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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."
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 blase, 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 their 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 the vastly prefer this to kids doing takeovers or racing around the streets.
But it is authentic. People showing up with cars they built by hand, food trucks 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.
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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