First, a note: this newsletter project is meant to breathe and cough a little bit so I’ll be trying a few different things as long as I do this. Like today!
There are times when I’ll go through the pitching process with a newspaper or magazines and realize that, hey, maybe this idea doesn’t fit into the container of an editorial outlet. Some of those ideas will invariably end up here, which I guess is a way of me saying that you’ll intermittently read things that were close but no cigar for different places.
There’s of course a bit of an ulterior motive here, as me being able to indulge myself by making pieces that weren’t quite right into what are, effectively, blogs, might pique the interest of the 2 editors that read this newsletter. Regardless, this is the first installment of that approach. This piece is adapted from a long back and forth with an editor for a piece that ultimately didn’t get the green light.
I’m not sure where you were in February, but for those of us in the general vicinity of Brooklyn around Valentine’s Day, our social feeds were overwhelmed by the trio of Skrillex, Four Tet, and Fred again.. floating around town getting into all sorts of DJ-related hijinks, including playing an invite-only show at Good Room and a set in Times Square with help from The Lot. (Shoutout Francois for somehow making that happen.) This was all a semi-guerilla marketing campaign to support their massive show at MSG, which itself came after Fred again..’s Boiler Room set broke through the noise and went semi-viral. (It’s more nuanced than that, of course, but let’s just keep the timeline simple for all of our sake’s.)
That all of this happened over the course of six months is impressive. Fred’s Boiler Room set is admittedly a banger, and what was odd is that it would get brought up by people who were only tangentially aware of the series beforehand. Fred was a perfect subject for the visual part of the whole thing, as well. He looks like a happy kid, and happy that he’s making his hometown audience happy with straightforward club hits. Seeing some unalloyed joy in a club setting felt refreshing. This was 2022. Our first summer with anything approaching normalcy.
Thanks to the power of his hopefully-well-paid publicist, Fred arrived in New York a few months later with Boiler Room still in the music discourse. Linking up with Skrillex (with whom he collaborated on “Rumble;” I’m partial to the live version above because it gives you a sense of how hype the room was that night) and Four Tet (whom I assume he just likes) seems more a product of industry proximity and vibes than anything else. Both of those guys are at very different popularity elevations but also well-respected by producers and DJs so sure, yeah, let’s say it makes sense and congrats to Four Tet for securing the bag.
The “popup” show at Good Room was a few nights before the MSG gig, and seemed to be an experiment in juicing social media engagement. Every angle that popped up on TikTok or Instagram was a phone filming other phones pointed at the DJ booth, giving you the sensation of watching someone sync up tracks through one of those camcorder displays from the 1990s.
As a club space, I could take or leave Good Room. It’s somewhere between too intimate and too big, the bar is in a weird place, and crucially there’s no outdoor space to smoke which is where I spend 80% of my time on a night out anyway. But in a city with precious few spots left after COVID, Good Room has become something approaching vital for the music community. I’m glad it’s there, but it was strange to see such familiar landscapes relayed through shaky TikToks.
I promise I’m not upset at people using their phones at a concert. That’s the world we live in. It’s stupid but what are you gonna do? What took me by surprise was that this was happening in a venue like Good Room, which for all its faults is an important musical weigh station between the underground and mainstream. Filming the DJ or the dance floor was a novelty, something to be mocked or glared at. This wasn’t the Socialista or Jean’s or, god forbid, the Brooklyn Mirage. People know the rules.
During the process of pitching this to my editor, my friend Phil sent me an episode of Scuba’s Not a Diving Podcast featuring an interview with tha gawd Shawn Reynaldo about the state of dance music journalism.(Shawn’s book First Floor Volume 1: Reflections on Electronic Music Culture is so good its backordered everywhere, but grab a copy when it gets reprinted.) The whole chat is worth a listen, but about a half an hour in Shawn talks about “a generational shift that was hastened” thanks to COVID shutting down club culture and accelerating a lot of people’s exits from the scene:
A lot of younger people encountered this music in a way that was abnormal compared to the past. They encountered it in livestreams and TikTok and watching a million Boiler Room videos and formulated an idea of what club culture would be like. And now they’ve arrived and altered the dynamic.
To be clear, Shawn isn’t saying that the younger generation is doing things wrong. They’re engaging with a space and culture that they’ve only ever seen in glossy 2D without much of the guidance you need when entering a community. And while I understand how that can sound patronizing or like gatekeeping—more on that in another installment—we all came into different scenes with the help of people who knew their way around. That’s what community is: people passing down shared knowledge to each other.
Shawn’s focus on the intergenerational exchange happening on the dance floor made me think of the intragenerational one I saw through those screens in Good Room and in many of the clubs in New York. Instead of a generation without a rulebook on how to behave, these were people who had a crystallized vision of what “going out” meant and were applying that rubric to new spaces. I thought of this chart while I was having coffee with Sam Valenti and we got to chatting about Shawn’s interview. The pre-COVID dance music community inhabits the bottom left quadrant:
I understand that this can read as “people should stay in their lanes” and discourage new entrants into community spaces. And, honestly, I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t in the back of my mind especially given the cultural history of club culture. Berlin spots like Berghain and Tresor have retained their status because of how incredibly selective they are about their patrons, a practice that came out of self-preservation when they catered exclusively to marginalized communities. The door people at these clubs are so venerated because they can sniff out bad actors like a bloodhound with a scent for bad molly and anger issues. They are there to make sure the energy on the other side of the door is maintained.
Nowadays is one of the only places in New York that I’ve seen do something similar, employing the classic bouncer line of “what DJ are you guys here to see?” when gangs of bros come looking for a good time. There is a protective purpose to this kind of exclusivity, this isn’t about velvet ropes or whether you know the person working the door. (For a New York-specific history of club culture, Tim Lawrence’s book Life and Death on the New York Dance Floor, 1980–1983 is great.)
The mainstream leaking into the underground and figuring out that it’s actually fun down here isn’t new, and has been happening for as long as there have been communities to co-opt. The current iteration seems urgent because primarily because it’s the one in front of us but also because there doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere left for the underground to go from here. Small clubs like Paragon, H0L0, Mood Ring, and the recently-opened Mansions feel like they have less of the scene-defining gravity as their forebears; it felt like Bossa Nova Civic Club tilted all of Brooklyn towards it when it first opened.
So where exactly does this generational and cultural inflection point leave us?If you’re mostly experiencing the dance floor through the cropped panopticon of social media, you’ll walk away with the impression that the atmosphere swirling around dance floors like Good Room, Elsewhere, and other mid-size rooms has shifted. And because new entrants—from whatever quadrant they might come—are being driven to the club through that lens, there’s a sense that the communal structure is being tested. The shoes-on-the-floor reality is tougher to summarize since we don’t do club vibe exit polls at 6am, though maybe we should start…
If there’s any hope, my bet is on the intergenerational exchange. Younger people seeking spots like Mood Ring are there to find their folks and may just not know how to go about doing it. If an open-minded 24-year old goes to H0L0 because they saw it on their #ForYouPage, then there’s a decent chance they become a part of the community and help it grow. The scene will have to adapt to that thread of discovery and engagement—the lifeblood of social media generally—but embracing those sorts of shifts can be a sustaining force.
I’m less optimistic about the people my age who are swapping vodka sodas at The Woods—and listen, I love The Woods—for K at Good Room. But I’m also getting to the age where all those people will start moving to the suburbs soon anyway, and the truth is that I’m old enough that my opinion about where the underground should go from here is close to irrelevant. The kids will figure it out, they always have.
One funny thing about aging out of the frontier is that the scene spreads beyond your sight lines without you even noticing it. Someone once said that the most interesting stuff is most likely happening outside of social media’s cone of self-consciousness. Maybe culture thrives when no one is looking in its direction.
Some music
Uh, not really club music but this track from 2019 (???) sits right in the cut of country fried indie/alt that just hits me in all the right places. Think somewhere between Clairo, the Beths, and Saint Cloud-era Waxahatchee:
Some clothing
A dual recommendation as Avery Trufelman’s indispensable clothing and culture series Articles of Interest nodded to the work of Clair Gunther and her studio Gesho where she does custom illustration work on clothing. I just asked her about doing some work on a heavy twill Drake’s chore coat and am downright giddy about the prospect. Look at this, it’s beautiful!
Oh, I also wrote a little thing about Little Tokyo for the good fellas over at Drake’s. It was wonderful just to write about something I knew so well, so go ahead and read it if you’re wondering about a patch of Manhattan that’s still thriving.
See you next time.
The live version of Rumble is pulsing with life. I could hear that all day.