Club lit

"Thank God I lived."

28 Jun

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Chris Randle on trying to capture the feeling of a rave in prose.

“I want to tell you a little story about house,” goes the opening line; we’re listening to Todd Terry’s 1991 single “Jump Up In the Air.” “House? What house?” somebody else asks. “House music!” the speaker replies, as if it were a question about the shape of the sun.

Prose is not clubbing’s first language. Lips become hard to read inside the lurid murk of the rave; chemical scents flood other senses. Between midnight and dawn, those uncounted hours, duration slips loose from narrative. Most books about dance music take a historical or sociological perspective, with the genre conventions that implies. In her recent book Raving, McKenzie Wark writes about dancing as a practice instead, an aesthetic, given form by bursts of noise. Club literature, let’s call it, which tries with words to contain what overwhelms the body. Maybe those efforts will always be doomed. How do you document an event that forbids notes or cameras? How can you describe unutterable sensations? The attempts continue anyway, each author compelled to preserve a sliver of some dissolving whole. As sand vanishes from the hourglass, we pocket a few grains, and wonder in daylight which moments they belonged to.

Yesterday’s parties took place at the dance halls of the early 20th century. The people who wrote about them were mostly unknowns: bureaucrats, minor newspaper columnists, elderly fox-trotters remembering how they met their sweethearts. James Nott’s book Going to the Palais: A Social And Cultural History of Dancing and Dance Halls in Britain, 1918-1960 cites various contributors from Mass-Observation, a research project that aimed to brush against the textures of everyday life. These volunteers might be thought of as anonymous modernists, overheard talk their dialogue. Outside a Blackpool ballroom in 1937, one Mass-Observer recorded: “The new relations made during the evening do not end here … 59 necking couples on way home from tower.” So fastidious! Did they check to make sure all the kisses added up?