| Event | S-R 2024 |
| Date | September 12 – 15, 2024 |
| Location | Secret Location, Catskills, NY |
Bromance: Against the Normie-Takeover of S-R
Art is beautiful because it has no real use-value. Like how gems are beloved because they’re shiny and useless. I bring this up because S-R which has defied the gnarly delights of profiteering for ten years, has existed in America through the labor of love, resisting brand deals, public relations, and the capitalistic hype that fuels terrible music. The rave scene in America, a small DIY network, takes cue from the fated genius types from the margins, like Arthur Russell, or K-Hand, not quite able to tap into commercial success as they remain a permanent underground current in contemporary culture.
This is the S-R that I experienced as first-time attendee in 2021. I knew of the festival through N, who is my favorite aesthete with impeccable taste and committed principles like a pipe organ. But that year, I went to my first S-R with a troupe of “alternative” bros, the types who have tattoos and long hair (by the way, “bro” is genderneutral). I was trying to keep code the first night, but the rave wave surely delivered me to the corners of the solidly queer. This is the beauty of the organism. It was a matter of time until I found them, people who were more explicit consent than bro-code, and blessed with hips that engined the whole dance floor. Kevin Aviance summoned all the cunt-folk and Ariel Zetina made usually stoic trans-mascs cry to Lady Gaga. I remember being whipped around by Juliana Huxtable, her holiness telling us how to do, what to dance, who to there, and yes, we obeyed. The normies were psychically kicked out or otherwise learned how to behave. In the ensuing act, Eris Drew and Octo Octa welcomed back the newly acculturated crowd. I remember watching (or hallucinating) Ariel Zetina managing the dancefloor, energetically arranging the density of the room with silent command. Eris & Octo gifted us with a gentle and steady bliss, the most heavenly exorcism in dance music. Well, what happened this year?
The alternative bros who have since revealed themselves as you know, embellished normies (in the derogatory sense), seemed to have forgotten. They forgot the bodily memory of dance music, and forgot how Juliana told them to shut the fuck up. They forgot about respect, self-cringing at their performance of solidarity four years back, and the forgetting meant the annulment of the contract. If you want to breathe, you need to shut up, and then, you may be allowed to be fucked by the music, like McKenzie Wark says. Instead, we got a return of the bro-code, the patriarchal and habitual membership boundaries that fuels Wall Street, tech, and the Pentagon. Accordingly, there were very few instances of raving happening in S-R that I got to experience. Everyone was instead networking, a bid for social closeness that the dancefloor failed to deliver. The theatre of a scene, the performance of being seen.
E told me she wasn’t going this year because S-R has become more about fashion than the music. Well actually, I told E, I think fashion is a big part of this culture. A muzik nerd does not make a good rave. But like this law of skirt length getting longer with economic downturn, maybe it is the economy, which impacts people in a cascading fashion according to socio-economic status. Hemlines were longer this year, and the dolls decided to stay home. It was no fun to go outside in daylight because the crowd was markedly less attractive. The bossa stage was a cute reprieve, but in terms of the main course: The bros flocked to the other bros doing little tricks on turntables (well, bro-folk love computer games, sports, and heterosexuality because it gives them an object outside of themselves to place their attention). And the lesbians who dominated main stage Saturday night were left on read. The gays had a little moment during Blasha and Allatt, our masculine identification to the straight 4/4 beat, in the style of Paris is Burning, but it dissipated in the bro-mass, who did not understand what was happening. Shyboi and Josey Rebelle’s b2b gave Berghain (I hear actual Berghain sucks these days) – the terrifying and undulating sublime of co-created discipline – but the crowd got sparse and paid no mind.
What does it mean that ten years of gatekept invites accompanies the rising prominence of profiteering, be it a grasp of mainstream fame, maybe a few hundred more followers on Instagram, or even book sales and article clicks? We are decades past the techno-optimism of the nineties, Madonna’s Ray of Light has given into a graspy form of relevance from the mother of Jesus herself. Perhaps that is why a mother wanted to spray bodily fluids on the sacred dancefloor established by Ron and Liv. And perhaps that’s why people thought it was okay to desecrate, literally by excrement, the grounds that Keioui walked. In the post-pandemic daze of 2021, we danced in the gym, beaming at each other alongside the security guards dancing to piano riffs of transexual house music. That Nowadays is union busting is one thing, but Aurora’s brilliance can only go so far. I am of the firm belief that bro-code has infected the rave, our miserable attempt to create alternative time-space on this scorched earth. I say, lock the gates. Charli XCX, Kamala Harris, and greedy club-owners do not belong at the rave, and the dancefloor will always behave accordingly.