Buddha By Night: Partying and Interconnectedness

I once had a term for those motions every DJ makes when s/he's in the mix: the DJ Bop. Every one of us has a particular little dance we do when we're following the rhythm; it's a ducking of the head, something in the neck - and it's a little different for every DJ.

I am indigenous to the nightclub; The Mix is my heartbeat. Everything you do in the booth has to follow the beat. If you tap your foot, do it in time. If you bob your head, do it in time. If you wave to a pretty girl on the dance floor, do it in time. If you fan yourself because it's really fucking hot in the booth, do it in time with the mix. The mix comes from you because you're the DJ, but you're also a part of it because it's bigger than you.

The goal of the DJ is to envelop everyone in that rhythm. A mother wraps a blanket around a child after a day's play in the snow; the DJ invites revelers out of the soulless, often arhythmic world into a pulsating, harmonic cave. That doesn't necessarily mean that everyone's on the dancefloor, but it does mean that everyone's tuned into the cadence of the party - whether it's Dieselboy or Digital Underground. It's no surprise that we use phrases like "feeling it" to describe one's being subsumed by The Beat. It's something that happens in the heart.

If my excessive capitalization smacks of big-headedness, it's because I take rhythm really seriously. To lose oneself in the dance is one of the oldest - and, arguably, most sacred - human traditions.

It's nothing to do with sexual display, scenesterism, or other sorts of egotistical exploits. Almost every one of us has had the experience: you're in the middle of the pit, the band is playing full-force, and somewhere in there, something gets lost: it's you. DJ Qbert puts it really well in the documentary, Scratch: when you're in the moment, you've mistaken that you've gone from being there and playing an instrument; rather, you are the instrument, and the universe is playing you.

In an earlier post, I tried to paint a dynamic in which the DJ and the dancefloor are two different entities, dialoguing. But let's step back and look at the whole thing. It's not just the DJ and the crowd. It's also the promoter (brain), the bartender (stomach), the bouncers (white blood cells). It's even the janitor (kidneys) and others. If we step back far enough, we see a picture of the whole party, bumping and thumping in time. It's no coincidence that artists refer to creative works as a kind of offspring. So while I would describe the DJ as the heart of any party, I'd also say it in context; we're only a small part of what's going on when people come together to create one big, artistic body.

Tripping into the Light Fantastic

Some time last year, I came to the realization that I'd been seeing a disproportionate number of inspired acts from the Bay Area. Several of these acts graced the stage of Bellingham's beloved Nightlight Lounge, one of the few places in town willing to insist on bringing national underground acts to our wee town. After a number of shows - Bassnectar, Yard Dogs Road Show, Indigo Bellydance, and others - I started to wonder what they're putting in the water down there in California.

Not only that, but it turns out that several of these artists are constantly collaborating in some way. A lot of them share management, but it seems a little heavier than that - circus is seeing a resurgence in the wake of burlesque, techno and psychedelia are once again making a comeback, and environmentalism is starting to go mainstream. I first realized that there was something serious going on when I attended my first Bassnectar show, only to see a huge banner prominently displaying tips on how to reduce one's economic and environmental footprints. No longer is the rave scene about snorting a bunch of meth and going crazy; no, the innovators have once again started pushing people toward new heights of social consciousness (besides having a taste for the psychedelic).

It's about time, says I: in a day in which the airwaves are dominated by 80s, crunk, and mashups, it seems that there's a distinct gap left by an absence of authentic underground cohesion. Let's look at hip-hop; after the hippies dropped out in the 70s, the next largest group of marginalized Americans started to speak out from black ghettos. Emerging from the depths of the ignored were four groups (breakdancers, DJs, MCs, and graffiti artists) who bonded together to form one of the strongest subcultures seen in America since jazz.

Of course, hip-hop has been almost totally misappropriated. There's still authentic hip-hop out there, but it's swamped by a barrage of iced-out suckas bought and sold by groups like Sony BMG, EMI, and other rich white guys who have the countless millions necessary to make sure their vision is the mainstream vision of, well, just about anything. The same guys who pass Trapped In The Closet as rhythm and blues (dare you to watch all 20 minutes - in case you can, there are 17 more episodes) are trying to pass Avril Lavigne as punk rock, trying to pass Usher as "urban music."

So what's next? Well... that's what I'm going south to find out. While I don't doubt that we'll be seeing dreadlocked poi spinners on MTV in five or ten years, I think that there's some powerful juju that this particular counterculture can bring to bear. By seeing how it comes together (and exposing myself to exploding torrents of talent), I'm hoping to gain better insights as to how this culture originates.

I leave Tuesday the 15th, by thumb. Destinations include:

-Portland, OR (studying contact juggling and street art)
-Eugene, OR (living in a 25-resident student co-op)
-Davis, CA (hunting world-class DJs)
-The Bay Area (DJing, juggling meetups, street performing, meeting childhood friends)
-Los Angeles (studying circus, promotion, chilling with roller derby friends)
-Santa Barbara, CA (carpool location to take me to my first Burning Man!)

Peace out, kiddos - I'll post from the road.

The Rebel Sell

In The Rebel Sell: Why The Culture Can't Be Jammed, authors Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter suggest that the there's no difference between a hippie and a hipster; that "cool" is a positional good that hinges on exploitation (not to mention that nobody was ever positively changed by psychedelics). Their position: that the bourgeoisie were a class that stood on the backs of the poor because of greater economic weight; that without the poor, there could be no rich. But icons in the counterculture are guilty of similar inequities, changing the rules by getting their "cool" as a good that's only "cool" because it's not mainstream. Their argument: that by chasing the standard of "cool," which is constantly changing as previously "cool" things get mainstreamed, the cultural elite becomes the new bourgeoisie.

Their arguments hinge on a few points. One of these points is that "cool" is totally ephemeral. They use the example of Burberry, a suave British label with a distinctive style that broadcasts a sort of aristocratic air about the wearer. But when lower-class people started reclaiming Burberry as their own brand, the "cool people" had to find a new brand, which meant a shitload of new money spent not feeding the poor or healing the sick, but on wearing something that hadn't yet been claimed by the chavs.

They later extend the argument to people paying the organic premium on food, buying sneakers made from recycled tires instead of Nikes, and participating in Buy Nothing Day. The suggestion is - and they literally use a Beavis and Butthead reference here - "without stuff that sucks, nothing is cool."

The suggestion here sounds like the rephrasing of an old argument: the denial of the sublime. The same mistake gets made by atheists, who would suggest that just because Bible-thumping theists are probably wrong that there's an invisible white man in the sky, that there's no divine spark to be found anywhere in the universe(s).

Getting back to the point: sure, there are particular aesthetics that are "cool" because they're uncommon. Vinyl clothing, Chuck Taylors, and the Burberry plaid are all positional goods; you can afford them, or you can't - with the implication that if you can't afford them (or choose not to), then you must not be cool.

But let's stop looking at the "misses" of counterculture, and start looking at the "hits." How would Heath and Potter describe DIY? Or the fact that ecstatic dance culture is tying in with the global permaculture movement?

In other words, there are things that are "cool" that are actually, well, cool. It's cool to reduce your economic footprint, for instance; environmental solvency isn't exactly something that starts to suck as soon as it goes mainstream, yeh? And let's take a look at Christianity, which started as a countercultural movement (there are still Christians in the world who consider Christianity a counterculture); there are plenty of aspects of the character of Jesus that are still cool to today. No surprise that "righteous" became surfer-speak for "cool." Or another commonality in the way that psychedelic culture now uses "conscious" as a descriptor for excellent and transcendent tracks.

Heath and Potter commonly use allegations of hippydom as a pejorative, with the underlying assumption that the hippies were wrong. To be more specific, many people cite the excesses of the 60s in suggesting that for all their positive rhetoric, all the hippies really wanted to do was get high. But every generation learns, and there's one important thing to take into account; many of us are the children of hippies, and we're taking hints from those of our parents who did end up selling out.

The Rebel Sell takes a position that counterculture seeks to destroy mainstream culture. I would make the argument more specific in that it seeks to replace mainstream culture. In theory, this only leads to one type of "cool" getting co-opted by the next... with one subculture dying out and more rushing in to take the throne. But what if it's not about the throne?

This generation of countercultures seems to be doing something different. Open source is not only challenging domination of intellectual property, but seeks to demolish the idea of intellectual property in the first place. Internet culture is a meritocracy, determined not by entitlement, but by involvement and savvy which is becoming more freely available every day. DIY attempts to make the least expensive option the coolest, rather than requiring cool-hunters to drop money on garments whose costs could feed villages.

In other words, several of these new countercultures are seeking to make self-empowerment, healing, and peace the new "cool." At that point - as long as the culture remains authentic - how could we go wrong by the mainstreaming of those concepts?

Future post pending on my upcoming trip to explore California counterculture - and what the hell happened to PLUR.

Living in the past

Jesus, long time no post. I sat on this one for a few months after running away with the circus... but this post made me feel significantly less alone in trying to elucidate this whole DJ-as-shaman picture.

My sweetie is in the roller derby. This means that, in the past few months, I have had to learn how to roller skate. I knew that it was just a matter of time, and I was unafraid enough of getting mocked by eight-year-olds (who usually think I'm pretty funny-looking anyway) to actually get pretty decent on quads.

There are only two roller rinks within a stone's throw of Bellingham, and that only applies if you throw the stone by power of military-spec slingshot. Either way, those two choices are:

-in the little town to the north, which is so marked by Christian conservatism that the city will mow your lawn for you if it gets too long and send you a bill (for reals)

-in the little town to the south, which is a sprawl of corporate retail hell.

Seeing as we're not exactly welcome in the former (and the floor there is a warped deathtrap), we make the trek down south, to Skagit Skate.

Skagit Skate is a very interesting place to me. I suck up the ambiance with a straw. Why? Because traveling there actually takes a person into the past. For example: just check out the web page (not that I'm exactly bragging about my own web design skillz).

The schedule usually runs like this: about twenty minutes of regular skating, followed by some kind of roller-game - limbo on skates, or racing, or somesuch. The music is, straight up, god awful. My suspicion: in the same way that Pepsi will pay your Roller Skating Association membership fees in exchange for product placement, my guess is that Clear Channel will pay your licensing fees if you'll play their NOW! That's What I Call Music For KIDS! Volume 58 that they send you in the mail every month. In other words: it's lots of Avril, lots of Xtina, lots of radio-bowdlerized crunk, and so on. Very very very safe music. They even shut down the floor periodically so that everyone can do the Cha-Cha Slide on roller skates. I shit you not. Remember this fly muhfucka?



Right. And if that wasn't a blast from the past, here's something else: right after the Cha-Cha Slide, they'll usually do a race. They split the race up into two groups: 12 and under, and 13 plus. During these races, they play music that's a little more "extreme" so that the kids can feel tougher. I'm super down with this. Here's the clincher: where they're never lacking the newest in pre-chewed Top 40, the newest thing they can dig outta the CD case for racing are tracks like the following:

-Crazy Frog's remix of "Axel F" (three years old)
-Darude's "Sandstorm" (eight years old)
-Rammstein's "Du Hast" (eleven years old)

Now, I'm not past using older material. After all, DJs are basically musical collage artists, and old samples are every bit as good as new ones - sometimes better. Additionally, it's easier to find those classic anthems in genres with which we're unfamiliar than it is to stay on the cutting-edge.

But every time I go to Skagit Skate, it feels a little bit like I've traveled into the past - into the land where "Du Hast," a track I used to play back when I was getting my start DJing at a party house seven years ago, is still in rotation.

Playing "Sandstorm" in a dance club will often earn snickers from seasoned clubgoers; the equivalent of the telling of a famous knock-knock joke at a comedy show. But, sharing the quaint gullibility of Burlington's skate park, Bellingham also lives in the past. Darude flies in Bellingham's nightclubs; the snickers of onlooking DJs are easily lost behind a sea of bouncing bodies.

I still haven't figured out whether pandering to an archaic standard is a wise idea. On one hand, it's a type of survivalism. There were two venues in which cutting-edge music had a home in Bellingham; after the closure of the Nightlight Lounge, there is one. And it's not even a venue - it's a seasonal techno party thrown by promoters whenever they can get the ear of wandering DJs. In the meantime, three of five nightclubs in Bellingham are throwing 80's Nights on a Thursday night, and the other two play Top 40. In other words: fuck this year's big beat chart-topper, we want the music of yesterday!

But on the other hand, that shit gets tired. Only listening to music you know is like only watching reruns; eventually, that shit is going to run out. One can't eat leftovers forever, yeh? And we can already see the bloated pop factories starting to go under, which means that this pre-chewed material won't exactly be coming out forever once people realize that they don't need to be paying $21.99 for a disc full of freely copiable data.

It's like the further you go from the cultural innovators, the fresher the leftovers taste. It wasn't until I became a DJ (read: professional music addict) that I realized that we here in quaint Collegetown, Washington have been eating pre-chewed steak for a long time. Sandstorm still flies here, and the few DJs in town who care are having a hell of a time breaking new music onto the scene. In the meantime, any new mixtape from some Vancouver / San Francisco / Berlin DJ is, for me, like that scene in Tron when they're drinking from the stream of raw data.

This thought has gone on long enough (a few months, haw haw). Next, something a little more concrete: cultural trickle-down theory, and those places from where culture originates.

Photo post: PPM

This gang is even tougher than The Snakes. They will fuck you up.

It can be heavy Underground

Further adventures in reinventing the wheel in my own words: I've been thinking of underground culture a lot recently, since it doesn't exactly seem to exist in quaint Bellingham.

OK, this isn't entirely untrue... there are a few people who are taking their own creative destinies into their own hands, and not for the sake of fueling their egos or their checking accounts. There are a few people here who are drawing out those members of the sickened masses into something authentic - something that hasn't been sold by the can on MTV, VH1, TNN, CNN, MSNBC.

The Underground exists. It is a thing we can refer to in the same way as we refer to the Machine. The Underground is a network of those people who have, for some (often traumatic) reason, left the bosom of our corporate hegemony and looked elsewhere. They have seen the chinks and cracks in the pavement, and - for those who look in the right way at the right time - have seen where the rabbit holes lie beneath.

Frank Zappa nailed it: "The Mainstream comes to you, but you have to go to the Underground."

Wikipedia seems to imply two definitions of the term:

-a secretive resistance movement, such as the Underground Railroad
-several specific subcultures: beat, hippie, punk rock, techno, and hip hop.

In the case of these (and possibly more) subcultures, the term "underground" can be used to delineate a particular example from those parts of that subculture that have been misappropriated by the mainstream. Specifically, using the phrase "underground hip hop" means that I am referring to countercultural hip hop such as Blackalicious, Del tha Funkee Homosapien, Sage Francis, KRS-ONE, and more. Conversely, leaving the "underground" off - especially in mixed company - could very well include anyone from Biz Markie to Vanilla Ice.

The distancing of oneself from the misappropriation of your image changes from counterculture to counterculture. Hiphoppas have a term for people who fail to walk that particular walk: "suckas." Most punk rockers, conversely, will just refuse to agree with anyone who describes Blink 182 as "punk." And many goths have either abandoned their spooky trappings or fled to a new scene while bringing a few select Gothic trappings along (see: rivetheads, gravers, "fetish" kids; and even more distant scenes like technoshamanism or even turntablism).

All these countercultures do have a commonality: the power of their appeal makes them ripe for appropriation by the Beast, who would use their viral power to lure the unsuspecting. That is: now, the poison flowing from the penis of Clear Channel now comes in hip-hop, punk rock, techno, jazz, hippie, and beat flavors. Those of us inventing the future have to be careful to avoid walking on those pieces of history that lead down the path to whoredom.

In other words, those who would struggle toward a freer society have to be quite wary of the past. And some newer countercultures - hip hop, punk, and rave - seem to be getting snapped up more quickly than we on the ground can invent them. Why do I see such a currently fatalistic question? Because we're now being fed 80s, crunk, and mashups - all recycled or cubicle-produced genres - while American counterculture still seems too nebulous to be producing anything with a huge amount of force right now (except, perhaps, Burners - though I'm sure we'll see glowingly sexy kids sporting dreadlocks and glow poi on MTV in a few years).

That said: I don't think the Underground itself can truly be appropriated. You can dress the devil up like Afrika Bambataa, but he's still doing the Top 40 two-step. Now, lets stop for a moment and consider that the current trend in marketing is for products that help you "be yourself" - but ultimately, they are fucking products. In the immortal words of Gil Scott-Heron: the Revolution does not go better with Coke. Those things that help you awaken to yourself and get beyond the trough can't be bought and sold (though, sometimes, imitating enlightenment can set us on the path).

This doesn't mean that countercultural people can't appropriate from the mainstream, or that people fighting materialism can't keep fetishes or other objects... but we've got to be beyond them before we can get back to them, Jonathan Livingston Seagull stylee. Alan Watts expressed religious trappings as being OK for those who were already awake to the truth - but unless your third eye is already open, no amount of candles or church or meditation will help you. You must have a soul for it to be saved... and you can't buy your way to freedom.

They may dress normalcy in your clothes, but the Machine will never beat us to the future. And the Underground is converging. I had a conversation with a Scottish friend who came here recently - we were discussing that today is the Iraq War's fifth birthday. He mentioned that he'd been in the global protest against the Iraq War and we got to talking about how there were synchronized protests from Madrid to Melbourne, as well as over the US. And they don't seem to have really stopped.

Terrence McKenna put it well: "This is your peer group. You know, we are not of the same class, of the same color. We have not originated from a particular line, but we are an affinity group." We're everywhere. We've always been here, and we'll always be here. The danger does not lie in being exterminated; it only lies in selling out.

Photo post: Street Ghost

A Seattle man and his afterimage. I remember the first time I wondered whether my reflection had his own house, his own family (a mirror image of my own, of course) - specifically, whether he would continue to exist once I walked away.

I suppose that the answer is yes, when addressed from the right angle.