself going to an event and it is "cool." It feels exciting and transgressive and worth sharing. You're not going to post every time you attend a 3D-printing hobby group to hang out with retired engineers.
In the US at least I assume most of it happened as a result of the gradual dissolution of white (Polish-American, Italian-American, Irish, German etc.) inner-city ethnic enclaves/quarters which happened in parallel with suburbanization. When we think of third places, it's usually these neighborhoods we associate them with. They were both walkable and were served by public transportation. In a suburb, children generally only go anywhere after leaving the house when being transported on wheels by their parents, which generally hinders any socializing.
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My in-laws, now married with 2 kids, had their relationship begin at a rave. I think they went together and got closer from the joint experience, like a date. I'm unsure if an underground house party was involved, but definitely possible based on their mutual friends.
Pretty sure they don't rave anymore and discontinued the recreational drug use now that they have two babies. But the rave or maybe mutiple raves were important to the start of their relationship.
Bars are expensive and high-pressure in my opinion. After the entrance fee of a commercial rave, there's no pressure to consume mind-altering substances, unlike a bar where being dry is a social faux pas and freeloading from the bar owner and bartenders who aren't getting tipped or making money. A rave is more like a normal music concert with a strong tolerance for drugs, like you mentioned.
In-Laws usually refers to your partner's parents? I'm assuming you dropped off sister-in-law or brother-in-law off this or I'm confused
Wife's sister and her husband. I guess only one in-law there.
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