I recently spent a week in Vienna and decided to check out the local club scene, eager to experience something new, maybe even something a little exotic. I had spent the days wandering through the streets and sitting in cafés trying to soak up as much Vienna as I could before returning to my more menial life in Toronto. Of course, that required for me to acquaint myself with the nightlife as well. I don't know if it was my increasing boredom with the scene back home or the change of setting to a distant locale that led me to believe the scene there would be different, but when I stumbled into the midst of it, I was pleasantly surprised.
The club was under a bridge that crossed the Danube and was impossible to see from up top. We had arrived there following a map only to find that it led us nowhere, and so we followed some guys that appeared to be walking with purpose down to the riverbank, where we were greeted by the vibrations of a heavy beat. I walked nonchalantly through a door that was almost invisible from the outside, trying to erase the 'tourist' stamp from my forehead by pretending to know what I was doing. And then I was inside.
This wasn't an exotic setting with strange people as I had anticipated. It was like a small warehouse with a bar and a stage, slightly run-down and barely lit. A dub beat reverberated off the walls in a familiar way. The people looked individual and moved around the space in an individual way, but not so differently from the people that surround me in my life at home. Whereas the scene at home is often made up of a largely homogenous crowd of people playing the part of scenesters, I was confronted here by a crowd I could've randomly picked off Queen Street in downtown Toronto.
There were a few typical Mixmag type club-goers, several beats and hipsters, the usual hippies, skinheads, hip-hop-heads, punks and mods, and of course the token Rasta man that seems to show up everywhere I go: a crowd that covered the spectrum of North American sub-cultural stereotypes. It was a scene from my everyday life as a student and citizen, sprinkled with indecipherable German conversation and half-liter bottles of beer. I hadn't stumbled into a different dimension as I had expected, but merely into an experience that took me back many years to my life as a high-school student in Calgary, Alberta, in the days when I first found identity in the scene.
The story is almost formulaic now. A teenage girl searching for identity and her place in the world finds acceptance in a subculture; in this case the rave culture; and adopts the lifestyle as her own. She finds freedom through long, uninhibited nights of dance and solace in the ideals of Peace, Love, Unity and Respect. As the years pass, the scene becomes less marginal, the people more detached from reality, and our heroine grows out of it all, like a pair of discarded Geek Boutique pants.
She enters into a different world, one less removed from politics and society, and only occasionally delves back into the party scene. But the party scene is not the same as it once was, or at least it doesn't make her feel the way it once did. The mostly younger crowd makes her feel too old to be there; the crew-from-back-in-the-day dwindles each year, while those that remain seem more distant to her with each meeting. As for everyone else in between, she no longer feels the sense of shared purpose she once did. Where this story ends, Vienna begins.
In Vienna, I danced for many hours and remembered why I loved the scene long ago. This was an experience of music enhanced by the feeling of belonging to something. I wasn't conscious of myself nor was I thinking about anything: I fell into the experience completely. Being a distinct individual in a sea of individuals gave me the sense that I was no longer individual: that I was moving as part of the crowd to some greater force.
Although I advocate the expression of individuality in society, I want to lose my consciousness of self when I experience music. Just as a good theatre experience for me is one in which the actors disappear into their characters, I want to forget about the medium: the speakers, the people, the club; through which I perceive music, in order to fully experience it. The medium makes up the event, and without the speakers, the people and the club there would be no event to talk about, but I don't want to be aware of these elements and my position within them.
That was why I could no longer lose myself in the music at parties back home. Even though it's not necessary to live the lifestyle and derive my identity from the subculture to enjoy its parties every once in a while, it seemed like the scene was made up of people who did: people who dressed the part, acted the part and lived the part. Because my identity changed, I felt like a giant in the land of midgets and so could never give myself entirely to the experience. In that club in Vienna, I got lost in the crowd and so was able to get lost in the music.
In the days where $5 for a night of dancing in a field, a tunnel or a warehouse was considered a huge rip-off, we would talk about how it was "all about the music". But it never is all about the music, not if you experience the music outside your home stereo or car radio. Being young and impressionable at the time, searching for pre-existing surfaces (dress, outward attitude) with which to define myself, I was maybe a more extreme example of this. But subcultures are ways of being, and when you enter into those realms even for a night, you experience the whole shebang: the styles, the displays, the attitudes, the mannerisms and, of course, the music.
What I didn't realize until Vienna was that none of this is static. These were different people, people that were all around my own age, who didn't look like they all lived according to the same principles, according to some group mentality. This was just a group of individual people who all seemed to adhere to their own principles and who were all there for the music, all concentrated under a bridge by the Danube.
Certainly for me it was all about the music. But on a deeper level, this too is a lifestyle: a sub-group of a subculture that caters to these people, maybe a slightly older crowd, who all love the music but don't want to share wardrobes and dreams. What I felt at home was that there was some 'authentic' subculture associated with the music, and that somehow I had lost my authenticity.
In fact, I had grown out of the crowd I had shared my experience with, not the subculture, and I found on the other side of the world that this subculture was still available to me in an altered form. There is no sense in which this experience was any less authentic than my experiences back-in-the-day. Certainly I dress differently now and don't shape my life around the scene, but this was the same feeling I remember having when I used to lose myself completely in the music. Different lifestyles can be attached to the same music just as the same lifestyles can be attached to different styles of music. There is no 'authentic' subculture.
At the club in Vienna, I experienced a strange concoction of my past and present mixed together: the familiar sense of losing myself in the music along with everyone else, coupled with the diverse crowd that surrounds me in the streets and settings that make up my everyday-world back in Toronto. I sometimes enjoy going to parties where I don't belong and observe the pockets of people dressed in strange styles and exhibiting strange behavior. But I believe that to fully experience dance music, you need to lose yourself in the music and the moment, and for me to do that I need to find an environment that enables me to do so. Thanks to the democratization of sub-culture, I can experience the scene without adhering to a specific lifestyle: what could be more liberating?
