Encounterculture

You Can Find Me in the Club*

Two facts resolutely refuse to settle into the compost pile of my cognitive thought processes:
One, that I have hated clubs, bars, socials, etc – all that shit – basically for as long as I’ve known that someday my age would grant me a safe passage in, and
Two, that I’ve been really fucking stupid for a long time.
Unless tonight’s events were a complete aberration (and, to be fair, I’m not ruling that out), clubs and me may just end up getting along fine after all. I had always thought of them as these cliquey establishments where everyone knows each other and constantly find themselves enraptured in fascinating conversation, and to some degree that was probably true. I didn’t get lucky tonight or anything; I’m not balls-deep in some wannabe actress who thinks I’m a casting agent – hell, I basically didn’t talk to anyone I didn’t already know. But I had a good time, and please believe it when I say that I’d have expected that to happen about as much as I’d expect to jump straight up to the moon.
I have to talk about the music they played above and beyond anything, since priorities are priorities and this is a popcult blog. Basically, they played exactly what you’d expect; standing outside, I could hear the muffled thump of “Milkshake” and “Get Low”, and I wasn’t in there for more than four seconds before those magnificent horn stabs from “Crazy in Love” sent a foot at my chest cavity. For a while, they kept shifting back and forth between top-forty hip-hop and early/mid-90s stuff, which contrary to what you may expect from my Give-me-the-Strokes-and-the-Exploding-Hearts-and-be-damned aesthetic pretensions, will do quite nicely. Then for some reason the DJ decided to bump Ye Olde Classick Rockque, and everyone yowled along to “You Shook Me All Night Long” and other assorted frivolities and good times were had by all. By that time, my second seven-dollar “Jack” and Coke (quotation marks used to pointedly delineate watered-down ineffectiveness, as per the rules of popcrit blogs) was coming to an end, and I decided to quit while I was ahead.
What struck me was how the DJ made seemingly no effort to mix the songs together; he’d just play one to the end or parts nearby and then immediately cue up the next one. Hell, he might not have even been mixing from vinyl, which would be heresy in my mind-club; the musical omniscience of everyone in attendance was what kept the vibe afloat, not the sudden sensation of being overpowered by Something New. Nights like this teach you that what you know about stuff is frequently embarrassingly wrong; smooth mixing in between songs is one way to do a mix set, but it’s far from the only way. Really, the only right way is to play stuff that people want to hear.
But here’s the thing: Although I think that that’s a worthwhile thing to talk about, and at some point when I’m bored at work and need to eat up some on-the-clock I’ll probably return to in full-on pedant-lecturer mode, that ain’t got shit to do with the fun I had tonight. The fun I had tonight wasn’t really even mine, if you demand honesty; I’m a self-diagnosed anhedonic even outside of the setting of a club, so whatever. What I’ll remember is the fun everyone else was having. I’ll remember my friend Doug, drunker than whatever Fuck is, dancing like he’d rented some limbs for the evening and had decided to get his money’s worth. I’ll remember Betsy, an old friend who had invited me (and like eight hundred other people) to celebrate her birthday, kissing me repeatedly throughout the night and introducing me to everyone as her favorite (not for any prurient reasons, of course; Betsy had consumed enough alcohol to make any prospective date-rapist’s job pitiably simple. Besides, there are some girls who are simply your friends. Still, out-of-character is out-of-character and needs to be noted, even if it means violently embarrassing one of your friends after the fact:). I’ll remember Kim showing up from out of fuckin’ NOWHERE because, well, yeah. I’ll remember seeing Blaze and Nick and all these other people who I haven’t seen in monthsandmonthsandmonths just emerging from the scenery. In other words, I’ll remember being an inconsequential part of a mass of people having what looked to me to be a very good time.
I am someone who has spent a lot of time in search of rapturous beauty in culture, and the fact that a lot of that’s contained in things easily accessed from home like movies and music and books and such, coupled with my own pathological litany, means that more likely than not, I spend a lot of time in my apartment by myself. I’m not bitching or moaning; this is the life that I’ve chosen for myself, and I could rattle off a list of exceedingly satisfactory experiences that I’ve had in that context that couldn’t possibly translate to the club. I doubt, for instance, that any manifestation of a club could match me being high off my ass and really hearing “Are You Ready For Love” or watching Chungking Express or reading Songbook for the first time. But the conclusion that these things lead me towards is that (a) everyone has their own standards of quality since everyone connects to things differently by virtue of their different lives, and (b) that’s incredibly depressing. I mean, to think that someone could watch, I dunno, Amelie and find it as beautiful a movie as I did for completely different reasons – reasons which, if the vox populi of the internet has made irrevocably clear, preclude any meaningful discussion of the work itself – that just saps any perceived nobility right out of the quest, and the saving grace of my life as far as I’ve ever known is that at least I’m living it in noble service of a higher ideal, albeit a stupid one.
Tonight, though, nobody wanted to discuss anything (and the music was way too loud to enable any discussion of anything anyway). All anyone wanted to do was have a good time, an impulse which led them to, yes, the club. When I think back on tonight, I’m guessing that what’s going to stick with me is the notion of the club as some indefinite signifier, a bar which really could have been one of several hundred or thousand in the city but which served as a site of unrestrained fun. I mean hell, the kind of fun I had was in the spirit of simple observance; I discovered that all I needed to do to have a productively fun night was nod my head to a Neptunes beat and make shy, thrilling eye contact with hot-but-probably-the-second-or-third-hottest-out-of-a-group-of-five-or-six girls, sip Coke doctored with a fluid which purported to be alcohol but which really only changed the taste, and get a quintessentially Club setting to describe to you (two rooms, one playing hip-hop, one playing new wave and punk; line outside; trucker-hatted assfaces bitching about how “bourgie” – yes, someone behind me in the line actually said that). I suppose that’ll do; if that means my standards are low, then there you go.
To tell the truth, I’m not even sure why I’m writing about this; one would think that benign, nondescript fun wouldn’t be the kind of thing which one would rush home and record (which is exactly what I’m doing). I have no defense for it, but the fact that I don’t and that I keep writing this thing anyway imparts upon me the distinct impression that I learned something worth knowing, something which may be one of those things which only gets transmitted by the innate enthusiasm in my language. I suppose the worst consequence that could happen would be that I come off sounding like a squealing girl whose conclusion is “omg i had such a good time!!!!1!!”; then again, there’s an argument to be made that that’s the dominant mode of expression on blogs, and that this is simply me momentarily embracing my medium. I leave it to history.
But I want to go back to the music for just a second before I conclude. Right now I can’t think of more than six or seven songs – MAAAYBE eight if you count the tabla intro to “Get Ur Freak On” – whose names I could tell you. There was a lot of what I’d call shit-rap; really poppy stuff and really awful stuff, frequently at the same time. But I didn’t care; I bobbed my head, cradled my jacket, attempted to maintain my usual demeanor of endearingly sly shame towards Betsy, and such. Music in that setting was simply, well, music, like background music from a movie – granted, background music being played at eighty thousand decibels, but just there for mood all the same. I’d spent all day trying to come up with a way to describe the precise manner in which I’d failed to appreciate the Rapture for well over six months simply because I’d only listen to it while I’d always listened to it while at work, and that’s just flatly the least conducive circumstance to enjoy music in the world. I didn’t get the Rapture until I bought Echoes on a whim from Circuit City while home on vacation and promptly drove around Durham, North Carolina embarrassing myself behind the wheel of my mom’s Acura by pumping my fist and caterwauling along with “House of Jealous Lovers”, but from that moment since I haven’t really been able to shut up about them. The fact of the matter is that music can be fun, just like a DJ can mix stuff together; you’ve just got to find the right place to enjoy it. Right now I'm rattled by the question of what tonight would have been like if we'd been in the throes of a DJ who refused to spin anything not touched/influenced/in effulgent praise of DFA; it would have been different, that's for sure, and I'm not sure if my top-forty let's-all-sing-along-with-"The Humpty Dance"fun would have been worth making the trade, obvious coolness be damned. Life making your points for you rules.

* And you better believe that they played and I loved the everliving up-rocking down-getting left-leaning right-waying fuck out of this.