I go to parties as an observer. A few weekends ago I went to Asheville to hear Hive, a dj from San Francisco. I noticed I have picked up the habit from more knowledgeable friends who introduced me to the scene of discretely calling the events parties. To me, it is amusing, and perhaps revealing, too, when I catch us stumbling over the word “rave.”

Thanks to terrible movies like “Go” and “Groove” and the unfortunate, immediate publicity for anything involving drugs and dancing, a rave is a well-known and often infamous thing. Calling it a party, which I inadvertently do, only confuses my mother about how exactly I spend my weekends.
But perhaps it should. The common concept of a rave should not be confused with what I am doing - going to listen to music and watch interesting people. I pick up magazines like Urb that cover electronic music events and am horrified by the flashy clubs and patrons. In the club I most frequently visit, I recognize many of the customers, the same people I see when we travel to Johnson City, Knoxville or Atlanta. It is small and dingy, the women’s bathroom still decorated by the graffiti of one of my misdirected male friends and salsa music from the adjoining club coming through the walls.

The last party I went to clearly defined the various elements of the scene. Often separate sections in the club offer different styles of music. In the area this flyer officially titles “This Room,” all the pill and Trance music fueled salivating and glow stick flinging Time magazine tells its readers is prevalent. In “That Room,” where drum and bass were playing, my friends and a dj, whose set had not started yet, sat on a sofa and listened.

It becomes irritating at times to like a form of music that is never showcased in a concert hall but in a chaotic atmosphere where the music that is easiest to dance to is always selected. I don’t dance, or even like to stay up late, but I do think that electronic music is the most original kind being produced now. It abandons pop music’s reliance on vocals. It abandons refrains and hooks. It even abandons western music’s traditional focus on transition in favor of repetition, in favor of something new. It’s exact. And so I listen. And I also watch.

This winter I rode in a train of cars twisting up a rural road, all with three and four heads in the backseat, tossing streams of bright cigarette ash down the road. A girl I know from my 8 o’clock class at a college hundreds of miles away that I had never guessed shared my interests turned out to be in the car in front of me. We were all going to a rave in a huge cave. By morning, when we finally set up our miserable tent in a parking space between cars, I was exhausted by the strobe lights and the tight pack of people, but I could not help but think of the evening in terms of the word I always mock on the parties’ promotional fliers. In some small ways there had been a kind of unity.

After arriving, the individual cars were parked and all the partygoers boarded school buses rented from the county to take us the rest of the way to the cave. It was a moment of realization, or maybe pleasant illusion, that I was part of a group in this unlikely setting, though I might not actually like the other passengers if I spoke to them, and I might think their clothing or lifestyles were silly. When those school buses returned to their duties on Monday, there would be the usual bullies and divisions, but that night my friend had turned on his little hand held tape player and everyone was enthusiastic about the Aphex Twin he played.

Since that night, I even find the excesses of the scene intriguing, and I think of it as the most fascinating subculture our electronic culture at large has to offer.

(Rose McLarney is a student at Warren Wilson College who lives in Franklin and is writing this summer for the Smoky Mountain News.)

 

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