Weekend Societies: Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures 9781501309311, 9781501311413, 9781501309328

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures
Part One Dance Empires and EDM Culture Industry
1 EDM Pop: A Soft Shell Formation in a New Festival Economy
2 Stereosonic and Australian Commercial EDM Festival Culture
3 Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in the EDM Festival Scene
Part Two Underground Networks and Transformational Events
4 Boutiquing at the Raindance Campout: Relational Aesthetics as Festival Technology
5 Harm Reduction or Psychedelic Support? Caring for Drug-Related Crises at Transformational Festivals
6 Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics and Democratized Practices of Well-Being on the UK Alternative Festival Circuit
7 Free Parties and Teknivals: Gift-Exchange and Participation on the Margins of the Market and the State Anne Petiau (Translation by Luis-Manuel Garcia)
Part three Cosmopolitan Experiments and Electroniculture
8 Towards a Cosmopolitan Weekend Dance Culture in Spain: From the Ruta Destroy to the Sónar Festival
9 Being-Scene at MUTEK: Remixing Spaces of Gender and Ethnicity in Electronic Music Performance
10 Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning Man
Index

Citation preview

Weekend Societies

Weekend Societies Electronic Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures

EDITED BY GRAHAM ST JOHN

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2017 © Graham St John, 2017 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0931-1 ePub: 978-1-5013-0933-5 ePDF: 978-1-5013-0932-8 Cover design by Louise Dugdale Cover image by Pascal Querner Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

CONTENTS List of Figures  vii

Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures Graham St John 1

PART ONE  Dance Empires and EDM Culture Industry  23 1 EDM Pop: A Soft Shell Formation in a New Festival Economy Fabian Holt  25 2 Stereosonic and Australian Commercial EDM Festival Culture Ed Montano  45 3 Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in the EDM Festival Scene Judy Park  69

PART TWO  Underground Networks and Transformational Events  91 4 Boutiquing at the Raindance Campout: Relational Aesthetics as Festival Technology Bryan Schmidt  93

vi

CONTENTS

5 Harm Reduction or Psychedelic Support? Caring for DrugRelated Crises at Transformational Festivals Deirdre Ruane  115 6 Dancing Outdoors: DiY Ethics and Democratized Practices of Well-Being on the UK Alternative Festival Circuit Alice O’Grady  137 7 Free Parties and Teknivals: Gift-Exchange and Participation on the Margins of the Market and the State Anne Petiau (Translation by Luis-Manuel Garcia)  159

PART THREE  Cosmopolitan Experiments and Electroniculture  173 8 Towards a Cosmopolitan Weekend Dance Culture in Spain: From the Ruta Destroy to the Sónar Festival Paolo Magaudda  175 9 Being-Scene at MUTEK: Remixing Spaces of Gender and Ethnicity in Electronic Music Performance tobias c. van Veen  195 10 Charms War: Dance Camps and Sound Cars at Burning Man Graham St John  219 Index 245

LIST OF FIGURES 1.1 DJ Afrojack and SFX CEO Robert Sillerman at NASDAQ, Times Square, New York City, 9 October 2013.  33 1.2 Tomorrowland main stage 2013.  36 2.1 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012.  47 2.2 Stereosonic, Sydney 2012.  51 4.1 A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a Raindance sound stage.  98 4.2 Water sculpture with permaculture system created by Gerasimos Christophoratos.  105 4.3 A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013.  110 5.1 The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014.  118 5.2 Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014.  120 5.3 The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014.  125 6.1 Demonstration of blacksmithing at Alchemy Festival, 2014.  143 6.2 Demonstration of woodcarving with chainsaws at Alchemy Festival, 2014.  143 6.3 Waveform Festival, 2012.  147 6.4 Magikana Festival, Wales. 

150

viii

LIST OF FIGURES

8.1 Main stage at ‘Sónar by Day’ 2009, when the festival was held in the CCCB and MACBA spaces within the barrio El Raval.  187 9.1 Jeff Mills plays percussion on the Roland TR-909, MUTEK Montréal (2012).  201 9.2 Katherine Kline and Erin Sexton improvise live electronic noise, MUTEK Montréal (2009).  206 9.3 Mossa plays percussion on amplified fruit, MUTEK Montréal (2014).  212 10.1 The Ten Principles of Burning Man.  221 10.2 Techno Ghetto, Burning Man, 1996.  227 10.3 The Space Cowboys’ ‘Mog’, Burning Man 2014.  229 10.4 The Dancetronauts, Burning Man 2014.  238

Introduction: Dance Music Festivals and Event-Cultures Graham St John

Researchers across the spectrum of social and cultural disciplines have, in recent times, sought to bring understanding to a growing cultural pattern where festivals have become integral to tourism and regional cultural economies and to the performance of identity and lifestyle. While electronic dance music (or EDM1) cultures are implicated in the ‘festivalisation of culture’ (Bennett, Taylor and Woodward 2014), they have lent their own unique sensibility to the pattern over the past two decades, at the crossroads of diverse local and global influences. When I say unique, I mean that dance music cultures possess distinct festal roots, in the club, the rave, the party. Beneath its diverse variations, electronic dance music culture is an event culture. But to refer to dance music festivalization is to acknowledge the variegated ways in which the local events and cultures native to dance music have evolved (and some might even argue, devolved) into larger scale mediated cultural events and global festivals. So far as dance cultural studies is concerned, this is relatively fresh terrain, despite the fact that electronic dance cultural events and their event-cultures proliferate and diversify rapidly. The local/global socio-cultural complexity of dance festivals demands conceptual frameworks capable of rendering

A note on the use of the term ‘EDM’. While this is conventionally used as a shorthand acronym for all forms of ‘electronic dance music’ (as, for example, the broad field of scholarship appearing in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture), in the last ten years ‘EDM’ has been progressively co-opted and popularized by a live event industry (e.g. SFX Entertainment, Insomniac, etc.) in which multiple electronic dance musics are formulated and marketed as ‘EDM’ (Reynolds 2012). Given that the dance music festival is the primary vehicle for this development, and that festivals are the primary focus of this volume, this introduction uses the non-acronymical ‘electronic dance music’, or more simply ‘dance music’ or ‘dance music festival’, to distinguish the broader cultural development from an industry trend that in this volume Fabian Holt dubs ‘EDM pop’. 1

2

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

these practices amenable to understanding – frameworks that will inevitably evolve from sustained ethnographic and multi-methods research, the kind of research that, for instance, led Chalcraft and Magaudda (2013), by way of a comparison of Sónar and WOMAD, to coin the phrase ‘festivalscape’, a concept inspired by Appadurai’s (1990) variety of ‘-scapes’ – ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes and ideoscapes – each comprising unique sets of ‘flows’ that intersect with others at the shifting local–global disjunctures of modernity. All such ‘scapes’ intersect in the festival, a topos greater than its components. Festivalscapes are a set of cultural, material and social flows, at both local and global levels, both concrete and imagined, both deliberate and unintended, which emerge and are established during a specific festival. In this sense, festivals can be seen and analysed as terrains where different cultural, aesthetic and political patterns and values temporarily converge and clash, constantly creating, stabilizing and redefining the setting of festival interaction, and in so doing stressing the problems raised by the multiple articulation of global cultural flows, local life and spatiality (Chalcraft and Magaudda 2013: 174). Scholars have given considerable attention to the study of music festivals. Recent scholarship emphasizes the diversity of cultural productions (see McKay 2015), with festivals recognisably shaped by various agendas, organizational styles and local influences (Wynn 2015). If music festivals offer privileged perspectives on the ‘local globalities’ of late modernity (Chalcraft and Magaudda 2013), electronic dance music festivalscapes are unique lenses on the diversity of such intersections. And yet, the latter are substantively under-researched. While there have been a variety of approaches to dance cultural industries, including cultural histories of disco (Lawrence 2003) and transnational house club culture (Rietveld 1998), and studies of regional (Buckland 2002; Anderson 2009) or ‘hypermobile’ (D’Andrea 2007) scenes, there has been little sustained study of electronic dance music festivalization,2 including research that could observe the evolution of a cultural industry through the fates of individual cultural events. Electronic dance music culture lies at the crossroads of local event origins and global industry imperatives. This volume grew out of a themed issue of Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture in which several of the chapters were first published. Dancecult was a fitting venue for the volume’s inception, given the journal’s commitment to publishing research on local and global cultural developments in electronic dance

2

An exception is work produced by Ed Montano (see Montano 2009, 2011, and this volume).

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

3

music, including festivals. While the international community of researchers at Dancecult do not conflate EDM (the acronym) with EDM (the festival industry), this has become an increasingly fraught terrain given the growth in the popularization of ‘EDM’ as an apparent ‘genre’. Nevertheless, that journal and this volume recognize the diversity of cultural forms in which electronic dance music manifests. From massive anarcho-libertarian raves sprouting around the London orbital at the turn of the 1990s, to dance empires responsible for cross-genre (‘EDM’), multi-city, transnational mega-raves, electronic dance music festivals have flourished worldwide over the last twenty-five years. They have become platforms for a variety of arts, lifestyles, industries, policies and indeed event-cultures, whether freeparty teknivals proliferating across Europe since the mid-1990s; colossal attractions like Belgium’s Tomorrowland, a ‘festival world’ enabled by new forms of mediatization (Holt 2016) and attracting more than 400,000 people over two weekends in July of 2014; ‘transformational festivals’ like Southern California’s Lightning in a Bottle; or digital arts and new media showcases like Montréal’s MUTEK and Barcelona’s Sónar Festival, the event most instrumental ‘in legitimizing electronic music as an artform’ (Chalcraft and Magaudda 2013: 187). The proliferation of electronic dance music festivals is an echo of the profusion of dance cultures and their night and day worlds. While weekend societies are exemplary event-centred cultures that provide their memberships with identification and recognition independent from traditional sources (e.g. ethnicity, faith, class), eventized movements are diverse in their organization, intention and populations. From ethically charged events with commitments to local regions and indigenous communities to subsidiaries of entertainment conglomerates touring multiple nations annually, dance music festivals are expressions of ‘freedoms’ that are revolutionary and recreational. Co-created ‘do-ocracies’ inspired by Burning Man or corporate sponsored bureaucracies in the mould of LA’s Electric Daisy Carnival, churches of genre or ecumenical free-for-alls, DJ-driven or fusional by design, offering sustainable solutions or orgies of excess, with habitués worshipping brand-name DJs or showing support for independent sound systems, diversity is evident across management styles, mediatization strategies, performance legacies and modes of participation. From Detroit’s Movement Electronic Music Festival to Portugal’s Boom Festival, dance music festivals have become stages for the performance of transnational meta-cultural aesthetics (e.g. techno, dub, psychedelic) and their potential synthesis. Characterized by meteoric rises, like Insomnia Events’ Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC), and tragic demises, like Berlin’s Love Parade (Nye and Hitzler 2011), these events have become major cultural and tourism industry hubs. With stakeholders and ticketholders carrying disparate motives, styles and expectations, they are contested sites. As cultural flashpoints, dance music festivals continually incite fledgling

4

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

operations under variable missions – reclaiming tradition, maintaining independence, selling culture, reducing harm, evolving consciousness – all transpiring at the verges of the dancefloor. While for the most part this volume addresses the cultures, or eventcultures, of electronic dance music, it begins with much-needed analyses of the culture industry of ‘EDM’—the meta-genre birthed by way of the music festival format. In his chapter, Fabian Holt opens the discussion on a development that has received scant formal attention, perhaps because comprehension of the success of these events relies on analytical expertise in social and visual media as well as genre formation, in addition to eventethnography. With attention to Tomorrowland among other festivals, what Holt calls ‘EDM pop’ is framed as a ‘soft shell genre formation’, a term adapted from culture industry sociology. Holt recognizes EDM pop as the product of the evolution of the popular music festival format in which EDM festivals have evolved into lucrative social media events beyond their physical platform. Tomorrowland is owned by SFX Entertainment, which, headed by media mogul Robert F. X. Sillerman, was a seminal force in the contemporary commodification of electronic dance music, exploited by way of the festival format, a practice with long roots in country and rock industries. Indeed, Sillerman had transformed the concert industry in the 1990s by consolidating regional rock promoters into Live Nation Entertainment. The  year 2012 appeared to be the pinnacle of an investment ‘gold rush’ in ‘EDM’. As chief executive of Live Nation, Michael Rapino, was reported to state at that time, ‘If you’re 15 to 25 years old now, this is your rock “n” roll’. The same New York Times story reported that DJs like Deadmau5, Tiësto and Afrojack were earning over $1 million for a festival appearance and up to $10 million for a Las Vegas nightclub residency (Sisario 2012). The serious risks associated with scaling up underground dance music appeared to show by 2016, when, $490 million USD in debt, SFX declared bankruptcy, shares plummeted, and Sillerman was replaced as CEO (Peoples 2016). Before this disaster, SFX embarked on a spending rampage buying up hundreds of dance music event companies. Among those outfits acquired was the parent company of Australia’s EDM mega-event Stereosonic, Totem OneLove. In his contribution to this volume, Ed Montano addresses the implications of this development, arguing that, with an abundance of international acts, Stereosonic ‘seems to be the culmination of Australian dance music culture’s drive to the global stage’. With the example of this national touring festival, Montano’s discussion of developments in Australia helps shape the inquiry. Does the shift from the intimacy of the nighttime clubbing scene to massive weekend festivals appearing in replicable formats with similar lineups and headline acts in events increasingly designed according to commercial motivations amount to the blanketing of local populations, culture and place? It would appear that under the machinations of SFX and other enterprises like Insomniac, this process may be well under way.

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

5

Dance event-cultures and festivalization The history of electronic dance music culture is in large part a story of the emergence of dance events and the cultures (and cultural industries) that have sustained them. It is a story of interrelated eventized dance movements that in many cases have evolved from localized cultural events (e.g. raves) to global cultural events (international festivals). While the contributions of Holt and Montano illustrate the corporatized outcomes of EDM festivalization, this recent narrative of industry massification competes with other stories in this cultural field. Such stories typically involve the formation of event-cultures; for example, acid house, rave, techno, psytrance, dub cultures and their diasporic movements whose populations have the dance event as their common purpose, a festal enclave beyond which its ‘culture’ may have little prestige, currency or even market value. It is a story that features different outcomes according to the event-culture in question, with a narrative that may change in tone depending on whom among the variety of stakeholders one dialogues with. Common to the festivalizing process is the story of legitimation. EDM festivals have been capable of establishing firm and continuing relationships with governing bodies on the strength of their powerful monopolization of music and media, resulting in gargantuan mega-events responsible for massive increases in regional tourism wealth. Offering a case study of a markedly different albeit successful niche tourism industry event, Paolo Magaudda discusses the exemplary case of Barcelona’s Sónar, a festival that began in 1994, evolving into a reputable cosmopolitan event on the international stage. Magaudda describes how Sónar was established as a legitimate translocal cultural phenomenon (i.e. staged in multiple international locations), endowing the city of Barcelona with brand power, becoming unique in doing so. Sónar’s success depended on distinguishing itself from those deviant aspects dance music culture associated with nightlife and illicit consumption practices – the publically mediated panic over which had caused the repression of ‘weekend cultures’ in various regions, including that exemplified by Spain’s own under-documented ‘ruta destroy’ movement, which had its roots in early 1980s Valencia, escalating at the turn of the 1990s, and vanishing by the early 1990s. Offering the first study in English of this phenomenon, Magaudda’s chapter also addresses ruta, demonstrating how, twenty years after its demise, protagonists resurrected the event-culture in the form of various modes of cultural representation. This process of demise (cultural panic) and resurrection (cultural celebration), where dance music culture becomes an object of cultural memory is a trajectory repeated elsewhere in the history of these movements. Magaudda observes how Sónar negotiates tensions at the heart of dance music culture, through the creation of separate subcultural/institutional

6

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

sections within its vast programme (broadly, Sónar by day, and Sónar by night). There is a similar tension preoccupying tobias c. van Veen in this volume in a retrospective study of MUTEK, Montréal’s influential electronic music festival. Kicking off in 2000, and becoming the inspiration for satellite events (e.g. in Chile, Argentina, Mexico, Berlin), MUTEK is the first North American festival to combine ‘rhythmic electronic music alongside experimental audiovisual works in listening contexts’. Informed by his own role as a curator and long-time participation in the event, van Veen explores the tension between MUTEK’s serious post-rave pretensions and the ‘communitas’ that blurs the boundary between performer and spectator typical of the art festival. In a study of the arts and politics of what he calls ‘being scene’, and the artifice of DJing, van Veen explores the implications of the imperative of cultural institutionalization in ‘live’ music performance. Since MUTEK pursues cultural legitimacy by way of Western musical traditions exemplified, as the chapter suggests, by electroacoustic and acousmatic music with its attendant privileging of white male performers, it distances itself from dance music and its DJ performance practice. This curatorial agenda is imputed to not only exclude female performers, but the performance mode (i.e. turntablism) adopted predominantly by Afrodiasporic artists. Electronic music has become integral to the ways cities seek to build reputations as desirable destinations in the ‘experience economy’ possessing distinct profiles within regional and global ‘cultural tourism’ networks (see Rapp  2009). Such can be observed in the activities of electronic arts and music festivals like CTM (formerly Club Transmediale), a festival integral to the New Berlin, and an event that, as Geoff Stahl (2014) observes, requires the right balance of cultural and social capital in order to sustain itself. Like MUTEK, CTM has been intimately connected with film festivals and the visual arts (especially the digital arts festival transmediale) since its inception in 2002. While CTM has its origins in late 1990s underground club culture located primarily around the former East Berlin districts of Prenzlauer Berg and Mitte, not unlike Sónar and MUTEK, organizers must respond to the demands of becoming a sustainable professional event – for example, with strategic partnerships, regional and international networks, the imperatives of funding regimes, etc. – while, maintaining, again according to Stahl, a ‘margin of unpredictability’ and a connection to the event’s roots. Diverse event-centred dance movements have emerged in the history of electronic dance music. Take for example, the free-party tekno sound system culture that flourished in France, Italy and elsewhere in Europe (and indeed outside Europe) from the mid-1990s, which was inspired by Spiral Tribe and other sound systems formed from collaborations between travellers and ravers, a development that saw the formation of teknivals (St John 2009: ch. 2). Or alternatively, consider psyculture, which emerged in the wake of Goatrance and which caused the birth of Portugal’s Boom Festival among

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

7

a now crowded calendar of psychedelic trance festivals in Europe and worldwide (Rom and Querner 2011; St John 2014a). Despite the differences between these festal cultures, the variations in ethics, technics and sensory aesthetics, they share utopian sensibilities shaped by responses to lifeworld circumstances, not least of all state regulation and corporatization of dance music culture, and indeed the mainstreaming of EDM. Across these eventcentred movements we find fiercely independent music and event-industries reliant on the re/production of the festival, a space of gift-exchange and alternative commercial economies that are at their most consistent in ‘free’ (or by donation) events. As Anne Petiau states in her contribution to this volume (translated by Luis Manuel-Garcia from the French original), at teknivals, ‘one can recognize the means by which individuals constantly re-establish social ties relevant to a system of gift-exchange, whether outside the systems of market and state or in their interstices’. Petiau explores the status of the French teknival as gift, a reciprocal logic distributed throughout the worldwide teknival movement where event-goers are encouraged to contribute to and effectively co-create events. The ethos of participation or ‘no spectators’ can also be found at the root of psychedelic trance events in Goa, and in every region of its emergence worldwide. But it is an ethos that is also challenged in each region, as small-scale events burgeon into festivals, as markets grow and fan-bases develop, as DJ cultures become celebrity cultures, as cottage industries become cultural industries. Original scenes are challenged as artists become inflated into headphonewearing icons occupying stages that grow higher and more elaborate, and where the gulf between the elevated artist and a vast sea of dancers – including those watching live-feeds at locations inside the venue or on the other side of the planet – grows wider. Maintaining an original PLUR ethos becomes a dubitable motivation for massive up-scaled festivals like Insomniac’s Electric Daisy Carnival. If EDC, mounted in numerous locations annually across the United States and abroad, amounts to a ‘religious experience’ for participants – as observed by DJ Tiësto in Under the Electric Sky (Cutforth and Lipsitz 2014), the documentary film for the 2013 Las Vegas EDC – one could speculate on the apparatus responsible for eliciting transcendence on a scale that attracted 350,000 people to the event at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway that year. In the film, one event designer offers the insight that ‘people are coming here to be inspired. If you go back to the purpose of cathedrals and what people were going for, it was to feel small and spiritually alive’. Making people feel small amid the spectacle is lucrative for Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella who, at one point in the film, casts a commanding gaze across the mega-rave aboard a VIP float. Strategic event-aggrandizement of this nature appears to have become indispensable to festival marketing since the Tomorrowland 2011 aftermovie (Tomorrowland 2011), which converts the cultural event into a

8

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

cinematic experience. As a mediated effort to capture the immediacy of an event, could the cinematic experience augment an event-culture, in this case that which is enlivened by the sounds of Progressive House? Such triggers an avalanche of questions concerning the role of new mediatization practices in EDM cultural events, notably the deregulation of broadcasting that has permitted event-organizations to distribute video by way of YouTube and social media. What might cultural events and beyond that, event-cultures, look like in these ‘new configurations of time, space and capital’ (Holt 2016)? What are the dimensions of the ‘event’ in a world of infinitely remediated live-feeds, and where aftermovies are ‘digital folkloric texts that everyone shares’ (Holt 2016). And ‘is it possible to base a culture’, as Simon Reynolds asked nearly two decades ago, ‘around sensations rather than truths, fascination rather than meaning, jouissance rather than plaisir?’ (1997: 109). For event marketing strategists, the answer is probably ‘yes’, if by ‘culture’ one means a brand to which event-goers are loyal. To observe the festivalization of dance culture is in some ways to observe the career of the liminal experience that has been emically recognized as the vibe – the socio-sonic experiential currency valued across dance scenes. Many researchers have recognized that the sociality of the much-vaunted vibe approximates the undifferentiated sensation of ‘spontaneous communitas’ (Turner 1969). For participants, this is a social juncture in which one participates wholly, and to which one is not a spectator. In the communitas of dance music events – the discommunitas – such participation ultimately involves the dissolution of subjectivity in which one becomes other to one’s self. In all the regions of this development, event-managers typically recall that ur-moment when ‘it all made sense’, that protean transformative juncture that afforded the inspiration to mount events that attempt to recreate the primal rave, augmented by sensory technologies and event design. Among the chief aspects of communitas is its capacity to unify strangers, each of whom are wholly attending, including those with disparate backgrounds, aesthetics, genders, sexualities and ethnicities. In the worldwide localities, or global localities, of its emergence – usually within metropolitan centres, but also in expatriate and experimental enclaves such as Goa in the late 1980s, Black Rock City (or Burning Man, see Jones 2011; St John 2014b), or perhaps Germany’s Fusion Festival – the non-local community of the dance music festival is stamped with cosmopolitan relationships. While art festivals are known to explicitly privilege the encounter, exchange and dialogue with the Other (Chalcraft, Delanty and Sassatelli 2014), the dance music festival is primarily dedicated to optimizing the conditions for the othering of the self. There have been few attempts to critically address such relationships within dance music cultural events and their event-cultures, which have proclaimed utopic sensibilities inscribed, for example, in the mythos of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity, Respect), or the psychedelic dissolution of selfother boundaries. An exception is Judy Soojin Park, whose chapter addresses

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

9

racial stereotyping within scenes that have typically promoted egalitarianism. Park’s study of Insomniac Events in Southern California demonstrates how Asian American participants leverage ‘belonging’ in a middle-class whitedominated scene by way of the imagined other of ‘urban hip-hop blackness’. By focusing on the negotiations of race and class by nonwhite participants’ in EDM festival scenes, and through a study of intra-scene tensions that present challenges to the egalitarian ideology of ‘PLUR’, Park’s work is representative of a neglected research direction within dance cultural studies. Dance festivals hold varying commitments to the varieties of cosmopolitanism identified by Chalcraft, Delanty and Sassatelli (2014: 111) – including the relativization of one’s own identity, positive recognition of the other, mutual evaluation of cultures and a shared normative culture, which involves self-other relations that are ‘mediated through an orientation towards world consciousness’. With regard to the latter, Portugal’s Boom Festival commands attention as a vehicle for ‘planetary consciousness’, a hallmark expression in the psycultural diaspora, as evident, for example, in total solar eclipse festivals (St John 2013). While these festivals are characterized by a ‘global’ consciousness, as reflected in cultural programming, ecological sustainability programs, artist nationalities and attendance by international ‘travellers’, they are nevertheless mounted within national borders where host cultures shape event management, promotion, programming and participant experience. But while host nations curate events, there is ambivalence expressed within psyculture towards national identity. On the one hand, one’s nationality is valued. In Alchemy of Spirit, the documentary produced on Boom 2012 (DROID i.d. 2013), the many participants vox-popped at the film’s beginning are asked to state their country of origin. Many nations are identified, and Boom revels in the multitude of national passport-holders represented at the event. For example, the front page of the Boom 2014 newspaper The Dharma Dragon celebrated the presence of ticket-holders from a record 152 nations at that event. National identity is performed on site, including by way of national flag displays by individual dancers. And yet, such displays are not without controversy. In 2014, also by way of The Dharma Dragon, Boom issued an edict to the affect that there should be no displays of national flags inside the main dancefloor: the Dance Temple. It is an observation consistent with that venue’s stature as a sacred site, a global destination for transcendenceseeking pilgrims, a ‘mothership’ in which one becomes temporarily abducted from standard identifiers (like nationality).

Transformational festivals Several chapters in this volume address the phenomenon of ‘transformational festivals’. I have long been cognisant that festivals, especially those across

10

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

the alternative spectrum of events, are transformational. In fact, this is among my chief motivations for researching such events, that they permit entrants to become liminars (literally: threshold dwellers) while occupying the demarcated time-space framework of the event. As festal citizens, participants are afforded passage into a transitional world possessing liminal conditions and carnivalesque logics (or illogics) to which inhabitants are compelled to surrender. The mood prevailing is, as Victor Turner knew, not inconsistent with a rite of passage, a structured ritual that possesses the power to transform an individual’s status, identity and life; only, the liminality of the modern festival holds heterogenous, elective and hypermediated characteristics. Raves and other dance events have embraced the transitional logic of the rite of passage, with ravers liminars par excellence. Whether revelatory practitioner accounts, or scholarly treatises, or those combining these approaches, electronic dance music culture literature offers testimony to the power of rave, techno, house, psytrance, etc., to transform participants, with experients typically claiming that events have changed lives, occasioning the formation of associations, causing re-evaluations of lifestyle, consumer and relationship patterns and the fashioning of more and more raves. In those events where the economic and aesthetic contribution of participants is encouraged, the cultures endogenous to these events are stamped with the imprimatur of transformative potentiality. Today, an event model appears to have harnessed and bottled this logic. ‘Transformational festivals’, in which electronic music often predominates (although not exclusively), like Lightning in a Bottle (California), Symbiosis (Nevada), Lucidity (Southern California), The Oracle Gatherings (Seattle), Beloved (Oregon), Shambhala (British Columbia), Sunrise Celebration (United Kingdom), Envision (Costa Rica), Boom (Portugal),3 among many others, are downstream from the confluence of various countercultural event models, including West Coast North American festival culture, notably Burning Man; UK Free Festivals in the Traveller tradition; and Goa Trance/psytrance and psychedelic electronica. We could trace several interwoven movements influencing these event models: progressive consciousness evolutionary agendas that have typically been associated with the New Age movement; sensory technologies and their purposeful – ‘shamanic’ or ‘gnostic’ – application, as documented, for instance, in the film Electronic Awakening (Johner 2012); healing arts and the human potential movement; egalitarianism, civic engagement and direct democracy (Turner 2014); the back to the land movement, sustainability practices

While there are proposed to be ninety ‘transformational festivals’, there is debate and disagreement about which events meet Jeet-Kei Leung’s criteria set out at: http://thebloomseries .com/guidelines-for-inclusion-transformational-festivals-map (accessed 13 May 2015). 3

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

11

and permaculture; the visionary arts movement and entheogens; and the embracing and appropriation of indigeneity (ritual and symbolism). Shedding light on transformational festivals, Bryan Schmidt in his contribution to this volume, states that these events include: an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music; visionary art, performance, art installations and live art; a workshop curriculum covering a spectrum of New Paradigm subjects; the creation and honoring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual; a social economy of artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a natural, outdoor setting to honor the Earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7) day duration. These are the paraphrased observations of Jeet-Kei Leung, a documentary film-maker from Vancouver who popularized (and capitalized) the phrase ‘Transformational Festival’ in a 2010 TEDx talk, subsequently producing a documentary webseries The Bloom (Leung and Chan 2014) and more recently using his mailing list to showcase ‘The Bloom Collection’, an initiative promoting ‘festival inspired apparel and goods’. These events, then, are programmatically transformational. That is, we can identify within their precincts the interwoven agendas of personal growth and global consciousness that are a legacy of the transpersonal counterculture. Reliant on a transformational architectonic, that these event-industries are commercial operations catering for a select middle-class and typically white event-going market is inscribed in the idea of the ‘boutique’ festival, a term sometimes used, as with Schmidt, interchangeably with ‘transformational festival’. ‘Boutique festivals’, which have evolved rapidly in the United Kingdom in the last decade, involve substantial programming diversity, in which electronic dance music can be a minor element, although typically substantive, as in the BoomTown Fair. These are participatory arts festivals, involving ‘ethical living’, possessing no commercial sponsorship, offering diverse dance music genres and lifestyle workshops and often ‘upmarket amenities’ (including glamour camping, or ‘glamping’, in yurts, podpads and tipis). Within an intensely competitive festival market, event survival and growth relies on events becoming strategically distinguished from those that do not offer countercultural authentica in their experiential design. Critical to this festival-based authenticity is the degree to which events are removed from those where the ‘main stage’ and lineups predominate proceedings (and promotions), and where festivalgoers are empowered to be co-creators in event production, a collaboration that takes diverse forms: from programming input, to costuming and theatrical performance, to dancing. By contrast to the sponsored hypermediated event dominated by a mainfloor mentality, the boutique festival is presented as ‘the informed consumer’s choice; one who appreciates, and has the means to adhere to, a

12

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

green and ethical lifestyle as part of leading a sustainable and responsible existence’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 9). But while possessing such progressive pretentions, according to these authors the ‘separation from the mainstream’ implicit to the ‘boutique experience’ is an illusory performance. The ‘experience design’ of these weekend societies apparently only provides the opportunity for ‘temporary countercultural identity performances’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 11). If such is the case, boutique festivals may then be considered a form of episodic rebellion, a favourite of ‘counterculture’ and ‘subculture’ critics who have attended to festal dissidence as a temporary, youthful affectation and a form of ineffectual resistance performed by the privileged. When Hakim Bey’s much vaunted ‘Temporary Autonomous Zone’ (1991) was denounced as a socially innocuous ‘lifestyle anarchism’ (Bookchin 1995), we recognize one variation of this critique. More generally, the pursuit of ‘autonomy’, ‘freedom’ and ‘authenticity’ integral to ticketed (i.e. commercialized) festival culture, boutique or otherwise, might provide evidence of ‘the new spirit of capitalism’ documented by Boltanski and Chiapello (2005), who in their analysis of post-1960s cultural activism demonstrated how capitalism gained legitimacy through licensing artistic creativity over sustained social critique. While the idealization of consumer participation is integral to boutique festivals, whether ‘co-creativity’ is an expression of the creative agency of individuals or ‘exploitation in the form of free labour through the expropriation of knowledge, creativity and communication’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 4), is open to interpretation. We are not far removed, it seems, from what marketing and consumption researchers refer to as the ‘co-creation of value’ in the fashioning of brands (Pongsakornrungsilp and Schroeder 2011). The enterprising consumer may be the ideal eventgoer within this type of event that embraces a philosophy of participation consistent with the mythos of the autonomous individual whose exercise of choice paves the way to prosperity, and/or democracy. Strategies by which event organizations mobilize value adding among event-goers who actively contribute to a marketable brand betokens a festivalized manifestation of ‘prosumer capitalism’ (Ritzer 2015). Prosumers are actors who produce and consume, a simultaneity recognizably integral to consumer tribalism (see Cova, Kozinets and Shankar 2007). Whether events offer micromodels of neoliberalism (or democracy), the encouragement of participant agency straddling the consumer/producer divide appears to be the hallmark strategy of the transformational festival, events that routinely cite the ethos of Burning Man, the annual Nevada event also known as Black Rock City, as inspirational. While, according to Chen (2012), the ‘inclusive community logic’ of Burning Man transforms participants into prosumerists, the practice as it transpires within the unique parameters of a self-organizing event demonstrates that it can be harnessed to ‘prefigurative’ and thus genuinely transformative ends (Chen 2015: 9).

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

13

Chief among the reasons why Burning Man has been such a successful transformative event-culture is that is has evolved a set of working principles that provide ethical guidance for its participants. Observance of the event’s Ten Principles has been instrumental in the practice by which the event distinguishes itself from other events, including dance music festivals and, specifically, EDM festivals. This strategy has been important to Burning Man given the increasing prevalence of electronic dance music in the form of theme camps and sound art vehicles at the event. As my own contribution to this volume demonstrates, this prevalence has been the cause of considerable controversy at Burning Man, prompting a series of policies and compromises, enabling the continuing presence of the dance music aesthetic while at the same time battling to retain a distinct identity. An ethical approach to event production, involving principles like ‘communal effort’ and ‘leave no trace’ as well as ‘radical self-expression’ (as seen at Burning Man) has motivated immersive art festivals worldwide, with varying degrees of success. Turning to Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’ to expose in exuberant ethnographic detail the relational and open-ended social artifice of the Californian Raindance Campout, Schmidt also begins unpacking some of the internal conflicts native to the operation of such events, including the privileged status of participants and the fraught terrain of cultural appropriation. If recent noise on blogs, social media and eventforums are any measure, offensive consumer ‘borrowing’ practices at dance and other music festivals has attracted increasing criticism. In Canada, for example, controversy over the widespread adoption of feathered headdresses at festivals sparked outrage among First Nations peoples, fueling debate within festival communities, which, like British Columbia’s Bass Coast Festival, banned ‘feathered war bonnets’ in 2014 (Dart 2014). This reaction to soft colonialism among eventgoers and organizers triggered an avalanche of popular commentary, including prominent articles in venues as diverse as the Guardian (Lynskey 2014) and VICE (Pacholik 2015). That festivals are dynamic experimental sites where the shaping influence of conflicting discourse, policies and behaviour are negotiated in-situ, is a subject addressed by Deirdre Ruane in her chapter in this edition. Ruane’s multi-sited ethnography of voluntary care-provision organizations at Boom, Burning Man and Secret Garden Party illustrates how these events are dynamic proving grounds for competing paradigms of drugs, drug users and ‘the self’. Based on evidence presented in Ruane’s study, the transformational capacity of such events relies upon deference towards the experimental and therapeutic uses of psychedelic substances prevailing over a medicalization approach as inscribed in the ‘harm reduction’ model where ‘losing control’ of one’s self (integral to individual growth within transformational/ transpersonal models) is perceived as an impairment. Given the illicit status of most psychedelics, and variations in national regulatory regimes, support organizations must negotiate a complicated path. Multi-day dance music

14

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

festivals like Boom and Secret Garden Party, where participants establish comfortable private camping spaces removed from the public domain of the central festival space and its dancefloors, provide event-goers with opportunities for experimental intimacies and knowledge sharing often unfeasible within clubbing environments, or at events in which participants must typically vacate the festival-grounds daily for their accommodation in local hotels. So far as drug consumption is concerned, the porous domestic character of the camping space vis-à-vis the dancefloor provides an optimal circumstance for sharing experiential knowledge with friends and neighbours, for communicating norms, for exchange and use, and for enabling informal harm minimization practices (i.e. friends ‘keeping an eye on’ each other) (see St John 2012: 174; Dilkes-Frayne 2015). While Burning Man has inspired UK festivals like Secret Garden Party and BoomTown Fair, such events appear to cherrypick from the principles of Black Rock City, effectively ‘remodelling the “No Spectators” ethos to fit within their own economic framework’ (Robinson 2015: 173). Still, this should be kept in perspective. While these events are not prestigious ‘freeparty’ universes obligating forms of gift-exchange and event co-production (as in the logic of the teknival), they do not, at the same time, offer ‘Electric Sky Package’ tickets (at $5,000) with access to private front-row tables with prime stage views on the ‘VIP Cabana Deck’, as sold by Insomniac Events for EDC New York 2015. While the capitalist cultural logic behind this strategy appears to be about as removed from ‘free’, ‘inclusive’ and ‘authentic’ dispositions as seems possible, resistance to such developments continues to prompt alternatives within the dance music culture industry. Indeed, the embrace of participative arts and popular immersive theatricality offers a facepalm to the star/audience, producer/consumer divisions magnified beyond measure at EDC. With that said, as Under the Electric Sky demonstrates, ravers remain perennial participants by way of the shared dance ekstasis – eternalized further through hyper-social mediations of ‘eternity’ enabled by Facebook and YouTube. And yet, it will be critical longitudinal studies of dance and electronic arts festivalscapes and their cultural industries that will determine more precisely what it is that event-goers are participating in. Prying open the motivations, imperatives and strategies of transnational dance entertainment empires, such studies will doubtlessly uncover a diversity of experimental co/production practices. Practices like that found at the S.U.N. Summer Gathering in Hungary whose ticketing strategy is an innovation in the democratization of festival space. For its third annual event, S.U.N. implemented a strategy where ticketholders were provided the opportunity to shape the direction and content of the festival as ‘members’ with rights to vote for major acts and land development projects.4

4

http://solarunitednatives.org (accessed 15 May 2015).

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

15

Investigations of social media enabled prosumerism among festival goers will further advance our understanding of ‘participation’ in EDM events, especially as that involvement is undertaken online beyond the gates and the duration of the festival. Music festival researchers have provided insights on the way Web 2.0 digital technologies enable user-generated experience and interaction extending the festival experience (Morey et al. 2014; Cormany 2015). But while internet, digital and communication technologies have enabled participation and ‘user-generated’ involvement all year round, and such technologies have grown integral to music scenes (Bennett and Peterson 2004), scene involvement has little meaning without real-time engagement inside the precincts of the event, an engagement that involves one’s mobility and travel to the event. Among the key recurring features of these recurrent events is that they are visited by participants who often travel significant distances (regionally and internationally). Travel to and altered experiences within rural spaces are among the features of these events appealing to their populace, typically urban-dwelling participants temporarily vacating. The affective dimensions of festive rurality are among the chief characteristics of alternative dance music festivals in the United Kingdom explored by Alice O’Grady in her chapter in this volume. While holding kinship with transformational festivals, these events are said to possess distinct roots in the UK free party movement arising from the convergence of Travellers and DiY sound systems. O’Grady is concerned with how these events, which also borrow from traditions like ‘garden parties, English fetes, camping trips, wilderness adventures’, prioritize the rural idyll and foster authenticity by way of temporary relocation into the countryside. While it is unstated in O’Grady’s analysis, I suspect that part of the appeal of these events, their capacity for enhancing ‘well-being’, is that they are not just experimental spaces but familiar spaces of experimentation. Although relying on a gestalt of familiarity, festivals rarely survive without innovation, which in countries with cluttered events calendars like the United Kingdom, the United States, Germany and Australia, requires strategic efforts to gain the favour of, and build support from, the eventgoing public. Like other cultural goods and services, the value of the festival emerges not only in its consumption, but in ‘the anticipation of a desired experience’ (Johansson and Toraldo 2015: 5). And perhaps nothing builds excitement more than the promise of surprise (i.e. that which is alternative to what is available elsewhere). But while novelty is implicit to the event design of dance music festivals, a circumstance ensuring event-management will continue to innovate, events also possess a drawing power that relies on their ability to return event-goers to a familiar place. We might understand this by way of the highly anticipated ‘little death’ of the ecstatic dance state, the entranced condition, in which the experient is permitted to go out of their mind in the company of others, friends and strangers alike, a circumstance

16

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

augmented through intention and experience design. The popular desire for this condition might be stated to be the desire to be without desire, even however fleetingly. But an understanding of the ‘little death’ of the festival cannot arrive by way of discursive analyses. Building anticipation for novelty is critical within the dance music culture industry, where mediators, none less than DJ/producers and label promoters (some of whom operate their own festivals or manage event sound-stages), play an important role in fashioning innovative style, genre iterations, tempo changes, typically formulated through the fusion of existing aesthetic elements, by which an original experience is promised. At the same time, the quest for originality in the laboratory of dance is countermanded by the desire for the familiar, the return to origins. This festal tension echoes the logic of Csikszentmihalyi’s (1990) ‘flow’ state. Here, an experience is characterized as ‘flowing’ where the artifice experienced (i.e. sport, music) is novel, and yet not too novel. The tension is especially evident in scenes that display remarkable resilience, like psytrance (see O'Grady 2015), whose participants will return time and again to a ‘vibe’ that is furnished by aesthetic conventions that are both timeless (e.g. the 16th note) and challenging (e.g. new styles like ‘hitech’). Across dance music scenes, the ‘vibe’ represents a curious balancing act of novelty and familiarity, innovation and authenticity, change and stasis, the tensions between which appears to illuminate that experience most endearing to event natives – the familiar otherness of ekstasis. This logic is recognized by Thomas Turino who offers insight on the role of challenges in the optimizing of the musical experience sought by those who will return time and again to re-enter the flow. These are states associated with activities that must include the proper balance between inherent challenges and the skill level of the actor. If the challenges are too low, the activity becomes boring and the mind wanders; if the challenges are too high, the activity leads to frustration and the actor cannot engage fully. When the balance is just right, it enhances concentration and that sense of being at one with the activity and perhaps the other people involved (Turino 2008: 4). In electronic dance music scenes, music producers, event organizers and dancefloor occupants attempt to maintain this harmony, the balancing of which in recurrent and reversioned events offer insight on the nature of ‘progressive’ sensibilities (for psytrance, see St John 2012: 214–15). While this familiar difference empowers participants to enter experimental and transformative states of selfhood, finding the tension-line amid shifting aesthetics grows increasingly difficult as dance music cultural events expand to host disparate event-tribes inside their sprawling precincts, such as might be found at Germany’s Fusion Festival. As events grow in scale to accommodate more music styles, performance arts and other options

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

17

across vast sites, some of them visited by a hundred thousand for a night, others camped in by a few hundred over a week, their liminal domains grow complex. If originary cultural events represent an arguably simplistic case of liminality, larger scale events are hyperliminal contexts, which in the case of Boom, for example, illustrates the propensity for energy sustainability and expenditure sought in equal measure by convergent populations (St John 2014c). Other events falling under the transformational rubric tend to offer multiple means for transition by permitting event publics the ability to perform variable identities that emerge on a status spectrum between consumer (the entertained) and producer (the artist), the complex liminal conditions of which warrants further consideration in the emergent field of dance music festival studies. This returns me to the logic of the transformational festival, and not to mention many other events consciously investing in a transformational logic. Such events rely upon the development of cultural industries dedicated to augmenting the conditions of participant liminality through the optimizing of event experience design, sensory technologies and prosumer arts. This event-liminalization raises questions about the supposed efficacy of these recurrent events, inquiries that will benefit from sustained and longitudinal studies of festivals. One might inquire, for example, as to whether these events facilitate transformations in personal, social and cultural conditions according to the passage rite model in which these festivals typically invest, or are they more akin to transitional worlds, parallel cultural universes and liminal mini-states to which event-goers and raving liminars repeatedly return? Does event attendance afford passage and recognition outside of the event, or does event experience, relationships and prestige hold currency only within the eventized culture itself? These are questions that it is hoped this volume will encourage future researchers to address. Weekend Societies organizes the chapters introduced above into three parts, each addressing identifiable themes in the field of electronic dance music festivals and event-cultures. In part one, Dance Empires and EDM Culture Industry, Holt, Montano and Park address the origins and implications of the EDM festival empires that currently dominate the attention economy of global dance music. In part two, Underground Networks and Transformational Events, Schmidt, Ruane, O’Grady and Petiau offer ethnographic insights on the aesthetics, economies and lifestyles of underground festivals – from boutique festival to teknival – in the United States, Portugal, the United Kingdom and France. Finally, in part three, Cosmopolitan Experiments and Electroniculture, Magaudda, van Veen and St John provide entries on the challenges faced by electronic music scenes in unique events on the world stage. Their contributions illustrate how increasingly popular sonicities – in Spain (Sónar), Montréal (MUTEK) and Black Rock City (Burning Man) – have evolved distinct festival identities and event-cultures. The contributions to this volume leave considerable

18

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

room for future investigations of electronic dance festival events and eventcultures, especially those proliferating in non-English language countries and in the global South, regions largely neglected here. It is hoped that these current entries on this nascent field of festivalization will fuel the conversation.

References Anderson, Tammy L. 2009. Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’. Theory, Culture & Society, 7 (2): 295–310. http://dx.doi.org /10.1177/026327690007002017. Bennett, Andy, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, eds. 2014. The Festivalisation of Culture. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson, eds. 2004. Music Scenes: Local, Trans local and Virtual. New York: Oxford University Press. Bey, Hakim. 1991. TAZ: The Temporary Autonomous Zone – Ontological Anarchy and Poetic Terrorism. New York: Autonomedia. Boltanski, L. and E. Chiapello. 2005. The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. G. Elliot. London: Verso. Bookchin, Murray. 1995. Social Anarchism or Lifestyle Anarchism: An Unbridgeable Chasm. Edinburgh: AK Press. Buckland, Fiona. 2002. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Chalcraft, Jasper, Gerard Delanty and Monica Sassatelli. 2014. ‘Varieties of Cosmopolitanism in Art Festivals’. In The Festivalisation of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 109–30. Aldershot: Ashgate. Chalcraft, Jasper and Paolo Magaudda. 2013. ‘“Space is the Place”: The Global Localities of the Sónar and WOMAD Music Festivals’. In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, eds. Gerard Delanty, Liana Giorgi and Monica Sassatelli, 173–89. New York: Routledge. Chen, Katherine K. 2012. ‘Artistic Prosumption: Cocreative Destruction at Burning Man’. American Behavioral Scientist, 56 (4): 570–95. http://dx.doi .org/10.1177/0002764211429362. Chen, Katherine K. 2015. ‘Prosumption: From Parasitic to Prefigurative.’ The Sociological Quarterly, 56 (3): 446–59. Cormany, Diane L. 2015. ‘Coachella Fans, Online and Translocal’. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 27 (2): 184–98. Cova, Bernard, Robert V. Kozinets and Avi Shankar, eds. 2007. Consumer Tribes. Burlington: Elsevier. Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. 1990. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper and Row. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York: Routledge.

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

19

Dart, Chris. 2014. ‘Bass Coast Festival Bans First Nations headdresses’. CBC Music, 25 July. http://music.cbc.ca/#!/blogs/2014/7/Bass-Coast-Festival-bans -First-Nations-headdresses (accessed 25 July 2016). Dilkes-Frayne, E. 2015. ‘Drugs at the Campsite: Socio-Spatial Relations and Drug Use at Music Festivals’. International Journal of Drug Policy (in press). http:// dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.drugpo.2015.10.004. Holt, Fabian. 2016 (forthcoming). ‘New Media, New Festival Worlds’. In Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, eds C. Baade and J. Deaville. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johansson, Marjana and Maria Laura Toraldo. 2015. ‘“From mosh pit to posh pit”: Festival Imagery in the Context of the Boutique Festival’. Culture and Organization. Published Online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14759551.2015.10 32287. Jones, Steven T. 2011. The Tribes of Burning Man: How an Experimental City in the Desert Is Shaping the New American Counterculture. San Francisco: CCC Publishing. Lawrence, Tim. 2003. Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970–1979. Durham: Duke University Press. Lynskey, Dorian. 2014. ‘This Means War: Why the Fashion Headdress Must Be Stopped’. The Guardian, 30 July. http://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2014/ jul/30/why-the-fashion-headdress-must-be-stopped (accessed 25 July 2016). McKay, George, ed. 2015. The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Montano, Ed. 2009. ‘DJ Culture in the Commercial Sydney Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1 (1): 81–93. Montano, Ed. 2011. ‘Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1): 63–89. Morey, Y., A. Bengry-Howell, C. Griffin, I. Szmigin and S. Riley. 2014. ‘Festivals 2.0: Consuming, Producing and Participating in the Extended Festival Experience’. In The Festivalisation of Culture, eds. A. Bennett, I. Woodward and J. Taylor, 251–58. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nye, Sean and Ronald Hitzler. 2011. ‘Where Is Duisburg? An LP Postscript’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1). http://dx.doi .org/10.12801/1947-5403.2011.02.01.13. O‘Grady, Alice. 2015. ‘Alternative Playworlds: Psytrance Festivals, Deep Play and Creative Zones of Transcendence’. In The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture, ed. George McKay, 149–64. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Pacholik, Devin. 2015. ‘This Is What Indigenous Artists Think of Your Hipster Headdress’. Noisey VICE, 28 August. http://noisey.vice.com/blog/this-is-what -indigenous-artists-think-of-your-hipster-headdress (accessed 25 July 2016). Peoples, Glenn. 2016. ‘SFX Files for Bankruptcy, Sillerman to Be Replaced as CEO’. Billboard, 1 February. http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6859512/sfx -bankruptcy (accessed 25 July 2016). Pongsakornrungsilp, Siwarit, and Jonathan E. Schroeder. 2011. ‘Understanding Value Co-Creation in a Co-Consuming Brand Community’. Marketing Theory, 11 (3): 303–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1470593111408178.

20

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Rapp, Tobias. 2009. Lost and Sound: Berlin, Techno, und der Easyjetset. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Reynolds, Simon. 1997. ‘Rave Culture: Living Dream or Living Death?’ In The Clubcultures Reader: Readings in Popular Cultural Studies, ed. Steve Redhead, 102–11. Oxford: Blackwell. Reynolds, Simon. 2012. ‘How Rave Music Conquered America’. The Guardian, 2 August. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave-music -conquered-america (accessed 25 July 2016). Rietveld, Hillegonda. 1998. This Is Our House: House Music, Cultural Spaces, and Technologies. Aldershot: Ashgate. Ritzer, George. 2015. ‘Prosumer Capitalism’. The Sociological Quarterly, 56 (3): 413–45. Robinson, Roxy. 2015. ‘No Spectators! The Art of Participation: From Burning Man to Boutique Festivals in Britain’. In The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture, ed. George McKay, 165–82. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Rom, Tom and Pascal Querner. 2011. Goa: 20 Years of Psychedelic Trance. Solothurn/Switzerland: Nachtschatten Verlag. Sisario, Ben. 2012. ‘Electronic Dance Concerts Turn Up Volume, Tempting Investors’. The New York Times, 4 April. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/05/ business/media/electronic-dance-genre-tempts-investors.html?pagewanted=all& _r=0 (accessed 25 July 2016). St John, Graham. 2009. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox. St John, Graham. 2012. Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance. Sheffield: Equinox. St John, Graham. 2013. ‘Total Solar Eclipse Festivals, Cosmic Pilgrims and Planetary Culture’. In Pop Pagans: Paganism and Popular Music, eds. Donna Weston and Andy Bennett, 126–44. Durham: Acumen. St John, Graham. 2014a. ‘Goatrance Travellers: Psytrance and Its Seasoned Progeny’. In The Globalization of Musics in Transit: Musical Migration and Tourism, eds. Simone Krüger and Ruxandra Trandafoiu, 160–82. New York: Routledge. St John, Graham. 2014b. ‘Begoggled in the Theater of Awe: Electronic Dance Music Culture at Burning Man’. In Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man, ed. Samantha Krukowski, 144–59. London: Black Dog Publishing. St John, Graham. 2014c. ‘The Logics of Sacrifice at Visionary Arts Festivals’. In The Festivalisation of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 49–68. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stahl, Geoff. 2014. ‘Getting By and Growing Older: Club Transmediale and Creative Life in the New Berlin’. In Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes, ed. Geoff Stahl, 191–210. Peter Lang: Berne. Turino, Thomas. 2008. Music as Social Life: The Politics of Participation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Turner, Erik. 2014. ‘Transformational Festivals: Reflections on Social Movements and Transformational Festivals as Civil Spheres’. PsypressUK, 8 December. http://psypressuk.com/2014/12/08/transformational-festivals-reflections-on -social-movements-and-transformational-festivals-as-civil-spheres-by-eric-turner (accessed 25 July 2016).

INTRODUCTION: DANCE MUSIC FESTIVALS AND EVENT-CULTURES

21

Turner, Victor. 1969. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine. Wynn, Jonathan R. 2015. Music/City: American Festivals and Placemaking in Austin, Nashville, and Newport. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Filmography Cutforth, Dan and Jane Lipsitz. 2014. Under the Electric Sky. DVD. Universal. DROID i.d. 2013. The Alchemy of Spirit. Part 1. Lisbon, Portugal: Boom Team. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTrsenzgJCQ (accessed 14 May 2015). Johner, Andrew. 2012. Electronic Awakening. DVD. North Atlantic. Leung, Jeet Kei. 2010. ‘Transformational Festivals’. TEDx Vancouver. http:// tedxtalks.ted.com/video/TEDxVancouver-Jeet-Kei-Leung-Tr (accessed 15 May 2015). Leung, Jeet Kei and Akira Chan. 2014. The Bloom Series. Elevate Films, Keyframe Entertainment, Muti Music & Grounded TV. http://thebloomseries.com. Tomorrowland 2011. Official aftermovie. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=M7CdTAiaLes (accessed 14 May 2015).

PART ONE

Dance Empires and EDM Culture Industry

CHAPTER ONE

EDM Pop: A Soft Shell Formation in a New Festival Economy Fabian Holt

Upon a hill across a blue lake That’s where I had my first heartbreak I still remember how it all changed ‘Don’t You Worry Child’, Swedish House Mafia (2012) Since the late 2000s, a form of electronic dance music consisting mainly of commercial house music and contemporary top 40 pop music has enjoyed mass popularity around the globe. The music is often identified as ‘EDM’ in popular media without being distinguished from other forms of electronic dance music below the mass media surface. This chapter identifies the new formation as EDM pop and situates it within broader evolutions in the popular music festival landscape. EDM pop has been covered by EDM magazines but also by rock and pop music magazines such as Pitchfork and Spin, and by the trade magazine Billboard. The trajectory of EDM into pop culture and into the corporate music industry reflected in this journalism has been subject to little research. While scholars have studied the growing industrialization of EDM in local contexts (Montano 2009, 2011; Stahl 2014), a broader conceptual framing of EDM pop and its festivalscape has not yet appeared in print. The aim of this chapter is to offer a broad analytical framing of EDM pop in terms of genre and industry. I argue that EDM pop is involved in

26

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

mass culture and corporate industry formations beyond the conventional genre networks of EDM and that similar situations have occurred several times before in the history of popular music. EDM pop can be interpreted as an example of a soft shell genre formation, a term I adopt from culture industry sociology to map the dynamics of popularization and corporatization. A crucial point in the chapter argument is that, following the soft shell theory, the evolution of EDM pop festivals can not only be interpreted as a formation within the genre but also within the broader popular music and popular culture landscape. By contrast to earlier soft shell developments in popular music history such as the Nashville Sound in country music, fusion in jazz, ‘tropical’ in salsa, or the ‘global pop’ trajectories of diverse local traditions, EDM pop is based in a live event economy. Professionally produced cultural events play a key role in the contemporary cultural economy of regions and cities, in the music business, in corporate sponsorship and in place marketing. The chapter analysis therefore situates EDM pop more specifically within the new economy of popular music festivals. I argue that this economy involves three core evolutions: (1) The evolution of the popular music festival as format for the music business in the 1990s, (2) the evolution of popular music festivals as generic events to mainstream society and business1 in the 2000s and (3) the evolution of popular music festivals as social media events in the 2010s. These evolutions help explain fundamental aspects of EDM pop festivals and can inform more detailed musicological and ethnographic studies in the future. The chapter is based on qualitative research on EDM pop festivals, with Tomorrowland in Belgium as the main example. I conducted field research at Tomorrowland in 2012 and 2013, interviewed the promoter ID&T, and researched the evolution in production, style and business of Tomorrowland marketing videos and livecasts. Complementary research on Creamfields, Electric Daisy Carnival, Sunburn and Ultra Music was conducted to explore general trends in the design and business of this festivalscape.

Conceptual approach: Industry sociology of mass culture The scholarly literature on EDM can roughly be interpreted as a discourse for studying the underground formations that for decades formed the core

This chapter refers to mainstream society and business according to terminology in the sociology of modernity (Slater 1998, 2011). 1

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

27

base of the genre. The same can be said of the literature on popular music festivals, which has concentrated on countercultural festivals and which has not yet framed an agenda for their evolution into consumer culture festivals. These literatures have explored core aspects of culture and community and their capacity to constitute alternative realities in the individual festival sphere and in social movement contexts (Cantwell 1993; Giorgi, Sassatelli and Delanty 2011). Electronic music scholarship has paid special attention to intimacy, trance, ritual and utopia (D’Andrea 2007; St John 2009). The  cultural landscape has changed considerably since the 1990s when festivals increasingly turned to mass popular music and evolved into industry-based events, awaiting analytical framing in the respective fields of scholarship. This chapter marks a departure from the existing literatures by researching the mass culture side of festival culture and of EDM, framing it explicitly as mass culture entertainment. EDM pop festivals can fundamentally be conceived as consumer culture environments of live entertainment and have much in common with conventional mass culture forms. A general aspect is the prevalence of generic models (Holt 2007: 2) appearing in the form of hit songs, theme park designs and brand culture. Another typical aspect is the psychological simplicity and emphasis on light emotions in the crowds and in the many songs about juvenile love and happiness such as ‘Don’t You Worry Child’ quoted earlier. Like 1970s arena rock, for instance, EDM pop festivals are characterized by a fascination with magnitude and pyrotechnics. Like TV soaps, they do not shy from the superficial and mundane, as illustrated by the melodies and lyrics to which main stage crowds sing along. Many of the synthesizer riffs and ostinatos resemble elements of top  40 pop songs. Finally, the EDM festivalscape is industry-based. By 2015, it had become dominated by two corporate entities, SFX-IDT and Live Nation-Insomniac, which by then owned all of the festivals mentioned in the opening paragraph (except Sunburn). How is industry-based entertainment commonly studied? There are traditions dedicated to this in the humanities within film studies, television studies and cultural studies from which popular music studies and other areas have drawn much inspiration. These traditions have developed conceptual approaches to studying texts and audience experiences, as in semiotics and reception studies (Hall 1980; Fiske 1990). Semiotics could be relevant for analysing how EDM pop festivals are differentiated from transformational festivals and boutique festivals, for instance, through their appeal to different lifestyle values, each gaining meaning in relation to one another through the principle of difference. Semiotics could also deliver analyses of the ‘language’ of EDM pop, its visual festival design and its discursive realities as a new global fashion (Bogart 2012; Dargis 2013) and a re-branding of 1990s rave culture (Reynolds 2012). Reception studies, moreover, is relevant for studying

28

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

how meanings are produced in live and socially mediated consumption. So semiotics and reception studies are relevant for understanding the culture, but to understand its industry dimensions we need to consider two other traditions, namely culture industry studies and political economy (Hall 1981; Ryan 1992). The theory of soft shell is particularly useful in this study because it offers an explanation of the dynamics in the processes of popularization and corporatization that EDM is undergoing.

Soft shell theory The concept of soft shell originates in Richard Peterson’s magisterial Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity (Peterson 1997). The book is the product of twenty-five years of field research on the evolution of country music into a genre with a distinct place in the corporate music industry, from the first commercial recordings in the early 1920s to the institutionalization of the genre in the early 1950s. A sociologist of culture industry, Peterson identifies a dynamic tension between a perceived core of the genre and its softer shell. The book is written as an empirical history, and the soft shell concept is presented in the form of an empirical typology and narrative, but the ideas can be adopted into a more general discourse for understanding similar processes in other genres. Consider the following framing applicable to electronic dance music (replacing the distinction ‘hard vs. soft country’ with ‘underground vs. pop EDM’): The basic justification for hard country is that it represents the authentic tradition of the music called country and that it is by and for those steeped in the tradition. The corresponding justification for soft country is that it melds country with pop music to make it enjoyable to the much larger numbers of those not born in to or knowledgeable about country music. The leading hard-core artists have received the most attention from contemporary commentators and later scholars as well. At the same time, the leading soft shell artists of an era have tended to be more popular with audiences and to make more money than their hard-core counterparts (Peterson 1997: 150). Peterson offers typologies and rich descriptions, but he does not offer a theory in the strict sense of explanations in a general and abstract language, although elements thereof can be deduced from his writing. At the core of his thinking about the term soft shell is a core-boundary metaphor, which appears in descriptions of contrasting of musical styles, artist personae, audiences, production systems (independent vs. corporate) and media spaces (local genre radio vs. national top 40). Peterson, moreover, adopts the term

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

29

soft shell into a historical narrative of the genre’s industrialization. While Peterson argues that hard and soft have co-existed throughout the history of the genre, it is clear that the relation between the two changes with corporate co-optation (in general, only the soft shell is co-opted). Peterson describes how soft country co-evolved with radio-based country music in the 1930s. In this process, the industry worked to smooth over the raw edges of the genre to establish it as family entertainment and increase its popularity with audiences beyond those who identified as fans of the music. This industry-driven popularization is a key aspect of soft shell dynamics (Peterson 1997: 229), and it is this point I interpret in the contemporary context in outlining the new festival economy provided on the following pages. The focus of the outline is the economic functions of festivals in a variety of commercial contexts outside the conventional boundaries of the festival sector and culture. Corporate culture industry develops, promotes and exploits soft shell culture. Intrinsic to this process is the influence of interests and logics outside genre spheres, of genre-specialized artists, producers and fans. A distinction can be made between micro and macro formations of soft shell. At the micro-level are individual artists and productions, while the macro-level formation is a collective style that is named and systematically produced. EDM pop is an example of the latter and has parallels in country music with the Nashville Sound of the 1960s and in jazz with Creed Taylors jazz-pop productions of the same decade and later with the smooth jazz industry. The Nashville Sound and EDM pop are examples of soft shell formations that created a new image for the genre and the idea of a new beginning, in part because the mass penetration was so strong that foundational images of the genre were transformed decades after its formative stages.2 Soft shell processes in these genres have not subsumed the genre in its entirety but the processes have affected the overall dynamics of the genre.

Three evolutions in the economy of popular music festivals Industry-based cultural events such as consumer culture music festivals involve economic activity across a number of local and international businesses, including musical entertainment, beverages, food, hospitality, media and transportation. Interest in the economic value chain in the host

2

For a study of country music and jazz, see Holt (2007: chs 3–4).

30

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

community has been central to the nominal field of events research within tourism studies for decades. There, scholars have typically analysed not the business of the festival organization itself but the impacts of the festival on other businesses in the community. This has led to a framing of the festival industry as a mixed industry (Getz 2012). The present chapter recognizes the value of this insight but does not use the term mixed industry because industry-based music festivals (1) are primarily framed within music markets and (2) do not mix with but conduct business with para-industries of more general commodity markets, such as advertising, hospitality and media. Few firms in the supply chain work only with festivals. In the present account, industry-based popular music festivals are identified as music industry, even as they are embedded in a network of para-industries.

1. The festival becomes a format for the music business in the 1990s Logic: Music markets and headliners The growing market value of live music in the late 1990s (Krueger 2005) transformed the role of festivals in the music business. Festivals went from being viewed as idiosyncratic cultural projects outside the daily business of the live music industry to becoming a generic format and avenue of commerce for the music industry as a whole. The transformation happened gradually during the 1980s and 1990s and peaked with the boom in the 2000s (e.g. Waddell 2013) when the number of popular music festivals doubled in many countries and several of the biggest festivals had doubled in size since the 1980s.3 By the 2000s there were more festivals, bigger festivals, and corporately owned festivals, some of which had started as a countercultural festival. Festivals have become one of the main areas of economic activity for artist agencies, managers and concert agencies. The large-scale festival became such a lucrative format during the festival boom that many event and concert promoters began promoting festivals. The secondary role of festivals in the music industry of the 1970s and 1980s was reflected in pricing of performing artists. Rock festival promoters, for

In addition to Billboard reports in the United States, the international dimension of the festival boom is backed up by other reports (NIRAS Denmark with Holt 2010; Webster 2014). While the boom involved an increase in the number and size of rock festivals in many countries, with even small countries having a couple of festivals with daily crowds of more than, say, 25,000 people can be found in many countries, the big EDM pop festivals examined in this chapter appear in a smaller number of countries, including Australia, Brazil, Belgium, The Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. 3

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

31

instance, were able to book artists at a discounted ‘festival rate’ compared with arena concerts.4 This arrangement eroded when festival headliners became a major source of revenue for corporate concert promoters in the 2000s. Festival promoters sought to compensate for the growing expenses by selling one-day tickets. The latter contributed to the rise of an arena concert culture within the festival, with thousands going mainly for one headliner, while remaining spectators to the festival culture. A distinct aspect of this evolution of the festival as an industry format is the role of headliners in drawing mass audiences. This is mostly the case in rock and jazz festivals, which are concert-based, but EDM pop festivals, too, need superstar DJs to reach mass live and media audiences.5 Tomorrowland and EDC Las Vegas market themselves as event brands, emphasizing the overall party experience rather than the lineup (Mason 2012; Sherburne 2013), but the lineups continue to feature countless chart-topping DJs that are featured prominently in livecastings on YouTube and Yahoo! The lineups also reveal that the EDM pop festival model has stabilized: Tomorrowland, for instance, consistently drew from the same pool of EDM pop stars every year between 2010 and 2015, including Avicii, Calvin Harris, Carl Cox, David Guetta, Deadmau5, Skrillex, Steve Aoki, Swedish House Mafia (with separate performances by the members after the trio split up in 2013) and Tiësto. The broad popularity of these DJs to contemporary youth explains why some among them have been adopted as part of the broader soft shell of rock and pop festivals such as Bonnaroo, Coachella, Rock Werchter, and T in the Park. The intensified market logic has changed festival culture, which has become more centered around stars and main stage shows and more standardized as the same stars appear at more festivals owned by the same corporations with the same facility and service providers. Many festivals have similar lineups, architectural designs, hospitality services and online ticketing services. The market competition for headliners results in higher prices on tickets, food, drinks and more brand sponsorship and thus drives a general commodification of the festival environment. Market development, moreover, shapes the design and location of new festivals. New festivals are created based on market research and a growing emphasis on commercial rather than cultural motivations; festivals proliferate in urban parks and former industrial facilities, designing the space primarily for the consumption of music and leaving out conventional festival spaces

Leif Skov, conversation with author, 10 August 2010. Adding superstars to the lineup drove the expansion of rock festivals when the biggest festivals grew from attracting 15,000 or 20,000 people per day to 40,000 or more during the 1980s and 1990s. 4 5

32

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

such as camping and grassroots participant spaces; and one-day tickets are offered to maximize profits, even though it involves more people coming for a show and not the multi-day festival experience. A formative moment in this market and industry evolution happened when corporate concert promoters began buying shares in rock music festivals in the 1990s and developed them as brands to grow their appeal to mainstream consumers and sponsors (Anderton 2011). This business development culminated during the festival boom in the 2000s when Live Nation acquired a majority stake in Festival Republic, illustrating the shift of emphasis from club venues and concerts to festivals within the corporate live music industry.6 By the early 2010s, Live Nation owned more than forty festivals in Europe alone, and the acquisitions accelerated in 2013–2015 when it gained ownership of major EDM pop and rock music festivals such as Insomniac Events and, the Swedish EDM pop festival promoter, Stureplansgruppen (Hanley 2015; Sackllah 2015; ‘Live Nation’s New Groove’). Meanwhile, industry mogul Robert Sillerman who led the  corporatization of the rock concert industry with the company that became Live Nation in  2005 moved on to do the same in EDM pop in the 2010s. Beginning in 2011, his corporation SFX Entertainment purchased hundreds of EDM pop events and festivals and grew media and advertising infrastructures around them. Within a year after the acquisition of Beatport, for instance, a partnership was established to market Beatport’s top 20 radio show through Clear Channel’s major-market hit radio stations (Mason 2014). By  9  October  2013, in  celebration of its initial public offering on the NASDAQ stock market, SFX CEO Sillerman rang the closing bell with DJ Afrojack. This ceremony marked a culmination in the corporatization of EDM. Ending his speech with ‘Let’s  Dance!’, Sillerman appeared to be leading the  charge in an  EDM pop gold rush (Figure 1.1). These corporate evolutions have led to similar organizational structures and models of integration with media and advertising in rock and EDM pop. This is what culture industry sociologists call institutional isomorphism. Yet, the situation in each genre is unique. In indie rock, for instance, a soft shell development in the 1990s and 2000s also involved co-optation by major record labels, corporate sponsors, and big festivals, but the music is still defined as an urban niche culture distinct from mass culture (Holt 2014).

Festival Republic emerged from a reorganization of the company Mean Fiddler, which promoted concerts and managed club venues in London. In 2007, two years after Live Nation gained ownership, the venue portfolio was sold and the company was rebranded under the name Festival Republic to concentrate on festivals (‘Festival Republic: About Us’). 6

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

33

FIGURE  1.1  DJ Afrojack and SFX CEO Robert Sillerman at NASDAQ, Times Square, New York City, 9 October 2013. Photo: Fabian Holt.

2. The festival becomes a generic event to mainstream society and business in the 2000s Logic: Service and brand management In the 1990s, cities were generally uninterested in hosting popular music festivals or raves. Festival managers were not part of the city’s elite networks. Dominant mass media stories focused on themes of hedonism, drugs, deviancy and noise (McKay 2000; St John 2009). The relationship between popular music festivals and cities was dominated by a perceived need for minimizing negative impacts such as noise and waste. The relationship between festivals and cities changed fundamentally in the 2000s when dominant narratives started focusing on the successful impact of festivals on city marketing and the local economy within a new and broader discourse of ‘the eventful city’ and ‘the festival city’ (Richards and Palmer 2010: 2–3). This shift resulted from several developments within post-industrial economies. During the 1970s and 1980s, city governments, informed by private consultancies, started to think of culture as an economic driver. During those decades, culture-led growth strategies typically involved museums, sports facilities, amusement parks and the development of public spaces for middle-class consumption (Zukin 1995). In the 1990s, the cultural event became widely recognized by the

34

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

advertising industry as an immersive medium and by city governments influenced by economic geographer Richard Florida’s ideas about creative cities (Florida 2002). The fascination with the publicity value of superstar concerts fuelled, in particular, by a craze of arena construction projects in the late 1990s and early 2000s, with a handful of O2 arenas being constructed in major European cities, for instance. The arena trend was soon followed by a growing interest in outdoor popular music festivals and events because of their ability to transform the cityscape into a festive landscape. City center festivals and raves are given permission to use public spaces because they stimulate consumption and have the capacity to produce positive images of the city as an attractive destination for mass numbers of young people. This mindset has stimulated support of such diverse events as the Love Parade in Germany (and its international counterparts) and EDC in Las Vegas (Hitzler and Nye 2011; Jasper and Magaudda 2013). As city governments and corporate sponsors approached various kinds of events from an economic logic, a regime of generic values arose, which applied to music festivals as well as film festivals, fashion weeks, sport events and other kinds of pop culture events (‘Big Brand Sponsors Target Music Festivals’). Generic values include quantitative measures such as the number of visitors and spending in hotels and restaurants. The generic logic also extended to the style of communication. Events across the diverse cultural landscape adopted the same mass communication and marketing techniques such as theming and visual identity. They also adopted the discourse of economic and marketing impacts from the tourism and advertising industry to rationalize public spending and gain access to corporate sponsors and political elites (Getz 2012).7 Industry festivals now routinely manage their events as brands and commission impact studies to communicate their economic value to stakeholders. Insomniac Events, for instance, has commissioned economic impact studies almost every year since 2010 from the Los Angeles consultancy Beacon Economics, which has many clients in the sports events industry and in the public sector (Shah 2015). SFX-IDT commissioned a similar study from the same company on the first TomorrowWorld festival in 2013 (Ruggieri 2014). These studies play a role in countering skepticism of drug use, but above all situate the festivals in the top industry tier of culture and sports events. In the case of Tomorrowland, the enthusiasm of the host community has evolved into a challenge to brand management because a growing number of people and organizations are associating themselves with the festival to capitalize on

I have witnessed how events use the impacts discourse in multiple situations in Roskilde and Copenhagen in my local role as an events expert at Roskilde University since 2006. 7

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

35

its popularity even if they are not representing the style and values of the festival.8

3. The festival becomes a social media event in the 2010s Logic: Social media metrics and mass culture semiotics Before the international mass penetration of Facebook and YouTube in the late 2000s, music festivals depended on broadcast radio and television for mass exposure. In Euro-America, television coverage was limited to concert broadcasts from a small number of big rock music festivals, which continue to dominate. The evolution of the BBC’s coverage of Glastonbury is a case in point: When the BBC started television broadcasting from Glastonbury in the mid-1990s, about twenty staff produced eight hours of daily broadcasting for an estimated audience of one million people. Within a few years, the broadcasts moved to a more popular channel, and by 2015 the BBC had about 200 people producing live streams across multiple radio, television and online channels (‘Glastonbury TV’). The BBC covers no other festival with the same intensity.9 Few, if any, national media corporations provide television coverage of EDM festivals. The music director of National Public Radio (NPR) in the United States, for instance, explains that they focus on music discovery and find it increasingly challenging to do that, showing awareness of, but not explicitly naming, the processes of commodification and massification.10 NPR’s music discovery, however, focuses mainly on genres such as rock, folk and classical music and not so much on electronic dance music. In the early 2010s, festival mediations expanded dramatically beyond broadcast media and into socially mediated televisuality. Televisual online mediations had happened since the early 1990s, but did not proliferate until popular social media had created an infrastructure for audiences and for a new media industry looking for live content to attract audiences and advertisers. In this advertising-based digital economy dominated by Google, festivals generate traffic and brand value for sponsors and media corporations such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo!, and their televisual mediations of festivals have in turn created a new source of revenue for festivals. The digital realm is a new source of revenue for the live music industry. This evolution can be illustrated from the perspective of Tomorrowland, which is staged in a national park outside Antwerpen (Figure 1.2). The festival started in 2005 by the Belgian branch of ID&T and was inspired by the company’s Mysteryland festival (1993–) near Amsterdam. Mysteryland has a

Koen Lemmens and Christophe Van den Branden, ID&T, interview with author, 24 January 2013. 9 Andrew Rogers, senior producer at the BBC, interview with author, 1 April 2015. 10 Anya Grundman, director of NPR, interview with author, 4 February 2015. 8

36

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

FIGURE 1.2  Tomorrowland main stage 2013. Photo: Fabian Holt. more hardstyle profile and fewer EDM pop stars (some DJs have graduated to Tomorrowland as they reached a mass market). Tomorrowland adopted Mysteryland’s Disney-style design and New Age pop spiritualism, as apparent in the fairy-tale decorations, in the naming of the festival and its individual areas, and in the location in a park area with trees and lakes. Tomorrowland also adopted the motto ‘Yesterday is history. Today is a gift. Tomorrow is mystery’. The festival’s soft shell orientation created a more genderbalanced audience with about 40 per cent women, contrasting the more male-dominated audiences at ID&T’s raves in the 1990s.11 Tomorrowland is universally known by the male festival audience, also online, to attract women with appeal to advertising and fashion industry images of beauty. What is less known is that many males at the festival aspire to similar body aesthetics, typically shaved, shorthaired, wearing H&M-style summer pants and sporting a shaved, muscular torso. These elements – the fairy-tale design, the park, the stars, the pretty women and men, and the spectacular main stage architecture – have all been exploited for their visual appeal in the digital mediations of the festival. It was the marketers of Tomorrowland who gradually built a digital sphere for the festival. Their first videos for YouTube in the late 2000s can be described as reportage, just like the other festival videos at the time produced

This information is based on interviews with managers at ID&T’s offices in Antwerpen in January 2013. The managers also shared consumer data with me. 11

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

37

by other festivals and by amateurs. The marketers then decided to produce a more ambitious video of a Moby show at the main stage in 2009. For that video, they developed a more elaborate stage design with fireworks and upgraded the equipment for producing a higher image quality. Enthusiastic audience responses encouraged marketers to go further in this direction and develop a style of cinematic festival video with image quality and editing at Hollywood industry standards. These immersive movies were framed as ‘trailers’ and ‘after movies’ and became folkloric texts in EDM pop culture, framing the festival experience for international audiences. The co-evolution of the physical festival world and the social media movies culminated in the defining 2011 after movie, which received more than 100 million views on YouTube within a year. Why has ID&T continued to expand the Tomorrowland video productions when tickets have sold out repeatedly since 2010? The festival’s YouTube channel features hundreds of TV-quality videos, mostly recordings of single DJ sets. The evolution in production style also suggests growing ambitions, articulated through a Lord of the Rings–style cinematography. The explanation for this cinematic intensification is that the festival marketers are affected by the massive audience enthusiasm and that the mediations generate sponsorship revenues. The more the livecasts and videos are watched online, the more negotiation power the festival has with its business partners, and the more it earns.12 The development is stimulated by the broader advertising economy of social media. Since Google acquired YouTube in 2009, it has worked strategically to grow its competitive advantage with the film and television business. YouTube launched a ‘premium content strategy’ in 2011 in which live events such as mass-market music festivals play a key role. YouTube partnered with festivals for exclusive live streaming, including Tomorrowland, whose marketing team embraced the opportunity, viewing YouTube as ‘a global TV station’.13 Media evolutions have played a major role in the commercial development of events throughout history. An illustrative example is the television history of the Olympic Games, which has produced its own research literature. Following a broader convergence between sports and television in the 1960s, television replaced ticket sales as the main source of revenue for the Olympics by 1972 and since the late 1970s more than half of the TV rights fees have come from commercial networks in the United States (Real 2014). Mass media broadcasting created the basis for an evolution in corporate sponsorship, which became a major source of revenue with the 1984 Games in Los Angeles. These developments generated debates about the consequences of mediatization and commodification. Scholars continue

The festival marketers at ID&T whom I interviewed in January 2013 said that I was correct in making this assumption, but they did not disclose any details of the economic arrangement. 13 Koen Lemmens, ID&T, interview with author, 24 January 2013. 12

38

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

to debate whether the media had a symbiotic or parasitic relationship with sports. Some argued that the growing influence of stars and sponsors challenged the fundamental Olympic values of equality and democracy (Roche 2000: 166; Real 2014). Moreover, television broadcasts altered the balance between the ritual elements of the event, with more emphasis on spectacle. It also boosted the transformation of sports into consumer culture. At the level of audience experience, the capacity of moving images to communicate emotional information intensified the audience experience of crowd emotions and star personae, thus contributing to the rise of celebrity culture, with Michael Jordan as a pioneering example. Global mediations of Jordan’s playing and his achievements were exploited commercially in celebrity-style ads for Nike’s Air Jordan shoe model from the mid-1980s. In those ads, Jordan was presented not as a conventional athlete but styled as a celebrity and with a line of lifestyle products (clothing and fragrance) named after him (Kellner 2002: 64). The media further created and exploited his celebrity status by reporting on his income and his life with a 56,000 square foot mansion, sports cars and celebrity friends. EDM pop DJ stars operate in a different sphere of nightlife and party culture and are not praised by news media, for instance, the way Jordan was, but they are completely embedded in a celebrity culture. The handful of highest-earning DJs are on Forbes’ Top  100 list, featured in tabloid media stories about their private jets, parties with Paris Hilton, videos with female pop stars, luxury apartments in celebrity destinations such as Miami and Hollywood, residencies in Las Vegas and paparazzi photos. David Guetta had his name and picture on a series of Coca-Cola bottles in 2012 and met with the United Nations general secretary in 2013 to support World Humanitarian Day. In 2015, Calvin Harris started dating Taylor Swift and modelled for Armani in a global campaign for their men’s underwear. In my analysis of Tomorrowland as a social media event (Holt 2016), I argue that the marketers used social media to expand consumption and marketing into an open-ended continuum, equivalent to the transformation of news media into a 24/7 cycle in the digital age. In this continuum, mediations circulate across the pages of corporate festivals and private persons, bringing traces of festival culture into the everyday through a more direct and complex relation between industry and audience. Mediatization processes are contingent to the specificity of changing media systems, but the changing balance between the ritual elements of the event and the multi-level commodification are obvious parallels with the mediatization of the Olympics and offer a perspective on the conversation about EDM pop festivals as a culture of sensations and spectacle as indicated by the editor’s introduction to this volume. Most of my Tomorrowland informants, online and at the festival, were not yet thirty years old and did not have the experience to see the present moment as the result of a series of transformations in the history of EDM.

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

39

Conclusion The chapter was motivated by the realization that the popularization of EDM in commercial media and festivals is one of the major developments in early twenty-first century pop culture but that research is lacking on the core dimensions. The aim of this chapter has therefore been to offer an analytical mapping of the genre and industry dimensions of EDM pop, paying special attention to its place within the broader economy of popular music festivals. The sociology of genre and industry served as a useful tool for a raw framing in the beginning of the chapter. Genre theory opens up for structural and comparative thinking about a music, its media, discourses and its networks of production and consumption. Comparative thinking about similar situations in other genres in the past is absent in writing about EDM pop. The structural similarities with earlier developments in country music and jazz motivated the adoption of the soft shell concept from culture industry sociology. What initially might seem as a contrasting of aesthetics within a given genre is actually part of more complex dynamics involving interests outside the genre’s own distinct networks. EDM pop can be added to a long list of examples of how the corporate music industry popularizes genres for a mainstream market. Such soft shell formations, therefore, cannot be adequately analysed within the boundaries of the individual genre. This chapter situated EDM pop in a broader popular music economy in which rock festivals in particular have had an instrumental role in the evolution of the corporate festival industry and the image of popular music festivals as desirable destination events for local host communities. EDM pop festivals have pushed this evolution further by adopting visual branding practices from the film and events industry and by their aesthetics of mass culture euphoria. The exploration of EDM pop within broader contexts beyond EDM indicates that its mass-market success can be attributed to a number of factors in what might be described as a perfect storm: Pop stars such as Madonna and Rihanna were looking for inspiration for a modern sound; a new generation of social media created a platform for mediating visually appealing festival worlds; neoliberal city governments with populist cultural views embraced pop culture events for millennials; a corporate festival industry had evolved and was ready to co-opt EDM; and, finally, there was a crisis in the recording industry and a sense that rock music was not evolving much anymore, with rock festival promoters complaining about the declining supply of headliners, and EDM pop having a generational appeal to millennial youth. The chapter thus makes the case for looking beyond the internal hard vs. soft dualism than in Peterson’s analysis. When soft shell formations evolve into global mass cultures, they exist rather distantly from the hard core and can therefore meaningfully be analysed as relatively separate areas. The framing of EDM pop as a mass culture formation motivated my

40

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

emphasis on the genre’s life in the wider pop culture mainstream. Peterson focused on the life of soft shell within the genre because he was studying the genre’s history and developed the distinction in this context. Soft shell should not be confined to the dualism of its boundary metaphor because it is also a matter of how a genre is popularized outside its own territory. Judging from past examples, we can assume that a soft shell formation has a shelf life in the mainstream, but also deeply transforms the genre’s boundaries and identity, instigating ongoing negotiations with changing notions of mainstream pop music. The general methodological point of this chapter is that genre theory has broad relevance for mapping new cultural formations, even when they seem to grow away from genre and do not position themselves discursively in a genre. The basic vocabulary of genre theory does not have to be re-invented for every genre. Existing concepts developed decades ago can prove useful and help recognize the general and unique aspects of a situation. Once macro-structural mappings have been offered, they can be critiqued and nuanced by more specialized studies.

Acknowledgements I would like to express gratitude to Graham St John for his ambitious and rigorous editorial suggestions on early drafts of this chapter. I am also very grateful for comments from Tami Gadir and Francesco Lapenta. In addition, I should like to collectively thank the many festival professionals with whom I have had formal and informal conversations since 2006. Without their input, the industry analysis of this chapter would not have been possible.

References Anderton, C. 2011. ‘Music Festival Sponsorship: Between Commerce and Carnival’. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 1 (2): 145–58. ‘Big Brand Sponsors Target Music Festivals’. CNN.com, 17 April 2015. http:// edition.cnn.com/videos/tv/2015/04/17/wbt-intv-andrews-music-festivals.cnn (accessed 17 June 2015). Bogart, J. 2012. ‘Buy the Hype: Why EDM Could Really Be the New Rock’. The Atlantic, 10 July 2012. http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/ archive/2012/07/buy-the-hype-why-electronic-dance-music-really-could-be-the -new-rock/259597/ (accessed 25 February 2013). Cantwell, R. 1993. Ethnomimesis: Folklife and the Representation of Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. D’Andrea, A. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Cultures in Ibiza and Goa. New York and London: Routledge.

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

41

Dargis, M. 2013. ‘Debauchery and the American Experience (Woo-Hoo!)’. The New York Times, 14 March 2013. http://movies.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/ movies/spring-breakers-directed-by-harmony-korine.html?pagewanted=all& _r=0 (accessed 16 May 2013). ‘Festival Republic: About Us’. http://www.festivalrepublic.co.uk/about-us/ (accessed 24 July 2015). Fiske, J. 2011 [1990]. Introduction to Communication Studies, 3rd edn. London: Routledge. Florida, R. 2002. The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books. Getz, D. 2012 [2007]. Event Studies: Theory, Research, and Policy for Planned Events, 2nd edn. New York: Routledge. Giorgi, L., M. Sassatelli and G. Delanty, eds. 2011. Festivals and the Public Cultural Sphere. New York and London: Routledge. ‘Glastonbury TV’. The Television Company. http://www.the-television-company .co.uk/glastonbury-television/ (accessed 4 August 2015). Hall, S. 1980 [1973]. ‘Encoding/Decoding’. In Culture, Media, Language, eds. S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis, 128–38. London: Hutcheson. Hall, S. 1981. ‘Notes on Deconstruction “the Popular”’. In People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. R. Samuel, 227–40. London: Routledge. Hanley, J. 2015. ‘Live Nation Sweden Acquires EDM Promoter’. Music Week, 5 March 2015. http://www.musicweek.com/news/read/live-nation-sweden -acquires-edm-promoter/061069 (accessed 19 July 2015). Hitzler, R. and S. Nye. 2011. ‘Where Is Duisburg? An LP Postscript’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1). https://dj.dancecult.net/index .php/dancecult/article/view/303/289. Holt, F. 2007. Genre in Popular Music. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Holt, F. 2014. ‘Rock Clubs and Gentrification in New York City: The Case of the Bowery Presents’. IASPM@Journal 4 (1): 21–41. Holt, F. 2016. ‘New Media, New Festival Worlds’. In Music and the Broadcast Experience: Performance, Production, and Audiences, eds. C. Baade and J. Deaville. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jaspar, C. and P. Magaudda. 2013. ‘“Space is the Place”: The Global Localities of the Sónar and WOMAD Music Festivals’. In Festivals and the Cultural Public Sphere, eds. G. Delanty, L. Giorgi and M. Sassatelli, 173–89. New York and London: Routledge. Kellner, D. 2002. Media Spectacle. New York and London: Routledge. Krueger, A. B. 2005. ‘The Economics of Real Superstars: The Market for Rock Concerts in the Material World’. Journal of Labor Economics, 23 (1): 1–30. ‘Live Nation’s New Groove: Electronic Dance Music and Scalped Tickets’. Bloomberg Business, 9 August 2013. http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ articles/2013-08-09/live-nation-jumps-on-electronic-dance-music-scalped-tickets (accessed 19 July 2015). Mason, K. 2012. ‘Electric Daisy Founder Pasquale Rotella: “We Don’t Want to Book” Superstar DJs Anymore’. Billboard.com, 8 June 2012. http://www .billboard.com/biz/articles/news/touring/1094072/electric-daisy-founder -pasquale-rotella-we-dont-want-to-book (accessed 2 August 2015).

42

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Mason, K. 2014. ‘John Sykes, Robert Sillerman on New Clear Channel, SFX Partnership: “We Want to Be the Best”’. Billboard.biz, 6 January 2014. http:// www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/branding/5862290/john-sykes-robert -sillerman-on-new-clear-channel-sfx-partnership (accessed 27 July 2015). McKay, G. 2000. Glastonbury: A Very English Fair. London: Gollancz. Montano, E. 2009. ‘DJ Culture in the Commercial Sydney Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1 (1): 81–93. http:// dj.dancecult.net/index.php/journal/article/viewFile/3/6. Montano, E. 2011. ‘Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1): 63–89. http://dj.dancecult.net/ index.php/journal/article/viewFile/45/99. NIRAS Denmark with F. Holt. 2010. Analyse af Danske Musikfestivaler [Analysis of Danish Music Festivals]. Copenhagen: Danish Arts Council. Peterson, R. 1997. Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Real, M. 2014. ‘Do Media Corrupt the Olympics? The Role of Commerce, Commodification, and Television in the Olympic Games’. Blog post on the website of Royal Roads University, School of Communication and Culture, 13 February 2014. http://scc.royalroads.ca/do-media-corrupt-olympics-role-commerce-commodification -and-television-olympic-games (accessed 8 January 2015). Reynolds, S. 2012. ‘How Rave Music Conquered America’. The Guardian, 2 August 2012. http://www.theguardian.com/music/2012/aug/02/how-rave -music-conquered-america (accessed 17 June 2015). Richards, G. and R. Palmer. 2010. Eventful Cities: Cultural Management and Urban Revitalization. Amsterdam and elsewhere: Elsevier. Roche, M. 2000. Mega-Events and Modernity: Olympics and Expos in the Growth of Global Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Ruggieri, M. 2014. ‘Economic Impact of TomorrowWorld: $85.1 Million for the State of Georgia’. AJC.com, 8 April 2014. http://www.accessatlanta.com/ weblogs/atlanta-music-scene/2014/apr/08/economic-impact-tomorrowworld-85 -million-state-geo/ (accessed 7 January 2015). Ryan, B. 1992. Making Capital From Culture: The Corporate Form of Capitalist Cultural Production. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Sackllah, D. 2015. ‘Live Nation Takes Bonnarroo: The Ongoing Corporatization of Music Festivals’. Consequence of Sound, 29 April 2015. http:// consequenceofsound.net/2015/04/live-nation-takes-bonnaroo-the-ongoing -corporatization-of-music-festivals/ (accessed 17 June 2015). Shah, N. 2015. ‘How Music Festivals Pump Billions into the U.S. Economy’. Wall Street Journal, 31 July 2015. http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/07/31/how -music-festivals-pump-billions-into-the-u-s-economy/ (accessed 7 January 2015). Sherburne, P. 2013. ‘Electric Daisy Chain: Insomniac and Dick Clark Prod. Plan 2014 EDM Awards’. Spin, 21 June 2013. http://www.spin.com/articles/electric -daisy-carnival-insomniac-dick-clark-productions-edm-awards-2014/ (accessed 19 July 2015). Slater, D. 1998. Consumer Culture and Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity. Slater, D. 2011. ‘Marketing as Monstrosity: The Impossible Place between Culture and Economy’. In Inside Marketing: Practices, Ideologies, Devices, eds. D. Zwick and J. Cayla, 23–41. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

EDM POP: A SOFT SHELL FORMATION IN A NEW FESTIVAL ECONOMY

43

St John, G. 2009. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Equinox. Stahl, G., ed. 2014. Poor, But Sexy: Reflections on Berlin Scenes. Peter Lang: Bern. Waddell, R. 2013. ‘2013: Most New U.S. Music Festivals Launched in History’. Billboard.com, 6 March 2013. http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/ news/1551222/2013-most-new-us-music-festivals-launched-in-history (accessed 6 July 2015). Webster, E. 2014. Association of Independent Festivals Six-Year Report. Association of Independent Festivals, October 2014. http://aiforg.com/wp -content/uploads/AIF-Six-Year-Report-2014.pdf (accessed 27 January 2016). Zukin, S. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

CHAPTER TWO

Stereosonic and Australian Commercial EDM Festival Culture Ed Montano

Stereosonic has really gone in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. That can be attributed to the DJs and the artists that they book. We’re here now in Sydney with a capacity crowd of over 60,000 people. Many years ago I remember here in Australia a lot of the media were talking about ‘dance music is dead, it’s over, superstar DJs are done and that’s it’, and here we are, 2011, and you can’t get any more people in this place, it’s unbelievable. CARL COX.1

At festivals you always get what I like to call a ‘collective energy’ – you get so many people that are here just for the same reason. FERRY CORSTEN.2

It’s 26 November 2011 and I’m at Sydney Showgrounds, the events precinct at Sydney Olympic Park, a site developed for the 2000 Olympic Games. But the event is no sporting competition. I am here for the first leg of Stereosonic, one of Australia’s most popular music festivals and its biggest EDM event. 1 2

Carl Cox, interview with the author (Sydney), 26 November 2011. Ferry Corsten, interview with the author (Sydney), 26 November 2011.

46

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

With an expected attendance above 50,000, the main stage is located in ANZ Stadium, a venue that typically holds national soccer matches or concerts by only the most popular of popular music artists. The eventual crowd figure is estimated at over 60,000, with the stadium arena closed off at one point due to overcrowding (Squires 2011). Jump forward seven days and I am at Melbourne Showgrounds for the third leg of Stereosonic 2011.3 There’s a slight feeling of déjà vu. Recalling my Sydney experience, stages have the same names, the same artists are on at the same or similar times playing the same or similar sets, and the same logos of corporate sponsors appear on posters and flash across huge screens. Jump forward twenty-four hours and I’m at Brisbane Showgrounds, for the fifth4 and final leg of Stereosonic 2011. The déjà vu returns. Same stage names, artists, sets and branding. The scale of each event is striking. While short of the audience numbers that flock to globally renowned festivals such as Glastonbury and Coachella, for a sole genre focused festival in Australia, Stereosonic represents a pinnacle. This chapter is intended as a case study for an analysis of the industry mechanisms that underpin the promotion and staging of EDM festivals, and the subsequent impacts of these events on local scenes. My focus is on Stereosonic, an event that in 2012 attracted ‘the largest recorded crowd for a music festival’ in Australia (Napieralski 2012).5 The chapter seeks to unpack some of the industry perspectives surrounding the festival through an analysis of its development from a one-day Melbourne-only event in 2007, through to its two-day multi-city format in 2013 and 2014, and the sale of its parent company Totem OneLove to global dance culture conglomorate SFX Entertainment for $75 million in 2013 (Fitzsimons 2013; Jarvis 2013). I locate the rise of Stereosonic at the commercial peak of EDM culture in Australia. In much the same way as ‘the repression of rave culture in the UK in the early 1990s led to the emergence of corporate clubbing in that nation’ (D’Andrea 2007: 223), I argue that the codes of practice that were introduced into the Australian party landscape in the 1990s served to push dance party organizers and promoters in a more professional and commercial direction. Stereosonic sits within an Australian dance music festival landscape that has been developing since the 1990s. Festivals such

The second leg of Stereosonic in Perth takes place the day after the first leg. The fourth leg of Stereosonic in Adelaide occurs concurrently with the Melbourne leg. To facilitate this, acts and timeslots are shuffled around, with artists flying between the two cities. 5 This chapter focuses on Stereosonic and contextualizes the festival in relation to other commercial, mainstream festivals. As such, I’m not concerned with other Australian dance music festivals that sit outside of the mainstream and incorporate a broader arts and lifestyle aesthetic, such as Earthcore and Rainbow Serpent. 3

4

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 47

FIGURE 2.1  Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. Photo: Drew Ressler/Rukes.com.

as Future Music Festival, Good Vibrations, Parklife, Vibes on a Summer’s Day and We Love Sounds have propelled EDM culture into the mainstream (Montano 2011a). The  nocturnal domain in which DJs and clubbers traditionally interacted has been partially replaced by daytime festivals that are played out in open public spaces such as parks, stadiums and cultural quarters. The chapter highlights how the festival experience has become one of the main sites of EDM consumption in Australia, and considers the commercialization and commodification of the EDM festival experience through the perspectives of industry insiders. Such discussion is relevant not only for understandings of EDM culture but also, more broadly, for considering the contemporary festival experience and its cultural and economic meanings. The chapter is grounded in over a decade of ethnographic research and participant-observation in the Sydney and Melbourne commercial EDM scenes. Aside from attending club nights, gigs and festivals, this has involved work in various music retail stores (such as Sydney’s iconic Central Station Records), and writing for websites inthemix and pulseradio.net. My work in music retail located me as an ‘insider’ in the scene, a beneficial position for establishing contacts and forming relationships with research subjects (see Montano 2013a). Eight key interviews form the core of the primary research material that informs the chapter. These include an interview with Richie McNeill, one of the founders of Stereosonic, who has an extensive

48

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

history of involvement in Australian dance music culture as a DJ, promoter, record label owner and as the festival organizer responsible for pivotal events such as Apollo Music Festival and Two Tribes, while also heading companies such as Hardware and Totem Industries.6 Alongside this I draw on interviews with John Curtin, who at the time of our conversation was Marketing Manager for Stereosonic, and Frank Cotela, a founder of Stereosonic and now CEO of OneLove, one of Australia’s main electronic dance music labels.7 Other interviewees include Ant Celestino, A&R Manager at OneLove and a dance music producer; Trent Grimes, a DJ and General Manager of Soapbox Agency that represents several of Australia’s dance music DJs, producers and artists; Jesse Desenberg, a producer– DJ who performs under the alias Kid Kenobi and was voted Australia’s number one DJ in the annual inthemix DJ poll in 2003, 2004 and 2005; Katie Cunningham, one of the editors of inthemix; and Henry Johnstone, who at the time of our interview was editor of pulseradio.net. The chapter thus focuses on the perspectives of three main industry participant types: promoters, DJs and journalists. Alongside these key interviews I draw on other interviews conducted over the course of my research. I also utilize various online media sources and print street press, and the promotional material of festivals, which includes everything from flyers and billboard posters to social media posts and after movies. My attendance at multiple legs of Stereosonic in 2011 was the result of winning the inthemix annual contributor competition for my work throughout the year for the dance music website. The prize included an all-expenses-paid trip to the three east coast legs of the festival, the opportunity to interview some of the headlining DJs and the publication of my reviews (Montano 2011b,c). Experiencing Stereosonic in this way was an opportunity to sample numerous great dance music acts. Yet the replication of the festival in each city, and the similarities I witnessed, led me on a search for the local and to question the impact of these events on local scenes. After more than a decade of researching the commercial EDM scene in Sydney and exploring its reliance on the circuit of international DJs and the global flow of dance music culture (Montano 2013b), Stereosonic, with its abundance of international acts playing music mostly sourced from overseas, seems to be the culmination of Australian dance music culture’s drive to the global stage. In the process, the local appears to have been

For detail on McNeill’s history and various dance music industry endeavours and exploits, see Fitzsimons 2014a,b,c. At the time of our interview, McNeill had left Stereosonic to take time out from the industry. 7 The label arm of OneLove was kept as a separate company following the acquisition of Totem OneLove by SFX. Cotela, like McNeill, left Totem soon after the sale, and is now expanding the scope of the operations of OneLove to include publishing, management and live touring. 6

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 49

left behind, overcome by the commercialization of the transnational megafestival that can be easily transported piece-by-piece between geographically dispersed cities and re-assembled in mirror image. Stereosonic is an example of ‘the cloned festival, which is commodified, standardised and [has] no special relationship with place’ and which has a ‘focus on big names and on tried and tested performers’ (Newbold et  al. 2015: xxi). In his article on ‘Oz Rock’, Homan suggests that in Australia ‘evidence exists of a variety of imperialising tendencies within national/ regional scenes, distinct from the external circulation of global pressure’ (2000: 32, italics in original). This may be the case for rock culture, but it appears less evident in Australian EDM culture. While Stereosonic has always featured local acts, its internationalized presence has had various impacts on local scenes and has generated a raft of diverging perspectives on the cultural and social value of festivals to EDM culture in Australia. At the time of writing, large-scale music festivals in Australia are in decline, with a seeming shift towards a more boutique experience (Jones 2015; McCabe 2015). Henry Johnstone describes how Stereosonic has been one of the last really big [festivals] to survive. The market is moving towards smaller boutique things. People want a bit of a different experience . … [Festivals] have grown into this huge, huge thing. The bubble is going to burst, and I think it’s starting to happen a little bit. How long it’s going to take, who knows? Maybe Stereosonic will stay above water because it’s been bought by SFX. But look at Big Day Out, that’s gone. Everything is dropping, and I think it’s moving to smaller, a couple of thousand capacity events that don’t even have headliners like Stereosonic. They will have second tier acts as their headliners, and it’s more about the experience.8 Stereosonic encapsulates a period in Australian EDM culture, and popular music culture more broadly, when there was a turn towards a super-sized live experience spread across multiple stages in the outdoors. The recent collapse of Future Music Festival (Kembrey, Vincent and Zuel 2015), Stereosonic’s closest competitor, and Stereosonic’s return in 2015 to a one-day format, is arguably evidence that festivals, like the acts they feature, go through a cycle of popularity. This is further emphasized by the demise of other large-scale Australian music festivals such as Big Day Out and Soundwave, the former associated with indie and mainstream rock (despite the presence of a tent

Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014. Interest in the smaller boutique festival can be seen in the 2016 re-launch of iconic Australian dance music festival Vibes on a Summer’s Day after a thirteen-year absence, at its original (smaller) venue of the Bondi Beach Pavilion in Sydney. 8

50

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

that featured electronic music acts), and the latter built around heavy metal and hard rock culture. For Frank Cotela, this is all part of a broader cycle of market shifts and popularity swings: EDC in Las Vegas is sold out. Tomorrowland in Belgium is sold out. There is a market out there. You’ve got to remember, nothing’s forever. We had the [OneLove] club night. We knew at 10 years that’s it, over, see you later. We were coming up to 10 years of Stereosonic. It’s like we won the lottery by selling it to SFX. If that didn’t happen, we would have considered changing the format of Stereosonic. Even though in its heyday it was doing 240,000 people, it dropped down to 180,000. That’s still big numbers, it’s still the biggest festival in Australia, [but] you have to adapt . … Big Day Out was a classic example of a festival that just got caught up in its own world. No one cared about Metallica coming out. No one cared about those big acts that they were paying millions of dollars to get. You have to keep changing.9 On top of this fluctuating festival landscape, SFX stands on the edge of either bankruptcy or takeover (Anonymous 2015a; Mac 2015; Sisario 2015). Its frenzied global buying spree of various EDM platforms and events companies seems increasingly like a series of mis-timed business takeovers, as part of CEO Robert Sillerman’s desire to participate in the ‘increasingly internationalised touring circuit controlled by oligopolistic and territorially organised promotion companies’ (Gibson and Connell 2012: 15). An analysis of this global corporatization and commercialization is beyond the scope of this chapter, but some related issues are addressed in interview material. In short, I write this at a critical moment for Stereosonic, Australian dance music culture, Australian music festivals and the global electronic dance music scene. As Gibson asks, ‘are there limits to the markets for festivals? Can places and audiences be “festivalled-out”?’ (2007: 79).

Music festivals in Australia The Australian live music market is unique in that many of its festivals ‘travel’ to capital cities over a one- or two-week period, as opposed to ‘static’ events such as Creamfields in the United Kingdom and Ultra Music Festival in the United States. Stereosonic visits the five state capital cities in Australia. Other Australian music festivals that travel (or did travel when they existed) include Big Day Out, Future Music Festival, Good Vibrations, Groovin the Moo, Listen Out, Parklife and Soundwave. Stereosonic’s move 9

Frank Cotela, interview with the author (Melbourne), 4 May 2016.

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 51

in 2013 and 2014 from a one-day to two-day format made it the weekend society of EDM culture in Australia. Globally, Stereosonic sits in similar festival terrain as other ‘hedonistic playgrounds’ (O’Grady 2013: 30) such as Creamfields in the United Kingdom, Tomorrowland in Belgium and EDC and Ultra Music Festival in the United States, in its position as a branded mega-event that features major headlining international DJs performing in a stadium or some other vast performance space. This breaks down the closeness of the dancefloor–DJ relationship of club culture, where the audience and the artist are now separated in a fashion akin to that witnessed at rock concerts. Combined with an abundance of corporate sponsorship and targeted branding, such festivals reflect how EDM culture has become ‘a hyper-commercial global phenomenon bursting with brand recognition’ (St John 2009a: 11). Popular music festivals and their associated social and cultural domains, and the broader aesthetic of festivalization, have attracted increasing scholarly attention in recent years. As Cummings notes, ‘[t]he contemporary music festival had its origins in the 1960s British and American outdoor rock and pop festivals in terms of physical layout, style and content’ (2014: 170). Less is known about events outside of the Anglo-American axis of rock culture. Cummings (2008) sketches a brief history of rock festivals in Australia, as does Gibson (2007: 68–69) who notes the increasing urbanization, commercialization and internationalization of Australian music festivals in

FIGURE 2.2  Stereosonic, Sydney 2012. Photo: Drew Ressler/Rukes.com.

52

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

the 1990s with events like Big Day Out and Homebake. Gibson and Connell (2012) have undertaken extensive research into Australian festival culture in regional areas, locating their work in a wider global phenomenon of the past couple of decades during which ‘the number of music festivals has grown exponentially … as people celebrate local and regional cultures, as musical styles diversify, and as councils, business coalitions and ­non‑profit groups use festivals to both promote tourism and stimulate regional development’ (Gibson and Connell 2012: 3). This increase in popularity of festivals is echoed by Kjus and Danielsen, who describe how ‘[r]ecent decades have seen a substantial growth in music festivals’ (2014: 663). In an industrial context, this growth is evidenced in the ever-expanding transnational operations of events companies such as Live Nation, with Morey et al. referring to ‘the corporatization of the festival industry over the past 15 years’ (2014: 253) and the promotion of branded festivals by these companies. Research has been undertaken on key issues that circulate around Australian music festival culture, such as: audience demographics, brands and festival sponsorship (Cummings 2008; Carah 2010); fashion and the construction of identity at festivals (Cummings 2006); and regional and rural festivals (Gibson 2007; Gration et  al. 2011; Gibson 2014). Within EDM culture, there are festivals that cater to a variety of different genres, lifestyles and movements, with many receiving the attention of scholars from around the world. These happenings and related topics include: mixed genre events (Lalioti 2013); psytrance gatherings and visionary arts festivals (St John 2009b, 2012, 2014a); Australian bush ‘doofs’ (Luckman 2014); nowiconic mega-events such as Burning Man (St John 2014b); the challenges of conducting research fieldwork in the festival environment (O’Grady 2013); and the connections between ravers, New Age travellers and anti-road protestors, and the ‘festive, carnival or festival-like performative elements’ of these cultures, in Britain during the 1990s (Martin 2014). Clearly music festivals represent a rich field of enquiry, generating an extensive body of research that explores numerous social, cultural and economic issues. This exhaustive exploration should come as no surprise, given that festivals are unique and complex events that exist within disparate societies. Festivals cut across art and industry, and ‘do not take place in a vacuum, they are the result of a range of social and cultural pressures, organisational and management decisions, and artist and audience expectations’ (Newbold et al. 2015: xv).

Stereosonic and Australian EDM culture The seed for Stereosonic was planted after the separation of the team of promoters behind the Two Tribes festival. Two Tribes was launched in 1999 as a joint venture between Richie McNeill’s Hardware Corp and

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 53

Mark James’ Future Entertainment. Between 2002 and 2006, Two Tribes was Australia’s most popular dance music festival, with shows in various state capital cities. After the two promoters split, as they ‘were moving in different directions musically’,10 James established Future Music Festival, and McNeill, under his new company Totem Industries, set up Stereosonic. Starting in 2007 as one event in Melbourne, 2008 saw the addition of Adelaide, Brisbane and Perth, with Sydney added in 2009. Having set up the event in partnership with the team behind OneLove Music Group, a record label, artist agency and touring company, the two companies eventually amalgamated into Totem OneLove, the entity that SFX purchased for $75 million in 2013, which McNeill described as like ‘winning the lottery I guess’ (Fitzsimons 2014c). The progression of Australia’s EDM culture from underground raves and warehouse parties to commercial mainstream mega-festival gatherings can in part be attributed to government policy. With its roots in UK rave culture that flowed south down transnational routes travelled by expats (Murphie and Scheer 1992), and in the gay and lesbian cultures of the 1980s (Brennan-Horley 2007: 124), contemporary Australian EDM culture represents a fusion of ‘international influences and sounds with already present local communities and practices’ (Luckman 2014: 192). As happened in the United Kingdom, similar processes of fighting against and negotiating with government have influenced the development of club culture and dance music events. In the United Kingdom, the free festival culture of the late 1980s and early 1990s driven by rave sound systems, such as Spiral Tribe, suffered from increasing suppression (Anderton 2011: 149; see also St John 2009a: 28–64). This culminated in the implementation of the Criminal Justice Act in 1994, widely cited as a key influence in driving the clubbing industry to become more organized and commercial (Anderton 2011: 146). In Australia, the death of Sydney clubber Anna Wood in 1995 from ecstasy-related causes generated a moral panic that increased the public profile of club culture and led to government policy responses, such as the Code of Practice for Dance Parties implemented by the New South Wales (NSW) government in 1998. As Brennan-Horley notes (2007: 125), the strict compliance criteria this introduced resulted in less ‘guerrilla-style events’ and more parties in established nightclubs that were driven by commercial concerns. McNeill describes how the increasing regulatory environment surrounding EDM culture in Australia, combined with city gentrification, influenced his own promoting practices and the development of festivals:

Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015.

10

54

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Raves and all-night dance parties became harder to do. It was almost like the festival culture was forced upon people. That shift from all-night raves to that festival explosion happened when city development drove those all-night venues away. A lot of those warehouses were converted into apartments. The urbanization of the cities in the ’90s forced those raves to just not happen. The docklands [in Melbourne], where I used to do the Hardware parties, it was just empty sheds and the ships coming in. Now it’s shops and thousands of apartments. So I think it was just progress that almost forced the festival culture to explode. I know that what drove us to do festivals back in the late ’90s was: 1. It was getting harder to do warehouse events because locations were becoming scarcer because of inner-city development, and [government] restrictions made it harder and harder to do things all night; and 2. It turned into quite a lucrative option, because as day events they became more appealing to a wider audience – people that were like 30 or 35 and used to go to clubs in the ’80s and ’90s started coming to these things again because they were like 12pm to 10pm. It wasn’t so late. Rave culture attracted a crowd that would party pretty hard. The day events toned it down a little bit. It became more appealing to a broader audience because it was during the day. You could be home by midnight and go to work on Monday. That’s why I think it just exploded so rapidly. There were these people listening to dance music that were just not coming to these all-night things because they were pretty raw and in dirty old sheds.11 Chan (1997), Homan (1998), Luckman (2000) and Gibson and Pagan (n.d.) have identified the potential effect of codes of practice to erode the underground elements of EDM and push it into the mainstream. Chan framed this in his 1997 response to what at the time was the NSW Draft Code of Practice for Dance Parties as a question – ‘The Death of Diversity?’ – arguing that the code would negatively impact smaller scale events and promoters because of the increased costs in implementing the recommendations in the code, and thus ‘promoters will turn to the more commercially accessible DJs and live acts in order to ensure that they draw enough crowd to meet their own costs’ (1997: 2). In her article (2000) on mapping the regulation of dance parties in Australia, Luckman identified what at the time were the three main documents relating to the official regulation of dance parties and raves: Western Australian Operational Guidelines for Rave Parties, Concerts and Large Public Events from 1995; Operational Guidelines for Dance Parties in South Australia from 1996; and NSW Code of Practice for Dance Parties and Guidelines for the Conduct of Dance Parties from 1998. In addition to those, the Victorian government

Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015.

11

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 55

introduced its Code of Practice for Running Safer Dance Parties in 2004, and more recently its Code of Practice for Running Safer Music Festivals and Events in 2013. Identifying similar issues of commerciality as Chan, Luckman suggests that under the guidelines of the documents dance parties attained a limited legitimacy, but that ‘this legitimacy is highly contingent and in practice only really afforded to those events organised on a commercial basis’ (2000: 219). Luckman describes the regulatory guidelines/codes of practice of state governments as part of a two-fold response to rave culture alongside harm minimisation programs funded by health ministries, observing that ‘[d]espite the standing of dance music cultures as mainstream cultural industries, the consumption of recreational drugs within dance cultures still gives rise to a familiar discourse of moral panic within media and governmental portrayals’ (2000: 219). Fifteen years later, this discourse of moral panic has subsided, a result of the increased mainstream presence of EDM culture that has been facilitated by the rise of Stereosonic. This mainstreaming stems from the professionalization and commercialization of the scene, and certainly the guidelines and codes of practice have played a role. This development has also come about through the involvement of ‘sponsors, brands and media’ (Anderton 2011: 146) in the festival landscape, even if ‘there is an enduring association between festivals and drug culture’ (Anderton 2008: 45). The  death of two patrons at separate legs of Stereosonic 2015 attracted some media attention (Anonymous 2015b,c) but not on the front page of any national newspapers. While the moral concern is still evident in government responses that imply ‘music festivals in Australia could be shut down permanently if things don’t improve’ (Anonymous 2016), the panic element seems to have largely dissipated, replaced by a media discourse that is shifting away from drug prohibition towards pill testing at festivals (Duffy 2015). To counter any moral concern, festival organizers play an active role in discussions on patron behaviour, as John Curtin highlights: We do not encourage drug use [and] we work really closely with the police. In terms of peer education and wanting to encourage people to do the right thing, we’re right there . … It’s very difficult. We’ve spoken to the government before about trying to fix issues like binge drinking and drugs, to make people aware of different things.12 Discussing the fallout and government policy responses to Anna Wood’s death, Homan identifies how the legislation that was implemented in Britain in the early 1990s ‘directly or indirectly produced censored dance cultures of a more static commercial character’ (1998: 70). This commercial character is

John Curtin, interview with the author (Melbourne), 26 June 2015.

12

56

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

clearly evident in Stereosonic and other EDM festivals, and thus the codes of practice of various Australian state governments have had similar censoring effects. Referencing Chan’s ‘death of diversity’, Homan similarly notes how codes of practice favour promoters with the finances to stage events that meet the compliance requirements, which in turn could generate an ‘enduring aesthetic of conformity’ (1998: 73). Yet access to capital, a commercial drive and the club scene’s ‘capitalist orientation as an “industry”’ (D’Andrea 2007: 108) do not necessarily result in conformity or a lack of diversity. In the case of Stereosonic, there is more going on than the performances of a select few superstar, international headlining DJs, with Katie Cunningham describing how ‘festivals like Stereosonic bring out so many artists that maybe wouldn’t come to Australia otherwise’.13 This includes lesser-known DJs, who are provided with performance opportunities across the multiple different stages. This is further emphasized by Johnstone: Stereosonic still take the time to tour more underground artists. This year [2014] they had Scuba, Nina Kraviz, Kölsch, and I think they are really trying to foster a general, all-round, encompassing kind of thing. They could very easily just snub those people, and they don’t, so that’s a good thing.14

Stereosonic, the local and the global Festivals impact upon how scene participants engage with global EDM culture. For D’Andrea, ‘[e]lectronic dance scenes must be considered within the context of complex globalisation’ (2010: 50). In contrast to government policies that may actively seek to generate or re-generate local music scenes and local music activity, dance party codes of practice and guidelines have indirectly created a globally focused EDM culture in Australia. While festivals represent localized articulations of EDM, their lineups typically prioritize international DJs and acts, with locals typically hidden away on smaller stages or scheduled in early daytime slots. Festivals highlight the processes of globalization that permeate contemporary EDM scenes ‘in which local (regional and national) party organizations, producers and DJs adapt technics, sample popular culture and remix aesthetics circulating as a result of globalization’ (St John 2012: 8). Stereosonic and other events make evident how ‘[m]any festivals may be locally derived but they are also internationally orientated . … Festivals create encounters between the global

Katie Cunningham, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014. Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014.

13 14

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 57

and the local which challenges and changes both’ (Newbold et  al. 2015: xxiv). The global does not arrive just in the form of international artists or sounds but also in patrons who come from overseas. As Curtin explains in regard to Stereosonic, ‘I’d estimate about 15% of our hand-to-hand industry tickets are sold by our international student promoters. A big part of our audience is people who are studying [and are] from Asia’.15 From its beginnings, Stereosonic has featured numerous international EDM headliners, including Armand Van Helden, Calvin Harris, Carl Cox, Deadmau5, Tiësto, Armin Van Buuren, Avicii, Diplo and Steve Aoki (among many others). While it features multiple stages with other mid-level DJs and artists, the international names dominate promotional material. Occasionally, Australian acts may break through into this top billing, as Peking Duk, Will Sparks, Stafford Brothers and Tommy Trash have in recent years, but Stereosonic exemplifies how ‘[t]ensions can be particularly apparent at major festivals with national and international headline acts, where local bands struggle to get on stage’ (Gibson 2007: 77; see also Gibson 2014: 153). These tensions can often be seen in online forum comments or media reports that query the absence of local performers. For the promoters, however, international names are essential to attract crowds and lend value to the price of admission, as McNeill explains: I’m all for supporting Australian music. There are Australian acts who you may be able to see 6 to 10 times a year . … But the value for the people is those acts that haven’t been here before or only come once every 12 or 18 months. The value, we found from our surveys, is in the acts people haven’t seen before or acts that aren’t here playing every 6 to 8 weeks. We mix it up. We’ve had some great Australian acts because we love their music and we want to get behind them, and others we provide because that’s what the punters want to see. There was a real mix, but it tended to be more internationals because we’re trying to run an international festival . … We’re considered in the top 10 international electronic dance music festivals . … It’s a tough debate. [People say] ‘you don’t put enough Australian artists on’. But we’re not an Australian festival, we’re an international festival, and that involves the best in the world in electronic music, whether it’s Australian, or if it’s from Egypt, or if it’s from Germany or Holland or Japan, so be it. We’re also not a charity. We’ll support acts where we can, but at the end of the day our punters in the surveys that we did were, for $130 a ticket, going to see acts that weren’t here, that they weren’t exposed to, that had a certain value for them over Australian stuff.16

John Curtin, interview with the author (Melbourne), 26 June 2015.

15

Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015.

16

58

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Festivals promote an international diversity while adhering to a conformity encouraged by local codes of practice and guidelines, which makes evident ‘[t]he taming of local practices into manageable sites of stable commerce’ (Homan 2000: 45). While festivals impact upon local scenes in ways that are both positive and negative, when considering Stereosonic it seems that any sense of locality is almost erased through ‘deferring to a global aesthetic’ (Homan 2000: 32), as McNeill highlights: We just focused on trying to bring the best line up each year to Australia and offer a truly international offering that competes with what’s happening overseas. More and more people these days are going to Coachella, to Ultra, to EDC, to Glastonbury, to festivals overseas . … We were always trying to put on the best show, the best value, look after the punter, but also have the festival compete with overseas festivals so people would stay in Australia and come to our festival, and also hopefully attract some of that travelling market and get Europeans, Asians … about 3% of credit card ticket sales were to outside Australia. With the line-up we kept that in mind. We wanted to be one of the best festivals in the world, not in Australia. Of course we have Australians in mind, but we were looking global.17 While EDM festivals provide local patrons with the opportunity to experience music and DJs they perhaps would not otherwise get to hear and see, their impact on local scenes can be detrimental for those connected to other forms of dance music consumption, such as nightclubbing. As Johnstone observes, ‘There has been a drop off in weekly clubbing and clubbing in general. To  have a consistent Tuesday night [in Sydney] is impossible, and it didn’t used to be that way ten years ago’.18 Commenting on the effect festivals have had on the scene, Jesse Desenberg (Kid Kenobi) also highlights this decline in club culture, which fights to compete against the high-profile, superstar, brand-like headliners of the festival circuit: [Festivals] definitely had a negative effect to begin with. When you have a festival that’s got every big name you could possibly think of, it’s going to make everything else look shit. It focuses on the fact it’s got to be about the big name, as opposed to the music. I think that’s a big separation between the older days and what is happening now. Today it tends to be about the name or the brand of the artist as opposed to the music.19

Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015.

17

Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014. Jesse Desenberg (Kid Kenobi), interview with the author (Sydney), 3 December 2014.

18 19

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 59

Trent Grimes describes the negative impact festivals can have on local touring artists and performance opportunities: Festivals definitely hurt [the DJ/club scene]. As someone who books DJs, events, Ministry [of Sound] tours and all that sort of stuff, I have every festival in front of me, so that when I’m plotting a tour, CD launch, artist album launch, whatever it is, I will route the tour so it is as far away [from the festival] as possible, because it’s going to hurt. There are three weekends that are going to be pretty dire and unpredictable. The weekend before, the weekend of and the weekend after . … So that’s when we focus on regional territories, where the artist might not go for the rest of the year.20 As well as this effect on the scheduling of DJ bookings, festivals also impact upon the practice of DJing. With lineups featuring multiple DJs, festivals rarely leave space for the four-hour DJ set. Short set times of an hour or ninety minutes make festival DJing about instant gratification, separating it from the musical journey associated with longer club sets. As Cunningham explains, ‘[the DJ festival set] is not going to be an intense journey breaking crazy, new, unheard music. It’s just going to be an hour set to have fun to, and that’s what festival sets have always been about’.21 The cultural dominance of festivals has altered perceptions of DJing, the shift to shorter set times echoed by Fikentscher when he describes how in some contemporary DJing ‘the musical journey is at best truncated’ (2013: 132). The ebbs and flows of this journey become replaced with the continuous peak generated by the playing of one big track after another, Desenberg describing how at festivals ‘you can get knocked down to forty-five minutes or an hour, and that definitely forces people to throw in all the biggest tracks in a short space of time’.22 Johnstone explores this in more detail, aligning the mode of DJ performance at festivals with the aesthetics of live rock music: Festivals have definitely had an impact [on DJing]. … It’s always been that at festivals, even more so now, DJs have to cut their sets short because they have to catch the audience’s attention quickly. What’s more interesting is that a lot of them aren’t DJ sets. You’ve got someone like Avicii or Steve Aoki, it’s just track after track, there’s no real mixing, there’s not really a journey going on. Whereas someone like Carl Cox, he may shorten his set to an hour for a festival but he’s still going to take the time to put the tracks together in a way that’s interesting for the crowd. What’s

Trent Grimes, interview with the author (Sydney), 28 December 2010. Katie Cunningham, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014. 22 Jesse Desenberg (Kid Kenobi), interview with the author (Sydney), 3 December 2014. 20 21

60

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

happened with these big acts playing these big festivals is essentially the rock format applied to dance music.23 The discourse surrounding EDM in Australia has been dominated in recent years by festivals and the impact of events such as Stereosonic. As seen in the earlier discussion, this discourse runs across topics as diverse as participant engagement with the scene, understandings of the local and the global, DJ performances, government policy and commercialization, among many others. Beyond its significance as an example of the contemporary cultural phenomenon of super-sized EDM gatherings, Stereosonic also serves as a case study of the socio-cultural convergence of government strategies, commercial interests, local contexts and global flows.

Conclusion Festivals dominate contemporary global EDM culture. Specific festival brands command the marketplace in certain countries, with some expanding into other territories (for example, EDC’s 2016 iterations in Japan, Mexico and the United Kingdom). This culture of festivals has seen EDM audiences shift from ‘clubbing’ to ‘festivalling’, from nighttime communities to weekend societies. The mainstream festivals of EDM culture corral the masses into well-organized, policed and regulated leisure environments. Local scenes have become absorbed into transnational flows. Local DJs have become subsumed under international headliners. Local audiences are exposed to a multitude of global performers. For Fikentscher, this influence of the global has been creeping into club culture since the 1990s ‘when socalled superclubs, dance festivals and global DJ branding diminished the role of geography in the relations between DJs and dancers’ (2013: 140). Club DJ residencies have all but disappeared. The scale of festivals and their annual occurrence ensures the relationship between DJ and crowd is one of anonymity, in contrast to residencies where the DJ would get to know the musical likes and dislikes of their regular patrons. For Fikentscher, this anonymity is further emphasized by the multi-stage, multi-DJ festival (2013: 142). The popularity of festivals such as Stereosonic situates Australia’s dance music scene, more so than ever before, within the global flows and ‘diffusion’ (Kong et al. 2006) of EDM. This chapter has used the example of Australia’s Stereosonic to explore some of the issues that arise when a festival dominates a scene. Grounded in ethnographic research, participant-observation and interviews with key industry personnel, the chapter has provided insights into and perspectives Henry Johnstone, interview with the author (Sydney), 4 December 2014.

23

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 61

on one of the world’s most successful EDM festivals. Some of the issues raised during this discussion warrant further investigation, such as the impact of festivals on DJing, programming and performativity, and the effect festivals have on the nighttime economy. The recent upheavals in the  Australian music festival environment seem to suggest audiences are indeed ‘festivalledout’ (Gibson 2007: 79), at least in regard to super-sized, stadiumbased  events. As Gibson observes, ‘Recently some mega-event  promoters have complained of over-saturation, undersupply of quality music acts that can attract distant audiences willing to pay high ticket prices, and the generally gloomy economic climate’ (2014: 152). For Richie McNeill, the demise of some previously popular events is the result of audiences reacting to a saturated festival scene: When there’s an over-supply it gets to a point where there’s a correction. The disappearance of Good Vibrations, Big Day Out, Parklife, Future Music … it was inevitable. When people are spoilt for choice and there’s an over-supply, they can pick and choose, and they pick the better quality product. Future Music, Big Day Out, things like that didn’t adapt and evolve and got incredibly expensive and didn’t look after the punter. The market is still there. The fad stage is over, where it was new and exciting, and now it’s just an established form of recreation that will continue. Quality things like Laneway [Festival] and Stereosonic that focus on what they do best, Splendour [in the Grass] and Falls Festival, that look after the punter, that are culturally and creatively great events, that focus on specific genres and styles of music, those things will survive . … The festival market is healthy. People are spoilt for choice.24 For Ant Celestino, this market correction may be driven by factors beyond audience choice and control. He cites the burgeoning EDM scene in the United States as providing more lucrative and convenient performance options for DJs, thus increasing the cost and restricting the international flow of available headline acts: The agency cycle has got so out of control. You’ve got a lack of headliners that are affordable. They want ridiculous money, and they want that because they are making great money in Las Vegas. Why would I come out [to Australia], all that hassle, a couple of weeks of touring and everything that’s involved, when I can make that money in one weekend in Vegas because the cycle there is in hyper-drive?25

Richie McNeill, interview with the author (via Skype), 19 June 2015. Ant Celestino, interview with the author (Melbourne), 4 May 2016.

24 25

62

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Stereosonic represents a key moment in the continuing evolution of Australia’s dance music culture. While its scale, commercialism and cloning strategy (Richards 2015: 252) disconnects the event from the local, and its harnessing of a party model that promotes consumption and indulgence is typically denigrated as providing a ‘formula dismissed as simply orgiastic’ (St John 2009a: 225), Stereosonic is an event that impacts significantly on promotional practices, DJ techniques, media engagement and audience consumption. Some of this impact may be construed as negative but ultimately the diversity delivered by the festival and the opportunities for exposure it provides shape Stereosonic as a meaningful platform for consumption and production, for audience and performer. The festival market may be changing but the festival experience will always be in demand. Australian EDM audiences in the future may look for a smallerscale experience or may re-focus their energies on clubbing. But for the moment it seems like this is the age of the branded mega festival for EDM culture, where the global overrides the local and the dancefloor is at the park, on the beach or in the stadium. In Australia, this age is embodied by Stereosonic.

Postscript Fifteen years ago Will Straw noted how ‘the life cycle of dance records is notoriously short-lived, as deejays and club patrons tire of them and demand novelty’ (2001: 169), while also fifteen years ago Kembrew McLeod connected a ‘rapidly evolving’ electronic dance music culture to the notion of ‘accelerated consumer culture’ (2001). Nothing has changed. Everything in EDM, from styles and sounds to club nights and venues, moves quickly through the popularity cycle. Festivals do not escape this velocity. While this chapter was under review, Stereosonic ceased operations, its demise seemingly a result of the financial woes of SFX. In February  2016, SFX filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the United States in order to restructure its business. Totem OneLove immediately released a statement declaring itself unaffected, as the bankruptcy proceedings only applied to US corporate territory (Carbines 2016a). Yet a few weeks later the company announced Stereosonic would be ‘taking a hiatus in 2016’ and would return ‘bigger and better’ in 2017. Industry and media questioned this, indicating 2015 was probably the last year of the festival (Moran 2016). This seems to have been confirmed by Totem OneLove being placed in administration and closing its offices in May  2016. In our interview Frank Cotela confirmed that Stereosonic had ended, while in an interview with Mixmag, Richie McNeill indicated he intends to launch two new festivals (Carbines 2016b). It has also been reported that McNeill, Cotela

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 63

and their three other partners in Stereosonic are still owed US$15 million from SFX (Griffiths 2016). All of this concludes the Stereosonic story in a rather confused and corporately focused way, and somewhat obscures the significant contribution the festival made in establishing Australia as a key market in global electronic dance music culture. It seems that Australia has, for the moment, moved out of the age of the branded mega EDM festival (even if such events remain popular elsewhere). Yet, over a period of nine years, Stereosonic demonstrated the significance of the festival format to a generation of electronic dance music fans seeking their own weekend society. While the festival format continues to provide a frame for EDM events in Australia, it is unlikely that something will ever match the scale and popularity of Stereosonic.

References Anderton, Chris. 2008. ‘Commercializing the Carnivalesque: The V Festival and Image/Risk Management’. Event Management, 12: 39–51. Anderton, Chris. 2011. ‘Music Festival Sponsorship: Between Commerce and Carnival’. Arts Marketing: An International Journal, 1 (2): 145–58. Anonymous. 2015a. ‘SFX Nears Bankruptcy after Poor Third Quarter’. Dancing Astronaut, 17 November. http://www.dancingastronaut.com/2015/11/sfx-nears -bankruptcy-poor-third-quarter/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Anonymous. 2015b. ‘One Dead, Another in Critical Condition after Stereosonic’. themusic.com.au, 29 November. http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2015/11/29/ one-dead-another-in-critical-condition-after-stereosonic/ (accessed 17 January 2016). Anonymous. 2015c. ‘Man Confirmed Dead, Another in Critical Condition at Stereosonic Adelaide’. themusic.com.au, 5 December. http://themusic.com.au/ news/all/2015/12/05/man-confirmed-dead-another-in-critical-condition-at -stereosonic-adelaide/ (accessed 17 January 2016). Anonymous. 2016. ‘The Presets Slam NSW Govt’s Threat to Axe Aus Music Festivals’. themusic.com.au, 4 January. http://themusic.com.au/news/ all/2016/01/04/the-presets-slam-nsw-govts-threat-to-axe-aus-music-festivals/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Brennan-Horley, Chris. 2007. ‘Work and Play: Vagaries Surrounding Contemporary Cultural Production in Sydney’s Dance Music Culture’. Media International Australia, 123: 123–37. Carah, Nicholas. 2010. Pop Brands: Branding, Popular Music, and Young People. New York: Peter Lang. Carbines, Scott. 2016a. ‘Stereosonic Organisers Say Festival Unaffected by Bankruptcy of SFX’. Mixmag, 2 February. http://www.mixmag.net/read/ stereosonic-organisers-say-festival-unaffected-by-bankruptcy-of-sfx-news (accessed 8 June 2016).

64

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Carbines, Scott. 2016b. ‘Stereosonic Founder to Launch New Festivals’. Mixmag, 11 May. http://www.mixmag.net/read/stereosonic-founder-to-launch-new -festivals-news (accessed 8 June 2016). Chan, Sebastian. 1997. ‘The Death of Diversity? The NSW Draft Code of Practice for Dance Parties’. http://www.snarl.org/youth/ravecode.pdf (accessed 17 January 2016). Cummings, Joanne. 2006. ‘It’s More Than a T-Shirt: Neo-tribal Sociality and Linking Images at Australian Indie Music Scenes’. Perfect Beat, 8 (1): 69–84. Cummings, Joanne. 2008. ‘Trade Mark Registered: Sponsorship within the Australian Indie Music Festival Scene’. Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 22 (5): 675–85. Cummings, Joanne. 2014. ‘The Greening of the Music Festival Scene: An Exploration of Sustainable Practices and Their Influence on Youth Culture’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 169–86. Farnham: Ashgate. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2007. Global Nomads: Techno and New Age as Transnational Countercultures in Ibiza and Goa. London: Routledge. D’Andrea, Anthony. 2010. ‘The Decline of Electronic Dance Scenes: The Case of Psytrance in Goa’. In The Local Scenes and Global Culture of Psytrance, ed. Graham St John, 40–54. New York: Routledge. Duffy, Conor. 2015. ‘Stereosonic Death: Emergency Doctor Wants Pill Testing at Music Festivals after Sylvia Choi’s Drug Overdose’. ABC News, 30 November. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-30/stereosonic-drug-death-prompts -doctor-warning-worst-yet-to-come/6988136 (accessed 17 January 2016). Fikentscher, Kai. 2013. ‘“It’s Not the Mix, It’s the Selection”: Music Programming in Contemporary DJ Culture’. In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, eds. Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, 123–49, London: Bloomsbury. Fitzsimons, Scott. 2013. ‘Done Deal: “World Class” Stereosonic Sold to US Company SFX’. themusic.com.au, 31 October. http://themusic.com.au/news/ all/2013/10/31/done-deal-stereosonic-sold-to-us-company-sfx/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Fitzsimons, Scott. 2014a. ‘Why Stereosonic Boss Richie McNeill Quit The Business’. themusic.com.au, 1 December. http://themusic.com.au/interviews/ all/2014/12/01/why-stereosonic-boss-richie-mcneill-quit-the-business-part-one/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Fitzsimons, Scott. 2014b. ‘The Birth of Dance Festivals in Australia: Richie McNeill Part Two’. themusic.com.au, 2 December. http://themusic.com.au/interviews/ all/2014/12/02/the-birth-of-dance-festivals-in-australia-richie-mcneill-part-two/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Fitzsimons, Scott. 2014c. ‘How Stereosonic & Richie McNeill Survived The Festival Turf War’. themusic.com.au, 4 December. http://themusic.com.au/ interviews/all/2014/12/04/exclusive-how-stereosonic-and-richie-mcneill -survived-the-festival-turf-war/ (accessed 15 January 2016). Gibson, Chris. 2007. ‘Music Festivals: Transformations in Non-metropolitan Places, and in Creative Work’. Media International Australia, 123: 65–81. Gibson, Chris. 2014. ‘Music Festivals and Regional Development Policy: Towards a Festival Ecology’. Perfect Beat, 14 (2): 140–57.

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 65 Gibson, Chris and John Connell. 2012. Music Festivals and Regional Development in Australia. Farnham: Ashgate. Gibson, Chris and Rebecca Pagan. n.d. ‘Rave Culture in Sydney, Australia: Mapping Youth Spaces in Media Discourse’. http://www.snarl.org/youth/ chrispagan2.pdf (accessed 17 January 2016). Gration, David, Charles Arcodia, Maria Raciti and Robyn Stokes. 2011. ‘The Blended Festivalscape and Its Sustainability at Nonurban Festivals’. Event Management, 15: 343–59. Griffiths, Neil. 2016. ‘US Promoters Owe Stereosonic Founders Millions’. themusic. com.au, 27 May. http://themusic.com.au/news/all/2016/05/27/us-promoters -owe-stereosonic-founders-millions/ (accessed 8 June 2016). Homan, Shane. 1998. ‘After the Law’. Perfect Beat, 4 (1): 56–83. Homan, Shane. 2000. ‘Losing the Local: Sydney and the Oz Rock Tradition’. Popular Music, 19 (1): 31–49. Jarvis, Nick. 2013. ‘It’s Official: Stereosonic and Totem OneLove Acquired by American Events Giant SFX’. inthemix, 30 October. http://inthemix.junkee.com/ its-official-stereosonic-and-totem-onelove-acquired-by-american-events-giant -sfx/21498 (accessed 15 January 2016). Jones, Ruby. 2015. ‘Goodbye Soundwave, Hello Boutique Music Festivals’. The Drum, 16 December. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-16/jones -goodbye-soundwave,-hello-boutique-music-festivals/7033172 (accessed 16 January 2016). Kembrey, Melanie, Peter Vincent and Bernard Zuel. 2015. ‘Future Music Festival Is Over’. Sydney Morning Herald, 2 April. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/ music/future-music-festival-is-over-it-will-not-return-in-2016-says-mushroom -group-20150402-1mdkfq.html (accessed 15 January 2016). Kjus, Yngvar and Anne Danielsen. 2014. ‘Live Islands in the Seas of Recordings: The Music Experience of Visitors at the Øya Festival’. Popular Music and Society, 37 (5): 660–79. Kong, Lily, Chris Gibson, Louise-May Khoo and Anne-Louise Semple. 2006. ‘Knowledges of the Creative Economy: Towards a Relational Geography of Diffusion and Adaptation in Asia’. Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 47 (2): 173–94. Lalioti, Vassiliki. 2013. ‘“Stay in Synch!”: Performing Cosmopolitanism in an Athens Festival’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (2): 131–51. Luckman, Susan. 2000. ‘Mapping the Regulation of Dance Parties’. Journal of Australian Studies, 24 (64): 217–23. Luckman, Susan. 2014. ‘Location, Spatiality and Liminality at Outdoor Music Festivals: Doofs as Journey’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 189–205. Farnham: Ashgate. Mac, Ryan. 2015. ‘The Fall of SFX: From Billion-Dollar Company to Bankruptcy Watch’. Forbes, 24 August. http://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2015/08/24/ the-fall-of-an-edm-empire-sfx/#2715e4857a0b7ffec988f8c0 (accessed 15 January 2016). Martin, Greg. 2014. ‘The Politics, Pleasure and Performance of New Age Travellers, Ravers and Anti-road Protestors: Connecting Festivals, Carnival and New Social Movements’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 87–106. Farnham: Ashgate.

66

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

McCabe, Kathy. 2015. ‘The Boutique Festival Blossoms as Generation X Music Fans Embrace Family-Friendly Vibes’. news.com.au, 11 September. http:// www.news.com.au/entertainment/music/the-boutique-festival-blossoms -as-generation-x-music-fans-embrace-familyfriendly-vibes/news-story/ c7b722796195c6318a1a953c9f4cde51 (accessed 16 January 2016). McLeod, Kembrew. 2001. ‘Genres, Subgenres, Sub-Subgenres and More: Musical and Social Differentiation within Electronic/Dance Music Communities’. Journal of Popular Music Studies, 13 (1): 59–75. Montano, Ed. 2011a. ‘Festival Fever and International DJs: The Changing Shape of DJ Culture in Sydney’s Commercial Electronic Dance Music Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 2 (1): 63–89. Montano, Ed. 2011b. ‘Stereosonic Festival Reporter: Sydney Wrap-up’. inthemix, 29 November. http://inthemix.junkee.com/stereosonic-festival-reporter-sydney -wrap-up/15973 (accessed 16 January 2016). Montano, Ed. 2011c. ‘Stereosonic Festival Reporter: Weekend Two’. inthemix, 9 December. http://inthemix.junkee.com/stereosonic-festival-reporter-weekend -two/16051 (accessed 16 January 2016). Montano, Ed. 2013a. ‘Ethnography from the Inside: Industry-Based Research in the Commercial Sydney EDM Scene’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (2): 113–30. Montano, Ed. 2013b. ‘DJ Culture and the Commercial Club Scene in Sydney’. In DJ Culture in the Mix: Power, Technology, and Social Change in Electronic Dance Music, eds. Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda C. Rietveld, 173–94, London: Bloomsbury. Moran, Jonathon. 2016. ‘Stereosonic Music Festival Believed to Have Been Permanently Binned’. The Daily Telegraph, 7 April. http://www.dailytelegraph .com.au/entertainment/sydney-confidential/stereosonic-music-festival-believed -to-have-been-permanently-binned/news-story/8f5d6c48e0bd39be77f2b02eaa3 06e92 (accessed 8 June 2016). Morey, Yvette, Andrew Bengry-Howell, Christine Griffin, Isabelle Szmigin and Sarah Riley. 2014. ‘Festivals 2.0: Consuming, Producing and Participating in the Extended Festival Experience’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 251–68. Farnham: Ashgate. Murphie, Andrew and Edward Scheer. 1992. ‘Dance Parties: Capital, Culture and Simulation’. In From Pop to Punk to Postmodernism, ed. Philip Hayward, 172–84. Sydney: Allen & Unwin. Napieralski, Mikolai. 2012. ‘A Lean Year for Festival Promoters’. The Age, 1 January. http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/a-lean-year-for -festival-promoters-20111231-1pghf.html (accessed 24 May 2015). Newbold, Chris, Jennie Jordan, Franco Bianchini and Christopher Maughan. 2015. ‘Introduction: Focusing on Festivals’. In Focus on Festivals: Contemporary European Case Studies and Perspectives, eds. Chris Newbold, Christopher Maughan, Jennie Jordan and Franco Bianchini, xv–xxvi. Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers. O’Grady, Alice. 2013. ‘Interrupting Flow: Researching Play, Performance and Immersion in Festival Scenes’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 5 (1): 18–38.

STEREOSONIC AND AUSTRALIAN COMMERCIAL EDM FESTIVAL CULTURE 67 Richards, Greg. 2015. ‘Festivals in the Network Society’. In Focus on Festivals: Contemporary European Case Studies and Perspectives, eds. Chris Newbold, Christopher Maughan, Jennie Jordan and Franco Bianchini, 245–54. Oxford: Goodfellow Publishers. Sisario, Ben. 2015. ‘SFX Cancels One Tribe Festival, Citing Weak Ticket Sales’. New York Times, 1 September. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/business/ media/sfx-cancels-one-tribe-festival-citing-weak-ticket-sales.html?_r=2 (accessed 15 January 2016). Squires, Rosie. 2011. ‘Fans Gatecrash Stereosonic Festival … Literally’. Daily Telegraph, 27 November. http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/fans-gatecrash -festival-literally/story-e6freuy9-1226207100029 (accessed 16 January 2016). St John, Graham. 2009a. Technomad: Global Raving Countercultures. London: Routledge. St John, Graham. 2009b. ‘Neotrance and the Psychedelic Festival’. Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture, 1 (1): 35–64. St John, Graham. 2012. Global Tribe: Technology, Spirituality and Psytrance. Sheffield: Equinox. St John, Graham. 2014a. ‘The Logics of Sacrifice at Visionary Arts Festivals’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 49–67. Farnham: Ashgate. St John, Graham. 2014b. ‘Begoggled in the Theatre of Awe: Electronic Dance Music Culture at Burning Man’. In Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man, ed. Samantha Krukowski, 144–59. London: Black Dog Publishing. Straw, Will. 2001. ‘Dance Music’. In The Cambridge Companion to Pop and Rock, eds. Simon Frith, Will Straw and John Street, 158–75, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CHAPTER THREE

Searching for a Cultural Home: Asian American Youth in the EDM Festival Scene Judy Park

This chapter investigates the recent proliferation of Asian American participants in EDM festivals with a particular focus on those organized by Insomniac Events in Southern California, such as Electric Daisy Carnival1 and the Wonderland series. Insomniac is unique among organizers of large EDM festivals in this region, such as HARD Events, as it appears to have fully embraced the historical rave culture and ideology of PLUR (Peace, Love, Unity and Respect). Insomniac’s events not only emphasize a magical and utopian ambience with themes incorporating Alice in Wonderland and the Snow Queen, but Insomniac founder Pasquale Rotella has explicitly referred to PLUR in his social media accounts and has actively encouraged attendees to wear kandies,2 a defining symbol of PLUR in contemporary

This chapter was previously published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture in May 2015. Dancecult permits the reproduction of this material by Bloomsbury in this volume. Executive Editor of Dancecult, Graham St John. 1 Although Electric Daisy Carnival occurs in Las Vegas, I include the event as part of the EDM festival scene in Southern California given its origins in the Greater Los Angeles region and the significant participation from residents of Southern California, according to my interviewees. 2 Kandies are bracelets, necklaces or other accessories made of neon beads that my interviewees believed are a defining symbol of PLUR and ‘rave culture’ in the contemporary EDM festival scene. Kandies are frequently exchanged between two participants that have developed a connection at a festival, following a ritualized handshake simulating each component of PLUR.

70

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

EDM festival culture (Rotella 2014; Sachs 2014). By propagating an ethos of PLUR, Insomniac’s events promise a space where anyone, regardless of race, class, gender or sexuality, can experience cultural belonging and acceptance. Meanwhile, as Insomniac’s festivals continue to become increasingly massive and commercialized, these events have attracted significant participation from groups beyond the middle-class white participants typically associated with the EDM festival scene. This newfound diversity of participants tests the egalitarian ethos of PLUR and provides an opportunity to examine how various groups negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the contemporary EDM festival scene. This chapter is a preliminary study of this tension between the massive contemporary EDM festival scene and the ideology of PLUR, which purports that EDM festivals are free from identity-based boundaries or inequalities. Using an interview-based methodology paired with participant observation, I argue that the status of Asian American youth as ‘perpetual foreigners’ and subsequent desire for cultural belonging have motivated their participation in EDM festivals. Nevertheless, the Asian American participants I interviewed defined notions of belonging, authenticity and subcultural capital in the EDM festival scene in relation to suburban middle-class whiteness and in opposition to urban hip-hop blackness. These experiences further perpetuated dominant understandings of race and the normalization of whiteness among my informants.3 EDM festivals are a meaningful place to analyse identity and belonging, as their roots can be traced back to the historical rave scene providing marginalized groups with alternative spaces of transgression. House music first developed in predominantly gay black clubs in Chicago in the 1980s, which provided a refuge, especially for clubgoers facing the dual oppression of racism and homophobia (Silcott 1999: 22). Soon, house music became popular in the UK after several British DJs encountered the music in the open-air disco scene of Ibiza in the summer of 1988, often referred to as the ‘Summer of Love’. These DJs sought to replicate this ‘hippie-ish, under-the-stars, beautiful open vibe’, together with variations of house music and the  euphoric effects of the drug ecstasy also encountered in Ibiza, in London (Silcott 1999: 31). Taking place in clubs, warehouses and even fitness centers, these dance parties came to be called ‘raves’. Although the British rave scene was far removed from Chicago house, it similarly provided a space of transgression – in this case, for British youth to escape from the cultural repression and economic realities associated with the Thatcher era.

I define normalization of whiteness as the process in which whiteness has become ‘the unacknowledged norm [and] the location from which others are defined and judged’ (Andersen 2003: 28). 3

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

71

The concept of raves quickly spread beyond the UK and returned to the United States, where the concept of PLUR flourished in various locations, but particularly in California where the legacies of the 1960s counterculture persisted. Importantly, most of these scenes came to be identified with middle-class white youth with house music’s connection to the Chicago gay black scene largely distanced. This whitening of the scene was facilitated by a moral panic and news coverage of white middle-class youth partaking in excessive drug use in unlicensed dance parties. By the early 2000s, police crackdowns had largely corralled the rave scene into conventional nightclubs and the live event industry. The latter grew steadily and began to gain notable traction in the late 2000s. In 2010, Insomniac’s Electric Daisy Carnival (EDC) attracted wide news attention due to a fifteen-yearold female attendant dying from overdose of ecstasy, which caused the city of Los Angeles to place a moratorium on all remaining events for the year. Ironically, my interviewees believed that the news served as publicity for EDC, which moved to Las Vegas in 2011 as a three-day festival attracting a record of more than 230,000 participants. Despite rave’s roots in providing a space of belonging and acceptance for marginalized groups, few scholars have focused on nonwhite participants’ negotiations of race or class in either the rave or EDM festival scenes. In fact, there seems to exist a clear tension between scholars’ claims that raves erase identity-based boundaries and stereotypes, and their lack of attention to how nonwhite participants negotiate this ‘erasure’. Most ethnographic studies have focused on ways raves provide white middle-class participants with socially distinct identifications and an alternative space of peace, love, unity and respect (Thornton 1996; Collin 1997; Reynolds 1998; Hutson 2000; Measham, Parker and Aldridge 2001; Hill 2002). Notable exceptions include Fikentscher (2000) and Buckland (2002), although my research provides more recent analysis, focusing specifically on Asian American participants, a largely overlooked group in EDM cultural studies. Therefore, my research makes two key contributions. First, it provides a much-needed study of the contemporary EDM festival scene focusing on how nonwhite participants negotiate their subjectivities in relation to the scene. In particular, the dominant depiction of Asian Americans as ‘honorary whites’ offers a unique opportunity to question the extent to which Asian American participation reinforces, obfuscates or undermines the middle-class whiteness of EDM festivals. Second, my research seeks to increase the visibility of Asian American youth and their engagements with popular culture, which has largely been neglected in ethnographic research and theory.4 As Lee and Zhou note, ‘Asian American youth as a group have

See Maira (2002) for an important exception and Lee and Zhou (2004) for a more general discussion of Asian American youth studies. 4

72

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

been almost entirely omitted from research on youth and youth culture in the U.S.’ (2004: 9). I argue that the academic negligence of the involvement of Asian American youth in popular culture further perpetuates their status as ‘perpetual foreigners’. After discussing my research methodology, I trace the history of dominant white depictions of Asian Americans, which have consistently portrayed Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners, inassimilable to the white American culture. Then, I analyse how the Asian American youth I interviewed have turned to the EDM festival scene for its promise of an egalitarian utopia, exemplified by the ethos of PLUR, particularly in Insomniac’s events. Finally, I argue that despite the rhetoric of racelessness, EDM festivals are signified by middle-class whiteness defined against lower-class hip-hop blackness, which my interviewees imagined to be urban lifestyles full of crime and gang activity.

Researching race in EDM festivals Most of my data consist of in-depth interviews with Asian American EDM festival participants in Southern California, paired with contextual information from participant-observation of the 2014 White Wonderland organized by Insomniac. Over the course of eight months, from May through December 2013, I conducted thirty-eight interviews with youth who selfidentified as Asian American and have attended at least three EDM festivals in Southern California, although thirty-one interviewees have attended more than eight. I interviewed twenty-one males and seventeen females. All interviewees were above the age of eighteen and the average age was twentythree. I used the snowball sampling method by first asking my high school and college networks in Southern California and then my interviewees for introductions to Asian American EDM festival participants. I used the openended and semi-structured interview method, as this study focuses on Asian American youth’s subjective understandings of identity and belonging. My interviews ranged from half an hour to an hour and a half. I allowed interviewees to self-identify as Asian American rather than imposing a formal definition because my research focuses on Asian Americanness as a cultural identity – an individual’s sense of belonging within a group based on his or her understanding of the group’s culture. This decision relies on the assumption that racial categories such as Asian Americans are social constructions that are historically contingent and unstable in their boundaries. As a result, I interviewed three individuals who identified as Asian American and as half-Asian or multiracial. The majority of interviewees, thirty-three of the thirty-eight, ethnically identified as Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Vietnamese, which, according to my informants, reflects the popularity of EDM festivals among these ethnic groups. Thus, it is important to note that the Asian American cultural identity under discussion in this chapter

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

73

is based on the specific understandings and experiences of my informants from limited ethnic groups, rather than a universal definition. Based on my interviews, I would synthesize their understanding of Asian American-ness to be associated with middle-class East Asian (more specifically Chinese, Taiwanese and Korean) and Vietnamese youth living in suburban Southern California. Nevertheless, informants of other ethnicities (South Asian, Filipino, Japanese and multiracial) self-identified with the Asian American classification largely through their identifications within East Asian or Vietnamese social groups. Though I do not argue that the diverse narratives and experiences of various ethnicities within East Asian, South Asian and Southeast Asian groups can be collapsed into one category, I suggest that the broader ‘Asian American’ group is the most relevant to discussions of race in the EDM festival scene. Most of my interviewees categorized racial groups in the scene as whites, blacks, Latinos and Asian Americans, defining Asian Americans as inclusive of individuals from East Asian, South Asian and Southeast Asian groups. I paired these interviews with participant observation at six EDM events including the 2013 White Wonderland, an annual New Year’s Eve music festival organized by Insomniac. My experiences at White Wonderland helped contextualize my interviewees’ experiences and support my interview findings. I experienced firsthand the magical and fantastical production by Insomniac, including white pillars surrounding the stage, snowflakes and chandeliers hanging from the ceiling and rays of laser light covering every corner of the dancefloor. As noted by several interviewees that ‘White Wonderland has the most Asians’ due to its location in Orange County, with its large Asian American population, I found that more than half the participants were Asian American. Furthermore, most of the Asian American participants I saw appeared to arrive in predominantly Asian American groups without significant interaction with those outside their groups. My lack of direct exposure to music festivals beyond White Wonderland serves as a limitation of my study. Nevertheless, it is important to note that my research question focuses on racial ideologies and their interplay with the ideologies of the EDM festival scene rather than racial performance. I focused my initial research on interviews as they allowed me to analyse how these ideologies influenced Asian American participants’ understandings of their experiences in the EDM festival scene and of their Asian American identities. I plan to conduct further ethnographic research to support the preliminary findings presented in this chapter.

Researcher positionality Another limitation of my study is the extent to which my position as a researcher influenced interviewee responses. I am not an insider to the scene, as I did not listen to EDM extensively and had never attended a festival before

74

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

I began my research. I also never experienced the influence of drugs, which various scholars (Collin 1997; Reynolds 1998; Hutson 2000; McCall 2001) and many of my interviewees believe are an important aspect of the EDM festival culture. On the other hand, my status as an outsider to the scene allowed me to ask festival participants a wide range of questions relating to their observations of other participants, as well as their perspectives on the PLUR-based culture, drug use, attire and sexual expressions. Although I am an outsider to the scene, my interviewees seemed to consider me an insider in other ways.5 Given that I am an Asian American young woman from Southern California, my interviewees seemed excited to share relatable experiences ranging from the high schools they attended to the Asian market where they first heard trance music. In particular, my young age seemed to put interviewees at notable ease, as indicated by their use of slang and profanity, candid discussions of their sexual or illegal experiences and expressions of internalized stereotypes of race and class that have become critical to my analysis. In particular, my interviewees seemed to be very comfortable sharing their internalized stereotypes of Asian Americans and even suggested that I would know about the academic pressures or strict parents because I was also Asian American. On the other hand, my identity as a heterosexual woman seemed to limit some interviewees’ responses when discussing topics of gender and sexuality. Some instances, however, such as when my male interviewees would noticeably hesitate or filter their perspectives on female participants, served as powerful moments for analysis.

Perpetual foreigners without a cultural home In this section, I argue that despite the seemingly contradictory nature of various dominant portrayals of Asian Americans, such as the ‘yellow peril’ and ‘model minority’, Asian Americans are consistently portrayed as ‘perpetual foreigners’ who are unassimilable to the dominant white American culture. These depictions have created a complex relationship between Asian Americans and the mainstream American culture. Not only do these ‘controlling images’ (Hill Collins 2000) circulate through popular culture and media, but they have also largely excluded Asian Americans in popular culture and media. Although whites have occasionally depicted Asian Americans with similar characteristics as middle-class whites when it serves their interests to do so, the persistent portrayal of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners ultimately denies Asian Americans access to the privileges of middle-class whiteness. 5

See Hill Collins (1986) for a more thorough discussion of the insider and outsider distinction.

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

75

From ‘Yellow Peril’ to ‘Model Minority’ Though dominant portrayals of Asian Americans have shifted from the ‘yellow peril’ in the late 1800s to the ‘model minority’ in the 1960s, this transition was initiated by whites to advance white interests. The first dominant depiction of Asian Americans, particularly Chinese immigrants to the West Coast in the late nineteenth century, was their portrayal as foreign threats to the American nation and family. Often referred to as the ‘yellow peril’, white Americans’ fear of this threat was framed not only in racialized imperialist terms of ‘earlier fantasies of exotic but distant Asia’, but also in gendered terms of Chinese Americans jeopardizing traditional white gender roles (Lee 1999: 9). Chinese American men were depicted as cheap ‘coolie laborers’ who stole jobs from white male labourers and undermined the white man’s duties to his family. Chinese American women were depicted as prostitutes who threatened the ‘purity’ of white womanhood (Lee 1999: 9–10). These fears eventually culminated to the 1875 Page Act: the first federal restrictive immigration law that prohibited the entry of ‘undesirable’ immigrants from Asia, particularly those perceived likely to become forced labourers or prostitutes. Popular representations of Asian Americans shifted from the undesirable coolie labourers and prostitutes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the ‘model minority’ in the 1960s, ‘at the peak of the civil rights and ethnic consciousness movements’ (Lee and Zhou 2004: 17). In  this context, whites used depictions of socioeconomically successful Asian Americans to deny the existence of racial inequalities and to blame other nonwhite groups, such as blacks and Latinos, for being culturally unfit or unwilling to attain success (Lee 1996, 2005). Various scholars have critiqued this stereotyping for obfuscating racial inequalities, hindering nonwhite solidarity and alienating Asian Americans who do not fit into the successful ‘model minority’ mold. Some scholars, however, have overlooked the interrelated link between depictions of Asian Americans as the ‘model minority’ and the ‘yellow peril’. For example, Lee and Zhou argue that the model minority stereotype ‘marked a significant departure from the portrayal of Asian Americans as aliens and foreigners’ (2004: 17). Nevertheless, I am sympathetic with the view that ‘the model minority and the yellow peril are actually continuous images’ in that both images have depicted Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who could be easily stereotyped as exotic creatures in order to advance white interests (Kibria 2002: 132).6 Despite the ‘model minority’ myth characterizing Asian Americans with seemingly positive and white-like qualities such as being hardworking, disciplined and

6

Also see Yu (2001) and Lee (2005).

76

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

success-oriented, it also suggests that Asian Americans are ultimately unlike whites in that they are too hardworking, disciplined and success-oriented, or that they possess only these qualities. Both the ‘model minority’ myth and the ‘yellow peril’ alienated Asian Americans as uninvited guests to the United States who threatened the economic security of whites.

Representations in popular culture and music The link between the ‘model minority’ myth and the ‘perpetual foreigner’ archetype is particularly pronounced when discussing representations of Asian Americans in popular culture. Media depictions have powerful implications by serving as ‘controlling images’ that disseminate dominant ideas about marginalized groups that often justify their own oppressions (Hill Collins 2000). Not only is popular mediation of Asians and Asian Americans scant, but even the few existing images are limited in the complexities of their representation: the overly sexualized ‘Lotus Blossom Baby (a.k.a. China Doll, Geisha Girls, shy Polynesian beauty, et al.) [or] the Dragon Lady (Fu Manchu’s various female relations, prostitutes, devious madams)’ for Asian women and the desexualized ‘egghead/wimp, or … the kung fu master/ninja/samurai’ for Asian men (Fung 2005: 237). In popular music, Asian Americans lack not only representation in the number of artists, producers and DJs, but also a mainstream sound or scene that they can call their own (Lee and Zhou 2004: 19). Granted that South Asian bhangra music has experienced popularity in the United States and some incorporation into popular music (Maira 2002), East Asians and Southeast Asians, who composed most of my interviewees, have not experienced as much success.7 For example, my interviewees noted that East Asian American artists seem to experience difficulty gaining sustainable success with white audiences, with the exception of ‘one-hit wonders like “Gangnam Style” or “Like a G6”’.8 This exclusion of Asian Americans in popular music reflects both the ‘model minority’ and ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotypes. The ‘model minority’ myth suggests that Asian Americans prioritize stable socioeconomic success over cultural and political engagements and that they lack the creativity necessary to become successful artists (Yu 2001: 189). The ‘perpetual foreigner’ stereotype largely prevents white audiences

I refer to ‘South Asian’ and ‘East Asian’ American artists together here, not because I do not acknowledge the important distinctions in their histories and cultures, but because dominant American cultures have largely collapsed the two groups into the category of ‘Asian Americans’. 8 References to Korean pop singer Psy’s song ‘Gangnam Style’, which became the most watched video on YouTube in 2012 and Asian American hip-hop group Far East Movement’s ‘Like a G6’, which achieved number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks in November 2010. 7

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

77

from considering Asian American artists as American artists in the first place. In turn, the lack of Asian American representation in popular music further perpetuates the dominant notion that they are unassimilable to American culture. As Robert Lee argues, ‘the “common understanding” of the Oriental as racialized alien … originates in the realm of popular culture, where struggles over who is or who can become a “real American” take place’ (1998: 5). I argue that the recently popularized EDM festival scene has also become a valuable place to frame discussions of who can belong as a ‘real American’. As revealed throughout my interviews with Asian American participants, the scene perpetuates the myth that it is an egalitarian utopia while falling short of true racial equality and acceptance. This myth serves to further the dominant obliteration and denial of racial inequality in the United States today.

Belonging through escape In this section, I analyse how my interviewees’ participation in the EDM festival scene relates to their Asian American identities and desire for cultural belonging. I argue that these discussions reflect a paradoxical understanding of the relationship between their Asian American identities and their participation in the scene. My interviewees claim that the EDM festival scene provides Asian American participants with access to mainstream American culture, yet the scene also represents experiences they consider antithetical to their Asian American backgrounds.

Searching for belonging The common thread throughout the history of the rave scene, despite all of its reappropriations, relocations and resurgences, is that raves represented spaces of belonging and acceptance to participants who have felt socially marginalized. The focus and definition of this marginalization has shifted in the United States, particularly as rave culture, originating in gay black communities, has been reappropriated by middle-class white youth who identified themselves as social outcasts. In contemporary EDM festivals, particularly those organized by Insomniac, this promise of belonging and acceptance persists through the ideology of PLUR. Many participants believe PLUR connects the EDM festival scene historical rave culture, or rather, their utopian imaginations of this culture. In fact, the majority of my informants used the word ‘rave’ interchangeably with an ‘EDM festival’ despite the clear differences in scale, production and culture of these two scenes. As EDM festivals have grown increasingly massive and its participant base increasingly diverse, the juxtaposition between the ethos of racial inclusion

78

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

symbolized by PLUR and the racialized groupings of participants creates a unique opportunity to analyse how nonwhite participants negotiate their subjectivities in relation to scene. Among my key questions to interviewees was why they believed Asian American participants were drawn to the EDM festival scene. A surprisingly high number of responses invoked the desire of Asian American youth for cultural belonging and the rave scene’s historical function of providing a welcoming space for society’s outcasts. Elise,9 a twenty-two-year-old Korean American, grew up in a predominantly Asian American community where more than 80 per cent of the students at her high school were Asian American. In response to my inquiry, she stated, ‘I feel like a lot of Asians feel the need to fit in just because, you know, we are from a different country’. By asserting that ‘a lot of Asians … are from a different country’, even when she herself was born in the United States, Elise seems to have internalized the dominant depiction of Asian Americans as perpetual foreigners who ‘feel the need to fit in’. Later in the interview, she connects this desire for belonging with the PLUR-based culture of EDM festivals: I think a lot of people that are into electronic music tend to be like introverted … like not the most popular people at school and stuff, so I feel like they feel accepted when they go [to EDM festivals] cause they’re not feeling judged or anything … . It’s easy for them to make friends there, so I think that’s what appeals to a lot of Asians. Elise implicitly draws the parallel between Asian American youth and the introverted and unpopular white youth associated with the historical rave scene, suggesting that both groups seek a cultural scene that provides them with an alternative reality of belonging and acceptance. Greg, a twenty-one-year-old Chinese American, echoed this belief that EDM festivals provide a space for Asian Americans to experience belonging, although his experiences were different than Elise’s in that he grew up in a predominantly upper-middle-class white neighbourhood in Ventura County. Noting that he has ‘personally felt racial discrimination’ in his life, Greg stated that the EDM festival scene provided him and other Asian Americans with a sense of belonging away from the dominance of the popular white kids in school: At least all or most of the Asian Americans that I’ve seen growing up in high school or middle school, they always wanted like a sense of belonging, to belong to something, whether they found like electronic music or something … For the most part, Asians, they’re always like, ‘Oh,

9

All interviewee names are pseudonyms throughout the chapter.

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

79

he’s probably all weak, can’t protect himself.’ He’s always picked on so it’s like to belong, like having a sense of family. This imagery of ‘family’ recurs regularly in the EDM festival scene and seems to be another legacy of the historical rave scene’s communal and uniting power. Many interviewees called the groups with whom they attend EDM festivals, ‘rave families’ and the people who first introduced them to the scene, ‘rave moms’ and ‘rave dads’. My interviewees’ use of the metaphor that a ‘rave’ is one big family suggests that they feel a deep connection with other participants who provide protection from the social dominance or bullying of the outside world. Yet, as I argue throughout the chapter, this metaphor of the family paints an overly idealistic picture of the contemporary EDM festival scene that is divided along racial and class lines.

Following trends In addition to the desire to find belonging, my informants also expressed a closely related belief that Asian American participants attended EDM festivals to ‘follow a trend’. Charles, a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese American, stated that Asian American youth began attending EDM festivals ‘because it’s a fad. Yeah, I feel like Asian American culture, like, they’re really heavily influenced by trends and fads, you know, what’s in’. When I asked Charles why he believes that the ‘Asian American culture’ is heavily influenced by fads, he replied, ‘I have no idea. It’s always been like that as far as I’ve seen, like when a new big restaurant comes out or when boba10 came out … It’s like the sense of being included, you know?’ Several other interviewees made similarly broad claims that Asian Americans are trendier than other racial groups. These perceptions highlighted these interviewees’ beliefs that Asian American youth participated in EDM festivals to fulfil their desire for belonging. A question that emerged from these conversations was whether Asian American participants believed that these trends, including EDM festivals, were started by whites or by other Asian Americans. The responses were divided. Elise provided a nuanced answer to this question, stating that ‘a raver identity is like something that makes you different from that average American, but at the same time … kinda ties you to the other Asians’. In other words, Elise suggests that Asian American participation in EDM festivals serves the dual purpose of adopting the ‘raver identity’, which they considered to be alternative to the mainstream and developing connections with other

Boba is a Taiwanese tea-based drink with chewy tapioca balls that several interviewees claimed ‘blew up’ in Asian American communities several years ago. 10

80

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Asian American participants. A useful concept with which to analyse this phenomenon is subcultural capital, which Sarah Thornton (1996) defines as the status of ‘hipness’, composed of cultural knowledge and commodities that participants of ‘subcultures’ adopt in order to distinguish themselves from the mainstream culture and other subcultures. In other words, Elise seems to believe that Asian American participants reacted to their need to ‘fit in’ to mainstream white America by ‘standing out’, especially as they do not have access to dominant means of achieving popularity. Classifying the massive and commoditized EDM festival scene as a ‘subculture’ may be closer to the participants’ imaginations than reality, yet my interviewees firmly believed that Asian American participants adopted the unique ‘raver identity’ to obtain a status of ‘hipness’, as well as to become connected to other Asian American youth in the scene.

Escaping from ‘Asian American identities’ Despite claiming that EDM festivals provide a sense of belonging for Asian Americans, my informants paradoxically believed that EDM festivals also provide an escape from their Asian American identities. When I asked Irene, a twenty-one-year-old Taiwanese American, if she thought her experiences as an Asian American motivated her decision to attend EDM festivals, Irene responded that ‘parental restrictions’, which have been a ‘big part of [her] life’, motivated her participation. Invoking dominant depictions of Asian Americans as the model minority, Irene suggests that ‘parental restrictions’ are an essential part of her understanding of the Asian American identity: I think at raves, there’s a contrast from being Asian, because, you know, it’s not like that strict, restraining curfew, being home by ten … . Like Asians, you can’t really do that and get kicked out of the house, that sort of thing? So yeah, it’s just like, I think because it’s such a stark contrast from being an Asian. It’s the freedom (emphasis added). Irene considers her participation in EDM festivals to be antithetical to ‘being an Asian’ and suggests that EDM festivals open up the opportunity to free herself from her Asian American identity. Several interviewees also noted that EDM festivals provided them with the freedom and escape from strict parents, which they understood to be central to their identities as Asian Americans and parallels dominant white depictions of Asian Americans as the model minority. Anthony, a twenty-one-year-old Vietnamese American, takes this idea of escaping from Asian American-ness further to argue that Asian American participants, including himself, have turned to EDM festivals in order to assimilate into whiteness, in contrast to Elise’s earlier statement that Asian

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

81

Americans became connected to each other through their participation. Although Anthony, like Elise, went to a predominantly Asian American high school, he notes that the most popular kids in school were white. He  first heard about EDM festivals from several of these ‘popular’ white girls, who he said he was ‘obsessed with’ and ‘wanted to be their friends’. He further stated, ‘Basically, that’s why I was trying to hang out with them and trying to like assimilate into their whole white culture’. When Anthony saw some of these girls posting about an upcoming EDM festival on their social media accounts, he states, ‘I was so intrigued and I wanted to be popular and I wanted to be cool, so I started like looking into it’. It was only because of his desire of wanting to become as popular as these white girls and ‘assimilate into white culture’ that he first began attending EDM festivals. Anthony extrapolates from his experiences to conclude, ‘Asians are trying to assimilate and copy white people, so they try to do the same thing’. Anthony suggests that even though he attends EDM festivals with predominantly Asian American groups, he is entering a space that signifies a type of whiteness that he perceives to be ‘cool’ and seeks to adopt.

Unmasking the middle-class whiteness of EDM festivals In this section, I evaluate the ideological myth that the PLUR-based EDM festival culture is equally welcoming to and accepting of all identities. I argue that the EDM festival culture is dominated by middle-class whiteness, as whites predominantly control ideologies of authenticity and belonging within the scene. It is important to note that I do not base my argument merely on the racial demographics of EDM festival participants. Instead, I seek to highlight the racialization of EDM festivals, or the process of ascribing a race to the scene, by analysing which groups control and represent the ‘raver identity’ related to the EDM festival culture. First, I discuss how my informants negotiate the idea that most of the ‘main characters’ of EDM festivals, including event producers, DJs and participants, are white despite the EDM festival’s claims of being raceless spaces. Then, I argue that authenticity and belonging in the EDM festival scene are represented and dominated by middle-class whiteness. Lastly, I demonstrate how my informants understand EDM festival culture as being antithetical to what they believed to be urban black hip-hop culture. I wish to highlight my interviewees’ practice of ‘strategic ignorance’, which Alison Bailey (2007: 88) defines as ‘a form of knowing that uses dominant misconceptions as a basis for active creative responses to oppression’. In other words, instead of simply accepting or denying dominant white depictions of Asian Americans, Asian Americans may resist creatively by adhering to

82

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

certain depictions when it serves their interests to do so. For instance, Asian Americans’ internalization of their status as the model minority and its association with work ethic and ambition can be useful for improving their educational and vocational prospects. It allows them to benefit from their relatively closer association with middle-class whiteness and to disidentify themselves from the oppressions of other nonwhite groups. In the context of the EDM festival scene, strategic ignorance allows Asian American youth to justify their participation in a scene dominated by middle-class whiteness through their firm belief in the cultural similarities between whites and Asian Americans, as well as culturally racist understandings of other nonwhite groups. This section also highlights my informants’ agency amid the dominant racial structures and ideologies, as well as their statuses as ‘oppressedresisting subjects’, simultaneously oppressed, resisting their oppression and oppressing other groups through cultural racism (Bailey 2007: 83).

‘White people are still the main characters’ Although most of my interviewees adhered to the ideology of PLUR to claim that they do not associate EDM festivals with any particular race or ethnicity, a few individuals explicitly noted the scene’s white dominance. When asked if she associates EDM festival culture with a racial group, Jen, a twenty-year-old Taiwanese American, stated, ‘even though I always go with Asian Americans, I would still say I think of white people for raves. The reason is because when all those events put up photos, it’s always like white people photos. Like white people are still generally the main characters … Attendees, DJs are generally white people’. Jen suggests that media images serve a powerful role in ascribing whiteness to the EDM festival scene for both participants and outsiders, regardless of whether the images accurately represent the firsthand experiences of participants. These images similarly echo the news coverage of the American rave scene in the 1990s, which triggered the moral panic around middle-class white youth excessively using drugs and made middle-class white youth the main characters despite other racial groups participating in the scene. Annie, a twenty-year-old Taiwanese American who attended the same international high school as Jen in Taiwan, echoed a similar belief in the dominant whiteness the EDM festival scene. When asked why she thinks EDM festivals appeal to Asian American youth, Annie responded, ‘I feel like the type of Asians they attract are Asians who are more Westernized … I don’t wanna use this word, but I definitely don’t see many “fobby”11 Asians

A fob (fresh off the boat) is a colloquial term used to describe an immigrant, typically Asian American, who is perceived not to have assimilated into the American culture, language and behaviour. 11

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

83

at raves at all’. Annie’s statement reflects a binary understanding of Asian Americans as the ‘Westernized Asians’ and ‘fobby Asians’, distinguished by their abilities to assimilate into white cultures. In fact, Annie seems to use the word ‘Westernized’ as a euphemism for culturally white. When pressed further about why there are not as many black or Latino participants at EDM festivals who may be just as ‘Westernized’ as Asian American youth, Annie responded hesitantly, ‘Oh yeah, hm … I don’t know, I feel like, I feel like when you, um, listen to hip-hop and rap and stuff, like the image of black people is just so strong and I feel like that’s kinda the same thing for EDM. Like for EDM, the image of white people is very strong so…’ This statement not only places hip-hop blackness and EDM whiteness as polar opposites of each other, but it also implies that the aforementioned ‘Westernized Asians’ are better able to identify with the whiteness of the EDM festival scene than black or Latino youth, a practice of strategic ignorance that places Asian Americans higher on the racial totem pole than other nonwhite groups. Although Jen and Annie were two of the few interviewees who explicitly noted the association of EDM festivals with whiteness, my other interviewees’ discussions revealed that the ‘main characters’ in the scene are dominated by whites. Although there are no official statistics on the demographics of popular DJs, a public poll hosted by DJ Mag (2013), a popular magazine dedicated to dance music, shows that sixteen out of the top twenty DJs are white. At the 2013 White Wonderland, all the go-go dancers and five of the six DJs were white – the sixth DJ was Laidback Luke, a multiracial Filipino-Dutch DJ. Laidback Luke was one of a handful of nonwhite DJs that my interviewees listed when I asked the question why it seems that most famous DJs seem to be white. Other Asian American DJs they listed included Steve Aoki, Shogun and Ken Loi, while they also pointed to Afrojack as another prominent nonwhite DJ. Nonetheless, the aspect of these discussions important for my analysis was not the actual proportion of successful DJs who are nonwhite but rather the ways in which my interviewees reacted to this question and what these reactions revealed about their understandings of race in the scene. A great number of interviewees were surprised at the question and noted they had never thought about the race of EDM DJs, uttering comments such as ‘now that I think about it, a lot of DJs are white…’. Others were quick to justify this phenomenon and thereby uphold the belief that the EDM festival scene is equally accessible to all races – they noted that the music originated in Europe or turned to reasons why nonwhite groups are not pursuing DJ careers. The latter point relied on dominant racial stereotypes such as that Asian Americans value financial stability and lack creativity, while blacks relate better to hip-hop lyrics focused on urban lower-class lifestyles. In fact, one interviewee pursuing a career as a DJ claimed, ‘Actually [my Asian American identity] might work to my advantage because there are so little … It’s like Jeremy Lin, you know?’ These responses reflected two ways

84

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

in which dominant racial ideologies were infused with the historical rave ideology adopted by the EDM festival scene; the normalization of whiteness and the denial of racism by invoking culturally based arguments.

Controlling authenticity, belonging and subcultural capital The normalization of whiteness and denial of racism were also persistent in discussions of the dominant participants in the scene. In the context of an accelerated commercialization of the EDM festival scene in the last few years, informants described a tension between the ‘kandi ravers’ – the most authentic and original attendees – and the ‘frat bros’ – the newcomers who were ruining the PLUR-based culture through their disrespectful behaviour. Although they did not always make this connection explicit, a closer analysis reveals that both these groups signify different forms of middle-class whiteness. In analysing the different forms of whiteness, I adopt Andersen’s belief that scholars ought to pay particular attention to the ‘differentiation among whites’ rather than ‘using whiteness as a monolithic category’ (2003: 28). My interviewees identified kandi ravers as white social outcasts from middle-class suburban high schools in surrounding regions. On the other hand, they identified the frat bros as the popular white kids who moved on to participate in the Greek fraternity systems at nearby universities. Although frat bros may more closely approximate popular understandings of middleclass whiteness, signified by their representations of financial, social and cultural capital,12 both frat bros and kandi ravers represent forms of middleclass whiteness differentiated by levels of mainstream social acceptance. When describing the types of participants that she observes at EDM festivals, Vicky, a twenty-year-old Korean American, stated, ‘I think half of the people that went were like the hardcore rave people, who, when you first think of rave people, the weird white people who wear a lot of kandi and they’re very eccentric and … they just kinda look like druggies’. Although Vicky was explicit in describing the whiteness of the kandi ravers, most interviewees only noted that kandi ravers tended to be white when prompted about their race, suggesting the normalization of whiteness in discussing the most authentic participants in the scene. My informants expressed complex relationships with the kandi ravers, who were considered to be ‘losers’ in mainstream culture yet also represented the most authentic ravers with

I use social capital to mean one’s social networks that have value, and cultural capital to mean one’s non-financial social assets, such as education, intellect, speech or dress, which can increase one’s opportunities or life chances. See Bourdieu (1986). 12

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

85

access to the subcultural capital within the EDM festival scene. Although my informants did not want to be fully identified as kandi ravers, they seemed to desire partial identification in order to be regarded as authentic ‘ravers’, with the status of ‘hipness’ discussed in previous sections. This partial identification was pronounced in the resentment shared with kandi ravers towards the frat bros, who were invading the scene and jeopardizing the subcultural capital of EDM festivals through their mainstream tendencies. Vicky described the other ‘half’ of the attendees at EDM festivals as ‘frat bros and sorority girls’, who have recently entered the scene to party, take drugs and find sexual partners. My informants’ views of the frat bros and sorority girls were gendered. Their resentment was predominantly directed towards the frat bros for their ‘obnoxious’ and ‘disrespectful’ behaviour. The sorority girls, while definitely inauthentic participants in their eyes, were ‘not hurting anyone [or] taking people’s spaces’. The frat bros were criticized for pushing, shoving, fighting and generally ‘having fun at other people’s expense’ – behaviours considered to be antithetical to the ethos of PLUR. Compared with kandi ravers, interviewees were highly conscious of the whiteness of the frat bros, often emphasizing this in their responses. For example, Irene described frat bros as ‘really, really white. Like the white guys with the tank tops … like the frat tank tops’. This emphasis on the whiteness of the frat bros compared to the kandi ravers seems to relate not only to my interviewees’ exposure to predominantly white fraternities and sororities in college, but also to their understandings of whiteness being associated with the self-entitled, disrespectful behaviour of frat bros. On the other hand, the whiteness of the kandi ravers, the most authentic participants, remained largely invisible. Asian American participants’ discussions of the kandi ravers and frat bros revolve around authenticity and belonging in the EDM festival scene, which are framed as negotiations of different forms of middle-class whiteness. They have come to understand kandi ravers as the embodiment of authenticity and subcultural capital through their loyalty to PLUR and frat bros as the embodiment of the mainstream and cultural capital through their statuses as ‘popular’ and ‘obnoxious’ white men. While my interviewees have turned to the EDM festival scene in order to seek access to subcultural capital and belonging, these ideals are ultimately defined in relation to middle-class whiteness.

Opposition to urban black hip-hop culture The EDM festival scene not only represents middle-class whiteness, but also represents anti-lower-class blackness through my informant’s beliefs that ‘rave culture’ was contrary to their imaginations of urban black hip-hop culture. Toni Morrison (1992) has argued that qualities are attributed to

86

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

whiteness only in relationship to their absence in a racialized Other. I argue that this definition through inversion also relates to classed understandings of race, as middle-class whiteness is defined in opposition to lower-class blackness. To my informants, hip-hop culture seems to represent the Other that is antithetical to the middle-class whiteness of EDM festivals. This classed understanding is an important factor behind my informants’ beliefs that they can belong in the EDM festival scene through their strategic internalization of the model minority myth, which suggests that Asian Americans are culturally and socioeconomically closer to middle-class whites than other nonwhite groups. Only a couple of interviewees explicitly expressed middle-classed understandings of EDM festival culture. Responding to why Asian American youth are drawn to EDM festivals, Priya, a twenty-two-year-old Indian American, noted that EDM attracts higher-income groups, implicitly defined as white and Asian American, while her lower-income ‘black and Mexican friends’ were more attracted to rap and hip-hop: I think especially for me and especially for Asians that I know, most of us are middle- or upper-middle-class, so I think it’s harder for people to associate to things like rap or hip-hop, which is, you know, mostly talking about struggle … which is probably why you see more of my black and Mexican friends who are into other music like rap and hip-hop. She further noted that the ticket prices for EDM festivals are ‘not cheap’, so the events attract a higher income demographic. Through her discussion, Priya points to two ways she believes that class position influences engagement with cultural scenes. First, socioeconomic status influences the types of cultural activities individuals can afford. Second, ‘class habitus’ draws them towards different types of musical and cultural scenes; that is, the ‘long-lasting dispositions of mind and body’ derived from the classed experiences of socialization, which in turn shape people’s cultural engagements (Bourdieu 1986). When asked whether she associates EDM with the middle- or upper-middle-class, Priya answered, ‘I think so’. Nevertheless, she had trouble explaining exactly what makes EDM seem middle- or upper-middle-class, except that she did not think EDM evoked ‘struggle’ like hip-hop. Other interviewees also expressed inconsistent racialized and classed understandings of EDM to explain why ‘Asian American youth are more drawn to EDM than hip-hop music’. Nick, a twenty-four-year-old Taiwanese American DJ-in-training, stated that he felt like EDM appeals to Asian American youth because ‘it’s probably easier to relate to than a lot of hip-hop. Like I don’t know about selling drugs or gang-banging’. Nick implies that most hip-hop music invokes activities associated with the (black) urban lower class, which Asian American youth would not relate to,

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

87

seemingly based on the sweeping assumption that most Asian Americans are middle- or upper-middle-class. Nick further stated that in contrast to hiphop, EDM is ‘very international … because there are very little lyrics, or the lyrics are very melodic so it’s not really about what the lyrics are … Everyone can hear a good melody, you know?’ At this point, Nick pauses and seems to realize that the idea that everyone can enjoy EDM equally contradicts his earlier statement that he does not see many black participants at EDM festivals. After some hesitation, he states that he does not know why Asian American youth seem to be attracted to EDM. ‘It could be because there’s something about it that other people don’t like about it, you know? Like maybe there’s something about EDM that black people don’t like’. Nick’s statements reveal how he negotiates the contradiction between his firm belief that EDM is open to all racial groups and his observation that there are few black participants in the scene. Instead of questioning whether EDM may not be as ‘international’ and inclusive as he had claimed, Nick effectively maintains his belief that EDM is not associated with any race by suggesting that blacks simply do not choose to enjoy the music. This again represents an instance of strategic ignorance as Nick seeks to justify his desire to become a popular EDM DJ and believe that he would not encounter racism as an Asian American.

Conclusion Asian American youth have turned to the EDM festival scene to fill the cultural void created by their status as perpetual foreigners. Yet, while EDM festivals, particularly those organized by Insomniac, perpetuate the promise of an egalitarian utopia through the PLUR ideology, both the physical production of the events and the symbolic production of authenticity in the scene reflect the dominance of middle-class whiteness. My interviewees’ references to this middle-class whiteness were often implicit, reflecting the normalization of whiteness in the EDM festival scene, effectively hidden by the commodified ideology of PLUR. On the other hand, my interviewees described the scene as explicitly antithetical to lower-class blackness, which they believed was encapsulated by what they understood to be hip-hop culture. These discussions served several different strategic interests of the Asian American youth I interviewed, as they justified their participation in the EDM festival scene dominated by middle-class whiteness, associated themselves more closely with middleclass whiteness and disassociated themselves from the oppressions of other nonwhite groups by adhering to cultural racism. My interviewees’ discussions of the contemporary EDM festival scene reflected and perpetuated the belief of middle-class whiteness as the desirable norm and lower-class blackness as the undesirable Other.

88

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

In this chapter, I have aimed to fill critical gaps at the intersections of cultural studies and Asian American studies. I have argued that previous scholarship on raves and EDM festivals has largely overlooked the opportunity to analyse the disjunction between the egalitarian ideology of raves and dominant ideologies of race and class. Meaningful complements to my study would include the study of race, class, gender or sexuality among other non-middle-classheterosexual-white participants in EDM festivals or other scenes dominated by middle-class whiteness. This chapter also calls for more research on the engagement of Asian American youth with popular and underground cultures, particularly research that adopts a more ethnographic approach given the limited participant observation in my preliminary findings. I have argued that Asian Americans provide a unique lens on the normalization of whiteness in various cultural scenes, as their ‘perpetual foreigner’ status often invokes desires for cultural belonging, while the ‘model minority’ myth characterizes Asian Americans as similarly middle-classed as whites, albeit to advance white interests. I also argue that the current lack of scholarly attention on the cultural engagements of Asian American youth further perpetuates the notion that Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners with unique, segregated cultures rather than meaningful participants in cultural scenes, as observed in the EDM festival scene in Southern California.

Acknowledgements I would like to thank Dr Sadhana Bery for her advising of my research. I would also like to thank Dr Alison Denton Jones and Dr Chiwen Bao for their advice and encouragement, as well as the Harvard College Research Program for the funding of this research. Lastly, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to each of my interviewees for willingly sharing their experiences and expressing their belief in the value of this study.

References Andersen, Margaret L. 2003. ‘Whitewashing Race: A Critical Review Essay on “Whiteness”’. In White Out: The Continuing Significance of Racism, eds. Ashley Doane and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, 21–34. New York: Routledge. Bailey, Alison. 2007. ‘Strategic Ignorance’. In Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance, ed. N. Tuana, 77–94. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1986. ‘The Forms of Capital’. In Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. J. Richardson, 241–58. New York: Greenwood.

SEARCHING FOR A CULTURAL HOME

89

Buckland, Fiona. 2002. Impossible Dance: Club Culture and Queer World-Making. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Collin, Matthew. 1997. Altered State: The Story of Ecstasy Culture and Acid House. New York: Serpent’s Tail. DJ Mag. ‘Top 100 DJs’. DJ Mag. 2013. http://www.djmag.com/top100 (accessed 1 March 2014). Fikentscher, Kai. 2000. ‘You Better Work!’ Underground Dance Music in New York City. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Fung, Richard. 2005. ‘Looking for My Penis: The Eroticized Asian in Gay Video Porn’. In A Companion to Asian American Studies, ed. Kent A. Ono, 235–53. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. Hill, Andrew. 2002. ‘Acid House and Thatcherism: Noise, the Mob, and the English Countryside’. British Journal of Sociology, 53 (1): 89–105. http://dx.doi .org/10.1080/00071310120109348. Hill Collins, Patricia. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge. Hutson, Scott R. 2000. ‘The Rave: Spiritual Healing in Modern Western Subcultures’. Anthropological Quarterly, 73 (1): 35–49. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/3317473. Kibria, Nazli. 2002. Becoming Asian American: Second-Generation Chinese and Korean American Identities. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lee, Jennifer and Min Zhou, eds. 2004. Asian American Youth: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity. New York: Routledge. Lee, Robert G. 1999. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lee, Stacey J. 1996. Unraveling the ‘Model Minority’ Stereotype: Listening to Asian American Youth. New York: Teachers College Press. Lee, Stacey J. 2005. Up against Whiteness: Race, School, and Immigrant Youth. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University. Maira, Sunaina. 2002. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. McCall, Tara. 2001. This Is Not a Rave: In the Shadow of a Subculture. Toronto: Insomniac Press. Measham, Fiona, Howard J. Parker and Judith Aldridge. 2001. Dancing on Drugs: Risk, Health and Hedonism in the British Club Scene. London: Free Association. Morrison, Toni. 1992. Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality. New York: Pantheon. Reynolds, Simon. 1998. Generation Ecstasy: Into the World of Techno and Rave Culture, 1st edn. Boston, MA: Little, Brown. Rotella, Pasquale (PasqualeRotella). ‘Owlie and his supporters spreading the positive vibes at #EDC! #peace #love #unity #respect’. 13 April 2014. Tweet (accessed 9 May 2015). Sachs, Elliot. ‘Diplo Bans Kandi, Pasquale Rotella Responds’. YourEDM, 11 August 2014. http://www.youredm.com/2014/08/11/diplo-bans-kandi -pasquale-rotella-responds/ (accessed 9 May 2015).

90

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Silcott, Mireille. 1999. Rave America: New School Dancescapes. Toronto: ECW Press. Thornton, Sarah. 1996. Club Cultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital, 1st U.S. edn. Hanover: University Press of New England. Yu, Henry. 2001. Thinking Orientals: Migration, Contact, and Exoticism in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press.

PART TWO

Underground Networks and Transformational Events

CHAPTER FOUR

Boutiquing at the Raindance Campout: Relational Aesthetics as Festival Technology Bryan Schmidt

Introduction Operating in California since 2005, the Raindance Campout departs from mega-music festival models by building an aesthetically customized, social and spiritual experience. With a maximum capacity of just 1,000 people, and no indication that admission limits will soon be significantly raised, Raindance exemplifies what some festivalgoers call a ‘boutique’ festival, an intentionally small-scale event that caters to a specific subculture in its music and aesthetics. Usually run for profit, boutique festivals emphasize style, personality and community over big-name attractions and spectacle firepower, drawing tight-knit circles (or ‘tribes’) instead of disparate crowds. For Raindance, this means including intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic components to distinguish itself from the myriad other events in the California festival ecosystem. In addition to DJs spinning day and night on amplified sound stages built in lush, natural settings, the gathering hosts a range of organized rituals, psychedelic art displays and workshops on subjects like Chakra Yoga and ‘Aquaponics with Applied Permaculture’. Raindance combines electronic dance music, artisanal vending, intricately constructed This chapter was previously published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture in May 2015. Dancecult permits the reproduction of this material by Bloomsbury in this volume. Executive Editor of Dancecult, Graham St John.

94

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

outdoor spaces that house performances and lectures, and a spiritual component linked to the ‘New Paradigm’ (a contemporary redeployment of New Age) that integrates – and, it might be argued, appropriates – cultural practices from East Asia, South Asia, South America and, especially, precolonial America. The brainchild of DJ John Edmonds (commonly known as Little John), Raindance is a product of the Santa Cruz underground rave scene with related events spanning back to 1995. Although Raindance now takes place far from Santa Cruz (at least a four- to six-hour drive, generally), it maintains a connection to the local scene, with DJs and much of the crowd hailing from that area and returning to the festival year after year. Though open to the general public, the ticketing link for Raindance 2013 referred to participants as a ‘private group’ and sold ‘membership passes for our annual private gathering’, suggesting an attempt to retain a social dynamic that does not extend far from its original constituency (Raindance Presents 2013a). As one first-time attendee put it: ‘Raindance is a family affair – everyone knows each other and has been a part of the [Northern California] underground tribe for a long time. Refined, evolved lifers, industry players, baller growers, local hicks, old-school scenesters, down-to-earth artists and misfit freaks made up the crowd, which felt experienced, passionate and highly stylized’ (KnowFun 2014). For this Raindancer, the feeling of a tight-knit community is attractive. His valorization of experience and stylization speak to how boutique festivals create unique, appealing subcultural articulations – sociality distinctive enough to be considered part of the festival’s attractions but manifested through the improvised activities of the participants themselves, rather than prepared stagings by organizers. By perceiving members of the crowd as ‘experienced’, ‘refined’, ‘evolved’, the reviewer enunciates participants’ ability to hold space in unique ways as a kind of artistic skill, one that can be developed through practice. Writing about boutique festivals in relation to theatre performance, Georgia Seffrin positions such small-scale events on a continuum between high art and popular entertainment: ‘[T]he boutique festival [is] located between the “department store” model of arts festival production, whereby audiences purchase tickets for a range of often avant-garde and dazzling international aesthetic experiences, and the community arts event, in which the focus is on the experience of the participant, and not on polished, dazzling work’ (2007: 67, emphasis added). While this definition may helpfully identify certain scalar aspects of boutique events, it repeats a typical highbrow– lowbrow aesthetic distinction wherein rudimentary, community-level art is contrasted to the presumably more mature work of the avant-garde. This common division, however, falters if comments like those of the Raindance participant quoted earlier are taken at their word. In his comments there appears to be no such divide between community and polished (‘refined’, ‘evolved’) art; rather, the social performance of the community itself has the

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

95

capacity to achieve artistic excellence. This suggests an alternative aesthetic regime that scrambles traditional systems of critique, which rely on clear-cut divides between high and low art. Boutique festivals, then, cannot simply be addressed in terms of the quality and scale of their production but must be understood to inaugurate their own particular stylizations and modes of evaluation. In this chapter, I wish to use the Raindance Campout as a case study to think through how social practice can take on aesthetic qualities. The event typifies trends in global festival culture that emphasize organizing principles based on generating interpersonal connection and dialogue to create an artistic synergy within temporary constructed spaces – trends that have now started to be adopted by large-scale, highly corporate events as well. Yet small-scale, boutique festivals should not be looked at as large festivals inwaiting. That is, they should not be characterized by what they lack, be it large crowds, high-profile musical acts or spectacle firepower; instead, boutique festivals should be considered sites for personal and subcultural identitymaking based on playful, improvised, personal encounters with other participants, and it is towards this activity that their art, music, workshops, architecture and even vending are oriented. Raindance thrives by generating affective ties between participants through momentary encounters that occur not only on the main dancefloors but also in interstitial, participantcreated performance sites: renegade sound stages, altars and installations, drum circles, theme camps. In what follows, I first investigate the creative potency of Raindance by considering it through the lens of what art curator and critic Nicholas Bourriaud calls ‘relational aesthetics’, work that creates social situations (rather than objects for contemplation) and takes as its theoretical horizon the field of human interaction. Bourriaud’s theory provides a critical apparatus that allows us to consider the festival space as one co-created by participants and organizers, where the event’s music, dance, sculpture, workshops and ritual practices become social interstices that facilitate micropractices of intersubjectivity; these induce a sense of alterity vis-à-vis quotidian forms of political economy. Within the space of a boutique festival, I argue, relational aesthetics solidify subcultural ties by creating a feeling of communality – a bond that helps instil a value system determined by the event’s framing dramaturgies. While such practices are present at large-scale events as well, the relative intimacy of boutique festivals – which affords the sense of a personalized, exclusive experience – creates a rarefied air that makes subcultural identification more acute. To members of relevant circles, attending boutique festivals confers what cultural sociologist Sarah Thornton (following Pierre Bourdieu) calls ‘subcultural capital’, the bona fides that allow entry into a niche community and distinguish oneself from the mainstream (1995: 27). In the context of leave-no-trace boutique festivals like Raindance, which lack sizable archives or media visibility, using

96

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

relational aesthetics as an analytical lens helps us understand the mechanics, stylization and political economy of subcultural identity-making. Relying on observations noted while attending the 2013 and 2014 Raindance Campouts as a participant-observer (both times working as a volunteer), I begin by discussing how Raindance might be viewed as an example of relational art. While, for Bourriaud, relational aesthetics carry an inherently progressive and democratizing energy, following prominent critiques of the theory I suggest that their political implications are more murky – potent yet indeterminate. To help unpack the larger implications of this small festival, then, I conclude by discussing Raindance as an example of an emerging category of similar events known as ‘transformational festivals’; this serves to illuminate the dramaturgy that guides participants and organizers towards specific ethical imperatives, as well as to highlight some of the political prerogatives that attend such practices.

Raindance as relational art Discussing his fifteen-year career throwing parties and festivals, Little John describes his motivation in terms of building scenarios that allow for improvised and combinative artistic expression: ‘I personally like to provide space for creative people to be able to express themselves through music, dance, painting, stilt walking – whatever your creative passion is, bring it, do it, throw it in the mix’ (Limbach 2010). Little John’s impetus for creating events like Raindance characterize the festival’s power as deriving not so much from the spectacle technologies and sensorial stimulation that amount to ‘putting on a show’ – massive sound systems, choreographed light shows, pyrotechnics, etc. – but from its ability to summon artistic display enacted by the participants themselves. Many, perhaps even a majority of Raindance participants identify as artists in some respect, and the festival brings together their creative energy in order to build a unique synergy. Staging a festival involves developing aesthetically heightened zones that attract social interaction, and logistically enabling participants to do the same. Much like Katherine Chen’s characterization of the organizing strategies of Burning Man (considered by many to be the progenitor of contemporary alternative festival culture), orchestrating an event like Raindance is a matter of attracting talented individuals to the event, motivating them to contribute and creating an infrastructure that allows the free flow of artistic energy (2009). The characterization of artistic practice as a process of instigating (rather than enacting) creative expression coincides with Nicholas Bourriaud’s theorizing on relational art in his book Relational Aesthetics. Bourriaud defines relational art as ‘an art taking as its theoretical horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than the assertion of an

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

97

independent and private symbolic space’ (2002: 5). He contrasts relational art to object-oriented modes of art-making characteristic of modernity, wherein a completed piece gets consumed by a patron, who is excluded from the act of creation and presumed to be passive when interfacing with the artwork. Relational aesthetics, instead, present an art form ‘where the substrate is formed by intersubjectivity, and which takes being-together as a central theme, the “encounter” between beholder and picture, and the collective elaboration of meaning’ (2002: 5–6, emphasis added). In other words, the artwork is not a materialized manifestation of the artist’s private imagination but the performative interplay that results from people coming into contact with the piece itself, and with each other in the spatio-temporal frame presented by the piece. Little John seems to echo this sentiment: ‘To me it’s like, if you’re a painter, you have your canvas, you have your paints, you have an idea of what you want to paint, and that’s your thing. For me, it’s like a three dimensional, living, breathing painting that I set up, and create this whole interactive art space of music, sound, artists’ (Limbach 2010). His artistic product is not a sculpture, painting or concert; it is not even the architecture of the festival space itself, with its sound stages, installations and tentscape. It is, rather, the participant-generated performances that activate these sites in real time. While Bourriaud developed relational aesthetics as a way of explaining 1990s interactive gallery art, his theory helps us understand the labour necessary to create the decorated dancefloors, altars, sculptures and lighting displays scattered throughout the festival; they are not intended to be the festival’s foci, but their loci, gathering points that prompt meaningful human performance. The performances that take place at Raindance are infinitely variable and may or may not correspond to recognized artistic genres. The festival brings different forms of art-making together within a single space, allowing them to intersect with one another. There is, of course, music: Santa Cruz ‘family DJ’s’, acts from the greater California area and usually a couple of international artists.1 There is dancing: scrums bouncing in front of the sound stages, flow artists spinning glowing poi, staves or hula–hoops, tweaked-out loners on the periphery bizarrely swaying with the beat. There is painting: artists with canvases just to the side of the dancefloor creating vibrant, visceral, visionary art; they colour with techniques so nuanced that the images seem to subtly bend and warp, injected with a kind of kineticism. There are poetry readings, water sculptures, electro-kinematic installations

Santa Cruz family DJs include Brother, Digital Honey, Stridah, The Pirate, Mozaic, Dax, Rob Monroy and Little John himself. Festival headliners in the last few years have included Vibesquad, Pumpkin, Random Rab, Bluetech, Shpongle, Om Unit, Thugfucker, Eprom, Marty Party and Russ Liquid. 1

98

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

and much more. What makes the space so exciting, though, is the saturation of talented individuals in close proximity, enabling them to scaffold their creative energies by riffing off one another: a visual artist’s brush strokes become guided by the music (see Figure 4.1); a dancer creates an elaborate choreography using a bedazzled sceptre she borrows from a metal sculptor; painters design crazy body art that circulates the grounds through ambulation. Even staged rituals are made all the more potent through musical accompaniment and by taking place near beautifully designed altars that incorporate spiritual icons from around the world. Art emerges in unexpected places: walking from the main dancefloor back to your campsite, for instance, you might encounter a well-made stone stack, a light installation hanging from the trees, a theme camp with carpets and pillows decorated with East Asian spiritual symbols to encourage impromptu meditation. Sometimes enhanced by participants’ use of hallucinogens, these eye-catching areas become assembly points for meaningful interaction. One evening, as I strolled through a wooded area in the quieter part of the festival grounds, I stumbled upon a van that had been converted into a mini sound stage, complete with turntables, amps and small, rotating LEDs; as amateur DJs spun their jams, passers-by gathered around to listen, dance and converse. Someone started spinning poi, which prompted me to join him; a woman began to wildly dance, going airborne with each base drop, stinging the ground with her foot and kicking up dirt into the eyes of those standing around; someone else came by and offered to rub fine-scented oils on anyone who cared for it. The entire event was

FIGURE  4.1  A painter creates visionary art near the dancefloor of a Raindance sound stage. Photo: Bryan Schmidt (2013).

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

99

aesthetically heightened, too, by participants’ costumes, face paint and trendy festivalwear (many components of which could be purchased in the festival’s vending tents): tunics, boots, utility belts, corsets, glowing boas, bangles, feathers, jewellery of all kinds, snazzy fedoras with ostentatious feathers sticking out, a woman with a fur tail, a guy in a child’s tiger onesie. The saturation and simultaneity of these myriad creative activities in the space of the festival blurs disciplinary boundaries, breaks down the barrier between quotidian life and aesthetic encounter, collapses the binary between performer and spectator and troubles the notion of a stable, structural artistic frame – where and when, precisely, does quotidian life end and the aesthetic experience begin? Cultivating a participatory ethic, the festival itself becomes an example of what performance scholar Wendy Clupper Meier calls a ‘heightened theatrical zone’, where self-performing, roleplaying and collective collaboration become operative modes of being, and which opens up space for the remaking of identity (2007: 170). Likewise, Graham St John describes similar visionary art festivals as hyperliminal spaces that ‘expose participants to disparate modes of self-dissolution and reflexivity’ (2014: 64). The potential for unexpected and aesthetically rich performance activity to crop up at any moment invigorates the Raindance space and binds its populace together. Discussing the performance event, theatre scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte uses the concept of the ‘autopoietic feedback loop’ to describe the invisible, self-generating energies that connect participants to one another; by creating an oscillating sense of the self as performer and the self as spectator, subject and object, participants are plunged into a state of liminality2 (2008: 12). In doing so, the performance event scrambles notions of the self and primes participants for communal transformation (2008: 50). Considering Raindance through the lens of relational aesthetics allows for the notion that, within the container of the event space, art is everywhere and always a performance event; it can arise unexpectedly, cogenerated, free-form, disciplinarily intersectional, subject to momentary contingencies. Fischer-Lichte’s theorizing might be seen to operate in conjunction with Bourriaud’s, which characterizes artistic practice as an experimental production of new social bonds; together, they point to a way of understanding how the density of creative activity at Raindance might lead to powerful forms of subcultural identification. Its boutique size and ability to summon the tight-knit Santa Cruz dance music community create circumstances wherein familiarity and repeated encounter give rise to a sense of intimacy and intersubjectivity.

Fischer-Lichte elaborates on this form of liminality as a feeling of existing ‘between the norms and rules of art and everyday life, between aesthetic and ethical imperatives’ (2008: 12). 2

100

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

The limits of relational aesthetics While intersubjective connections may be intensely meaningful to festival participants, it is crucial to question their durability and political directionality rather than assume their inherent value. Scholars have rightly critiqued Bourriaud’s sanguine approach to the development of relational aesthetics on a number of different grounds, especially the liberatory rhetoric that accompanies it. For Bourriaud, relational art is without a doubt a positive innovation, one that ‘permit[s] the development of new political and cultural designs’ through dialogic interaction; it is capable of generating new economic possibilities by allowing for micropolitical disengagements from the dominant system of capitalist exchange: Over and above its mercantile nature and its semantic value, the work of art represents a social interstice. This interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production, etc. The interstice is a space in human relations which fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities than those in effect within the system (2002: 6). Bourriaud recognizes that relational art still operates as a commodity, but, as Stewart Martin notes, he sees it as having ‘an essentially critical relation to capitalist culture, defined by its resistance to exchange-value and, at least implicitly, its struggle with subjection to the value form’ (2007: 376). Bourriaud’s belief in the positive potential of these temporary rearticulations of capitalism (rather than the sustained engagement of more classical leftist projects) aligns with festival communities’ faith in the creation of transitory sites that enable alternative social practices as a foil to corporate consumerist culture. This is especially apparent in the cultivation of alternative economic practices at festivals, such as the artisanal and gift economies present at boutique events like Raindance. The artisanal economy consists of artists, jewellers, metallurgists, clothing designers and food sellers who attempt to counter the apparatus of mass production by vending goods that they themselves have produced. Such an economy operates through personal encounter, attempting to reframe the exchange event as a site for interpersonal connection between buyer and seller instead of the alienation normalized in industrial capitalism. The profit motive is still operative, but it is not the end of the story; vendors in an artisanal economy sacrifice the possibility of a potentially more profitable scale of production in order to create objects that retain the aura of their creator’s labour, and which circulate among participants assumed to share similar values.

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

101

In a gift economy, made famous through events like Burning Man, participants appear to abandon the profit motive altogether; they donate to the community goods, services, art objects, performances and lectures – labour for which one typically receives compensation in the quotidian world. The presence of these free items and activities are part of the draw of events like Raindance, and those who offer them appear to allow the event to capitalize on their labour power for no or minimal compensation (at most the waiving of the admission fee, and this only for those whose labour would be valued much higher in the outside marketplace). Yet, to view such donations as complete disavowals of the profit motive occludes the (sub) cultural capital generated by this seemingly free labour. Whether conscious of it or not, what participants sacrifice by declining to sell their work they gain in reputation within the community, a status that is sometimes parlayed into gigs or commissions for larger, more financially lucrative venues and ventures. Such a system creates the veneer of eschewing capitalist exchange but does not necessarily escape its perquisites. Martin pushes back against the notion that temporary rearticulations of capitalism, particularly in the context of an artistic event, actually lead to realistic models for the future. Quite to the contrary, he believes that they are ‘helplessly reversible into an aestheticisation of novel forms of capitalist exchange’, further abstracting the logics of capital even as they attempt to transcend them (2007: 371). Even though alternative economic practices occur at festivals like Raindance, attending the event itself is a form of exchange, one more in line with what economists Joseph Pine II and James H. Gilmore term the ‘experience economy’, than with the more typical exchange of goods and services (1999). Bourriaud’s theory fails to account for the cultural capital generated by participating in relational aesthetics, which ultimately reasserts the value form presumed to be bracketed off when in the social interstice. The claim to an ‘authentic’ community that exists outside the mainstream market is itself laden with cultural capital; yet, as with events like Burning Man, claiming alterity vis-à-vis the quotidian does not release participants from the market’s sign game or social logics (Kozinets 2002: 36). Rather, the required intersection with mainstream capitalism to generate the technology and materials necessary to produce Raindance’s relational art gets abstracted through the social interaction that occurs around it. The affective ties boutique festivals generate create memorable, moving, even transformational experiences, but they also create loyal customers. Keeping this in mind is crucial to understanding how, despite creating liminoid spaces that house alternative economic structures, boutique festivals still plug into normative macroeconomic paradigms. Claire Bishop has also argued vehemently against assuming, as Bourriaud does, the a priori politicality of relational art. She notes that because ‘[Bourriaud] regards the open-ended participatory work of art as more

102

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

ethical and political in implication than the autonomous, finite object’, the interactive premise of relational art is seen as inherently superior to optical contemplation, which is deemed passive and disengaged; yet, ‘underlying [this] argument about relational aesthetics is the presumption that dialogue is in and of itself democratic’ – far from a foregone conclusion (2005: 118–19). For Bishop, the fundamental flaw in Bourriaud’s argument is that the conversations created around relational art tend to be between people who already have much in common: gallery goers with similar dispositions towards art consumption, or, in the case of boutique festivals, subcultural groupings with pre-established aesthetic interests, agreed upon rules for social conduct and similar political postures. Instead of more agonistic models of democracy that embrace concepts like subject–group difference (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) or dissensus (Rancière 2010), Bourriaud’s discussion of relational art points towards a liberal-democratic utopia in which frictions and antagonisms between disparate subjects simply disappear. This critique certainly holds weight in the context of Raindance, a space in which participants are already bound together through common location, artistic tastes and lifestyle choices, as well as important identity-positional attributes like class and race (the festival’s population, like most in the California scene, is by a vast majority white and middle or upper-middle class). Indeed, events like Raindance tend to be judged on criteria like ‘good vibes’, an unspoken copasetic quality that values minimal conflict and the feeling of social cohesion. This is not to say that conflicts do not occur, but they tend to manifest on a personal level rather than through political positioning, and organizers attempt to police it when it becomes outwardly visible and threatens the harmony of the space. I acknowledge these powerful critiques of relational aesthetics to make clear that I see the theory as offering a way of understanding the formal qualities of Raindance’s artistic practice, the intentionality integral to creating festival spaces and the efficacy such work has in solidifying subcultural ties – but not as an apparatus to assert the revolutionary qualities of boutique festivals. In fact, the critiques levelled at relational aesthetics are useful for understanding contradictions that arise in the politics of festival culture, wherein too often the creative ethos and transformational project get positioned as inherently critical and progressive. The reality, I suggest, is far murkier. But questioning Bourriaud’s assumptions regarding the a priori progressivism of relational art should not amount to ignoring its potency. We should instead think about what might be achieved by viewing relational aesthetics as a technology, a way of reifying or disseminating ideology via the immanence of participation. Relational aesthetics act as a kind of spectacle, but a spectacle that operates differently than that famously theorized by Guy Debord (which Bourriaud sought to counter in writing Relational Aesthetics). They present, instead, an encoding power that, as performance

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

103

scholar Margaret Werry writes, is not ‘hegemonically totalizing, [but instead] a transversal, constellated and coincidental, mobile and multiple cultural formation, open to the intransigence, desire, and momentum of the subjects it produces’ (2005: 381). Festivals constitute diffuse ideological apparatuses that utilize the creative energy of participants to consecrate a particular ethico-political position – one that is often inexplicit, but which can be gleaned from sustained attention to participants’ activities and event dramaturgies. Self-identifying through their disidentification with an imagined mainstream (e.g. the ‘misfit freaks’3 described by the Raindance attendee in this chapter’s introduction), boutique festivals and their participants use the language and poetics of subculture to declare independence from certain normative paradigms (industrial capitalism, mass consumer culture, etc.). But in distancing themselves from this position, they abstract the way other mainstream values get reified – as I will discuss in greater detail later. With their participatory nature a catalyst for subcultural identity formation, relational aesthetics help naturalize the idea that a community’s values are self-generated, primal aspects of the individual or subculture itself – rather than the ideological residue of an opposing social structure. Viewing relational aesthetics as a technology forces us to question the purposes towards which that technology gets deployed, directing us to consider the discourse that frames events like Raindance. To do so, in the following section I discuss how Raindance operates within an emerging category of events called transformational festivals, whose ethical system has lately begun to be codified and disseminated. Communicated through Raindance’s website, advertisements and framing rituals, as well as through popular online hubs frequented by festival regulars, this ethical system constitutes the major dramaturgy that bounds the performance event prompted by relational art. My goal here is not to produce a comprehensive and definitive accounting of Raindance’s politics, but to consider a couple of axes on which the concept of ‘transformation’ is built in order to reveal what it abstracts.

What transformation? A[n] experience as unbelievable as Raindance 2014 is few and far between. My soul and body is fiercely cleansed of all pain and stress involved in my life. I literally cried harder than I ever have because of

The ‘freak’, as discussed by Arun Saldanha, performs oppositionality via the dominant social structure that governs her/him. His chapter ‘Goa Freaks’ provides an excellent conversation on the conceptual history of the freak and how it relates festival/rave culture – especially in regards to the culture’s ethical and racial dynamics (2007). 3

104

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

laughing soooo hard. The thing that makes me smile about it now is knowing that I was [consciously unconscious] the whole time. For my life to change for the better in that state of mind [I] feel unbelievably blessed. So from here … with a clean canvas I am super exited to learn and grow with my family and have my heart beat again (Briscoe 2014). [Raindance web advertisement:] The term ‘transformational festival’ was not even a buzz word when we started. We just knew we were on to something special. We knew it deserved to be nurtured and cultivated, and yet had no idea that ten years later there would be so many amazing festivals, and that the West Coast would become a trendsetter for conscious gathering evolution (Andy 2014). I want to frame this section by discussing a participant-created water sculpture and altar given prominent placement on the festival grounds in both 2013 and 2014 (Figure  4.2). An example of relational art, it encapsulates the political axes I wish to explore in Raindance as a whole. The piece consisted of two pools stacked on top of one another, lined with dozens of wooden slats like a giant crate; water flowed through a spout from the top pool to the lower one, and a solar-powered pump cycled it back up again, creating a continuous loop so that the tranquil sound of running water continued for the festival’s duration. A variety of culturalgeographical images and artefacts lined the structure: a figurine of Krishna holding a flute, two Buddha heads, candles depicting Jesus Christ and the Virgin of Guadalupe, a picture of the Painted Desert, a San Pedro cactus, a clay vase featuring a brown-skinned figure with a headdress holding a potted plant (seemingly a Central American derivation), a wood-carved Native American face wearing a plumed headdress. The artist, Gerasimos Christoforatos, who produced the piece as a gift to the Raindance community, deployed these symbols as an attempt to ‘incorporate all the different religions of the world, to represent the unification of what we might all consider to be spirituality’.4 Christoforatos’ sculpture also served a functional purpose, working as an operational hydroponic and permaculture system. Troughs growing small herbs lined the top pool, while the bottom one contained fish; waste from the fish pumped back up to the top tank to help fertilize the plants, and in turn, the runoff from the plants helped feed the fish – both could be harvested for human consumption. The piece constitutes a particularly visible example of relational art at Raindance, presumably seen by everyone and built with the intention of encouraging people to ‘hold space’ with one another by presenting an aesthetically and spiritually charged environment. As Christoforatos 4

Gerasimos Christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 November 2014.

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

105

FIGURE  4.2  Water sculpture with permaculture system created by Gerasimos Christophoratos. Photo: Gerasimos Christophoratos (2013). expresses, the piece was incomplete upon its arrival; it grew to completion via the acts of communal co-creation that it prompted: People would bring certain kinds of stones or crystals and different candles and incense, different types of artistic metal objects; they may bring things to hang around the Buddha’s neck – medicine pouches, little pendants of eagles. And things build up over time as people leave objects

106

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

behind. So we reach this climax where people are giving what they have to offer to the piece, and just as the event is over and the climax is over, things get taken apart; and just as it’s built up it’s also built down.5 Through the community’s donations, Christoforatos sees the sculpture taking on a lifespan coincident with the duration of the festival, generating a kind of community aura. This, he proposes, extends beyond objects placed upon the sculpture to performance practices, rituals and social encounters that occurred around it: a man who set up a desk nearby and wrote poetry, a juggler who attracted onlookers as he practiced, even some confused partiers who used the sculpture to fill their drinking bottles. In 2013, the piece demarcated one of Raindance’s workshop spaces, hosting intellectual and embodied classes: ‘Making a wild-crafted hydrosol’, ‘Herbal medicine for the home’, ‘Spirits in a bottle’,6 ‘Weaving a dreamcatcher’, ‘Finding your inner Jedi’, and ‘Anchors with Wings’.7 For Christoforatos, all of this was absorbed into the sculpture itself, endowing it with an energy that reflected the ethos of the festival community. Through thinking about this sculpture, we can see a number of tropes associated with Raindance as a whole: 1. An emphasis on ecology and sustainability, and a particular fascination with water.8 2. A non-specific spirituality that mixes elements from different world religions and indigenous cultural practices. 3. An emphasis on identity-making and the unleashing of personal potential through spiritual practice – in a word: transformation. Over the past ten to fifteen years, a number of similar electronic dance music events sharing these values have cropped up primarily in California and British Columbia, coming to be known as transformational festivals. Raindance does not explicitly label itself a transformational festival on its logo or website, but as the advertisement that begins this section indicates,

Gerasimos Christoforatos, phone interview with the author, 5 November 2014. A workshop on aromatics, essential oils and plant spirits. 7 ‘A playful exploration of core essence using transformational life coaching techniques and creative inquiry exercises’ (Raindance Presents 2013b). 8 The presence of water has always been an important element of the Raindance Campout. In the early years, the event was held in a Scout camp near Santa Cruz that had a swimming pool; in recent years, the festival occurred on the Yuba River (2013) and Feather River (2014). The river provided a refreshing place for participants to cool off during hot California afternoons (a nearby sound stage helping to build the party), as well as a site for daily water blessings and yoga practice that took place in the morning and evening. 5 6

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

107

administrators are aware of the term’s growing cachet and embrace being categorized as such. The term ‘transformational festival’ is relatively new, having only emerged in the last five years or so, and largely due to the efforts of Jeet-Kei Leung, an avid participant in the West Coast festival scene and documentarian of electronic dance music culture. Leung’s TEDx Vancouver talk in 2010, entitled ‘Transformational Festivals and the New Evolutionary Culture’, codified the term around a series of event models, principles and aesthetics, and helped disseminate it widely among festival participants and organizers. Leung parlayed his talk into a Kickstarter campaign that led to the creation of a four-part documentary of transformational festivals called the Bloom Series, and an accompanying web portal that helped solidify their ethics and poetics.9 According to Leung, transformational festivals are powered by the co-creation of an immersive, participant-driven reality (what I’m here associating with relational aesthetics). They are distinguished from other festival genres by the following qualities: an ecstatic core ritual provided through electronic dance music; visionary art, performance, art installations and live art; a workshop curriculum covering a spectrum of New Paradigm subjects; the creation and honouring of sacred space; ceremony and ritual; a social economy of artisans and vendors (or, alternative gift economy); a natural, outdoor setting to honour the Earth; and a multiple (typically 3–7) day duration (The Bloom Series 2013). Leung frames transformational festivals as ‘a cultural renaissance in progress’, an ‘evolution’ and a conduit for ‘building a better world’ (The Bloom Series 2013). Like Bourriaud, his language creates a teleological narrative of positive development, a dramaturgy that frames the Raindance experience as a participatory critical project. Yet, when we consider that transformational festivals arise within the context of North American liberalism, a number of axes emerge on which we might consider their distinctive political positionality: economic structure, spiritual inflection, sexual, gender10 and racial politics, etc. Certainly, as these events gain momentum and spread beyond the West Coast scene, efforts should be made to more comprehensively account for these various aspects. However, seeking to avoid straying from my subject thus far, here I wish only to briefly discuss two major areas made visible through Christophoratos’ previously discussed artwork: first, the ecological ethos cultivated within the

Leung is also writing a book with the working title: ‘Dancing Together into the Great Shift: Transformational Festivals & the New Evolutionary Culture’. 10 In Leung’s TEDx Vancouver talk, he discusses ‘gender alchemy’ (a challenge to the Manichean male/female divide) and ‘models of compatible diversity’ as formative components of the transformational festival movement (TEDxTalks 2011). 9

108

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

festival space; and second, a form of spirituality that grafts contemporary technology to practices of indigenous culture, what Leung refers to as ‘Ancient future culture’ (TEDxTalks 2011).

Ecological ethos Christophoratos gifted his water sculpture to the Raindance community in order to ‘educate people about sustainability so that we can spread this kind of technology to make a difference here and abroad’. While technically not 100 per cent self-sustaining (the system can be run on solar power, but requires modest nutritional supplementation), the altar itself performs homeostasis by displaying a self-perpetuating life cycle between plant and animal – bioprocesses at perfect equilibrium. The cultural symbols that surround it depict humans as the stewards of this equilibrium, rather than antagonists. The sculpture’s cyclical permaculture functionality, beauty and relational aesthetics crystalize how transformational festivals generate an environmentally oriented politics among its populace. Acting as both inspiration and (through workshops dedicated to teaching sustainable living techniques) training grounds, they seek to spread ecological consciousness beyond the festival frame. All transformational festivals are leave-no-trace events, where organizers guarantee that, post-festival, the land will be left in as pristine shape as before participants arrived. The leave-no-trace ethos is central to generating feelings of subcultural belonging vis-à-vis other, presumably more hedonistic events. When I attended Raindance, I remember discussing with some people camping near me how they could no longer bring themselves to attend festivals without the leave-no-trace label because of their discomfort with the trash politics that accompany them – not only the beer bottles, wrappers and cigarette butts unthinkingly strewn across the event grounds, but the way that a culture of ecological carelessness intersected with human relationality to make for a colder, more impersonal environment. In  contrast, practices of trash consciousness – picking up one’s cigarette butts and placing them in a snazzy pouch, or converting beer cans into recycled sculptures – reverberate throughout transformational festival spaces, constituting ecological microperformances that reify communal solidarity through a sense of shared ethics. Of course, leave-no-trace events can never hope to literally leave no trace. Cigarette butts get picked up, string and twine tangled in trees get taken down, but even if visible markers of the event disappear, traces can be found at the molecular level: soap used for making giant bubbles (a playful relational art activity I saw both years I attended Raindance) that sinks into the soil, or a feather from someone’s festive boa that gets trampled into the ground. While I do not suggest that participants are ignorant of this contradiction, I want to point out that since leave-no-trace eschews unseen

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

109

remnants of festival activity, it normalizes a perceptual frame that can only account for concrete, visible forms of environmental impact. Furthermore, leave-no-trace is achieved partly through the labour of volunteers who patrol the grounds picking up trash in exchange for a free ticket to the festival after three four-hour shifts. In 2014, the festival added a $25 ‘impact fee’ for all participants, including volunteers, to offset the labour and logistical costs of making the event carbon-neutral. While these aspects no doubt illustrate the legitimate attention organizers pay to environmental concerns and weave an ecological ethos into the event’s dramaturgy, they also authorize consumption patterns wherein the labour that sustains them gets abstracted. Transformational festivals necessarily impact the environment through the fuel burnt to generate the wattage required to run sound stages and lighting displays, and to travel into remote spaces. But participants and organizers view this as a strategy, where the training and consciousness-raising that takes place within the space outweighs the heightened consumption patterns perceived to generate this momentum. Seen thus, events like Raindance constitute what Slavoj Žižek calls a ‘chocolate laxative’, a calling card of contemporary liberal society wherein ‘the very thing which causes damage should already be the medicine’ (2004); the impact fee, combined with the leave-no-trace policy (encouraged through community self-regulation but only guaranteed through organizers’ post-festival management), potentially reifies unsustainable consumption patterns that accompany the event’s Saturnalian atmosphere.

Ancient future culture It is unclear precisely how the Raindance name came about – some say that it arose to reference an unusually dry summer at the time of the company’s founding, while the poster for the group’s first event (a ‘Tribal Dance Party’) suggests an homage to ritual practices in Ancient Egypt and Africa (Raindance Presents 2014). Regardless of the derivation, suffice it to say the event’s name characterizes it as a fusion of contemporary recreational practice (camping) with indigenous ritual, and this carries through to the spiritual inflection of the festival’s contemporary iteration. The transformational festival movement encourages signifiers of indigenous culture to get deployed alongside contemporary technologies that create a heightened state of aesthetic richness (light shows, synthesizers, hallucinogens, etc.) in order to induce a return to what are presumed to be more sustainable environmental practices and more respectful human interactions. Placed throughout Raindance, for instance, were dreamcatchers, a totem pole, a teepee; altars (like the one described earlier) included figurines and symbols reflecting indigenous cultures from around the globe; paintings depicted indigenous bodies fused with cybernetic technologies (see Figure  4.3); participants wore headdresses, moccasins, beaded vests

110

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

FIGURE 4.3  A piece of visionary art present at Raindance 2013 (artist unknown). Note how the headdress (suggesting indigeneity) combines with deconstructive geometrical patterns. Photo: Bryan Schmidt (2013).

and other clothing inspired by representations of Native Americans; they integrated objects like Māori poi into their dance practices and instruments like the didgeridoo into cut-and-paste water rites or dancefloor rituals. Transformational festivals, as described by Leung, are built on a premise of fostering a new mode of spirituality discovered through combining the reperformance or redeployment of ‘ancient’ ritual elements alongside the spectacle firepower provided by contemporary visual, aural and chemical technologies; this leads, potentially, to what he calls ‘reindigenization’, an attempt to simultaneously ‘reconnect with the earth … with our own indigenous nature’, and to explore ‘a re-encounter [with] representatives of indigenous communities’ (Festival Fire 2013). Leung’s concept of reindigenization proposes a fundamental mutability in terms of the positionality of the predominantly white, middle-class population that attends transformational festivals. It aligns with what Arun Saldanha has discussed as the white ethico-political project of psychedelics aimed at transcending the geohistorical body (2007: 15). Seen thus, transformation here posits an evacuation of one’s hegemonic identity to enter a primal, fluid state of being; participants then reconstitute their identities, picking and choosing from a range of cultural practices that may or may not align with their former positionality. Participants come together at transformational festivals to form temporary (white)

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

111

enclaves dedicated, at least in part, to rearticulating the self as malleable, adaptable and performative, able to perceive and indeed become that which they see as the antithesis and casualty of global modernity: the indigenous Other. Despite what I take to be the genuinely respectful intentions of festivalgoers,11 the dangers of such a project should be immediately apparent. The relative absence of indigenous bodies at events like Raindance speaks particularly loudly, coinciding with contemporary controversies that display the lack of control indigenous groups have over their own representation.12 The ability to view indigeneity as a mutable category that can be tried on, played with, cast aside or altered if desired undoubtedly speaks to the privileged position many festivalgoers occupy within the US racial and cultural hierarchy. It both displays and refortifies white supremacy by characterizing whiteness as neutral, unmarked, a blank slate. Furthermore, the appropriation of religious and cultural practices for the purposes of reinvigorating the identities of festivalgoers threatens to drain these practices of their specificity, historical significance and symbolic power. It redeploys them as forms of identity capital in a neoliberal marketplace that does not privilege those from whom the practices were mined, but rather, homo economicus, the rational figure of political modernity that can detach from the web of cultural associations that sustain community and resistance (Werry 2011: 185). There is reason to suggest that some of these issues are also familiar to patrons and organizers of transformational festivals themselves: one such event, Lightning in a Bottle, banned headdresses and other explicit Native American mimicry in 2014; others are following suit, triggering widespread debate within the community about issues of cultural appropriation. Discussing ‘reindigenization’, Leung himself acknowledges the danger of reifying exploitive behaviours and explores how to bridge the gap between indigenous and contemporary neo-tribal communities ‘in a good way, in [a] right relationship[, in] a way that is not replaying the dynamics of colonialism, but is attempting to heal those dynamics’ (Festival Fire 2013). He thus outlines at least a personal consciousness of the ease with which projects that emphasize such cultural remixing (particularly as enacted by relatively privileged persons within the hegemonic order) can slip into a reiteration of neo-colonial marginalization practices even if, outwardly at least, it is precisely the racial/gender/class politics of white colonial modernity from which transformational festival participants attempt to disassociate.

Graham St John suggests that although many deployments of Native American imagery in festival settings falls into the camp of solipsistic neoprimitivism, ‘some exemplify genuine efforts to advance change in the wake of the recognition of crises of self and globe, or contextualize respectful exchanges involving collaborative intercultural performances’ (2013: 191). 12 For example, in the United States the naming of sports teams like the Washington Redskins or the Golden State Warriors remains a major terrain of struggle for Native American communities. 11

112

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Conclusion Bourriaud wrote Relational Aesthetics primarily to understand shifts in the 1990s European gallery art scene, and it is worth questioning the need to reach into such a different disciplinary space to theorize an event like Raindance. Despite festival culture becoming a major artistic trendsetter for society at large, it often gets dismissively framed as a hedonistic party scene rather than a critical space for creative identity-making or ethico-political development. As just one small example, a 2015 New York Times article discusses how the Wassaic Project, a New York-based artist residency, developed an accompanying festival event that aimed to mimic the ‘spirit’ of music festival culture; in the article, organizer Bowie Zunino described a desire to draw from music festival culture in order to build an event with a sense of generosity and sociality, but ‘where the art wasn’t hippy stuff but serious contemporary art’ (Green 2015). While Zunino values the affective ties that arise within music festivals, he effortlessly dismisses the artistic practice that, as I have argued, helps generate this communal cohesion. Discussing Raindance as relational art, I hope, does work to counter similar characterizations of festival culture as lowbrow and unserious, a frou-frou hobby that contrasts with thoughtful contemporary art practice. Perspectives like Zunino’s occlude the creativity, collaboration and discipline that enable events like Raindance – from organizers and participants alike. The lens of relational aesthetics opens up festival culture to modes of analysis that take seriously its affective power and ethical imperatives. It reveals the technologies by which boutique events generate a sense of belonging and inspiration without access to the resources of larger festivals. While I have sought to refute the teleological, liberatory trope seen in Bourriaud’s writing and the discourse surrounding transformational festivals, placing the two in conversation makes visible the participatory technologies that operate at events like Raindance and potentially reify fundamental values of Western liberalism. Relational art in the context of the Raindance Campout does indeed produce real transformations that bind participants together and encourage alternative social practice, but transformation is never neutral. It occurs within the discursive frame that circumscribes it and travels along multiple axes, rather than a single, positivist continuum. The progressive energy participants, organizers and spokespeople invest in the concept of ‘transformation’ naturalizes such a continuum and abstracts contradictory critical axes: the presence of the material culture, rituals and representational practices of diverse peoples substitutes for actual multicultural diversity; the impact fee’s assurance of sustainability and proper stewardship of the land obscure the unsustainable consumption patterns that participants engage in while at the festival; and alternative economic practices among a tiny population supplant systemic critique. This is not to call out the Raindance Campout for ‘bad politics’, but merely to indicate that it has

BOUTIQUING AT THE RAINDANCE CAMPOUT

113

politics; politics that cannot be uncritically contrasted to an imagined normative ‘mainstream’. Neither relational aesthetics, nor a boutique size, nor an ethical model assures progressivism. The point is not to moralize but to advocate for reflexivity among participants, organizers and scholars in determining where transformational festival culture’s ethical imperatives lie. The dizzying array of rituals, artistic practices, costumes, dancing bodies, finely constructed spaces – all simultaneously present in the spellbinding crucible of a natural setting – should not prevent us from questioning what happens when the amps are finally turned off and the temporary community dispersed. Intensity of experience, the novelty of creative invention and the richness of sociality should prod us to ask the crucial question: ‘What exactly have I signed up for here?’

Acknowledgements Many thanks to Arun Saldanha for helping me set off on this project and to Rita Kompelmakher for attending Raindance with me and providing much needed feedback on my writing and observations.

References ‘An Interview with Jeet Kei Leung’. 2013. Festival Fire, 19 April. http://festivalfire .com/jeet-kei-leung/ (accessed 16 November 2014). Andy. 2014. ‘Fort Knox Five to DJ at Raindance Festival 10 Year Anniversary!! June 6–9th’, 3 June. http://www.fortknoxfive.com/2014/06/03/fort-knox -five-to-dj-at-raindance-festival-10-year-anniversary-june-6-9th/ (accessed 16 November 2014). Bishop, Claire. 2005. Installation Art. London: Routledge. Bourriaud, Nicholas. [1998] 2002. Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods with the participation of Mathieu Copeland. Dijon: Les Presses du Reel. Briscoe, Chris. 2014. ‘A experience as unbelievable…’. Facebook, 12 June. https:// www.facebook.com/events/656336294428254/ (accessed 22 February 2015). Chen, Katherine. 2009. Enabling Creative Chaos: The Organization behind the Burning Man Event. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. 2008. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. New York: Routledge. Gilmore, James H. and B. Joseph Pine II. 1999. The Experience Economy. Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press. Green, Penelope. 2015. ‘The Wassaic: A Festival, a “Beautiful” Flood and Now Art’. New York Times, 4 March: D5. KnowFun. 2014. ‘Dancing in the Rain – Lost in Sound Reviews Raindance 2014’. Lost in Sound, 26 June. http://lostinsound.org/dancing-rain-lostinsound -reviews-raindance 2014/ (accessed 16 November 2014).

114

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Kozinets, Robert V. 2002. ‘Can Consumers Escape the Market? Emancipatory Illuminations from Burning Man’. Journal of Consumer Research, 29 (4): 20–38. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso. Leung, Jeet-Kei. 2013. ‘Guidelines for Inclusion on Transformational Festivals Map’. The Bloom Series, 13 January. http://thebloomseries.com/guidelines-for -inclusion-transformational-festivals-map/ (accessed 16 November 2014). Limbach, Elizabeth. 2010. ‘Raindance’. Good Times, 7 April. http://www.gtweekly .com/index.php/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/santa-cruz-arts -entertainment-/983-raindance.html (accessed 16 November 2014). Martin, Stewart. 2007. ‘Critique of Relational Aesthetics’. Third Text, 21 (4): 369–86. Meier, Wendy Clupper. 2007. ‘The Performance Culture of Burning Man’ (PhD diss., School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, University of Maryland). Raindance Presents. 2013a. ‘Participate’. https://www.raindancepresents.com/ campout2013/workshops.phph (accessed 1 August 2013). Raindance Presents. 2013b. ‘Raindance 2013 Workshops’. https://www .raindancepresents.com/campout2013/.php (accessed 1 August 2013). Raindance Presents. 2014. ‘#tbt Flyer for the first ever Raindance party’, 1 May. Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/raindancepresents/timelineh (accessed 16 November 2014). Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus, trans. Steven Corcoran. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Saldanha, Arun. 2007. Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Seffrin, Georgia. 2007. ‘The Out-of-the-Box Festival of Early Childhood: Fashioning the Boutique Festival for Children’. In Festivalising!: Theatrical Events, Politics, and Culture, eds. T. Hauptfleisch, S. Lev-Aladgem, J. Martin, W. Sauter and H. Schoenmakers, 67–78. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. St John, Graham. 2013. ‘Indian Spirit: Amerindians and the Techno-Tribes of Psytrance’. In Tribal Fantasies: Native Americans in the European Imaginary, 1900–2010, eds. James Mackay and David Stirrup, 173–96. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. St John, Graham. 2014. ‘The Logics of Sacrifice at Visionary Arts Festivals’. In The Festivalization of Culture, eds. Andy Bennett, Jodie Taylor and Ian Woodward, 49–67. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. TEDxTalks. 2011. ‘Transformational Festivals: Jeet Kei Leung at TEDxVancouver’. YouTube, 20 August. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8tDpQp6m0Ah (accessed 5 May 2013). Thornton, Sarah. 1995. Club Cultures and Subcultures: Music, Media, and Subcultural Capital. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Werry, Margaret. 2005. ‘“The Greatest Show on Earth”: Political Spectacle, Spectacular Politics, and the American Pacific’. Theatre Journal, 57 (3): 355–82. Werry, Margaret. 2011. The Tourist State: Performing Leisure, Liberalism, and Race in New Zealand. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. ‘A Cup of Decaf Reality’. Lacan dotcom. http://www.lacan .com/zizekdecaf.htm (accessed 6 December 2014).

CHAPTER FIVE

Harm Reduction or Psychedelic Support? Caring for Drug-Related Crises at Transformational Festivals Deirdre Ruane

5  August  2014, Boom Festival, Portugal. Late afternoon. Now that the Sacred Fire has been lit, the first beats from the Dance Temple roll across the hillside to meet the onrushing crowd. The heat is punishing, but inside the  Temple we find shade and cool falling mist. Faces turn up to receive it. It has finally begun. Many of the crowd, swept up in the moment, drop acid – or a blue fractal blotter they think is acid – round about now, and by midnight psychedelic support space Kosmicare is having its busiest night on record. Within the compound, near the centre of the site, a full team of sitters and others not on shift, pulled in to help, are hard at work. I am with a young Irishman who thinks he is in hell. It is like psychedelic A&E: visitors are arriving on foot and in jeeps or buggies, alone or brought by friends, medics or security. The list on the whiteboard by the front desk, where visitors are checked in and their detailed admission forms are filled in, gets longer and longer. Most of them are having classic LSD trips: a familiar sequence of

This chapter was previously published in Dancecult: Journal of Electronic Dance Music Culture in May 2015. Dancecult permits the reproduction of this material by Bloomsbury in this volume. Executive Editor of Dancecult, Graham St John.

116

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

dissolution and gradual reassembling. But by morning we are wondering why a few just do not seem to be coming down. That is when people from CheckIn – the government-endorsed drug checking lab that has been running all night by the main dancefloor – arrive with their detailed findings and an explanation. What the visitors thought was LSD is in fact DOx, a family of psychedelic amphetamines with twentyfive to thirty-six hour effects. As we formulate a strategy for visitors on DOx, CheckIn are posting warning signs all over the site. Burn Night, 31  August  2014, Burning Man, Nevada, USA. After watching The Most Stubborn Man in the history of Burns finally collapse, I arrive on shift at the Zendo ‘psych support’ space at 2:00 am. Inside it is warmly lit, with piles of blankets on raised sleeping platforms, and skilled therapists stand ready to assist. But it is buried down a dark side street with minimal footfall, out past 2.30 and E, and because of the hostile nature of Nevada law enforcement, its advertising has been evasive and ambiguous. It is almost empty. Some roamers are being dispatched to the biggest and loudest dance camps, to tell people about the Zendo and offer to sit with anyone they find having a crisis. They will find no one who admits to this. The shift leader quietly points me towards a guy sitting cross-legged on the floor, swaying and moving his hands fluidly through the air. After we have talked for a while, I ask him what he took. He closes up and pulls away. ‘I don’t see why I should tell you that’, he says, ‘it’s irrelevant to my personal quest’. 26 July 2014, Secret Garden Party, UK. Kosmicare UK (KCUK) is tucked away in the most remote corner of the festival site, far from the medical and welfare tents, behind a fairground swing ride that pumps out disco. We are expecting a quiet shift. Then a dozen or so late-teenage boys and girls arrive, supporting a terrified girl who is convinced the security guards intend to strip-search her. They have all taken what they think is MDMA. One of the volunteers, a chemist, examines their baggie and decides that it is pentedrone, a recently synthesized cathinone associated with compulsive binges and stimulant psychosis. He is almost right – months later, results from a postal testing service confirm that it is pentedrone’s closest relative, alpha-PVP – but at the time there’s no way to check. Meanwhile I watch the visitors follow their friend down into the same pit of paranoia: black magic, conspiracy, harassment, sexual violence, incontinence and shame. The three of us on shift work flat-out long into the night. Sleep will resolve the problem, but they think we are part of the conspiracy and they will not sleep here until we have won their trust. The next afternoon I head over to medical and welfare. We were told they had been briefed, but the ones on duty have not heard of us. There have been hundreds of cases like the ones we had, distressed and paranoid in eerily

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

117

similar ways. But the brusque nurse on the triage desk will not believe that it is not MDMA. She insists its ‘the bad batch the police told us about’; so pure that people are overdosing. I try to tell her that the effects we saw were nothing like MDMA overdose, and anyway there is bound to be much more than one bad batch at a festival this size – but she is busy, and no longer listening. Many of the electronic dance music events known as ‘transformational festivals’ provide psychedelic support spaces. Staffed by volunteers, members of the transformational festival community known as ‘sitters’, these spaces offer refuge and compassionate care to festivalgoers undergoing difficult drug experiences. The purpose of the space is to assist participants towards the resolution of these experiences, while alleviating the burden of psychedelic and other drug-induced crises for on-site medics, who are often ill equipped to handle such cases. Many of the support workers subscribe to a core value within psychedelic culture discourse: that psychedelics can aid personal growth if their use is handled appropriately, and relatedly, that difficult psychedelic experiences can lead to valuable psychological breakthroughs. The work of the care spaces is sometimes referred to as ‘psychedelic harm reduction’, a somewhat contentious phrase. Harm reduction is a paradigm for the care of drug users that offers an alternative to approaches based on criminalization and abstinence, seeking to reduce the harm rather than the use of drugs. Early harm reduction was peer-driven, originating with an advocacy group of Dutch heroin addicts. However, although the work of peer-based harm reduction initiatives continues, a more medicalized form of harm reduction has come to dominate the field. This approach is associated with neoliberal views of drugs, drug users, the self and the nature of the relationship between drugs workers and those they support. Engaging with this mainstream harm reduction paradigm can cause difficulties for psychedelic support workers. The paradigm is in many ways incompatible with the discourse of psychedelic culture, as expressed in the ideologies of the transformational festival. However, in the context of international drug prohibition, the support projects must endorse the values of harm reduction in order to gain access to events, visibility to festivalgoers and integration with other support staff. Points of conflict between the psychedelic and harm reduction discourses create tensions both within the support organizations and in their relations with on-site medics, security guards, festival organizers and the police. This complex situation is further impacted by the effects of national and local drug policy. This chapter considers how psychedelic support workers negotiate this discourse dichotomy in the course of caregiving, within differing national and local drug policy climates. Along with relevant literature, it

118

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

draws upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted throughout the summer of 2014 in which I volunteered as a sitter with three psychedelic support organisations: KCUK (UK), the Zendo Project (United States) and Kosmicare (Portugal). Participant observation was carried out at seven festivals in three countries with contrasting legal climates (the UK, the United States and Portugal), and was supplemented by in-depth interviews with nineteen support workers. Early findings suggest that mainstream harm reduction discourses may be a poor fit for psychedelics and that risks inherent in their adoption by festival support spaces, such as abjection of drug users in difficulty, may create a trust-damaging divide between users and workers. First, the scene must be set. Transformational festivals have a distinctive culture that sets them apart from other electronic dance music festivals, focusing on self-transformation and community-building through dance, group ritual and co-creativity. Psychedelic support plays an important role in this ‘transformation’. The following section draws upon both scholarly and scene writing, along with my own observations during fieldwork, to provide a brief introduction to the transformational festival.

FIGURE 5.1  The Sacred Fire, Boom 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane.

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

119

Transformational festivals, identity and the collective Transformational festivals are an emerging category of events with some or all of the following features: electronic dance music, including psychedelic dance music; visionary art; an emphasis on creative participation rather than spectatorship; leave-no-trace or permaculture-based operating principles; seminars, workshops and lectures; green politics and/or social activism; and a remit of personal and social transformation (Krasnow 2012), along with widespread use of psychedelics and group ritual. Leung (2010) positions the American and Canadian West Coast as the current centre of the movement, though transformational festivals can be found worldwide. Several cultural currents converge in the transformational festival, a nonexhaustive account of which will be given here. One is Burning Man, at which a temporary community known as Black Rock City is built in the Nevada desert for a week each year. Burning Man began as an anarcho-punk event emphasising art, ritual and co-creativity. Dance music camps arrived later, becoming integral to the event (Jones 2011: 84–88). Another influence on the transformational festival was the Goatrance movement, which was seeded in the late 1960s with ‘spontaneous dance jams’ on the beaches of Goa mounted by ‘freaks’ who had settled there. By the 1970s, these events had evolved into full-moon dance gatherings (St John 2012: 34–35). As the Goa scene itself declined in the 1990s and 2000s, psychedelic events inspired by the Goa aesthetic and philosophy began to spring up worldwide, such as Boom, Ozora and Envision festivals. In the UK, the transformational festival scene that supports events like Sunrise Celebration, Waveform and Alchemy is rooted in the Free Festival/New Age Traveller movement of the 1970s, and was further fuelled by 1980s–1990s UK rave and its legendary outdoor events (Dearling 2012: 14). Migrating across the Atlantic in the mid-1990s, rave combined with ‘progressive currents’ on the US West Coast to bring about a proliferation of transformational festivals there (Leung 2010). The ‘transformation’ that is said to occur at these events has various vectors. Social transformation may arise from connections made, information exchanged and skills learned at events. In constructing festival spaces, crews and festivalgoers engage in utopics: a form of ‘spatial play’ involving the construction of physical representations of ‘the good society’ (Marin 1984: 6–12; Hetherington 1997: 328). Though these representations are necessarily temporary and often hotly contested (St John 2013), they enable the formation of activist networks that can persist on return to the ‘real world’, in areas such as non-market economies (Kozinets 2002: 20–38), environmentalism (Purdue et  al. 1997: 660–64) or use of festival-learned skills to assist disaster relief efforts (Jones 2011: 176–78).

120

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

FIGURE 5.2  Constructing the Temple, Burning Man 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane. Alongside the transformational festival’s utopian social aspirations, and inextricable from them, is the idea of the transformation of self through the festival experience and the non-ordinary states of being it facilitates. Numerous authors, for example, Gilmore (2010: 13), Tramacchi (2000: 206) and Pike (2011: 158), have framed the festival state by way of Victor Turner’s theory of liminality (Turner 1969: 95), in which a threshold is crossed into a ‘betwixt and between’ state where everyday rules and the flow of normal time are suspended and new social roles can be assumed. However, St John’s reconfiguration of Turner’s theory (2001) offers a better purchase on transformational festivals, acknowledging the wild heterogeneity of peak experiences and the central role of embodiment. Perhaps the most common image of the collective, embodied spirit of transformational festivals is that of the dancefloor, on which ego boundaries are said to dissolve, resulting in ecstatic experiences of communion mediated by the rhythms of psytrance and other electronic music, and often assisted by consumption of psychedelics. Duffy et  al. (2011: 23) describe how an ‘emotional response of belonging’ arises from communication ‘through pulse’, such as that engaged in by a dancing crowd moving in synchrony. As St John (2012: 183) writes, in spaces like the Dance Temple at Boom Festival ‘the boundaries that separate people from each other and from the world are subject to liquidation’.

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

121

This merging with the collective may involve a temporary suspension of – or deliberate flight from – everyday identity as a unitary neoliberal subject (as described by Rose, Barry and Osborne 1996: 41) constantly engaged in processes of self-monitoring, self-governing and efficiency maximization. As St John (2012: 116) writes, one becomes ‘unburdened of disciplined, voluntary modes of subjectivity’. While one is thus unburdened, a different subjectivity reveals itself. Experiences of selfhood within the space of the transformational festival are characterized by fluidity, integration with others and periods of dissolution into group ecstatic states – an experience that is arguably the driving force behind the transformational festival’s collectivist, utopic aspirations. However, the process is not always smooth. As Echenhofer (2012) found, the phase of dissolution early in a psychedelic experience can be disturbing and involve an upwelling of difficult emotions. In the right setting, and especially if support is given, this crisis phase can give way to a ‘healing catharsis’ (Leung 2010), which resolves into an experience of reintegration, both in oneself and with the collective. This process is highly valued within transformational festival culture and seen as an opportunity for growth (Zendo 2013: 2). Thus, Leung (2010) sees the provision of psychedelic support as integral to the culture. In the context of these values, drug consumption preferences in transformational festival culture differ from those, for instance, at corporate EDM events. Informal surveys of festivalgoers during fieldwork in the UK and Portugal, alongside data from drug checking facilities, allowed me to build up a picture of supply and demand based on respondents’ stated preferences and on which substances they had noticed were being sold within the festival. ‘Classic’ psychedelics, such as LSD, mushrooms and forms of DMT such as the smoking blend changa, are the most highly valued, and along with MDMA, the most sought after. Cannabis is ubiquitous, and lesser-known synthetic psychedelics such as the 2C family are also popular. Stimulants such as speed and mephedrone are present, but they are less popular than at more-corporate events. Ketamine provokes widespread ambivalence: many profess to dislike it but it is nonetheless widely used. Most ‘hard’ drugs such as heroin and crack – though not cocaine, at least not unanimously – are shunned by transformational festivalgoers, many of whom distance themselves emphatically from users of addictive drugs. Finally, novel psychoactive substances (NPS), such as the DOx family, NBOMe and alpha-PVP, are rarely sought or sold explicitly; rather, they tend to be sold as one of the ‘classics’. Successive waves of bans on psychoactive substances make the ongoing synthesis or rediscovery of still-legal NPS an attractive proposition for the drug trade. NPS have little history of human use and thus carry unknown risks. Several key aspects of psychedelic culture discourse will be foregrounded in this analysis, as they are central to the work of psychedelic support

122

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

projects. These are views of the self; views of drug use and its value; attitudes to drug users and their relationship with support workers; and conceptions of the central purpose of the support space. The self is here regarded as transpersonal, holistic, part of a collective, and capable of dissolving and reforming, with a porous self–other boundary. In theory, drug users undergoing intense altered states are seen as engaged in valuable internal processes, and thus deserving of respect (Zendo 2013: 2). As fellow scene members, support workers are considered to be the peers and equals of those they support. Finally, the facilitation of potentially beneficial psychedelic processes with the aim of personal growth is the core purpose of the support space. As we shall see, each of these points contrasts sharply with mainstream harm reduction discourse. The next section provides a brief introduction to the support projects, their work within the transformational festival milieu and the differing pressures of local and national drug policy upon them. There is little scholarship concerning the projects as yet, so this account rests upon memoirs of and conversations with support workers, along with my own field observations.

Ground crew: Psychedelic support projects at work Psychedelic support volunteers are drawn from festival culture. Many are psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors and other mental health professionals; others are community drugs workers; some simply have extensive experience with psychedelics. Their remit of care covers all difficult drug experiences for which medical attention is not required. While most volunteers work within the care space, mobile teams, such as the Vibe Patrol at Boom or the Zendo Roamers at Burning Man, circulate on dancefloors to ‘keep the vibe high’, providing primary care, water, reassurance and sometimes transport to the care space. The first step in a visitor’s care is establishing whether they require medical attention, referring them to medical staff if this is the case. If not, care strategies are shaped by what the visitor is believed to have taken, and thus the profile and estimated duration of the effects. For those deemed to be undergoing a psychedelic crisis arising from a normal dosage of a wellknown substance, care focuses on the facilitation of the visitor’s internal process. It may start with the provision of basic comforts such as blankets, water or tea and a private, low-stimulus space if desired. Subsequently, sitters remain with visitors, talking, listening or simply sitting quietly with the visitor as desired. The aim is to create an atmosphere of safety in which the visitor feels able to confront and process difficult emotions.

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

123

In transformational festival culture, dance is seen as a powerful catalyst of this internal work. Thus, some care techniques use movement and dance to help visitors towards catharsis. Zendo training includes a segment on ‘bodywork’ techniques, which encourage the visitor to focus on and amplify involuntary movements, and Kosmicare sometimes features a separate space in which visitors can dance if desired. Most such cases resolve without problems given support, comfort and time. However, many others are less predictable. Visitors may have taken too much of one substance or an incompatible combination of several; been unwittingly spiked; be suffering from difficult physical conditions, lack of food or sleep; or been sold a more harmful substance than the one they expected. Care of these cases focuses on the minimization of health impacts. Visitors are monitored closely and may be medicated if their case does not seem to be resolving, though this is avoided where possible. In rare cases, support workers may decide to keep visitors within the compound if they are thought to be a risk to themselves or others. Formulating a care strategy with the right balance of process facilitation and damage control is easier in policy climates where drug checking is possible. Where checking is prohibited, support staff must rely on guesswork and experience. Experience, however, is inadequate in the face of the constant influx of NPS being sold as more-familiar drugs. Punitive climates, which lack checking facilities and where transactions must be performed hastily and surreptitiously to avoid the police, create favourable conditions for the sale of partly or wholly adulterated drugs, recalling Rhodes’ (2009) characterization of governments as ‘agents of harm production’. Some of the roots of psychedelic support lie in the Free Festival movement of the 1970s in the UK, which saw the setup of Festival Aid, later Festival Welfare Services, a government-funded organization linked to drugs charity Release and run by members of the Traveller movement (Dearling 2012: 65–80). Others spring from Goa, where Karin Silenzi de Stagni, now the manager of KCUK, set up a popular ‘nest’ space at beach parties in the late 1990s (De Stagni 2013). Elsewhere, in 2001, MAPS – the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies – began to provide support at US festivals like Burning Man. A few years later, taking advantage of decriminalization in Portugal, Portuguese government agency The Service for Intervention in Addictive Behaviors and Dependencies (SICAD) invited MAPS to set up Kosmicare at Boom (Emerson et al. 2014: 34), inspiring De Stagni to start a UK branch. Other projects include Daath Psy-Help in Hungary (Móró and Rácz 2013: 1), Alice Project and Eclipse in Germany and mobile drug checking services like Spain’s Energy Control and Austria’s CheckIt!, which provide some psychedelic support as an adjunct to their lab work. However, this paper focuses on Kosmicare, the Zendo Project (also a MAPS initiative) and KCUK.

124

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

Kosmicare Portuguese project Kosmicare had approximately sixty volunteers, many of whom were mental health professionals, at Boom festival in 2014. Volunteers work in shifts of six with experienced shift leaders and a medical team on hand. Their compound, whose structures are provided by the festival, is central and well publicized on maps and brochures. They share detailed data with CheckIn, a front-of-house (that is, providing feedback to users on a short timescale) drug checking laboratory with state-of-the-art testing facilities located beside the Dance Temple, Boom’s central dance­ floor. The Portuguese policy environment is perhaps the most liberal in the world. In 2001, as documented by Hughes and Stevens (2010: 1001– 18), possession of a small amount of any illicit drug was changed from a criminal offence to an administrative one and a battery of governmentsponsored harm reduction programs were rolled out. Medicalization was at the core of the approach, with drug-use portrayed as a public health issue. MAPS and SICAD launched Kosmicare at Boom the following year (Emerson et al. 2014: 34). While psychedelic support projects in many other countries struggle to justify their existence to the authorities, Kosmicare is heartily endorsed by the Portuguese government, and Boom organizers give Kosmicare unprecedented visibility and publicity on-site. However, within this more relaxed policy climate, some tensions still arise between the psychedelic discourse to which the majority of support workers subscribe and the medicalized, harm-reduction-based approach of Portuguese drug policy. These mostly concern moves towards formalization of the care space and will be explored later.

The Zendo Project In the United States, MAPS’ current psychedelic support project is the Zendo. Managed by a team of therapists, with about eighty volunteers, it operates at events in the United States and Costa Rica, and relies on crowdfunding and donations. The Zendo is notable for its intent to act as a ‘teaching hospital’ for psychedelic therapists, in hopes that the law will eventually change to permit this type of therapy (Emerson et  al. 2014: 34). However, such a change still seems a remote possibility under US drug policy. The provision of harm reduction facilities is illegal for event organizers under the RAVE Act of 2003, as this is considered to be ‘encouraging the use of drugs’ (Blake 2015). Policy in Nevada, Burning Man’s home state, is especially punitive; for example, it is a felony to possess a drug checking kit. As Emerson et al. (2014: 34) state, a previous MAPS project worked with the Black Rock Rangers – Burning Man’s own community safety group – from 2003 to

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

125

FIGURE 5.3  The Zendo setup at Burning Man 2014. Photo: Deirdre Ruane.

2008, but was forced to shut down as harm reduction became increasingly criminalized; today, the Zendo is not connected with the organizers of Burning Man. Zendo workers must, therefore, find an accommodation between the values of psychedelic discourse and the representatives of a mainstream culture who regard harm reduction as dangerously radical. Another feature of the US festival landscape is the typically heavy police presence, including many undercover police. Warnings not to talk about drugs with anyone outside one’s own camp are passed around Burning Man and broadcast on the city radio station BMIR. As a result, silences attend both sides of the relationship between the Zendo and those it seeks to support. Since open provision of harm reduction at events can be problematic in the US policy climate, the Zendo takes the precaution of advertising as ‘psych support’ rather than psychedelic support. Furthermore, visitors and potential visitors are reluctant to discuss their drug consumption due to the climate of distrust arising from policing strategies. This reticence and the absence of checking facilities complicates the processes of formulating care strategies and predicting how cases will progress. Possibly due to the Zendo’s low profile, its rates of visitor participation tend to be much lower than those of Kosmicare at Boom, though the

126

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

event is considerably larger (70,000 compared to Boom’s 40,000 in 2014). In 2014, the Zendo was moved from its previous central placement to a remote location with its case total for the week falling by more than half. For comparison, Kosmicare at Boom 2014 had just short of 400 cases. While there are other possible explanations for this dramatic disparity, such as Burning Man’s ethos of self-reliance or its structure of close-knit, supportive camps, the possibility cannot be dismissed that a significant number of Burners who might have benefited from the help of the Zendo may have been afraid to ask, unaware of the Zendo or unable to find it.

Kosmicare UK More informal and emphatically peer-based compared with the Portuguese organization, KCUK is linked with it in name only, though many KCUK volunteers have also worked at Boom. The core identity of most KCUK volunteers is that of the experienced psychedelic user supporting those with less experience, though some are also therapists. The organization is smaller in scale than others, running on donations from visitors and small contributions towards expenses by event organizers. The tents and field kitchen are the managers’ own, shifts of two or three are fielded and there is no medical presence on staff. Of the three groups in this study, KCUK are the most open about their support of the psychedelic discourse. This openness can cause problems in a policy climate that appears to be growing more punitive. Though the medicalization approach to harm reduction was pioneered in the UK reaching a peak of popularity there during the New Labour years (1997–2010), the subsequent Conservative/ Liberal Democrat government reinstated supply and demand eradication as its central approach (HM Government 2010). At festivals, frontof-house drug checking is not possible under UK law at the time of writing. Psychedelic support is not illegal but organizers of larger events, under the supervision of local councils and police, are wary of giving any indication that they are condoning drug use. In recent years, many UK festivals have been subject to last-minute, unaffordable policing fee increases, which in most cases amount to a de facto shutdown (for one example, see Resident Advisor 2010). Thus, even if KCUK gains admittance to these events, their presence may go unacknowledged and unpublicized by the organizers, and problems often occur with visibility, infrastructure supply and integration – or lack of – with other on-site support services. Each of the three organizations has been shaped by the policy climate within which it operates. All experience conflicts and dissonances between the values of transformational festival culture and the local policy climate. In the more punitive regimes, the organizations’ values run counter to policy

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

127

and to prevailing opinion. If made explicit, these conflicts can result in the abrupt termination of their work at the events. Despite these difficulties, all three groups, and psychedelic support as a movement, appear to be undergoing a spurt of growth and formalization. Kosmicare have begun to release quantitative findings on the efficacy of their intervention (Carvalho et  al. 2014). An international collaboration between support workers, the Manual of Psychedelic Support, has codified many formerly fluid and ad-hoc working practices (Oak et al. 2015). KCUK is currently applying for charity status. The support groups’ methods, results and values, which formerly tended to be implicit and shared among practitioners, are becoming increasingly explicit, codified and public. The groups are facing choices about the discourses and contexts they will use to frame this information. One possible frame is that of harm reduction. It is now the core paradigm in Portugal, with a history of political influence in Australia and the UK (O’Malley 2002: 280) and for a short time in the United States (Marlatt 1996: 785). As such, it can be seen as providing a quasi-respectable banner behind which drug policy reformers can rally. However, harm reduction is a concept freighted with assumptions and axioms that conflict with those of psychedelic culture, or exacerbate pre-existing problems within the culture. The following section examines the academic literature on harm reduction and considers its origins, in order to understand the implications for psychedelic support projects and the possible risks inherent in adopting harm reduction as their dominant discourse.

Harm reduction: A brief history of an idea Harm reduction began as an advocacy movement by a group of Dutch heroin users, the ‘Junkiebond’, who first went public at the beginning of the 1980s (Blok 2008). The movement set out to offer an alternative to the then popular approaches to drug use: attempts at supply and/or demand eradication, and ‘abstentionism’ or use reduction. Instead, this approach focused on the reduction of ‘risk behaviours’ such as the sharing of needles. The original approach was pragmatic and had peer-based services at its heart, on the basis that ‘drug users themselves know best what their problems are’ (Wijngaart 1991, cited in Marlatt 1996: 784) – this is now known as the ‘Dutch model’. Marlatt (1996: 785) describes an awareness, among early US harm reduction advocates, that drug use transpired in a complex social context and that marginalization and inequality contributed to both the likelihood of drug use and the harm arising from it. However, the concept mutated throughout the 1990s as it was adopted in other countries, losing many of its progressive aspects. The brief enthusiasm for the approach in the United States swung back towards a more punitive

128

WEEKEND SOCIETIES

neoconservatism. The emerging ‘UK model’ replaced the focus on peer support with medicalization. Awareness of the social context of drug use receded, replaced by a more neoliberal view of the drug user in which use was seen as merely a matter of free, individual choice (O’Malley 2002: 280), isolated from social issues and problems, and addiction was perceived as a ‘disease of the will’ (Valverde 1998). Despite attempts to uproot or reconceptualize this approach, the neoliberal view of the self remains implicit to harm reduction rhetoric and practice. Delineated vividly by Rose, Barry and Osborne (1996: 44), the neoliberal subject is a rational, choice-making individual whose ostensibly free choices and projects of self-government and self-improvement are in fact manifestations of internalized microprocesses of power that enable those in authority to govern ‘at a distance’. Rather than being seen as part of a community, neoliberal subjects are entrepreneurial and competitive. This view of the self has various implications for harm reduction: dislocation of the user from their community or society; overemphasis on rationality at the expense of pleasure (Moore 2008); and the portrayal of the addict (and by extension, drug users in general) as one who has misused their free will by making a bad – that is, irrational and irresponsible – choice. Thus, within policy and practice, drug users became increasingly demonized. Moving further from the ‘Dutch model’, a deep divide developed between drugs workers and users, although involvement of users in their own treatment is still a nominal goal (Onsia 2014). Concepts of harm shifted, foregrounding harm done by drug users to communities through crime (Hunt and Stevens 2004: 334–35). This shifting concept of harm has faced sustained critique recently. It has been said to lack an evidence base (Nutt, King and Phillips  2010: 1564), and to neglect large-scale harm caused by government agencies and policies (Rhodes 2009: 196). Further, regarding psychedelics, critics such as Tupper (2008: 297–303), Emerson et  al. (2014: 28) and Tennison (2012: 1–12) take issue with the focus on harm – which they consider to be relatively minimal – at the expense of the therapeutic and social benefits psychedelics could provide. This view is shared by many support workers. Thus, harm reduction discourse may be something of a poisoned chalice for the psychedelic support movement. The benefits that the discourse can confer in terms of respectability and legitimacy may not compensate for the difficulties of attempting to reconcile the values of transformational festival culture and harm reduction. The communal, fluid view of ‘self’ and ‘other’ within the transformational festival contrasts with the conception of self in harm reduction discourse: isolated and competitive, within a model where loss of self-mastery constitutes failure and weakness. Similarly, views of drug users as potentially engaged in valuable practices, and deserving of respect, conflict with mainstream portrayals as abject, criminal and willimpaired. While the drugs of choice in transformational festival culture

HARM REDUCTION OR PSYCHEDELIC SUPPORT?

129

are predominantly psychedelics (valued as cognitive tools or ‘teachers’) and recreational drugs that facilitate dancing, the underlying assumptions of harm reduction discourse are shaped by heroin and other highly addictive substances. Finally, peer support is integral to care initiatives at transformational festivals; Leung (2010) portrays care spaces as developing organically from practices of informal care by ‘strangers and friends’ within the festival. Mainstream drugs organizations, on the other hand, perceive support workers as distinct from (and at worst, superior to) current users. Many of my participants expressed their discontent with the terminology of harm reduction and were reluctant to use it. Nonetheless, this approach permeates the world of psychedelic support, leading to explicit and implicit tensions in areas where the two discourses intersect. The final sections use fieldwork findings to explore some of these areas.

Open and closed care spaces Tangible expressions of the two competing discourses, and clashes between them, can be observed at the physical boundary between care spaces and the festival. At KCUK, which subscribes more to psychedelic culture discourse than that of harm reduction, the care space – an outdoor campfire area, a large army tent for more talkative visitors and a bell tent divided into private spaces – is designed to present few barriers to entry. KCUK workers are aware that visitors may feel too shy, wary or ashamed to ask for help immediately, especially in the context of the UK drug laws where admitting use can be risky. Thus the open campfire area acts as a low-commitment stage in the establishment of trust. Space within the bell tent is carefully managed, but on the whole KCUK’s configuration reflects the psychedelic discourse of the collective-minded, fluid self and the need for a porous boundary between visitors and support workers. This approach does have its disadvantages, in that it can be difficult to keep track of more mobile visitors and their friends at busy times. In its earlier iterations, Kosmicare at Boom was similarly open, incorporating a social space. However as representatives, not only of psychedelic culture but also of Portugal’s innovative drug policy, since 2010 Kosmicare have been keeping detailed records to measure the efficacy of their intervention. Each visitor’s mental state is evaluated by their sitter on arrival and departure, using a form with seventy-five questions. To enable this monitoring process, the compound has been fenced, with a single entrance via the front desk, and entry has been restricted to sitters and visitors. Results to date have been encouraging: ‘Pre-post mental state evaluation showed statistically significant difference (p