Who killed the rave?
ft.com
ft.com
Raves are not clubs, and historically have never done that well in club environments. People who are really into staying up all night dancing to techno music aren't buying expensive alcoholic drinks, they're buying cheap water to stay hydrated. Many (though by no means all) take drugs, but generally that means one dose of a drug like MDMA at the beginning of the evening. Psychedelic drugs like LSD are also associated with the rave scene but are less compatible with a nightclub environment (bars, security, overgrown disco lights). People are more likely to consume psychedelics at an outdoor party or a warehouse space.
In my view what has killed raves was the declining availability of cheap accessible commercial spaces, police/administrative hostility to informal economic activity, and overcommercialization, which has tended to select for the shittiest music/DJs.
My experience of small intimate clubs in Europe is that people tell each other off for pulling out phones, or there’s just no light in the room - so there’s nothing to photograph. People are there for a good time. If you want a good experience, go for small lesser known artists in small venues. You’ll have fewer people there to record the night.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv33bb-C_bo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Wy2WYqD2Rs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEacozH2uXs
There's also huge EDM and other types of events (so I guess not techno but the vibe seems related, at least to me)
Much of the time it would be in industrial areas that were pretty deserted and dark at night, far away from any life that would complain about the noise that would go on until at lease sunrise. If outdoors it might be out in the woods, on the edge of an Indian reservation, in the desert, etc. Often there was a gritty sense of danger and some really odd characters you would meet, certainly not helped by the substances they might be on.
What you linked is what I'd call outdoor parties/festivals. Maybe folks today call them raves, but these things existed back then and we certainly didn't.
There were events where I met so many people that it had a snowball effect. In addition to anyone there I already knew, I'd be building/merging new friend groups on the fly and sometimes hours would go by before I'd see any of the people I came with.
Conversely, at sanctioned events I'd stick tight with my friends pretty much all night... sure you'd meet other people, but not nearly to the same level. Generally dance more and socialize less.
While true, I think in this case it is referring to the noun, which peaked in the 90s early 2000s underground movement and was the basis for the PLUR culture that is uniquely absent in the club scene; and I say that as a person who has mainly been into clubs as I was too young at the time but knew plenty of those candy-ravers growing up but was really into various genres of psy music (ambient then, techno and then finally trance) before I ever went out to party.
I read the article, and it's maonly focused on techno heavy parts of Berlin and OZ but I know there is a contingent of early dubstepers and to a lesser extend DnB (which was more widely accepted at the time) here on HN that grew up and went to events that were analogous to this as we listened to pirate radio from the UK and went to underground parties out in warehouses and in outdoor parties when things were only starting up because we couldn't go to Plastic People in London.
This is the closest we had to the early rave scene, where everyone sort of knew everyone (including the artists, promoters or venue owners) and we still called it 'raving' as you mentioned, but these became the state-side analogues (Dub-Warz [0] in EC and SMOG [1] in WC) to DMZ [2] nights and eventually to things like Red Bull Academy sponsored events and Outlook festival [3] [4] when adoption had peaked.
All of this is to say, that the verb and the noun represent unique periods, that latter I think can still be found in festivals but have ultimately a more corporate and capitalistic motivation than just a bunch of party people bootstrapping and renting a bunch of generators and PAs and taking them out into a warehouse, desert or forest and dancing all night and day.
0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP9ve9YEjGY
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T150ZZZ0Luo
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TziN0N40X3E
All of the rest of what you're saying killed raves is a result of this crackdown.
The MDMA supply in Toronto was turned off overnight when the guy that processed barrels of chemicals at one of the chemistry labs at the University of Waterloo got caught in the spring of 2000.
there's always the next generation of young people. the question is: why aren't they as interested in raves than the generations before them?
The spontaneity of gathering your friends to dance on the beach, use a private warehouse after hours, or host a house party that went past 2AM, was now risking police showing up and handing out fines.
Regulation is the fastest way to kill anything unique and valuable.
[EDIT: Found a report for City Council recommendations related to this. It's a dull read, but historically facinating if you were around back then. https://www.toronto.ca/legdocs/2000/agendas/council/cc/cc000... ]
Long gone are the exceptional raves like the ones held at the Ontario Science Centre which had staff manning the displays from 10pm until we were kicked out via the loading docks at 6am on Sunday morning... There's nothing quite like being 1 of ~6000 people on astroturf at a hanger in the Downsview airport watching the sun coming up at 4-5am on a warm summer night to a great morning trance set!
I wonder where they're finding the space now that all the old warehouses are worth a mint.
It still exists, and people are more interested than ever (look at the growth of festivals and rave-adjacent events). There are regular illegal raves in every major city in California, >6 most weekends in San Francisco. But due to regulation and increased interest from the “wrong people”, they’re really hidden.
Party People Documentary: Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUqlAUh4_3c
Party People Documentary: Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQZAwIHhOnc
America in a nutshell…
This is rewriting history. Raves was a british thing, and it was in the open, not in clubs.
Chicago warehouse parties preceded raves and are important for electronic dance music history, but are not raves.
Proper raves where the DIY open or underground fare, secretly organized, communicated with flyers or whisper-net, etc. And when the 1994 act banned them there was a lot of (justified) anger from the rave "community"! In any case, still a British thing.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-647769...
There was loud rave music & ravers having a great time, ie it was a rave.
Raves happened in secret and in the open. I went to both kinds. Pros and cons to both.
But to be even more pedantic the concept goes further than that as in the late 30s and forties there would be dance contests to see who could last the longest…
To go even further than that jazz, before that polka… it being a folk version of the waltzes of the time. Newspapers of time read like madlibs only replace leather jackets and mohawks with polka dots. Quite a trip.
Going back further pre industrialization its said you couldn't hear the orchestra over the sounds of fucking in the box seats on the balcony… the idea of stuffy classical concerts only emerging when the concert halls were opened to the burgeoning middle class and said class would dress up to rub shoulders with the aristocracy.
But in antiquity the mystery religions of Dionysus would arguably be the first true raves in spirit.
But every culture has its all night dances, from pow wows of the plains to suffi’s in the muslim world.
Music is largely universal and a uniquely human endeavor, the oldest flutes found are made by Neanderthal.
But techno?… thats all Detroit.
We're not talking about Techno per se though, but the so-called "rave parties" of the late 80s/early 90s associated with the namesake culture. A lot more than techno was involved, including acid house and later UK developments like jungle.
(And to be pedantic in the same way, we can find it way before Detroit, e.g. in Dusseldorf and Moroder's Italy and NYC)
What is the debate going on here? Is it epistemology? Or linguistics?
I imagine its some subset, if anyone can point me in the right direction, I'm interested.
When I think "rave" I don't think about paying stupid money for drinks, being groped by security, mainstream artists and EDM ("musical gentrification") in general, curfews, expensive tickets, arbitrary rules, profiteering, or drugs/sexual expression being frowned on or barred.
Raves should be counter-culture, anti-authoritarian, DIY, and anarchic. Bona-fide liberated situations that aren't behest of the rules and requirements of commercial events. This is a definition that shouldn't be diluted nor conflated.
The crowd that goes to clubs, well at least mainstream clubs you’d find on Google Maps, seems to have almost no overlap with the crowd that goes to raves. It’s common to try clubbing for a bit in college to see what the hype’s about, then “graduate” to raves.
But there's some excellent venues here in Switzerland, and I think many are helped with arts funding and/or run as artist collectives and non profits.
> People who are really into staying up all night dancing to techno music aren't buying expensive alcoholic drinks, they're buying cheap water to stay hydrated. Many (though by no means all) take drugs, but generally that means one dose of a drug like MDMA at the beginning of the evening.
There is very little money for clubs to make from techno ravers, as they're not typically the ones downing alcohol; I highly doubt one can rave to music till sunrise while continually taking in alcohol at the rate at which your typical alcohol going club-goers would.
And then there are also that amazing sober ravers who can do 8-12hrs even without any drug. Shouldn't be underestimated how much some people like the music and their trancy dance therapy. (but yeah, those only also buy water/cola/maté).
I've been to more recent Hardstyle shows since then at less sketchy venues and that's been fun, but something maybe about the repetitiveness of non-progressive trance or whatever at the time was quite boring. Some part of me wonders what that music feels like after taking something, but I spend enough time around people over 30 who regularly take mdma, coke, K, (I know they're quite different) that it continues seeming like something I'd prefer not to introduce into my life; it seems like they kind of need it. Incidentally, I'm definitely the exception in almost any group, having not engaged in anything but weed+alcohol recreationally, and occasionally drop those for periods of time. People are generally surprised that I haven't tried psychedelics yet.
I feel the same. Also, one of my friends developed a very bad condition after that, it was quite scary and depressing. Another one just died after taking a small dose (probably had an existing condition, but still...). there is no reason to take this shit.
Weed, LSD, MDMA, Cocaine. He never did heroin (afaik) but tried more than I can recall.
He's very well adjusted and no longer does drugs at all. He doesn't even drink. No bad trauma, no rehab. He justed wanted to try them all to say he had.
We grayvers still like to have fun, just more comfortably. We have work next week, you know.
If I'm thinking of the same groups you're mentioning, they were already super organized. Mostly because they've been going for decades now.
They’re all over America and I presume the world.
If you are asking why they don't go out of their way to advertise to outsiders, it's because these events do not scale well, and what they absolutely do not want are thousands of insta/tiktok tourists who don't contribute back to the scene or bring extra scrutiny from police.
The last things we want are people doing stupid crap to make the law have to come around, or to make it all about themselves at the expense of others’ enjoyment.
(It's not directly a Burner event either, although with a lot of East Bay attendees, there's organically a large portion of people who go to both.)
I left it all behind years ago but your event sounds awesome. Glad some people still keep the vibe alive.
My wife still dances all-out, and she goes every weekend to see Doc or Farina or DJ Dan or whoever is in town. She can't live without getting sweaty from dancing, and I admire her for it especially as we're getting older - I'm in my 50s now, my knees are not what they used to be.
Have you seen the recently released documentary about Wicked Soundsystem? I'm guessing you're probably familiar with those guys. We saw it in a theater in LA and then went to the after party, it brought back so many memories.
Ironically to the north, an opposite social civilization has attracted all the introverted people.
Entertainment must extrovert to gain eyeballs, but it uses the technology of the introverts to do so.
But underlying this ironic alliance is a force that cares not for the social polarity, it simply will nihilistically predate on both spheres to produce the maximal profit while eating away at the fabric of a functioning society.
The matrix really is the endgame goal: pods plugged into a VR machine. The matrix struggled with plausible explanations for why the machines kept humans in that state, and the endgame of capitalism likewise has no solution how the world would function at the end of its road.
Start going to shows and look for fliers
Also check out spaz parties.
You can't buy tickets to them, you have to know someone who's in the group chat for them. You can just turn up on the day if you know where the event is; they're always incredibly remote, usually on a patch of bush (forest) on someone's enormous farm or a national park, pitch a tent, join in, help out where you can. Security is "if you act like a dickhead you'll be asked politely to leave by a bunch of people". There's no financial contribution, except sometimes a hat is passed around if someone had to pay for equipment hire or similar. You can buy drugs there, but only if you know the person you're buying from; usually better to sort yourself out before you go, there won't be anyone advertising anything for sale at the doof.
Note: Burning car and local farm fire truck to stop fire spreading.
Not quite the same thing as a bush doof.
It shares a bit of overlap with many other variations of a bush party that I've been to, they've all been a little bit unique, a little bit the same.
There's even been a odd local lesser version of the more famous US Burning Man here - inspired by is perhaps the best description: https://blazingswan.com.au/ and not like a B&S, a bush doof, nor a Burning Man.
None of these things look like an inner city warehouse rave or nightclub either.
Raves died in the 90s for a few reasons.
1. They made dancing illegal (look it up before rage comments).
2. Corporate sponsors moved in.
3. Glow sticks / candy ravers
4. Drugs
5. Police tactics and not being able to be paid off by promoters.
6. The internet (remember map points and info lines?)
7. Models, actresses, famous types going and demanding special service / VIP.
8. DJ as GOD sick gross
9. OG promoters cashing out and not caring. Think Drop Bass and Daft Punk (google it).
10. Techno mainstream / a la hip hop. (DRUGS/S&M)
In the scheme of things, this is nothing.
It was a high school gymnasium.
Didn't work out so well.
(My social media profile pic is me wearing neon glasses there one year.)
In my corner of the woods back in the 90's, we also had the occasional "graver" (no y) who were mixing up rave and goth aesthetics.
Club nights are not raves. Raves are (usually) not posted on RA. The underground scene is doing just fine.
The article seems to be written for people who reads a newspaper with their breakfast, not for people who had yet to gone asleep while that person reads their paper.
Where do you think the people going to those raves in the early 90s ended up? As old guys who now have well paid corporate jobs in the city and read FT.
That guy could probably bore the crap out of today's youth with stories about how raves and music used to "authentic" and how everything today is crap.
Well, yes, it's just another kind of "underground scene", you know, the ones on private islands.
Plus, as I mentioned elsewhere. A non-trivial number of today's FT readers are the same people that were at those original raves in the early 90s.
Honestly my favourite news outlet these days, despite my being well to the left of their editorial staff. I read it mostly for their drum and bass coverage.
[^0] See https://www.ft.com/content/7796593c-08ac-485c-afe9-a45ac2c28... or https://www.ft.com/content/084bab07-c5cf-4b25-ba7d-769af6b42..., but there's loads.
Brilliant. I love this on 174 different levels.
https://www.ft.com/content/09f792fc-5548-11e4-89e8-00144feab...
I wouldn’t discredit FT writers as well, as I’m assuming they’re writing for a specific audience.
It's sort of like the pressures that lead people to pirate versus streaming service.
High volume purchasers in a category are more likely to purchase many things across the category.
I don't go to nightclubs ever, odds that I'm going to go to a rave are also pretty close to zero.
I have a friend who DJs, even removing the nights he performs, he goes to nightclubs infinitely more than I do. He also goes to raves more than I do.
To support that, it looks like music festival attendance is going up over the years. Music festivals are, I think, closer to raves than they are to night clubs, which, by the same logic, would suggest an increase in rave attendance.
Also worth mentioning that some of what was called a rave before is now a club. There is a difference between occupying a decommissioned soviet building after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a fancy club on high valued real estate, even though it used to be the same place.
This isn't global nor is it specific dance music but at least in the UK, festivals are struggling and have declined significantly since the beginning of covid - 204 festivals have disappeared since 2019: https://www.aiforg.com/blog-database/72-uk-festivals-cancell...
It seems like now, we are indeed seeing less festivals, but the remaining ones are becoming bigger and more expensive. So, maybe less festivals but higher budgets.
These are anecdotal evidence, but that's a lot of anecdotes.
In none of these case I saw a particular event motivating this, I guess it was just not profitable. Also worth noting that most night clubs that are still open tend to get terrible reviews on Google (less than 3/5 on average). It is kind of a meme to complain about nightclubs you go to, especially if you get denied entry, but still, not very encouraging.
But also more broadly, I've heard from multiple local venues that one big change is that EDM crowds don't drink as much. This means venues make A LOT less money, and that means fewer venues. If I had to guess, another factor is that younger crowds don't have the buying power older generations had, so if anything they would be MORE likely to go to an "illegal" rave with no cover and do some drugs instead of drinking.
Basically, to me, economic forces suggests that the rave crowd and club crowd are NOT correlated.
edit: and more anecdotal data for you, I use to go to a lot of clubs when I was young (and fewer raves), but now that I'm older me and my group tend to either throw our own parties at home with our own gear, or go to "listening bar" type venues that wouldn't typically be classified as a "club." We're all too old to drink high priced shitty beer and deal with lines and bouncers. I'd rather be able to have a top sound system, order an IPA or cocktail, and maybe even have a seat to lounge in!
In a similar vein, most people I know who love watching sports do not play the sport they enjoy watching. However, like the parent, I suspect that the numbers watching a sport strongly correlates with the numbers playing the sport. There need not be overlap between the watchers and the players for the correlation to stand. Something being in the zeitgeist lifts all related boats, it seems. Raves and clubs are different expressions of what is essentially the same fashion. It seems unlikely that only one expression would die off where the general fashion trend remains intact.
This is a very efficient way to communicate that you don’t have experience with raves and/or clubs.
Raves usually start about then.
They are not remotely the same thing.
For every raver I know, it means going out dancing to electronic music and usually taking some drugs other than alcohol. It doesnt matter if it starts at 1pm and ends at 1am, or whether it starts at 12am and ends at 5am. The time doesnt matter, legality doesn't matter, and location doesn't matter.
I've been "raving" since 2002 and for me it means dancing to electronic dance music and taking drugs, and it can be in a legit nightclub, or someones house, or a festival, or indeed an illegal warehouse rave. Everyone I have "raved" with, used the term interchangably.
If I told my friend, "I was raving at Tomorrowland last year", they would never say, "you can't say you were raving because that's not an illegal event."
Raving is not a scientific or mathematical term that has some precise definition. Don't try and make it that way, that's not what raving is about dude.
For me it means people dancing to electronic music and most likely taking drugs too. It can mean raving in a club or a festival or on the beach in Thailand or in a forest in the UK or in a warehouse in Brooklyn, if there's electronic dance music and drugs, then it's a rave.
Here is what Claude says: "A rave is a large dance party or festival typically featuring electronic dance music (EDM), characterized by: Extended duration - often running late into the night or through early morning hours Electronic music - featuring DJs playing various genres like house, techno, trance, and drum & bass Distinctive atmosphere - using elements like elaborate light shows, lasers, fog machines, and visual projections Communal experience - bringing together large groups of people dancing in a shared space"
Moreover, as several commenters have pointed out there has been a big growth in festivals and awareness. Lots of people talk to me about "house music" now, whereas before it was a relatively "underground" thing.
Now, I think there's a question about whether the scale of such events have maintained the same cultural ethos as the early rave days, and that, though I'm not old enough to have participated, is likely a categorical no. There's a greater focus on 'documenting' experiences at these events rather than living it. Here's a clip of an rising group called Kienemusik [tik tok link](https://www.tiktok.com/@as.anca/video/7359750430345186593?q=...), where you can see there's more video taping than dancing. I would venture to say, we are so filled with wonder sometimes that we forget that part of experiencing awe is letting go of ego and just experiencing.
There was a sense of freedom and optimism on the dance floor that I've never found anywhere else. I made songs like the songs that I most liked to dance to. Most of it came from Europe back then, but I wish I followed my heart, or at least spent half my time following my heart.
I feel bad for the kids in the video. In my day, and maybe yours, it would have been very unusual to see a cellphone in the club or at a rave. My kids schools don't allow screens and they go away for a couple weeks each summer to a camp that doesn't allow screens. They tell me that they really enjoy it after a couple of days, and I think it gives them a chance to feel the way we did as kids... back then there wasn't a movement of people trying to live more in the moment because everybody lived in the moment all the time.
Don't beat yourself up too hard though, you can always pickup a DJ controller and start again :)
And too: the scene has radically shifted, so being a promoter is a large part of the work. It's kind of like eSports in a way.
[1] https://www.instagram.com/p/DDkjBJhP1Sh/?utm_source=ig_web_c... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ISoPHerYsn4&t=1181s [3] Think Cerce, Boilerroom
Detroit, Berlin were spaces in which electronic music accelerated, reflecting an intent to go further into the future or outwards into space, including cyberspace, to escape the banality of the immediate environment outside the dance floor. A language develops to collectively approach a future previously experienced as private fantasy.
The DJ changes discs to keep the party going, deeply listening to the dancers' body movements as much as the music, dissolving, modulating the energy of the music in cybernetic flow. That's the mix. Waves of intensity, vastness, then resting down on the ground collectively staring at the sky, or recordings of Space Night projected on the ceiling... at this point, are we still strangers when we actually experience awe of an optimistic future?
The DJ can't foster this kind of environment when the ego is in the way, can't be a "rock star" or flashy. The DJ has to listen to make a humanistic virtual space that overrides the algorithmic dopamine-driven virtual space stored in everyone's pocket. It's possible. You have to want it for yourself. Otherwise... we drown in facades and cellphone pictures.
That sounds like it was out of Last Night A DJ Saved My Life [1]!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Night_a_DJ_Saved_My_Life_...
https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262632874/rhythm-science/
https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view...
https://www.artbrain.org/journal-of-neuroaesthetics/journal-...
Tier 1 city RE prices have made live entertainment venues harder to run profitably.
GenZ studies have found a lower participation in "risky behavior" which late night clubbing may or not be considered.
Mobile internet & smartphones seem to be killing all forms of live in person interaction.
And finally electronic music of various forms used to be a niche, and now it's mainstream. In the 90s/00s my consumption of electronic music was mp3 downloads of BBC late night recordings. Now pop is electronic, electronic is pop, it's all on the radio, it's unavoidable.
Surprisingly often, it's both.
Even two years of covid couldn't do it.
Commercial real estate is generally illegal anywhere dense housing is also illegal.
As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other.
And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate.
And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.
I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.
In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...)
In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second...)
4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)
I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)
We already have speculation tax in Canada.
Additionally, since 2004, there’s a law that allows local authorities to take over empty homes and sell them, to make sure they are used for housing
Not sure what the effects have been of either
They tried this in China. People would just get divorced so each partner had their own home. It turns out you can easily find someone in your family to "buy" a house as well.
Its the same thing as taxes. No one is stopping you from making up fake receipts. But you don't do that because its fraud.
One thing missing - renters cannot homestead their apartment and so the funds that own the apartment have to charge more rent to cover taxes on those apartments.
This is because a ton of them are in the Chinese equivalent of like Boise, Idaho where demand is fairly low. People want to live where the high paying jobs are.
Better example: northern Alaska.
Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates.
In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%.
Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue.
"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China. In the US, we don't see that.
Property taxes in the US mean you can't speculate so easily on property (you lose ~1% value a year). But they have 99 year leases instead, but everyone thinks the government will let you renew those with minimal fees.
China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else. It was not market forces.
How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration?
In the US, builders don't build 100 starter homes because it is more profitable and easier to build a couple McMansions and sell them for crazy prices. THOSE are the homes that get built as "investments". No builder will benefit from producing a large supply of homes, so they don't. The market will not self correct.
In the US, the largest amount of government land is held by the Feds and they keep increasing the limits on what the land can be used for year after year. Figure out how to make new home building key to government finances like in China and you will INSTANTLY have the problem solved and even have over supply.
Some say there's little demand but that's horse shit. People snap up much worse desolate land around me to homestead for mucho dinero. Building a house with your own hands on public or unowned desolate lands is the most essential of basic human fulfilments. The youth cannot afford the already built homes nor their construction, so they ought to be able to take matters in their own hands.
To build a starter home I not only had to go to bumfuck Egypt with the most libertarian zoning anywhere near jobs I can find, i also had to rule out the 9/10 of properties with practically irrevocable covenants made by self righteous boomers back in the 80s who already built their pig farm shithole and don't want their precious livestock living near anything but a mansion.
Then I had to find a rare loophole around code compliance and inspections so I could DIY it on weekends and not be subject to weekday inspections. Most codes want stuff like an expensive egress window even though no one living in the house is bigger than a much smaller sliding window, and it goes on infinitum.
Then I had to find a place they hadn't outlawed water yet through a grandfathered well, and finally get buddy enough with the power company to actually get them to run power without royally fucking me with arbitrary requirements. Almost the entire system is designed around grandfathered protectionism while kicking the next generation in the teeth with entirely different and constrained rules voted on by people who who live in places that don't even conform to the requirements imposed on you, which of course gives them a free artificial value boost as well.
Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now.
There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits.
A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.
Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.
Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.
For example in some countries, many students share a house. Whereas in other countries, every student will have a whole house to themselves.
In some places, children will get their own house at 16. In others, children, parents, and grandparents are all sharing one house.
The people who actually take care of a community aren't "entitled" for wanting to be part of it.
That's homeowner vacancy rate. Rental vacancy rate is around 6.9%:
While the supply of house units per capita is at the record-high levels.
Reality: housing is cheap, abundant, and high quality. Just not near the downtown cores of large cities.
Reference to Ricardo's law of rent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent
That is very different than a Tier 1 city.
It's funny that cities various 'interesting districts' are normally just suburbs that the city absorbed. But yeah, suburbs are just awful places without their own culture or interest (unless absorbed, then they are a distinct interesting district).
Big cities pay top performers the most, by far, but median incomes tend to be quite a bit lower than small town/rural areas. If you are a professional sports star or F500 CEO, the city is unquestionably the place to be†, but for the normal person who will end up in a drab job the money often isn't there. Many will accept the low pay due to being temporarily embarrassed CEOs, of course.
† Although knowing some of these people, they tend to live rurally as well, having the means to be able to live in both settings. The rich rarely live in just one place.
Where I live in the Suburbs of Des Moines, McDonalds starts at $16/hour. There are rural towns not far away where they start at $14, and I know rural towns farther out where you start at $10 (McDonalds isn't in these towns so it isn't a full comparison but that is the closest I can give). Where I live apartments can be had for under $1000/month so it is feasible for someone working at McDonalds to live on that wage. In the more rural areas apartments might be $500/month but you are making less plus the local grocery stores are more expesnive than the Aldi you could walk to from the apartment (thus meaning you don't need a car though crossing the highways isn't exactly safe).
Of course the real issue is people pick where to live based on factors other than cost of living. They care where their families live.
I expect the median income is often higher in rural areas because, while there is little on the high end, there is more mid-tier opportunity. In the big city if you don't make it into the big leagues, only the dregs are left. Cities amplify the extremes. In rural areas, the $30 per hour jobs are willing to hire any warm body that shows up.
Of course, rural is a difficult categorization as it is a catchall for everything that is left. A rural area with a strong agricultural sector, for example, is nothing like a rural area that is not much more than barren wilderness. In the former, there is a lot of money to be made, comparatively, while in the latter the McDonalds at the highway rest stop may be the only business there is for hundreds of miles. We are definitely talking about a certain kind of rural here.
That is true of anywhere, but employment metrics (e.g. unemployment rate) tend to look a lot better in these rural areas. The average Joe has a better chance of finding a job, and a higher paying job at that, in these rural areas. Something that hasn't gone unnoticed, of course. Population data since the mid-2000s shows relative decline in large urban areas and relative growth in small towns, although all area types are seeing population growth.
It won't be a superstar job, but Average Joe isn't getting that kind of job no matter where he is located. He may think so while in his temporarily embarrassed CEO state, but in the end he never does. Only a small segment of the population reach those heights. A SV tech salary is quite unusual.
> If you are a farmer
A farmer is, by very definition, a business owner. That may be beyond our discussion, but certainly those farm businesses are hiring anyone they can get, and paying a pretty penny for it. Those farm jobs are an opportunity for most anyone.
> so working at a cafe for minimum wage may be all you can get.
Cafe workers tend to be tipped, so it is far from a minimum wage job. I have the books for an industry-adjacent small town restaurant in front of me and the workers are making around $50/hour all in (maybe even more; I don't usually see the cash tips).
McDonalds isn't in that realm, but only foreign workers who come with some binding to the business, limiting their options, with a willingness to sacrifice to come into the country ever end up there.
Of course, variation exists
It is numbers game. Its not about what any single wants best, but how many times you can sell people their 2nd choice using the same land.
Some dream of living in a condo in the city, some of a rural ranch house. I don't think anybody dreams of a rural condo.
Given equal cost of a home, most people would prefer to live in a city. Especially if you look globally, cities are absolutely trampling suburbs with demand. Yes, people in the suburbs often chose that preferentially, but there are less people in suburbs.
In America, suburbs are disproportionately popular. I’m guessing that has more to do with civics than preferences. Most of suburbanites I know in America either live near their suburban job, or express some fear/distrust of various aspects of city life - and it’s mostly related to cars and transportation.
My point is that if you remove jobs and pay from the current incentives, city demand would decrease dramatically.
I agree that if you remove zoning, many areas of single family homes would be built up if they are in and around urban cores. That isnt new demand, but existing demand, not able to be expressed by current law.
However, my point is that if your [random small town] job paid the same as NY or SF, you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns.
WE are describing two different situations.
> you would see a flux out of those cities to the small towns
Having actually tried this, hated it, and moved back, I am skeptical.
This mistakes the price one person can pay for a piece of land with the price many people can pay to to use the same land. A single family home does rent for more money than a condo if they are on the same block in the city.
A major reason zoning exists is because with out it you'd have developers and investors out-bidding the homeowners to redevelop plots of land as they became available.
It's a collective response to the power of $$$ in a free market.
Even if all of those condo purchaser who would buy a unit in the building that replaced a single home would've preferred a single home, they didn't have a direct say in that lot being turned into condos. The person with the most money did.
And of course, they couldn't have all fit there. But I am skeptical of "enough people with money want to live in your area now" as being a sufficient justification to say that local control has to be eliminated. Why favor the future richer potential-resident over the current resident? (I would extend this broadly, for incumbency protections for renters and owners alike - why is it an inherent good for an existing area to get denser forever? Why not encourage less centralized development? Why would "the people with the most money should get to decide how this area is developed?" the best plan?)
People work minimum-wage jobs and choose to live in cities. These individuals are not preferencing a city for the wage, but rather the lifestyle, access to amenities, the lower cost options it offers, car-free life, etc.
I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
> their perfectly natural tendency to want as much space/land/house as they can afford
Is this a natural tendency? I don't think this "natural" tendency holds true globally, and I'm even skeptical it actually holds true in America, where suburbs are unusually popular.
> I'm quite confident the majority of suburbanites would strongly prefer living on 20 acres if they could still get to work in 20 minutes and the grocery store in 10.
I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres. Which is the reality we see globally.
But it's of course a ridiculously illogical claim that people would prefer rural living if only it had all the benefits of city living. What are the benefits people derive from the hypothetical 20 acres? What does it even mean in this context, because it's incompatible the whole premise of this argument. People prefer "grocery store in 10 [minutes]" more than 20 acres, and that's why cities exist.
People working minimum wage jobs have very little choice in their lives and certainly can't afford to move arbitrarily.
> I think it's super disingenuous to claim that people only live in cities for work. There are tons of social options in cities, tons of civic amenities, and tons of lifestyle differences that draw people to a city.
All of which is available to people that don't live in the city. We have various forms of transportation options. Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert. At no point during that trip did I feel the urge to move to Denver.
> I'm quite confident that the majority of people (ie city dwellers, which are the majority of humans) would preferentially prefer the access and amenities of a city home at the expense of 20 acres.
I'm dead-ass certain that's your own biases speaking. Of course we could settle this if either of us can be assed to put together a poll and go flog it on social media. Want to co-author a paper?
Not really. It is a big difference between having mat 30 min to gym, school, whatever or whatever and not even needing a car and having to drive almost an hour to get anywhere. It is difference between "I can and will actually do it" vs "nope, cant do it".
> Hell I once flew halfway across the country just to catch KMFDM in concert.
That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Man if you think adult humans are that helpless I really don't know what to tell you. They aren't, but apparently you'd need some convincing.
> That is definitely not something an average person would do on the regular.
Sure, it's a pretty extreme example. It's nothing for folks to drive up the eastern seaboard between Atlanta and Baltimore to catch shows though. Anyway point stands, none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
It is not about being helpless. It is about day having certain amount of hours, you needing minimum 8 of them for work, another 8 for sleep and showering, then another time for cooking, cleaning, putting kids to sleep, ensuring they do homework and simply being at home supervising them. If your kids cant engage in hobbies without you driving them there and back, then congratulation, you just spent 3 hours driving and waiting.
Additional 3 hours a day needed to get to work, back from work, to gym and from gym are a time you simply cant use for anything else.
> none of the entertainment and cultural experiences that folks who are stuck in major urban areas use to tout the experience are denied to folks who don't live in the city.
Sure, it is just that they require more effort, time and money to get there and back. So much, that you just wont do it on the regular.
Im happy to trade that for having to spend an hour in car/train a few times a year to see a show or museum.
I would take a pay cut to work closer to home.
Ditch the suburbanite identity politics and start advocating for the development of shows and museums in your local area that you could walk to, instead of taking your money away from your economic center at the benefit of oil companies (bc let's be real, suburban identity sells car dependence and even if you take the train, all the cultural momentum from the propaganda shaped your life decisions to move there and what's that train run on?).
For this conversation, we're talking about the cores of tier 1 cities where the high paying jobs are most abundant. I considers a location suburban if they are predominantly single-family homes and if many of them commute into the Metro for work.
I'm going to ignore all that identity politics stuff because frankly I don't understand what you were trying to say there
I do implore you to attempt to reengage your brain, despite the the mental anguish it will require to actually comprehend what somebody was saying to you when it conflicts with an identity you don’t know that you hold.
It's not for everybody but it's not an oil scam either.
Your situation is a completely irrelevant red hearing for the discussion we are having. You are actually rural, and are describing an actually rural life—not a suburban rural identity & not an urban suburban identity.
If you don’t even have state or county roads, like no paved roads going anywhere near where you are and there’s nothing around and there’s no police around and everything else you described then that’s not at all what I am responding to. Because what you describe sounds to me like you don’t have anything within walkable distance, and I was directly responding to somebody who says that they have shit they can walk to.
You are living an actual rural life because you are outside the range of services provided, relying on yourself instead and in terms of my own personal Urbanist Theory that’s exactly how it should be.
When I moved to US, I chose to live pretty much as far as I can from the nearest large city that wouldn't be considered straight up "rural" (although we do have a bunch of farms around here). And the reason is because I don't want to live in what is, in effect, a giant human anthill.
It’s OK to admit that you don’t actually know or maybe that you even have learned something today, but I did actually do a research paper with how and why we came to live in suburbs as a core point of research, and guess what? It was a result of master planned communities by white supremacists and their oil and motor industry buddies.
Most of the best old suburbs in America were built organically through bit by bit demand around street cars, not car cars. Then the motor industry executives and oil industry executives got together and lobby the government to create the crime of jaywalking, to buy up all the street cars and remove them from American cities, to build out the highway system, and to change zoning laws, to encourage if not outright force the building of car dependent American suburbia.
Do not get me wrong streetcar, suburb, designed suburbs are fantastic, walkable compact, wonderful wonderfully tight communities. But today in today’s world this year of our Lord 2025? Today those street car suburbs are urban compared to the car dependent suburban sprawl that we have now.
Personally I find city people the most boring and socially/culturally stunted because they think a cultivated/curated 'mall like setting of stuff' = culture. They also tend to think buying access to art/culture because they have money = having artist style/culture. The music scenes/art scenes are overly (often self) curated pap.
Lots of cities 'diverse' districts are just... suburbs... that the cities absorbed.
Even for things like 'exotic' foods I routinely find bombed out suburban strip mall restaurants to be superior and less 'catered' to American Paletes than places in cities that have to be more generic because they serve such a large population.
I also have personally found when I have been lonely in life, being lonely in the city is the worst kind of loneliness.
Looking out my window, I can't even see another house. If I twist my neck, I can see a neighbor's barn about half a mile away, though.
It is sprawling, car-dependent, low-density development I can't abide, the kind of cul-de-sac-ridden suburbs the US has been building around its urban fringes for the last 80-odd years. It feels suffocating to be surrounded by mile after mile of other people's stuff, with nowhere to go but strip malls and nothing to do but drive from one parking lot to another. People talk about wanting a house with a yard, but when that yard is the only place you can be without justifying your presence there by participating in some transaction, it can feel like a very confining space indeed.
This already happened during Covid, and no country substantially de-urbanized. In fact, urban real estate prices skyrocketed.
The only cities where prices stayed flat or went down were highly over-priced places that people hated living anyway (like the Bay Area).
As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Also, not all suburbs are created equal, and this is even more true outside the US.
If someone else does all the maintenance, dusting and vacuum cleaning, maybe. Other then that, actual swimming pool for doing laps or actual water park with slides is kind of better in most cases. There are some people who would use that large house or would be using their backyard swimming pool often ... but most just dont.
> As you get older, especially if you are married and have kids, usually the trade-off skews strongly towards having a big house, and then you will balance the distance side of the equation.
Someone with kids appreciates not having long drive to and from work, those take away from time with kids. And someone with kids over 7 years including kids themselves appreciates presence ability to do go to sport clubs, music clubs, libraries, school or whatever else without parent having to drive them each time.
There is some advantage to big house in remote place with kids, but it also causes you and the kids to be more isolated from everything else.
I know farmers who think nothing about hunting off their back porch - and why not their gun doesn't have the range to kill a neighbor so they don't have to worry about missing their shot. I know people who shoot guns in the suburbs, but they have done extra work to create a safe range in their house (and generally only safe for the lowest power rounds). The denser your living the less viable having a safe space to shoot is.
There are things that are only possible in a dense city. You need a lot of people to have enough interest to support a symphony orchestra. There are a lot of niche stores that can only make it in a dense city because that is the only way to get enough people interested in that niche to support a store.
If you live in LA or San Diego, you can live close to the beach and go there all the time. Most people there don't, but if that's important to you, you can achieve it.
If you live in Vancouver, BC or Seattle, you can ski in the winter and hike in mountains outside of cell phone reception in the summer AFTER WORK, never mind every weekend.
I assume most american cities have gun clubs. If the attraction to shooting a gun can be satiated with target practice, that can be a decent compromise. (Of course if the attraction is feeling like a frontiersman by shooting straight off your porch, that's a different thing. I can understand it even if I don't share it)
This is not possible with every city and every hobby, but that ends up kind of becoming the point. The cities that have this overlap become even more in-demand. It's why housing is so expensive in places like YVR and SFO.
My jurisdiction gave free money to everyone that lost their job/income, with far more liberal eligibility criteria than unemployment insurance had, at fixed amounts conveniently we’ll above the monthly rental costs for most.
Kept the rental market propped up.
Does anyone have a source that actually shows that this was a factor?
It's also created big windfalls - due to easy distribution/sales for online stuff - for more than enough people to drive up prices in many of the most-already-in-demand regions.
Ye olde rich person historically has traditionally addressed the "there are different pros/cons to the city than rurally" dilemma by having multiple properties. Which of course only eats into supply more. Is the percentage of people able to do that now higher or lower than it was when a country home required full-time live-in staff?
I'm really not surprised real estate prices continue to rise when building new units is often an extremely expensive, risky process that in some areas can be stopped at any time with literally no reason required
And in many cities breakneck construction activity is happening still real estate is getting very expensive.
This seems rather simplistic reason to me.
Colleges pay rent. Colleges pay salaries to people who pay rent. All those go up with high real estate prices. Further, even if the college owns a land, the money they earn on that land has to compete with what a developer who is willing to tear it down and put up a residential building which now earns higher rent or sale price.
I don’t think all the increase comes down to high real estate costs but it’s clear that high real estate costs can easily raise prices downstream across nearly every area.
Positional goods cease to be so if you substantially increase their supply - this is why Rolex, Gucci, etc are constantly worried about knockoffs.
That's difficult, for all sorts of reasons. NIMBYs protecting their investment is one aspect, but the maths of density, transport infrastructure and travel times is another big deal.
Walkable, interesting downtowns AND big floorplans AND low taxes AND abundant supply within a short travel time is a tough set of constraints.
Since second job is sold as "freedom from household drudgery" and GDP booster it can't really be challenged.
and
https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail
Nope. It becomes slightly further from the record high numbers, but still better than at any time before 90-s.
At this point, the misery caucus is just grasping at straws. In a couple of years, the housing inventory will make even that metric irrelevant, but the price of housing will still be going up.
> The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions
Nope. The solution is the opposite: preserve the SFH at all costs and shut down the misery caucus. Build new cities, not new density. Create jobs outside of dense hellscapes.
Because the reality is that NOT A SINGLE CITY has lowered the housing sale prices by increasing the density of existing areas. Not a single one in the US, Europe, or Japan.
Yeah, can you then point out an example of a city where densification worked to decrease the housing sale prices?
Tokyo? Nope. Seattle? Definitely nope, even though its housing inventory grew by 25% within 12 years. Moscow? Nope.
If it's so "round Earth", then there must be some early metrics that can indicate the success of densification railroading in places where it's been tried?
For example, Minneapolis went full cookoo nuts by abolishing parking requirements and the SFH zoning in 2019. They gave out the city to be screwed up by developers. How's it faring now? Oh, the price growth not only not slowed down, it ACCELERATED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ATNHPIUS33460Q
Do you know Mark Twain's definition of "insanity"?
You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
Can you point out the shortage on this graph: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1koDH ?
We do NOT have a housing crisis. Not even close. Housing is more affordable and of better quality than ever.
We have a DENSITY crisis. People are forced by economic forces to move to relatively few unaffordable locations.
> You point at few absolute price decreases which is true but don't take into account multiple variables (like population increases, inflation, tax policy) or understand higher order derivatives. In which case you've got no business arguing in these threads.
What "higher order derivatives"? I read most of the new research on urbanist policy. And so far everything I've seen confirms what I said.
Just stop. I’m not gonna “research” 1+1 for you.
And it's not like I'm saying anything controversial. Even urbanists admit that density increases don't lead to lower prices: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2023/4/26/upzoning-might...
Because of government subsidies. (If you were willing to pay $100k for college and the government will give you $50k, now the college can charge $150k. Yes that's simplistic but it's the crux.)
> healthcare getting expensive
Healthcare is doubly removed from price feedbacks - patients don't pay for doctors, insurance companies do. Patients don't even pay for insurance, employers do.
Not too mention that the number of new doctors in the US is artificially constrained.
> day care getting expensive
can't help you on this one
> streaming services getting expensive
Streaming services started out undercutting cable prices. That's no longer necessary so the price is stabilizing. Plus now they are expected to produce their own content.
Expecting everything to have the same root cause is unrealistic.
> In economics, the Baumol effect, also known as Baumol's cost disease, first described by William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in the 1960s, is the tendency for wages in jobs that have experienced little or no increase in labor productivity to rise in response to rising wages in other jobs that did experience high productivity growth.
Stuff that's made in China gets relatively cheap, so stuff that's not made in China gets relatively more expensive.
In pre-internet times, people shared real estate. Bars, restaurants, church, etc. Their discretionary income went into the fees, offerings, etc. to make these places comfortable. With the rise of the internet, people started preferring to stay home to use the internet. All that discretionary income once spent on fuelling those third places is now competing for each own's individual domain, thus driving up the price where individuals are found.
Two years of COVID exacerbated things because even those who still got out of the house from time to time were forced to stay home, so what remaining money was still funnelling out to activities outside of the home was entirely redirected into individual real estate.
Also, I’m pretty tightly involved in the local bar and hospitality scene, and most places are doing just fine — not quite pre-COVID levels at a number of places, but some are busier than ever.
The real estate bubble, if we are to call it that, goes back to the early 2000s at least. Pre-COVID, implying somewhere around 2019, isn't telling. For what it is worth, the housing price data I have in front of me shows that prices have come back down to nearly pre-COVID levels as well, so that more or less tracks anyway.
How does it compare to the 1990s? The landscape has definitely changed here. A couple of decades ago there were three busy bars mere steps from my place. Now, there isn't a single bar in town. Those closures brought consolidation to bars found in the next town over, which saw them thrive there, but now the decline is staring to become visible there too. The next, next town over is probably busier than ever as a result with even more consolidation slowly starting to take place, I can believe you there, but that doesn't imply general strength of the industry.
The media regularly reports on the dying death of the third place. Your local experience may not be providing an accurate picture.
Airbnb, easy and cheap travel, remote work, property management firms, remote surveillance and access control, etc. And also declining household sizes (many more people living alone) which is seemingly a result of internet/social media/mobile devices.
The thing is, the managerial class is pushing for a return to the office, trying to reinstate the former balance.
in my opinion is the same with every price augmentation in the last 20 years. The Internet helped make fake offers that drove price high.
snd yes blablabla the invisible hand of the market…
the invisible hand of the markt is if all speculators work for the same goal on a market with scarcity they dont compete. See prices of Art. its all fake
It was only two years though. An industry can hold off and fight back in that time.
If you have prime real estate in the center of a city but that is undeveloped, currently developing it increases your tax. In a land value tax system, that land would presumably be taxed higher, but tax would not increase if it is developed, therefore incentivizing the owner to actually use it.
It feels like a way to force these people out of the towns and family homes they've grown up in, in favor of some rich guy or corporation. They can be strong-armed out by increasing their property value around them past a point they can afford the taxes.
If someone is lucky enough to win the lottery by buying a pot of land for cheap and then seeing its value rise astronomically, they would be given the option to defer their tax payments until the sale of their profit when they realize their gains.
Obviously, there is still a large incentive for them to move sooner rather than later, but they would not be forced out of their home. I think this would be much fairer than the status quo as it would increase the incentive for them to move.
Ultimately, it is not an efficient use of land to have someone keep their single family home in the middle of high-rises like you see in the movie up. We've got a homeless crisis and random parking lots or low density is making it worse. There needs to be a compromise here. Deferred payments lets you balance the scales in a way that would be fair to all.
I would expect a land tax to do the complete opposite and reduce the value of land by half or more, which would do quite bad things to the finances of homeowners, most of whom were born before 2000.
Because they can't afford it.
Also my belief is that people don't do anything anymore because nobody gets really bored anymore. Boredom is a powerful motivator to make plans, set up clubs, find interests, meet people etc.
Now you just swipe through instagram for a few minutes and boom, no more boredom.
Going to a club is cheap, in most you only pay for drinks which a bit more expensive than in a pub, but it's not breaking the bank.
Here in Italy you can go to a club and spend less than 10€s for the night if you don't have to eat.
I'll say what the issue with clubs are: plenty of people never got there to have fun but to meet people and get laid. Now dating apps have removed the need for youth to go to clubs.
So "can't afford it" isn't an explanation for the decline in rave culture, even if it might be a reason kids don't go out to clubs today.
And before that, it was grunge rock. But now, check out the prices for Pearl Jam tickets!
Why is it shocking? The Internet is the current Big Thing that's upending everything the way previous Big Things (steam engine, movable type, etc) did. And real estate prices are one of the central coordination mechanisms for arranging things in the physical world.
It seems to me that every single generation changed and there needs not be an external reason for that other than young people wanting to do things the way they see fit, which normally is anything different from what their parents see as ideal.
And specifically their appetite for the risk/discomfort that goes along with living in realtime physical moments with other people.
Human beings are awkward as hell, but that's what laughter and tolerance are the bridges for.
Yet I can't help but wonder if people also said the same about the telephone (which enabled socialization without colocation) and television (Which enabled entertainment as a passive indirect consumption)
I realize of course that the internet, and mobile (and eventually VR/AR) is Yet Another Step Further.
But...like every step does it not also come with benefits for some at the expense of others?
For example, I simply can't believe that true extraverts are simply going to be resigned to giving up all these physical moments - they will continue to seek out and create and participate in-person spaces.
To me, the problem is less about the way that we do or do not socialize, and rather the monumentally addictive nature of online and app spaces, and the fact that the companies in charge of them have no other motivation at his point it seems than to just push it all to the limit.
Our feeble caveman brains cannot handle the dopamine roulette that is the TikTok/Instagram/Twitter feed. We have no immunity to it, so the only solution is artificial restrictions like screentime. Then again, we've had to reckon with that with plentiful calories too as we trended towards universal obesity and have STARTED to turn it around (but not succeeded yet). And that took decades.
Every generation struggled with something. Our grandparents were choked by smog. Our parents had polluted waterways and lead in everything. We are engulfed in microplastics and addictive technology. Our children will wreckon with the effects of climate change.
Through all this, humanity continues to grow, invent new technology, and raise both the floor for existence and the ceiling for prosperity.
The worst thing we can do now is to give up on the next generation or on the future of humanity. Optimism is our obligation and responsibility.
Absolutely. There were periods of time in history when there was significant opposition to television. Hence the coining of terms like "boob tube", "idiot box", "idiot's lantern", "cultural wasteland", etc. You can see a bit more of some of that (although not with a primarily historical focus) here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_aspects_of_television#N...
EDIT:
For yet more on this topic:
https://behavioralscientist.org/history-panic-entertainment-...
https://20thcenturyhistorysongbook.com/song-book/the-fifties...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Arguments_for_the_Elimina...
Exactly. Bad things can and do become normalized and then unremarked upon. Some people confuse that phenomenon with those things actually being good.
People often have clearer eyes at the transition.
Because the principle of capitalism that shall not be said d is that the value of a human life is zero
... The second unspoken principle of capitalism is that the environment is worth zero
Finally, the third is that the human race is worth zero
I'd say they were probably right. Pre-solo-consumptive technology, people on average were better socialized.
It's inherent in the nature of improved consumptive and interactive experiences to smooth off the pain points.
Unfortunately many of those same pain points are also intrinsic to realworld, realtime interaction. And doing them more proficiently is a skill that one can learn and improve (or not).
There were a lot more letters before the telephone. In London, the mail would be picked up and delivered up to twelve times per day. Within the city, you could have back-and-forth conversations through the mail within a single day.
The risk/discomfort lasted just that night. Nowadays everyone is posting everything everywhere. No wonder youngsters don’t want to risk it.
This is a form of social cooling in my opinion.
With everyone posting everything, and everyone's digital history recorded (if anyone cares to archive or dig it up), everyone would have skeletons in their closet.
I was hoping that would make society more tolerant and willing to accept faults in people.
In actuality, it just seems to have produced an industry of digital cleaners that the wealthy can afford, while everyone else gets fucked.
But then, that's why I limit my posting on social media outside of HN.
Most people are simply not that virtuous, because by definition the vast majority of the population has to have mediocre virtues or be in that ballpark range.
So ‘radical transparency’ reveals as much negative as positive, on average.
But the next step was how society would change (or not), suddenly realizing that most people are simply not that virtuous. Certainly not as much as their previously perception-dominant "best face" made them seem to be.
Instead of accepting that, we seem to still be taking pot shots at leaders or prospective leaders for faults.
Or... maybe Trump's twice electability is an indicator that most people are willing to overlook things, now.
The general population can just not care about a ‘next step’ on average…?
They are not overlooking things. They are looking at things and like what they see. There is segment population for which a credible accusation is seen as a good thing about a guy.
There's a whole separate realm of social circle snapchatting (networking).
Not to mention swiping in dating apps.
Just because the younger generation are doing things differently it doesn’t make them wrong, in my generation it was sending text messages that was wrong because we weren’t talking on the phone. Before that it was talking on the phone rather than going to people’s houses.
I’ll also add what my psychologist told me.
Social skills aren’t innate in humans, we have to be taught them. Smaller family sizes and greater distances from extended family mean these aren’t taught by older siblings/cousins/etc like the used to and parents aren’t filling the gap, which means standards of social interaction are changing much more rapidly.
Yes, but that also doesn't mean change can't be bad or in the wrong direction.
What you describe isn't neutral, and it's pretty clearly not good.
It's different but I think it's wonderful.
I actively work to learn how to do the same, and it's like having an extra-sense. The ability to backchannel while also doing face-to-face adds elements to communication that people who don't do it fail to catch.
(I'm 49 if it matters)
Technology combined with oligarchy is really leading to a demographic and social disaster. I think the iron placenta and designer babies are the only things that will prevent population collapse. Well, age extension will probably kick in too.
It's a race between us killing the worlds biosphere and us fading away to nothingness right now. I think there's plenty of population momentum to kill off the planet
The Internet is the most recent technology that is enabled a small number of individuals to become vastly wealthy alongside, of course, a certain lax style of government. As wealth inequality increases, more of the money in the economy becomes tied up in wealthy people’s investments and savings, which inflates asset prices.
I think one solution to lower rent is a rule that for every month a rental property is vacant its book value declines by 10 times the rent.
Wouldn't that just lower its property tax, thereby making it more profitable for owners to leave venues unrented (compared to the status quo)?
If the barista must be paid $109k to afford to live there, then let Starbucks jack the price of a plain black coffee to $17 for a small. Fewer people will be willing to pay this, Starbucks will go out of business and virtually nothing will fill its place. Suddenly these multimillion dollar homes will be in barren wastelands and, gee, maybe they won't be worth so much anymore. A softer solution is to pay the low wage workers from the time they leave the front door, if the wages are insufficient to live nearby.
And people should be paid for commuting. Unpaid commutes to work are a huge hidden subsidy for businesses. They use tax funded roads to allow workers to live farther away in cheaper locations and don't have to compensate them for the time needed to get to their jobs.
Which, in turn, makes events that do happen more expensive, decreasing turnout. If there's a Friday night event for CA$15 with CA$5 drinks, I'm much more likely to go than if it costs CA$50 with CA$15 drinks.
Abandoned warehouses and other commercial building you could host a rave were once plenty in NYC. No more. Hell when I was a kid there were three abandoned factory buildings in my neighborhood we'd break into and become our "club house" in grade school. You just had to watch for squatters and neighbors calling the cops. Now you're lucky if there are even lots around - most have been built on already.
https://monosnap.com/direct/YxtOr5VARRXTAIr2Ej9ae5KCjAjRfn
The owners (who live across the street) confronted them immediately. Bouncers dressed in "security" shirts forced them away. It took 1.5 hours for the sheriffs to show up.
The whole neighborhood is traumatized.
Someone would call the cops for the amount of noise now before the party even started.
Then factor in fentanyl.
Maybe most of all though, in the mid 90s electronic music was a new thing in the US.
The first rave I went to , I really didn't even know what I was going to. The reason I stopped going was the novelty had completely worn off. Amazing times but the falloff was rather steep.
I wasn't a raver but I went to a couple, and wow, what a time. There's nothing quite like the smell of a diesel generator and the sound of earth-shaking bass surrounded by dancing zombies inventing dance moves on each beat, deep in a pacific north west forest. I had a few of friends who were into that scene.
No idea what the UK rave scene is like these days.
I’m in my thirties and have been involved with these kind of parties for at least ten years.
A general trend that I have been observing for years though is what usually is being referred to as „TikTok Guys“. This involves guys and girls in their early twenties wearing fetish outfits and doing lots of drugs.
I don’t care about people coming in fetish outfits to our parties but I don’t want some young guy overdose on one our parties. In practice this means that we have been much more careful about who knows when and where a party is happening.
This seems like mostly a case of competition for activity than anything.
The forbidden fruit is sweetest. If you can go get THC gummies whenever then you don’t need to grab whatever is available right now.
But I think too that Covid is a huge problem. Rave age now is people who were at a delicate phase of interpersonal development five years ago. And just hanging out in crowded places is now risky behavior.
Living in a world freshly built to cater specifically to them did strange things to Baby Boomer’s heads. COVID is going to do something equally bad to GenZ (and A) in more or less the opposite direction and I worry what it will be.
Some places I visited in Berlin even required checking in your phone at coat check. These were the best-organized coat checks I’d seen in my life.
There were at least two sites that I knew of for keeping track of parties (bayraves.com was one, I don’t recall the other). The scene was dying at the same time that I was aging out, but I sure miss it.
When I lived in the Midwest, the scene died when ecstasy became a known quantity in mainstream news media. The last rave that I went to (there) was loaded with a million cops. An org that offered free testing for purity / adulterants was told they’d be arrested for testing any pills. What a backward and unhelpful position to take when people may be at risk of an OD. Ecstasy was still generally clean at the time. I’d be afraid to take an unknown pill today, what with fentanyl and the like.
'This. is. Radio. One. Essential... Essential...'
What I do do though is travel for swing dance events [1], which often involves live music, bluesy late night parties, etc. I also have friends who do similar for salsa dancing and board game / anime / nerd conventions. So I wonder if part of this is that "staying up late doing fun thing with semi-strangers" has expanded to more domains than freestyle dancing to electronic music?
[1]: eg https://dclx.org/ https://www.instagram.com/bal_moment/ https://www.balweek.com/about
I think this is definitely the biggest reason.
The average YouTube video probably has serious electronic music going for it.
Back in the '80s and '90s you felt rebellious listening to that stuff. Now it's so common it borders on proverbial.
I'd probably go to a public venue that plays 90s and 2000s electronic music but for me it would be the equivalent of my boomer mom going to a Fleetwood Mac concert in the '90s. Just more nostalgia than a desire to relive the rave days. There's no way I could dance the way I used to in the '90s. There would need to be seating there for my old Xennial butt.
I think the biggest factor for the decline of night raves is just that people are more health conscious and night raves takes a lot of toll on the body.
I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that.
Women went along with it because, well, what was the alternative, and the contemporary culture encouraged it.
Online dating has its problems, certainly, but the risks people took in the 70s, 80s, 90s were kind of insane by today's standards. And also the amount of unwanted attention women had to put up with. Sure, some of the attention was wanted, but surely not most of it.
And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.
999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.
And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.
I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.
Same as, until the Jet Age, the only alternative to risky world travel by land and sea was to stay home.. and then we invented jet airliners, which made travel multiple orders of magnitude safer than the Age of Sail.
I'm a neutral observer on this tbh, never had anything against bar culture at the time, but if you were a 19yr old weighing up your options today, online dating looks like the same potential reward without all sorts of down sides. Not just the personal safety stuff, but as a guy not having to run the gauntlet of approaching women and getting shot down (no big deal really, but cultural shifts now frown upon asking at all, whereas it used to be more a case of.. ask away, the important thing was to respect it if you got told no).
The flip side is that online dating results in a much more publicly conservative culture, where even merely flirting is at risk of being reframed as sexual misconduct, people have thinner skins and lower tolerance generally because they've never had to develop a thick skin, it takes some of the beautiful chaos out of the world.. people didn't go about the place constantly looking to hook up (well, maybe some did) but the very possibility added something to the atmosphere, even if the probability was low.
And on the subject of beautiful chaos. Take a look at video footage from major rock, pop and dance concerts/festivals from 2000 ish and today. Watch the crowds, look at their facial expressions, energy level, state of mind.
Something is up with that, right?
Clubs aren't really raves though. Yes, most single people going to clubs are looking to hook up - all a "club" really is, is a bar with a DJ. A real rave typically doesn't even sell alcohol. But I'd wager that most single people going to actual raves (in warehouses or outdoors) are either too high to even think about hooking up, or really are there for the music and to dance - at least through the 1990's and early 2000s. I'm in the latter group, I'm a guy who went to raves (in warehouses and outdoors) for the music, as did everyone else I knew. Nobody was trying to hook up, it was definitely about getting our dance on.
Right, most types of social gatherings have decreased over the past 15 years. Events that haven't fallen off are the noteworthy ones.
I think they just do different risk-taking behavior. Sports betting seems way more prevalent, and Gamblers Anonymous is reporting way more younger people attending meetings.
I raved back in the early 2000s and I still rave now and the popularity is absolutely booming in a way I've never seen before and in more parts of the world.
15 years ago there was zero electronic music events in Dubai, now there are huge electronic music festivals there and it's clear a ton of people at those events are taking "something" that isn't just booze. Even Saudi has had its first big EDM festivals, albeit I think they were no alcohol allowed.
EDM artists are more popular than ever and more and more of my friends are getting into EDM and going to EDM festivals like Tomorrowland, Mysteryland, ADE, etc.
Friday, Saturday club attendance has been dropping across the world, and many electronic music focused club venues have shut down (at least in Australia and the UK).
My word association of "rave" is "festival" though. Festivals feel like they're still booming, or at least not in dramatic decline.
From a small personal sampling: Coachella, Portola, Outside Lands, Proper, Lightning in a Bottle, festivals are still going strong. For some (Coachella, Lightning in a Bottle) attendance felt like it dropped 2023 -> 2024, but perhaps 10-20%, and this is likely economically correlated (inflation, etc). Late 2024- festivals (Portola, Proper) were packed.
hehe, my definition of a rave is a temporary venue where at least 2 people have asked if you need help finding Molly.
There is a bisect of "festival" goers and "ravers", but many ravers are priced out of festivals, but may attend raves weekly or monthly.
Both of these imho, are different than your traditional licensed club that primarily serves alcohol and is 21+ exclusive.
I sure hope not
https://www.kuow.org/stories/under-the-bridge-a-portrait-of-...
With mixed results, it kind of burned the spot by virtue of being talked about in too wide an audience but I think it's also important to make it known to the mainstream that this kind of stuff is happening.
All that's needed to make a rave happen is music & speakers, scale and quality is all configurable. Humans will always find spaces to congregate: whether it's their own houses, local parks, abandoned warehouses, industrial districts, or deep in the woods. I hope we're not losing our drive to be around eachother and dance, it's been such a integral part of my life story (as a fairly young person!) and has let me find my people.
I'm gonna dump a little bit with the blind hope that someone can explain what I'm feeling. Not meaning to disrespect you mjsir, but this thread just has the right context:
I'm in my 30s and I have never danced, I don't dance, I think of myself as not having the brain lobe for dancing. I've done choreographed dancing like tap dancing and pole dancing, but I don't dance dance. I don't want to dance, but people keep saying it's essential to the human experience. So I would prefer either dancing or knowing for sure that I don't need it, over my current state of anxious uncertainty.
I don't find places to congregate, I don't know if I've found my people at all, and I feel like my life story is incomplete when I come to these threads on the nerd computer-touching website and see people say that raves are so important. I'm a nerd's nerd, one of my fondest memories is staying up all night alone in my room playing with threads and sockets in Java as a teen. I've had 3 romantic partners, 1 asked me out, 2 I met on a dating site. I do not approach people in real life. I barely live in real life.
This feeling that I'm missing out on something and unsure if I want it, peaked earlier this year when I dated a girl who was just a hundred times cooler than me. A chill go-with-the-flow hippie literal surfer type. When I think about her I have to wonder what the fuck is wrong with me. She did not stick around, and I've been left with the sense that I'm living my entire life wrong.
Can anyone relate?
I can relate with everything you have said and my life experience seems to be similar to yours. When I was younger in the 90s I forced myself to go clubbing a few times. I hated everything about it, frankly. Even so, I can't help but feel like I'm missing out on important life experiences when I read comments here.
But I think it's important to keep in mind that threads like these suffer from selection bias because, objectively speaking, most people in real life do not go clubbing or raving in their adulthood...
For a lot folks, partnered dance forms are nothing short of life changing, and they tend to appeal to analytical introverts; if you haven't tried already, go sign up for your local lindy hop lessons, and keep your expectations low. There's no downside, at the very least you'll get some exercise.
At least we still have plenty of forest areas to renegade in.
Give it two years or so to fade. There’s just not enough low cost big spaces to hold shit in.
People who love the music will go their for the music and will keep going. Social media folks that go there for the drugs and epic party will lose interest, because it's not as epic as they think it is.
Apart from that other alternative clubs are just doing fine (I am going mostly to drum and bass parties). Even though they got less. But I think the club dying there was because of other reasons, not the missing audience
On the other hand real raves don't happen in legal venues. I've partied in warehouses, upscale restaurants, artist studios, roller skating rinks, movie theaters, hotels, apartments. I threw parties on the lightship Nantucket (LV-112), although those were day parties. But none of these events would be factored into the financial times reporting.
Some of the evidence presented by the article is compelling but just don't think they can draw real conclusions about the state of nightlife with such a limited perspective.
But yeah, the decline of the nightlife and hospitality sector is what this article is about, as the regulated rave experience is very mainstream and has been for a long time now
The production value is quite high now and still improving so I don't see why the illicit rave experience would be so interesting when the facilities would be so lacking in comparison. There are lots of electronic dance music events on boats, cruiseliners, retired battleships and more.
Music festivals are bigger than ever though, and they are so frequent and numerous that you can go as frequently as people were going to clubs. I have multiple friend groups where that’s all they do and it is far more intense than just being out passed 3am, although many do officially end their main programming at 1am, many don’t.
But sure you go mass appeal and you get a manufactured mass appeal vibe, which on the scale of rave vibes is a 3 or 4 and the scale is exponential.
If you don't know you don't know but it's worth checking it out if you can.
to me, rave is about PLUR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PLUR
"No judgements" is not something I would attribute to legal venues. I mean there are SOOOOOOOO many clubs with dress codes, and that's just scratching the surface.
It is my understanding that rave culture evolved out of the 90's illegal party scene which grew from the 80's acid house music scene. But even if you take it from the Acid Tests that would mean the parties were only legal for a year and have been illegal for nearly 60 years.
To some a rave is just any party, to me it refers to the event being a grassroots operation. For the people, by the people and which is usually done on the cheap because artists aren't usually rolling in dough.
To each their own though. I'm not gonna police your use of the word (unless you publish it apparently).
I swear if you strip away legal pot and LGBTQ rights (not saying those are bad) we have culturally returned to the 1950s. This is a very conservative period with little interest in or tolerance for actual outside-the-lines culture or experience.
I have noticed that after normalizing anything, counterculture areas of California will always have something even more unfamiliar trying to get tolerated and representation
But I don’t see what you’re referring to
I think there is a disinterest in illicit raves because the market has reached parity and beyond for the experience that the market actually enjoyed. If it fails to do that or the illegal raves are better again, I think there is still interest in that, far bigger than whatever was happening in the 90s
Loads of people have commented on these trends. I’m not pointing out anything new, but I do think a lot of people don’t see it because it’s hidden behind a facade of very visible socially liberal movements that garner attention out of proportion to their numbers. These folks do not represent the mean or the median of the culture.
If you are in the Bay Area or LA or really any metro California city that isn’t a deep suburb your experience might be different. These areas have always been more liberal than the average and enduringly so. The SF Bay was where gay people could go back when there was not just a strong taboo but in many cases real persecution.
Edit: with the last election I think the conservative zeitgeist is going to finally crest, and probably inspire a backlash that will start the pendulum going the other way. Things like politics are the lagging end. There’s also a backlash brewing against social media including dating apps, which are one of the drivers for both youth alienation and promulgation of reactionary attitudes. Right wing cultural fear mongering has excellent memetic fitness on social media.
The decline in sexual experience is occurring in California metros too. Its really interesting how the behaviors have shifted and surprising to me. But people are bonding, social, far less exclusionary, inclusive to things they’ve never heard of - unless you’re the wrong star sign, ironically, or political party.
I date 20-somethings, it’s just different than what I see with people I grew up with. I would say chronic anxiety and demisexuality are common, the most notable to me, and drive a lot of these shifts. But the libidos are there, their age-peers don’t know what they’re doing with really offputting habits or aren’t as interested either. I just cant extrapolate a real exclusionary streak from conservative leanings. Your algorithm is just cooked right now.
These things are very different and do not belong in the same list, and I've noticed that when people do put them together, they're often trying to make the point that political party is just another arbitrary inherent attribute like race, rather than a serious reflection of someone's character. Can you explain why you think they belong together?
Just because certain media outlets brainwashed you into thinking that Republican == Nazi (they all backpedaled after the election ended by the way) doesn't mean it's true. Go talk to actual people with blue collar jobs. You'll find that their character is quite all right actually.
I know, you'll have a knee-jerk reaction to the above. Let me illustrate the point. 100% of "white people are oppressors" rhetoric comes from the left. By your logic, no white person should vote Democrat. Ah, but you'll say that not everyone on the left is hung up on this, not everyone is actually an oppressor, and we can all get along. Well, the same point applies to the right and misogynists then, doesn't it?
When we're older, then political affiliation starts reflecting more on a persons character. Then we've all been through (or should have been through) the different situations where politics have a real world impact on our lives that we can understand and relate to.
The chronic anxiety you mention, as well as the pervasive loneliness and depression I observe, seems to indicate a lack of healthy and supportive social bonds.
I can see that there are plenty of other people who would have more difficult doing this by nature of not attracting positive attention and interest by default.
Do we have statistics on sex from the age of opium? (Gen Z is the first smartphone-with-unregulated-social generation.)
Can I push back just a bit. I'm the parent of a teenager and we've had the talk. The kids are alright. When I was a teen I felt everyone felt pressure to be sexually active. While the boys carried the brunt of peer pressure it was the girls who had to deal with the actual fallout. Todays teens are dealing with a lot right now. And my impression is they have a healthier relationship with sex then our generation ever did. Girls have agency, and outside of the social media chucklefucks it's taboo to be serial sexual harasser and be treated with any sort of respect.
But that kind of intersects with my next point. There is this vast number of basically hikikomori out there, not to mention lots of mostly boys with very screwed up images of sex from early and uncritical consumption of porn and “masculinity” grifter bullshit. It’s from among these groups that every sort of toxic authoritarian movement is drawing its support.
There’s a lot more unhealthy antisocial stuff out there, and overall I think it’s worse. It’s become more extreme. There isn’t a middle. Young people are either healthy today or they are fucked.
But a more publicly observable and, obviously, very adjacent indicator is kissing.
Time was, you'd see a lot of people kissing in public. Not just quick ones either. Pretty normal to walk past bars and there'd be a couple (or more than one) making out by the smoking area. Same in bars beyond a certain time of night, same in a lot of city parks. Sometimes even on the subway. Teenagers walking home from nights out or drinking in the park. (Legal here in the UK and not frowned upon like in the US). In the middle of club or festival crowds.
And whether you think that's cool or gross, there's notably less of it around, and that's been a trend for quite some time.
Maybe the 70s through 90s was an anomaly, it would have been heavily frowned upon before that, but something certainly changed in the mid/late 00s.
Like racism?
Whoops, not that kind of outside-the-lines, buddy! We only do the certified kind of transgressions here!
A few reasons:
1. security at official music events are often complete arseholes and can totally destroy the vibe. Think of all the row rent chip on their shoulder wannabe cops, then place them in a field of drunk partying adults with complete power and almost zero oversight (+)
2. Advertising everywhere
3. Massively overpriced food and drink
(+) While I fully understand that once you've got multiple thousands of humans in a field, you do need security, at small illegal raves - say a few hundred people - there's no need and the vibe without feeling like you're being watched is spectacular.
Regarding expense: not everyone is broke. And many people have shifted their budget to exclusively going to music festivals. I know lots of people that scoff at the idea of going to a nightclub or “going out” at all, but praise and prioritize going to music festivals. Even more are on payment plans for festival tickets far in advance, they are confident they can sell them at a premium if they don't go.
I’m just reporting what I’m seeing and applying market dynamics to it.
Given the tension with “wooks” that bum their way to the bigger festivals and have little to support themselves or any integration into society, I see intentional segregation with the current generation of festivals goers that supports an intentional interest in paying a premium for the exclusion it comes with. Event groups found that pool of wealth and demand, and are capitalizing on it to its extreme. But this crowd is really not trying to be around the other budget conscious crowd at the warehouse and barnyard, and there are plenty of good vibes to be had - you just choose which festival has the vibe you like. if one is too fratty for you, or has too many influencers, then you can still go to the “PLUR” one.
On the other hand - saying this as a former tech guy for illegal raves - even in small raves below 100 people in attendance there's so much potential for shit to go seriously wrong. Obviously substance consumption related issues ranging from ODs over contaminants to mixture effect amplifications, that's the most pressing issue, but you also have your fair share of travel accidents aka someone tripping over tree branches, and you will always have a few people (mostly male, but also a few female) who won't understand borders in all possible ways if they're not sober.
Back then a lot of that dark shit was swept under the rug, let us be very clear here. That's the sad price to pay for fly-by-night events without proper security, EMS and whatnot else that is required for licensed events.
As for people not understanding boundaries, small groups of adults, up to a couple of hundred, are generally self policing. I've witnessed a couple of guys being forceably ejected from gatherings, but over the hundred or so I've probably attended in my life (raves I mean) I've only seen this being required a couple of times.
There will always be people attracted to the underground scene where the production value doesn't rank higher than the energy on the dancefloor.
It's good to have both options but they are very different experiences, the mainstream stuff with high production value is a show, it's meant for people who are going to parties to see specific artists and their shows.
That experience is quite opposite of what a good underground rave is, it's much more raw, less concerned about the surface-level showmanship; artists are there to provide a journey to the ones on the dancefloor but not to be the main star, the main star is supposed to be the party itself.
I really enjoy much more the experience of the underground scene, I don't see phones up in the air recording, I don't see people staring at a light show/screens with AV, the experience of getting lost with a crowd of people, all dancing, interacting among each other.
Personally I think it's quite good to have the mainstream scene, it filters out quite a lot of people who wouldn't belong in an underground rave.
I do not find it surprising. When I was younger (college age and soon after), I wanted events to start sooner and late events oftentimes discouraged me. It sucked even at that age. It is one thing to start dancing at 8pm and have endurance till the early morning, because you feel like it and have nothing to do the next day. And something completely different if you have to wait till 1am till the event starts. You get tired and dumber the next day, but the amount of dancing you got in exchange is just lower.
I was not using stimulants or anything like that and frankly, dropping amount of stimulants use among young people would explain larger younger crowd at earlier events.
As a millennial in Belgium, my parties started no earlier than 23:00 and ended at 05:00. But maybe it makes sense that this is disappearing? My parents started partying at 19:00
>One executive in the entertainment industry said younger people were less inclined to go out raving until 6am as they were more health conscious and less frivolous with money than previous generations
This is the same generation that has 12 step skincare routines, eats only organic food, chooses to vape or zyn rather than smoke because of secondhand smoke, everyone has an Apple watch on their wrist tracking calories, etc.
If anything I’m surprised that binge drinking and going out late as survived as long as it has.
And as far as the money comment, this generation is not less frivolous there’s just less money to go around haha.
There's nothing wrong with it (quite the opposite), but keep in mind that this is not a normal thing. Most generations didn't act like this.
And the generation after us will probably think we were dumb about stuff as well (eg. social media, disinfo, Delta9, etc).
In Australia, nightclub entry can be expensive, ranging from $20-50 per club. 10 years ago, you’d club hop, maybe going to 3-4 clubs from 11pm until 7am. These days, it’s not worth it. Drinks are like $12-16 for a basic mixed drink. A lot of patrons just drink at home, then drink (free) water and take MDMA and/or ketamine at clubs, which is significantly cheaper than a night of buying drinks.
I've also anecdotally seen more day parties which might be driven by demand from the former rave crews who are aging out.
Did that journey recently with a Canadian friend who moved here as his welcome party :) On nothing stronger than booze, too!
I miss the pre COVID Vegas style nightclubs in the Meatpacking District. Yes, crowded and aggressive bouncers who make up the door policy on the spot, but once you're in there's mesmerizing lighting and visual effects, top notch sound systems, the glitziness of bottle service, and the euphoric albeit predictable drops of EDM.
Different strokes!
it's also very hard for me to rationalize staying up until the main act comes on at 3-5am, getting home at 6am minimum. You waste most or all of the next day.
Miss me with the DJs wearing masks, the choreographed light shows, the bottle service, the $200 admission. Look at the schtick-lessness of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=608rs5kB9ns
Maybe i need to go to those different outdoor ones
I actually agree that the grunginess of Bushwick can be obnoxious and frankly gross a lot of the time, but the thought of hanging out with a bunch of cishet normies in an expensive SoHo club is anathema to why I would even go out in the first place.
That said, in the UK for a good while now a lot of places are closed at midnight, on paper to prevent excessive drinking and nighttime troubles. In practice people just drink more and earlier in the day.
Perhaps a perfect storm… 90s/00s ravers are older now and appreciate the loer impact on the rest of their week of starting and finishing earlier and the younger generation is less into the wilder side of partying, so noon – midnight perhaps works out better for everyone a lot of the time.
At the same time, according to the article, it seems that larger one off events or festivals are still very popular. So the kids still want to dance.
I see illegal dance parties in the countryside more than ever
Who's attending these? Is it mainly the old timers or are they attracting a strong following from new generations?
Mostly 20somethings as far as I have seen; invites are word of mouth (aka Whatsapp) and we stumble on them because we hike around a lot and then have a chat. This is during the day when the partygoers are chilling out usually.
Oldtimers are mostly dancing in local bars to small cover bands. Also until the early morning usually and no coke/speed, but just beer/spirits.
I guess since they used "rave", people assume they use the commonly understood definition of the word, not just "dancing at a random dance-club in the city", which I don't think many would consider "raving".
> Who's attending these? Is it mainly the old timers or are they attracting a strong following from new generations?
Here in Spain there is a wide range of folks attending dance parties both the ones in/around big cities, and the ones out on the country-side. Obviously, the ones out on the country-side tend to have a crowd that is more "hippie" for the lack of better words, but otherwise I see all types of ranges and people from different walks of life. Mostly skew around my own age I think though, around 30 or so.
yea, this article has unfortunately fallen foul of the 'headline doesn't match the article' problem. Seems to be a common problem these days when the headline writer is judged by how many clicks their headline gets, rather than if it's actually relevant to the article.
the rent
There was obviously a pause during COVID and a slow ramp after, but it's been back to normal for about 1.5 years now.
I also see more electronic artists playing gigs all over the world, more people getting into DJ'ing or electronic music production, and there are more EDM artists getting hugely popular in the mainstream, see acts like Fred Again.
One, I hated the term "raving". I was thought raves were finding an abandoned house, playing music and drugs. I just like the music and don't need the dance clubs or the drugs.
But with the said, I think the "club" scene has dropped off. Expensive drinks. Expensive covers. Who wants that.
Has the music droppped off? I think it kind of merged into more mainstream music.
I went out to one of those giant clubs in Brooklyn not too long ago to see a friend DJ (Brooklyn Mirage). I was on guestlist, but the cover would have been $50. I bought a round of drinks to say thanks, and for three drinks I paid $75. Plus they made me load a credit card on some stupid wristband to even get the drinks. What 20-something can afford to do that with any regularity? Their rent is already 2-3x what I paid when I moved to Brooklyn nearly 20 years ago.
I don't buy the "young kids don't want to go out late anymore". They just never encountered scenes that were consistently relaxed, fun, and cheap.
You like sports? Well, you need a subscription to see their away games, a subscription to see their home games, and a separate subscription to see their games in season, and a subscription to see their off season. You want to see them in person? well.....
You like music? Well, the cost of a ticket to see your favorite artist is $80 + $60 in fees. Online purchase fee. Printing fee. Seat Reservation fee. etc.
Wanna go out for a few drinks? That'll be $8 for shitty beer on tap
Want to go anywhere? Time to reserve your parking spot, or pay your parking ticket. Public transport outside NY? lol. Can't really get drunk or high now either since you need to kinda be sober enough to get back. Or fuck it! Uber and pay an extra $50 in surge charge fees!
Want to go to the museum on the weekend while you visit a city? Well, too bad, it's very congested so the museum has surge charged the price of the ticket to $70 (the Shedd Aquarium special in Chicago).
I'm good I think I'll just stay home and jerk off
Exactly. There's a fine line between convenience and the cost of doing it yourself, like getting a decent smash burger or firing half of the devops team.
The most ridiculous thing is having venues trying to casually extort you at every possible opportunity, without the implicit advantage of a few very subtle but 'approved' dealers lurking around while making sure everybody is having a safe but very fun time.
It's like an escalator to nowhere
Practically every 20-something (and just as many 30+ somethings) I know in NYC DO do this very regularly, especially if they already live in wburg/bushwick. If they're not there, they're mixing it up at nowadays.
There were definitely expensive clubs that kids with money went to when I was young -- a friend ran sound at The Box and that was always wildly priced. But there was no shortage of illegal parties in warehouses with cheap drinks and no cover on the williamsburg waterfront and out in Bushwick in the early 2000s for the weirdos. Even met my wife at one.
The DeBlasio administration was the first to add a "night mayor", and they made it easier to open legit venues in the same neighborhoods that used to host the illegal warehouse parties, like that triangle just west of Flushing avenue centered around the Morgan L train stop, where Elsewhere and The Brooklyn Mirage among a few other big, high priced venues are now.
In exchange for making it easier to open more venues and have more legal dance parties, they cracked down on the illegal parties pretty hard. This had the effect of pushing the prices up, changing the scene and crowd, and introducing more regulations. Before, you had to be a little more plugged in to know when and where the parties were because they were "underground" (but only a little). You could also reliably dance until 6 or 7am and buy all the alcohol you wanted whenever.
Now, these parties are way more mainstream so people who are less enthusiastic about dancing show up because it's something accessible to do, and everything must legally shut down at 4.
I remember being excited that things were going legit because I thought it would make the parties that I frequented better, but now with the benefit of hindsight over the past 8 or so years, I think it's had a negative impact on the scene, along with all the other issues related to the ubiquity of cell phones and the changing gen z tastes.
I still long fondly for Bushwick circa 2012, but it might just be more "Back in my day..." nostalgia.
With insane ticket, cover and drink costs. People would rather stay in and do something cheaper.
I will say the underground scene is thriving because of this though.
Plus the bombed out building post war Berlin industrial feel is 1. Real, and 2. free for the promoter and the drinks are cheaper there. Yes, that's real barbed wire, and yes, its really electrified.
Drinks were a lot cheaper, but for most of us, it was drinking store bought drinks outside, then going in and having one or two drinks inside.
Now, an event like this, 60eur+ (~15 kebabs) for less known DJs, and you can't even sit down at a table/booth, you need to reserve those in advance and pay like 300eur (+ tickets.. but you get a bottle of cheap vodka and like 4 redbulls in the price). And it's a night club, a few tables and benches were always a must for those who either drank a bit too much or took a bit too much of the happy pills.
Completely agreed on the terminology. When I got into the scene (late 90s, Philly and Baltimore), everyone legit totally avoided saying "rave" or "raving" when talking with other folks in the scene. We all just said "party", and it was clear what you were talking about based on context (and, for better or worse, clothing style). No one said "ravers" either, it was always "party kids" instead, at least among the younger end of the crowd.
"Party" could interchangeably refer to either a "one-off" event or a club weekly/monthly, and similarly made no connotations as to whether or not the venue was licensed/above-board. Unlicensed one-offs were referred to as "outlaw", "warehouse party", etc. There were also unlicensed venues which threw regular weekly/monthly parties and these were absolutely amazing, so I'm a bit perplexed by the folks here saying a "real" rave is only an unlicensed one-off.
In any case, in my area, as a term "rave" was largely only used by news media, law enforcement, and outsiders who completely misunderstood what the scene was about. The only major exception was internet discussions – web sites like ravelinks.com, newsgroups like alt.rave. But even there, "rave" in the name just helped people find the sites, and still wasn't a term thrown around much in actual discussions.
> Has the music droppped off?
No, it's better than ever in my opinion, especially for non-mainstream house-adjacent music. There are a ton of talented producers who are seamlessly merging many genres and influences... folks are combining classic UK rave synths (well, really from Belgian New Beat originally) with Italo-disco, or taking trance and adding in happy hardcore elements, etc. Many classic samples and sounds, but given a new twist, it's great.
That said, I used to be a major drum and bass head back in the day, but largely lost interest in that genre as it became less danceable over the years. Not to mention my knees aren't what they used to be...
Over in Japan the term was party people which slurred into pary people and finally paripi which is the term today.
Just some interesting culture from the other side of the pond.
Looking back on "Trance" and "House" as genres they seem really vapid, vain, and dare I say it, decadent. Reading about the "mecca" of these genres, Ibiza, makes me wish I'd never listened to this stuff growing up.
Do you wish you’d never listened to Mozart? He was a serial misogynist after all.
I can understand parents not wanting their children to listen to music with explicit lyrics, but for an adult to feel this way?
Music is not decadent.
It can be. Primitive music eliciting primitive emotions is certainly decadent.
Sure you can organise raves in illegal locations but a club can still be about the music and can be a more sustainable “home” for the music.
Sure it’s a lot more expensive but then again everything is - the clubs just need to survive somehow.
Tbh I live in Berlin, where rave culture is most alive probably
But yes, every other day of the week, it's like a restaurant that serves music, the machine must go on, rent gets paid, food in bellies etc.
There’s still plenty of “underground” dance music and events going on.
The main stream stuff is just another sub genre of electronic music.
I've never done any kind of "party drug" [1], and I think that party drugs have to be a requirement for me to enjoy something like that (at least for someone as awkward as me). Repetitive music that's so loud it hurts, not being able to talk to people, close contact to strangers of questionable hygiene; it's hard for me to even imagine how anyone could enjoy it.
I suspect that there are a lot of people like me who are finally being honest with themselves and acknowledging that they don't actually enjoy the entire club scene. Obviously if you like it, don't let me take it away from you, but one of the best parts of reaching age 30 for me was that no one expects or wants me to go to a club with them now.
[1] The only "recreational drugs" I've ever done are alcohol and caffeine, and I haven't had alcohol in quite awhile.
My dad is an outlier who managed to never have any issues thankfully, but there is a pretty strong history of addiction (mostly alcoholism, but other stuff too) on my dad's side of the family, and as such I've always treated drugs pretty cautiously.
In fact, I've been absolutely cranking this[1] crazy shit on repeat for weeks now and have been sober each time! The mixing, the flow, and the leftfield-weirdness of the whole thing hits my soul juuuuuuust right.
So, we're out there. Much of the people who regularly support the scene are also often sober, or don't regularly party hard. Check your preconceived notions and blanket generalizations at the door, please, and then try coming out to a show. We'd be happy to show you how things actually are. :)
[1]https://soundcloud.com/dkmntl/azu-tiwaline-at-lentekabinet-2...
That said, I think that a possible explanation for the decline in club popularity is that a lot of people don't actually like it unless they're on drugs. Not just the music, but the whole club scene. It might be an acquired taste, entirely possible, but it's not a taste I ever felt the need to acquire.
Not quite apples to apples, but similar, about a year ago I realized that I actually don't like living in NYC. Moreover, I realized that I never really liked it, and I had been trying to convince myself that I did for the last decade. I don't like how expensive it is, I don't like going to bars, I don't like hipster art stuff, I do like the train, but not having a car is still inconvenient, etc. There's a million things that I know a lot of people in NYC really like (and more power to them if they do), but I do think that if people were more honest with themselves there would be a lot fewer people living in this city.
This[1] is a good example of what that kinda music sounds like, he's one of my favorite DJs/producers out there. I suspect it might still not be for you, and that's totally fine! This shit deeeeeeefinitely isn't for everyone. :)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYS3OUKKGqc
Edit: And as an aside, I'm with ya on NYC. Every time I visited, all of my NYC friends would just regale me, and themselves, with stories about finding places to live and what they have to deal with living there. I don't understand it.
I liked some stuff more than others, but never really clicked with any of it.
Just to be clear, not claiming that the stuff I listen to is "objectively" better or anything. 90+% of what I listen to is garage-punk stuff like NOFX or Misfits, which is its own kind of trash. It's just jived better for me (doesn't hurt that I was exposed to it much younger).
I don't regret moving to NYC, when I did it was probably an economically-ok decision; a lot more high-paying tech jobs here than in Dallas (where I lived before), and there are parts I still like about it, but there were definitely other parts that I was lying to myself about for a long time.
Though I will admit, I think a good chunk of that is that I've just been here too long. I probably should move... I just need to convince my employer to let me go full-remote.
If you have SiriusXM their Chill station plays this type of music.
One of my favorite DJs is Nora En Pure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nora_En_Pure
It is amusing to me that she was born after I graduated high school.
I think sober partying and daytime partying are a good trend in general. I love taking drugs occasionally, but I like to party every weekend.
I enjoy electronic music. I enjoy dancing. I absolutely hated the club scene every time I went. All the ones I went to were in dark and fairly disgusting venues, where people spent hours moving back and forth between sitting around getting drunk with music blasting so loud you couldn't have a conversation, and awkwardly moving around a crowded dance for floor. As the other person said, it was hard to see how anyone was actually enjoying the situation, particularly considering everyone was paying a good deal of money and screwing up their sleep schedule for it.
I can get enjoying electronic music and dancing to it, but the club scene always seemed immensely unappealing.
For me personally, I've always found it kinda funny how much I love those spaces. I generally have a strong dislike of crowds, large masses of people, yadda yadda. My primary happy places are at home all cozy with my family, and out in the mountains backpacking in the wilderness far away from a single soul.
But my third happy place is something akin to a dilapidated warehouse or building that is being used as an unlicensed venue for incredibly loud, repetitive music. The room is packed, with just enough room for cutting a rug, there's sweat on the walls, it's pitch dark save for a single red light over the DJ booth and there's not a snowball's chance in hell that you'll be able to chat with the person next to you. You're stepping in something wet and sticky, who the fuck knows what's on your shoes.
Get the music just right and I'll lose myself in that crowd and cathartically dance my ass off all night long.
Edit: I think part of it is that I've always found the existence of such underground spaces to be super cool. I like to experience things like that that are just below the surface of "normal society".
And while we are at it, alcohol use will be correlated to dancing itself. It helps to loose inhibitions a lot of us just would not overcome without it. Same deal.
For a festival that's proper shit without drugs, try Oktoberfest here in Munich.
I also don't line raves, but that makes me dislike them even more. So the point of "raves" is to get drugged while doing something you don't enjoy? Would you allow your kids to go to one?
Fortunately I think you're exaggregating or your experience is an outlier and people actually go there to have fun listening to loud music (while sometimes, indeed, using drugs).
Honestly, I'm in my mid-30's, I think that I'm too old to "start" doing this stuff. In a lot of cases (and this is still something I'm not 100% used to), people look to me as the "grown up" in the room, for better or worse.
>Honestly, I'm in my mid-30's, I think that I'm too old to "start" doing this stuff.
Certainly not, you are still young :)
I've been reducing my caffeine intake, and I don't drink alcohol. I don't even eat sweets anymore. I'm basically a square now; too old to do this stuff.
Never too late to find out what a flood of serotonin feels like.
Yeah but don't take pressed pills, take M crystals as they are the pure form.
You can get them for free and/or low cost, https://endoverdose.net
What was it that was keeping you from being honest with yourself about that? I figured out pretty quickly that the whole club/dance/nightlife scene was just not compatible with my particular personality and haven't had any trouble simply avoiding it.
I have some friends who have stopped going, and while they won't come out an admit it, I think they were lying to themselves about enjoying it. I kind of got the impression that nothing about them "changed" to where they don't enjoy it anymore, just that they finally realized that they're not "missing something", and that they simply don't enjoy it.
Closest personal analog I can think of: It took me about ten years to realize that I don't actually enjoy living in NYC, and that I never enjoyed it. I had been trying to convince myself that it was fun, and I don't think I ever actually liked living here.
ETA:
I forgot to actually state my main point.
I think a lot of people want to like going to clubs, because their friends say they like going. I have some friends that I think actually enjoy it (though they always took a drug before going), and the few times I've gone I've tried my best to keep an open mind.
The thing about the drugs is it only heightens the experience. It's like salt on your food. The ingredients still have to be good. I found the drugs made it great but that's because I loved it anyway. I've never understood people who say "you have to be on drugs to enjoy it". The only drug like that is alcohol, the drug that numbs you enough to make deeply unpleasant situations tolerable.
For me the great thing about 30+ is not having to go to alcohol venues and do all the various pre-mating rituals. But I also don't go clubbing any more because I go to bed before midnight. Still love the music though (trance, as played by Oakenfold and Paul van Dyk).
I tend to make jokes when I'm nervous, so the awkwardness wasn't really a problem for doing that, but it wouldn't work if the jokes are inaudible.
It doesn't help that I have never really felt comfortably being physically close to strangers. I'll put up with it on the subway, but that's a purely utilitarian thing. I suspect alcohol would help with that, but I don't drink anymore (and never drank that much).
I certainly don't want to diminish your enjoyment for this, I'm just saying that every time I've gone to a club it's the worst moment of my life. I absolutely hate everything about it.
[1] This isn't meant as self-deprecating or fishing for compliments, I'm perfectly happy with my body. I just acknowledge that I was probably never going to be a male model.
I was at one a couple of weekends ago, 11pm - 4am.
A good mix of ages too, people clearly in their 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s. Everyone having a great time, I would guess at least 70% of the people were on something too, (MDMA, Ecstasy etc).
(Neither really my scene).
MDMA/molly is usually in crystal/powder form, with the idea that it is more pure.
But how drugs are called on the street and what they are in reality is constantly changing, there are countless myths, and dealers are not exactly a reliable source of information regarding what they sell.
In reality, that's essentially the same thing. If you look at https://www.drugsdata.org/ you will see that it is mostly just MDMA, the form doesn't matter much.
why?
even though MDMA is the real technical name (and Molly + Ecstasy are nicknames), the name "Ecstasy" is kinda misleading because it's usually MDMA mixed with other stuff, and that's not always good...
the name "Molly" has a pure vibe to it. It's like a warm hug from a friend.
Dr. Andrew Huberman said in his video that MDMA is not actually ecstastic, rather it produce warm feelings and promote inner acceptance and peaceful connections with others.
MDMA is typically just that one substance in crystalline powder form.
Drug pro-tip: anything powder is garbage, crack comes in rocks (crack users aren't all that picky though, from beeswax to swiss cheese to chalk, from white as snow to bright yellow, usually off-white, it comes in a variety of appearances and textures and users savor the cut - the most favored stuff is usually not the purest), coke comes in chunks (white, off-white, even yellowish, good quality stuff has a flaky structure and pearlescent shine), heroin comes in chunks (from white to tan to black, occasionally gooey), weed comes in nuggets (but used to come in chunks, maybe still does if reggies/illegal weed still exists in your area), meth is long usually clear crystals, molly is shorter and more cuboid crystals, usually colored (pink, tan/brown, only very rarely clear).
Anyway, regarding the difference between ecstasy and MDMA, from personal experience, I cannot remember a time when the effects were the same. Every time I took a pill, the effect was totally different from MDMA. MDMA provided a more 'pure' experience, whereas with advertised 'ecstasy' pills, I experienced hallucinations, memory loss, and a very heavy hangover.
The demographic is definitely millennial, with maybe ~25% being Gen Z.
It's also definitely not... popular. The biggest nights have a _way_ smaller turnout than college bars or city clubs. I'm not sure how strong the crowd actually was 10-20 years ago, but these clubs aren't in the mainstream appeal. Maybe from lack of marketing, maybe taste+preference.
Like the other person said, house proud is probably my favorite. If you see a tall thin guy likely wearing a sweater and hat, say hey to me!
A clubbing lifestyle where you're out every weekend isn't healthy, but festivals on weekends every other month are doable. Society seems much more health aware these days due to social media and the web in general.
Clubs in cities that have existed for decades get yeeted out of their rental contracts as there is no renter protection for commercial rental contracts - once it expires or gets terminated under the provisions of the contract (usually because some hipster shithole is willing to pay even more money), that's it. Others lose their license because people moving from the countryside can't cope with the noise and call the police all the time.
Clubs in rural areas almost don't exist anymore because of rural flight eliminating a lot of the customer base and what remains gets taken off the road by DUI enforcement.
That leaves illegal outdoor raves, and team 1312 has been aggressively beating down on these even over a decade ago when I was the tech guy for a local rave group. It's not made easier by the fact that there will always be some dumbasses dragging their minor siblings with them and other people not caring whom they sell MDMA and whatnot to, so you'll inevitably get into trouble for that as well.
Cinemas and concerts are in the same boats.
With the cost of essentials through the roof spending $$$ for a night out is now a periodic luxury rather than every Saturday night.
Here, this isn't an environment to chat someone up in:
Raves are and always have been about dancing. The creeps walking around looking for hookups are just that, a bunch of weird creeps that annoy people trying to dance.
Edit: To clarify, it's creepy becaucse a lot of people are on something and pretty vulnerable, they're there to dance and enjoy the music and now some creep is trying to get in their pants while they're rolling and drunk
I don't think that's an appropriate way to frame it.
Don't find romantic partners at raves, that's creepy, people are there to dance.
Don't find romantic partners at night clubs, that's creepy, people are there to dance.
Don't find romantic partners at public places, that's creepy, people don't want to be bothered in public.
Don't find romantic partners among friends, now you're ruining all the friendships.
Do stay locked up inside and try to find romantic partners between advertisements, by swiping on a screen three thousand times. That's more efficient and won't risk you wasting any productive time that you in fact owe to the government, to shareholders and to pensioners. It's actually quite outrageous that some young people are trying to escape their productivity duties and even risk forming long term relationships and having children, which is literally taking food out of the mouths of the elderly. They need your tax dollar, stop wasting time!
There is always someone looking to vibe with a positive-energy person they met that night. Sometimes it leads to more and sometimes you just dance all night, give a big hug, and never see each other again.
A nightclub is a location, a rave is a type of party where electronic DANCE music is played.
The idea of a rave is that people go there to DANCE to the electronic DANCE music. Not to hookup.
(In North America at least) A night club is a particular kind of venue, it's not just a location. It's very distinct from a rave, and they have very different cultures. It's confusing when you conflate the two.
Because the post is about raves. I responded to a comment about nightclubs in a post about raves, its implied then they're talking about raves in nightclubs, what else would they be talking about?
> (In North America at least) A night club is a particular kind of venue, it's not just a location. It's very distinct from a rave, and they have very different cultures. It's confusing when you conflate the two.
What the hell are you talking about, raves happen in nightclubs all the time (all over the US too). You are just making up your own definitions now.
Back in the day, there were rave/dance type clubs which were all about the dancing. They'd typically have focused genres of music, well known or regular DJs, etc.
Then there were more generic nightclubs (usually in University towns) which were where people went to either get drunk or hook up. Those would typically not focus much on music (usually playing crowd pleasers, 50s/60s/70s/80s/ tunes etc.), and instead bringing people in with cheap drinks offers, foam parties, fancy dress nights, etc.
(Better Watergate photos)
Berlin's famed nightclubs, losing customers, face an uncertain future (300 comments) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38151205
14 years ago - Berlins new techno beat. why international tech startups should move to berlin - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2729524 (Article is gone so not sure if it's a play on techno)
I think the owner of Watergate, felt it was a good time to retire from that anyway, but that isn't the case for the other spaces affected.
This page hasn't been updated in over 6 years but: https://padowatch.noblogs.org/
Things like this maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cuddle_party
As for modern electronic music, it became very dumb compared to oldschool techno of 90s, who even listens to that crap nowadays? Why someone would pay for loud noise?
Great fun.
And there's still nighttime ones (also great fun) and illegal ones (which look to also be great fun).
The demographic that has that energy are also the ones that skip on a cover charge as much as possible and pregame
I'm sure raving will come back in 20 years like most fashion.
That said, absolutely worth going to at least once, for everything else.
Accidental and deliberate surveillance is so common and cheap that this is no longer viable.
Place is cheap and kind of a shithole so it’s possible to open cool bars and late night music venues. People move there because it’s now a cool place. Prices go up. People complain about the noise from the venues. Venues close and are replaced with sterile overpriced crap. Place is now boring and expensive. See: Shoreditch as a fine example.
In recent years, the homeless situation has spiked with dozens and dozens of aggressive, clearly mentally unstable individuals at various locations in the area. On top of that, the clientele has changed as the university students choose to stay closer to campus has their local offerings have expanded. This new group of patrons has brought violence with shootings and assaults happening now that never happened before.
The city government has responded by capping alcohol sales at midnight and requiring any bars that stay open later to provide and pay for onsite security. This extra cost has essentially crippled the club / bar scene with many of them going out of business.
Wonder if anything similar is happening in other cities, with nightclubs bearing the brunt of the costs for increasing violence in their area.
Blackbird Ordinary, Miami. July 4th weekend.
Normal clubby kind of night. Then in comes a dude in bright ridiculous Uncle Sam gear, sparklers and all, making a spectacle of himself. All the phones come out.
Sigh. This is not the point of clubs/bars. You're mostly not supposed to be "seen" and certainly not like that.
Younger people don't seem to be going to these places nearly as much as generations past. I think a lot of this drop off can be attributed to Social Media & Tinder.
You don't need to go out to see your friends or find a date. So why bother? It's easier and cheaper to stay home.
There was also a intensive effort to kill nightclubs with lockout laws
I agree this loses some of the spirit of the original rave scene, but as an older person now it fits better for me. If the original late-night scene is dying it's because the younger generation doesn't care very much for this kind of night out.
It's 5pm on Sunday
No one knows we're dancing
Outside the sun is blinding
No one knows we're dancing
It is amazing all you come across if you spend a lot of time walking your dog.
But there was a real unfortunate one in Oslo. Someone had picked a local and found after a good deal of spelunking found that there was a huge cave farther in. They decided this was a prefect place for an illegal rave.
Got it all setup and running, people dancing.
However running electric diesel generator(s) in a cave with little access to fresh air was not the best idea someone came up with that year.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42352825
Nightclub stickers over smartphone rule divides the dancefloor (91 comments)
A group of sound systems put the word out that they're going to get together illictly in a field in some remote location. There's a number that attendees ring to get the location on the (first) night. It carries on all weekend or until the police convince everyone to leave.
I've been participating in Toronto version (TEMOM) and it's developed into a wonderful community.
If a rave is somewhere that your parents go, then it's naff.
It's also extremely expensive if it's legal. Everyone is brassic.
They use the most spurious justifications regarding newer commercial tenants and antisocial behaviour to deny the legacy cultural tenets their ability to operate as a late-night business from a licensing perspective.
(a demographic that includes myself fwiw)
You go see older commercial acts in the harder styles (Mauro Picotto, Jeff Mills, Richie Hawtin) and you'll see just how old and how hard those crowds go. The younger crowds tend to go more Business Techno or BoilerRoom madness - Amelie Lens, Charlotte de Witte to FredAgain/Overmono.
That said there is a noticeable difference between the infantilised and hyper-commercial 'PLUR-fest' nonsense in the US - focusing on kandi and costumes last seen in the happy hardcore scene in Europe 30 years ago. It's in stark contrast to the standard European Electronic music festival circuit and dedicated warehouse venues which definitely skew older.
I'd also highlight the average age of a 'raver' in Berlin is about 8 years older than that of a 'US' one. Average age to have a kid in Ireland is about 35. In the US it's 27. That goes a long way towards maintaining a scene!
Most parties were on ranches or in the middle of nowhere state land.
We lugged generators and DJ equipment and the parties were a few hundred people.
We camped out - it was a blast.
It was a community - you shared your food, drugs etc.
I never enjoyed the massive raves, thought they were too commercial.
Gen Z now is more into festivals. Back in the day multi-artist festivals were rare.
We're too overstimulated and numb to bother leaving the house. Why bother playing a game when you can watch someone play it for you on Youtube with less effort?
IMHO, "raves" are, or were, underground, unsanctioned, and generally illegal, whereas "clubs" are typically licensed and legal - in other words, expensive and lame. I went to raves back in the early-90s, and I can tell you, it was nothing like dance clubs of the last 10 years.
Like why aren't we listening to guitar solos, or 80s metal bands or grunge anymore? No one killed it
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criminal_Justice_and_Public_Or...
Most of the raves I attend now are on indigenous lands, it's definitely not mainstream, and I can party till morning.
Worth a watch!
There are raves like this all the time in Spain, Italy, France & Czech
I don't have a subscription to ft.com.
Is it "tastes change" or a sexier and clickbaitier mound of bullshit?
Quoting the bits that take stabs at explaining it:
> [Night-time consultancy co-founder] Leichsenring said venue owners were often closing their doors earlier to save on costs, as revenue from drink sales tended to drop off in the early morning hours.
> More restrictive licensing rules after Covid-19 have also become an issue for clubs and promoters in cities across the globe
> The increased popularity of daytime events and festivals is another factor
> One executive in the entertainment industry said younger people were less inclined to go out raving until 6am as they were more health conscious and less frivolous with money than previous generations
2 sounds like a bunch of bullshit. WHICH more restrictive licensing rules? WHERE were the rules made, everywhere? There are no new rules where I live. HOW did these mythical rules impact things? WHAT the fuck is this guy talking about?
3 and 4 are: tastes change. People don't like sock hops anymore the same way they don't like raves anymore.
I can tell from my personal experience that I stopped going because most club shows start earliest at 10 pm, and even then headliner probably goes on at 1, and that’s just not sustainable for me, especially if I wanted to take a risk and see someone I was 50/50 on.
I’m aging, I’m 29, I enjoy the morning a lot more than I used to. It’s just too exhausting. And if the music isn’t perfect, you’re left bored and exhausted. The venues are also way too crowded, drinks are expensive, it’s just not as good of a time as in smaller underground venues.
I’d rather go to a show during the day, or early evening and HAVE and they’ve been GREAT but house and techno acts are compelled to start after midnight, and I will probably never go to one of those again.
I'm not sure if I have gotten more picky about music than I used to be - I certainly remember getting into ridiculous arguments over sub-sub-subgenres back in the 90s - but when I was younger perhaps I was simply a bit more tolerant of dancing to music that wasn't exactly what I liked? Or maybe I was so full of energy and excitement about going out in the first place that the music wasn't as make-or-break for me back then?
Last year I settled into a routine of going to a small outdoor rave once every few months or so, ones with daytime components so I could join at dawn. The music played at outdoor parties in my area is not exactly my favorite, but at least it's still electronic and because it's less exhausting to dance during my normal waking hours I don't mind so much.
I definitely miss being so sucked into the vibe that I can't pull myself away, but I've just accepted that that's not something you can really get everywhere all the time. In certain cities, at certain times, when there's a big enough local crew whose tastes exactly align with yours, you'll have a magical few years, but then the music changes, the people change, and it'll be another dry spell. I like to think, though, that my dry spells are someone else's peak years. Maybe it all balances out in the end?
Then you become more and more a morning person, so in the evening you aren't even that hyped up and your brain is already trying to call it a night.
For me something like standard 4x4 techno has become so formulaic that it doesnt interest me as much
Raves aren't special here.
Nobody wants pics of them dancing like a spastic monkey
This made promoters criminally liable for drug offenses committed by people unrelated to them at their events. Then, it was selectively enforced against club drugs at electronic events and not cocaine at rock shows, and boom, no more raves in the US.
I'm already super sleepy by 23:00.
If there is a 'decline' it's likely because there's been a 20 year surge in DJ events -- like some clubs either going 50/50 between live performance events and dj dance nights or out right choosing DJ nights over live performance because it's cheaper (no sound check, no load-in/load-out, fewer drink comps for individuals and plus-ones ....) -- and the era is cycling down. But it hardly means nightclubbing or dance clubs are done for. Even if the activity were in decline, mobile phones would not be the cause. People go out even when their city is being bombed
Why no one plays laser tag anymore?
Same answer as all the rest, Gen Z, of course!
Non paywalled link
I'm being really serious here. I don't really know anyone who understands this scene. I'm trying to learn but it's kind of a disaster, I wallflower up hard, get in a hella bad move that I don't understand what anyone's motives are, and then leave.
Yeah, I know. It probably speaks poorly of me. I try my best not to inflict that on anyone. Feel like maybe some wires in my brain are disconnected. Is it just supposed to be natural for humans to like music and dancing like that??
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230922-the-night-angry...
Prices have gone up like crazy after; this includes rent. Cheap airlines like Ryanair & Easyjet have canceled many flights to Berlin in the last year.
I can see this as I rent out my living room on Airbnb part time and 2024 was the lowest no. of bookings since I started, almost a decade ago (2022 was a brief surge as everyone went traveling 'again' but that was it).
Hotel prices are also crazy (I got a lot of guests in 2023 that choose a high-end Airbnb over a four star hotel for the first time because the latter was now outside their budget in my area).
Then we have the phenomenon of restaurants closing early. It was easy to get dinner at 11pm at a good restaurant in my neighborhood (central Berlin). Most such places would close at midnight/1am. Now the latest is 9pm with most places closing at 10pm.
There is a street next to mine that is full of restaurants and bars. It used to be lively until 1:30am, even during the week. Before the pandemic. Now it's dead and feels like a small town now around 10:30pm.
Talking to several patrons there, this is what happened: during the pandemic all service staff found other jobs. Places were closed because they had to (lock-downs).
At the same time there was turnover of tenants in the neighborhood. People fled the cities because remote work allowed them.
The empty flats got new tenants and these people moved in under the assumption their street would keep the same noise levels. Ofc the landlords, desperate to fill their emptying flats during the lock-downs, would not tell them of any caveats in this regard.
When the lock-downs ended restaurants initially couldn't open longer than 10pm anyway because they couldn't find enough staff. People had found other work and didn't return to these jobs.
When staffing rebounded and they tried to open longer, two things got in the way:
1. Customers had gotten used to eat early (we're talking two years here from end of the lock-downs to the staffing situation in the gastronomy 'kinda' normalizing).
2. The new tenants in the flats in a street with restaurants had lived for 2+ years under the assumption their street was quiet from 10:30pm. They called the police and got injunctions for noise nuisance etc. TL;DR it was legally not possible any more to open longer for these restaurants, all of a sudden.
As a social dancer (tango) I noticed the same things mentioned re. the clubs. Prices have gone up, as a result less well-off people simply can't afford going dancing more than once a week. Most of my friends used to go 2--3 times a week. I still do but I work in tech and so does my partner and we don't have kids or any mortgage to pay off. We're in the 1%.
To get you an idea: the average venue for social dancing charged 7 EUR during the week, in 2019.
It's was 10 EUR when places reopened after the pandemic in late 2021 (i.e. 43% more).
And this year some venues have raised prices to 10--13 EUR as of 1st of January. So we're talking a 43%--86% price increase for admission and drinks went along in pricing.
It's simply not affordable. As a result, the average age in the Berlin tango scene went from 30 to 50 in just five years. It's mostly old(er) people with very few younger ones that work in well paying jobs (lots of techies) or have other sources of wealth.
And because more older people make up the majority of the audience, venues close much earlier. It was easy to go dancing until 1--2am during the week and 4--5am on weekends. Now it's midnight during the week and 2--3am max on weekends.
And because of the issue with airlines and hotel/Airbnb prices we also have less social dance tourists. Berlin used to be a top destination for social dancers from abroad to come visit but its noticeable less in 2023/2024 than before the pandemic.
In my younger years, I was active in the wearhouse and desert rave scene, and it was a lot of fun. Typically it would just be an empty wearhouse in a run down industrial district, or simply an empty lot far out in the desert far from any homes.
Different rave scenes had different groups of people- some were quite out of control and doing very dangerous things, others were much more organized and responsible. Although I haven't been in many years, I am certain the more organized and responsible ones with a strong culture of vetting who is invited, and having responsible sober regulars that are able to help those more inexperienced are still going strong, and I still get invites to them.
There is nothing like dancing all night until sunrise under the stars on a warm summer desert night... to excellent electronic music made/performed live by the artists. Usually people are very friendly, warm and welcoming- aided by certain phenylethylamine compounds no doubt.
In the UK, where I believe the word originates when applied to late night electronic music events in the mid 80s, the term meant an often unauthorised event in a field or industrial site.
Perhaps it was the noise menace, or perhaps people dancing in a field fuelled by MDMA caused a big deal in alcohol duty revenue for the government, but raves became highly regulated with the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act. Illegal raves were clamped down on by police with a fierce intensity. This essentially pushed the music back into clubs, where people could be taxed more easily. This ended the original race scene. By the late 90s the term was anachronistic in the UK. In the 2010s certain dance subcultures, drum and bass springs to mind, started becoming known as raves again, but these were anything from club nights to outdoor festivals. Quite unlike the earlier usage
It appears that your usage mirrors the UK rave scene from the late 80s to early 90s that died out, and the author has a broader usage that is in use today in the UK.
I'm on the USA west coast, and we still have warehouse and outdoor raves here, and people wouldn't use the term rave to refer to a permanent dance club. Many are illegal, and the police do shut them down sometimes, but mostly just tell people to go home. I've also seen the police show up and not shut it down.
Sometimes raves are happening every 3 days locally to me, sometimes the world has stopped all together. Very odd and polite that the world can tell when I am not interested in that level of (to be clear, often enjoyable) debauchery.
I presume that they will start up again once I get my warehouse finished on my off-grid property in the desert...
I don't think we can ever really know. It's complex and multifaceted.