Nightlife in Crisis

I’m an odd duck—I didn’t get into the clubbing scene until I was 34 years old. Now, I had been listening to electronic music in some incarnation since I was 13, but it took me 21 years to work up the courage to go to a rave. I was at Lehman Brothers at the time—it was close to the end, in August, 2008—and I bought tickets to see Tiesto at the Borgata. I was a big Tiesto fan at the time, back in the days when he was a trance DJ, before he started playing EDM crap. In case you forgot, Tiesto was the musical entertainment for the opening ceremonies of the Athens Olympics in 2004. But electronic music still hadn’t caught on in 2008. Tiesto was playing in a ballroom at the Borgata, like where you would have a wedding reception, and the place was half full, at best. I got there early and left late. An aspiring DJ, I kept standing on my tiptoes to see what he was doing in the booth.

A month later, after the bankruptcy, I said fuck it, and bought two top-of-the-line Pioneer CDJ-1000 CD players and a DJM-800 mixer and started downloading tracks off of Beatport. This was in the days before Mixed In Key, so I was keying my tracks with a pitch pipe and putting them in an Excel spreadsheet. I was practicing four hours a day, rattling the windows of our living room. My poor wife. I burned the tracks onto CDs and lugged them to gigs in big CD cases. The good old days.

I also started going out a lot, to Cielo and Pacha. I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen to you, where you have a religious experience in a club—it happened to me when Above and Beyond played at Pacha in 2009, and they dropped “Meet Me In Montauk” right at the peak of their set. I owned that track, and I would listen to it occasionally, and I thought it was a cute little track, but when I heard it on one of the world’s largest sound systems, I got what dance music was all about. And if you have a religious experience in a club, you spend the rest of your life chasing it, trying to have another one. I had another such religious experience when Nick Warren played at Cielo later that year, and he played “Silent Drop” by Dosem—those arpeggios sounded so crisp on that Funktion One sound system. I was hooked for life.

Fast forward to today—nightclubs are closing all around the world. Everywhere. In Europe, in the UK, and in the United States. They are closing in New York, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles. People are…disinterested. The idea of starting your evening at 12am and ending it at 5am is exhausting. People like bed. And they like Netflix and Doordash and Tinder. Gen Z has fucking murdered nightlife, leaving a chalk outline in the crime scene.

Now, I will be the first to admit that not everyone is there for the music. I’d guess that 20% of people are there for the music, and 80% of people are there to get fucked up. People tell me that the music sounds really good on ecstasy. I’ll take their word for it. Again, I’m an odd duck—every club I’ve ever been to, I have gone stone cold sober. I get a $10 water and sip it slowly so I don’t have to lose my place on the dance floor when I have to take a piss. On more than one occasion, people have mistaken me for the drug dealer, and if you have ever seen me in person, you intuitively know why. I look like a drug dealer.

I have to admit, the idea of going out at 50 does not sound incredibly appealing. I think the last time I went out was at Brooklyn Mirage to see Joris Voorn. My hip started to hurt, so I was bending over at the waist to take the pressure off, and this security guy ran over to me, thinking I was blasted on drugs. I was like, no, man, my hip hurts. And he looks at my gray hair and says to me, “Getting a little old for this?” It was funny, but not ha ha funny. I have never felt older in my life.

Well, I am not much of a believer of acting your age. I’ve been saying for years that I’ll be going to clubs in my 70s. Tracks sound different in a club. The closest I can get to a club sound system is my Corvette, which has a system that kicks like it knows karate. But it’s still not the same as seeing it live. I have a theory. I have a theory that when I am on my deathbed, I will not remember all the nights I spent at home in front of the TV. You know what I will remember? Every single night I went out. I don’t always have an amazing time when I go to a club, but you know what? It is better than sitting in front of the TV. This falls under a larger category of making memories generally. Now, obviously you don’t have to go to a club to make memories. You can travel. You can go hang gliding. You can go white water rafting. You can have an orgy. Whatever floats your boat. I happen to like music, so I go to clubs. And the one thing I like about going to underground clubs is that I know I am going to hear music that I never heard before. Sure, you can go to Club Kryptonite in Myrtle Beach and hear dance remixes of the same Top 40 songs you’ve been hearing for years. Kitsch. Music for the masses. You know my shpiel about contempt prior to investigation. I’ve seen more Taylor Swift merch in the last month than I care to mention. Give me the tatted-up Berghain techno heads with the scoop-neck black T-shirs and Rick Owens boots. Those are my people.

I think people have memories of raves in 2002 with the glowsticks and pink visors and think that is what electronic music is all about. There are many genres. I personally have no patience with the festivals—the last thing I want to be doing is standing in a mud puddle with a bunch of fuzzy foreigners watching Nina Kraviz spin 140bpm techno. That sounds like hell. I’d delete the word “rave” from your vocabulary. Go someplace like Do Not Sit on the Furniture in Miami and listen to some sub-120bpm blissed-out organic house. You’re likely to find that more your speed. There is something for everyone. You can be a hippie and go to psy-trance parties. You can wear skinny jeans and fall in a K-hole at deep house parties. The tweakers with their glowsticks are tres gauche these days. Also, dance music people are pretty accepting—you can be a complete normie with a broker fleece vest and fit right in with the househeads. Nobody cares. And old people are welcome, too. Carl Cox is 60, for crying out loud.

Anyway, the reason I bring all this up is that I am having a party in NYC, which is one of a long series of parties going back to 2013. Want to come? In the past, I had no problem packing the room—I’ve sold 300 tickets to a single party before. Now that everyone wants Netflix, Doordash, and Tinder, it is tougher to get people to come out. I can guarantee a few things:

·      The music will be great

·      You’ll meet someone new and have a great conversation

·      You’ll make a memory

You know what I always say—go to the conference, go to the party—luck will never find you in your apartment. And my music doesn’t suck.

The details:

Friday, December 6^th

Doux Supper Club

59 W 21^st St

7pm-1130pm

Here is the link to get tickets.

Hope to see you there!