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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."
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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