A few weeks ago I put forward the proposition that clubland has become a drug culture that uses music, instead of a music culture that uses drugs. I’m still not sure if I agree. But the reactions of my nocturnal f(r)iends to the rant has been more interesting than my unresolved doubts: the beer monsters and stay-at-homes mostly agreed, saying (surprise, surprise) that the disco was too late, too hard, too loud, too taxing. The hedonists conceded a point, but felt that I’d overstated things: it isn’t just “that”—a party’s all about the people, the venue, the atmosphere—you can’t blame the essence of the problem on a substance, or separate it from the crazy tangle of elements that makes an event. But what was really interesting was the number of people who argued a combination of these two points:

a) “It didn’t always used to be like that” [historical]
b) “It’s not like that in {Hawtingrad}” [geographical]

I scanned the dark recesses of my own discotheque memory tapes for confirmation of both assertions, and found that… yes, it had been true. I’m not old school, so I can’t speak for the spirit of ’89, but I do remember where it was possible to go and see Laurent Garnier play for six hours to a room full of adoring fans and the best sound system you could imagine. Ah, Tokyo’s old Liquid Room, RIP. Sure, it cost the equivalent of forty US dollars to get in, but it was the business. But this is rare anywhere, and perhaps only metropolii that have the critical mass of both people and objects in circulation can make it happen. Tokyo of 2006 has Unit, Offenbach has Robert Johnson, Berlin has the Panorama Bar—but these places are the exception, rather than the rule.

The Rule is Rex. I have this wonderful/terrible memory of seeing Isolée play at Rex in Paris. Isolée was bringing his set to its crescendo with a speaker-blowing rendition of “Face B,” and there in the audience was this utter penis and his two mates, shirts off, fanny packs strapped across their fronts. I thought it was fist pumping. I thought it was praise. But no, these mofos were heckling the good man. They weren’t losing their shit, they were giving him shit. Now, I don’t speak much French, but it was pretty obvious what this guy was saying. I’ll offer what is probably as accurate as a machine translation:

“C’mon you pulsating glowstick, pump it up! I paid hard euro for this!”
“My pill is kicking in, you German pigdog!”
“Can’t you see my prune is pulsating—play Gehts Noch!”

Below said ‘ecklers in a small semi-circle were the discerning few, smiling that smile, dancing that dance, blowing that smoke, and all that jazz. Behind that were everyone else, not really dancing, just kinda nodding along. We could not have been listening to the same music, and yet there we all were…

All over the world (with the exception of the exceptional places mentioned), the same scene seems to be repeated. Is it Abletonitis? Is it the perennial sigh of the “misunderstood” artist casting his pearls before swine? Is it the fact that the nightclub and its needs are fundamentally at odds with the appreciation of, well, music? Maybe Isolée played his next set to an adoring, appreciative crowd the following Saturday somewhere in Hawtingrad, but my experience at Rex was typical of what I saw in Europe outside of the handful of “truly great” clubs.

It’s not just the drugs, boredom, or booze. The real enemy here appears to be habit. We need habits, no question. Repetition is our only defence against something disappearing—you wanna build something, you wanna make something happen? You’re gonna have to do it again. Try building a house, try being a drummer, try making a baby. Maybe life itself is nothing but the transformation of this repetition compulsion into pleasure, and our fear of death is simply a fear of breaking the habit of living.

But the problem with habits is that they brook no breakage—once established, their inertia will outlive common sense, boredom, even the end of the organism itself. Like Matthew Dear’s lyric from “Dog Days”: “Tell another story to your body so it makes sense / The reason for this story is to give away your last chance.” Indeed. And clubs, being what they are, are the final resting place of our deepest habits, the zenith/nadir of our bodily needs wanting to step on the good foot and do the bad thing again and again and again. It’s good that we have a space for our habits to prance about, but the problem for creativity is that habit will have its needs met, and nothing else. The drinkers want to keep drinking, the DJ wants to keep playing, and the dickhead hassling Isolée… well, he just wanted to “go off” in a timely fashion. They’ve paid hard euro, they came to get wasted, and your job is to satisfy their urges. Hey, they work all week, this is their only outlet, have some compassion! Point is, we may never “give up” our habits, but the thing we need to cultivate, more than anything else, is a sense of the “exceptional.”

The Greeks had the Dionysia, the Romans the Bacchanalia, the Haitians have Voodoo rites, and if you’ve seen Borat you know that even evangelical Christians get to freak out and speak in tongues for a few moments every week without guilt. Maybe we can leave the serpents, satyrs, and bloodlettings for another barbecue and just take the lesson that all these events dip their lid to a seemingly immutable human need to lose it without the fear of guilt or recrimination. It seems to me that we’ve inherited a potentially fantastic idea from Jamaica in the form of the sound system. Monsters and misfires aside, from Coxsone Dodd through the Wild Bunch to rave kidz and their rigs, a mobile sound system retains the greatest potential as a spacemaker. Alls you got to have is a kick-ass PA, some great DJs, choose your space carefully and imaginatively, and make sure you invite the good peepz. Mix, stir, and voila: instant party. Kids, if you’re listening, consider getting access to a sound system and throwing your own parties. It sure beats bitching about other peoples’… or does it?

[Peter Chambers]