Silent rave
The first nice day of spring—this past Friday, in New York City—always makes me feel suspicious and somewhat put upon, threatened. I’m supposed to be too overjoyed about it; instead I end up thinking about crowds and sweat and exposed skin I wish weren’t exposed and a general mindless air of following the orders of the sun. This may be the inevitable consequence of city life, or New York City life, where every palpable shift in the zeitgeist feels like a contrived trend to be resisted.
But here’s further evidence that people should feel lucky not to live in Manhattan. After work, I found myself in Union Square and happened to witness an event being staged there where a bunch of people wore their headphones and danced to music on their iPods in what was billed as a “silent rave.” I found this to be crushingly depressing, an all-too-perfect symbol of the way isolation and rote individualism is colonizing what is left of public space, and how even ostensibly group-oriented activities must be eviscerated from within by a self-regard that’s presumed to be primary. Let’s all get together and dance, but not to the same music—we’ll just all watch each other perform the writhing ritual of self-projection and serve as one another’s audience. That way we can reinforce that public space is just where you go to be under the microscope, where you can surveil and be surveilled as opposed to sharing any experiences or exchanging any ideas. The headphones preclude the expectation of social exchange, which can make civic participation so irritating. The “silent rave” lets you simulate community without the noisome bother of belonging to one.
Like “flash mobs,” that peculiar form of performance art where people just show up and clog the flows of commercial life with their mere being, the silent rave seemed to be a vague gesture toward participation in something by people who must lack the ingenuity to come up with something more rigorous for one another to do than simply showing up. It’s low-impact participation with a vague subversive intent that’s not directed at anything in particular. They are not protests, which must seem pretty strident and would require overt commitment to a particular political view. Instead, they feel like marketing stunts, they feel promotional. It all reminded me of the models who are hired to hang out in front fo Abercrombie and Fitch on 5th Avenue.
But I don’t know what the silent rave is promoting. iPods? A generation’s general commitment to gadgets? To mediating themselves through technology? To being apart together? Back in the old days, I imagine people sat together in parks without headphones and shared the same sensory environment. Now they can be “together” without cramping their style or compromising. That’s progress, I guess.
Comments
It seems worth mentioning the ostensible origins of the flash mob—a Harper’s editor staged batches of them over a period of (a year? a couple of years?) to see if it would take off. His idea was to see if people would do pretty much exactly what you’re describing here—join the mob mentality without questioning.
I say “ostensibly” not because I doubt that the editor wanted to do an inquiry into hipster-sheep, but because his idea seems so cynical as to spring from a place other than genuine curiosity. The Harper’s staging of a stunt seems somewhat cruel to me, a trick designed to show the public how dumb Harper’s editors think the public is.
I’m intrigued by the idea of mass gatherings with a purpose other than mere sharing of public space not because I like to follow the crowd, but because I genuinely like the idea of people using public space to do something a little creative, a little offbeat, a little way of connecting with strangers. That people took up the idea of flash mobs (and then morphed it into things like a silent rave) says to me not that they’re sheep, but that they’re hungry for communal gatherings. We have so few rituals left in our culture that people are willing to do things that may seem stupid, contrived, or hipsterish in order to create the semblance of a ritual. We don’t even have events as loose as be-ins anymore, and so silent raves suddenly become more appealing than they should be.
As far as it being for people lacking ingenuity: You mean like watching movies other people filmed, or listening to music other people have made, or reading books other people have written? I find this potentially more interesting than any of those acts, because it IS an act of participation, even if the form initially seems to be one of narcissism.
(That said, I was at said “silent rave” and found the actual act uninteresting and wholly disappointing, so I’m speaking theoretically here.)
Comment by Virginia Ploix — April 21, 2008 @ 11:49 am
I may be wrong, but I don’t think silent ravers are jonesing for ritual so much as taking for granted their impossibility and irrelevance. They didn’t sullenly consent to silent raves in the absence of better collective-experience opportunities; they chose it on some level because it was a particular kind of anti-experience, where connecting with strangers is obviated by the rules of the game. It seems to me easier to connect with someone when you are observing the same phenomenon, watching the same film or same band or what have you, rather then agreeing to show up only on the condition of refusing to share such things. (Maybe if these folks were yearning for ritual so much, they could have gone to see the pope.)
No more community, only celebrity—only making a splash. Participation now means showing up and being observed, which is why some of these same sorts of people (I’m willing to venture) hire their own paparazzi to tail them around. Which is why it doesn’t matter to the ravers that they share the same music as they rave. They rave alone in their own spotlight as long as the headphones block everything else out and ensure that their special soundtrack, their own theme music reigns supreme.
Comment by Rob Horning — April 21, 2008 @ 1:42 pm
<i>But I don’t know what the silent rave is promoting. iPods? A generation’s general commitment to gadgets? To mediating themselves through technology? To being apart together?</i>
Maybe some sort of quirky tribute to Rachel Carson?
Comment by EBM — April 21, 2008 @ 9:15 pm
I was part of one of these a month ago in LA and it was fucking incredible. Ridiculousness can be it’s own affirmation, and that’s sort of the point; to go as batshit as you feel like to exactly what you want to go batshit to. Everyone can have their own agenda (you’re mistaken if you think culture needs an agenda to be valid in the first place). The lesson is that I can be my own DJ, load my shit with fucked up noise rock, make up my own steps, and aim for drunken soul force exhaustion instead of whatever the hell I’m supposed to care about in a “normal” situation. Also, since when do we fucking owe eachother a conversation or a collective dance to the same fucking song that none of us can stand? What’s your ideal? We feed eachother grapes in a circle while reading each other’s poems? We all salute something none of us understand? Silent Raves are incredible because they’re as real and personal as playing air guitar in your bedroom, they are valid because they exist. They aren’t defined by the military aesthetics of a club experience. That stuff’s all stripped away because you aren’t trying to be impressive. Silent Raves turn public space into something free from all the judgements that normally accompany life, thus reclaiming both public space and dance as a pure expression instead of socially mediated formal exercise. This might all be extrememely “self-regarding”, “roteley individualistic” etc. However, maybe since we staged it in a public place, it felt more like coming out of the other side of all that. Then again, maybe I’m just used to such a sociopathic level of alienation that simply feeling alive enough to dance anywhere to anything is a triumph.
Comment by SuperUnison from LA — April 24, 2008 @ 2:05 pm
Okay, so I’m the guy who threw silent rave in LA last month, and here’s my two cents…
First off, I can totally see how, from an outside perspective, this kind of event appears to be A: totally narcissistic, B: an iPod commercial, and C: a symbol of my generation’s general desire to cocoon ourselves in some personal sense of “style.”
That said, here’s what it looks like from the inside…
1: It’s more communal than it looks. During the hour or so that we all boogied our asses off on Hollywood Boulevard, we had strangers off the street joining in to dance with us. A bunch of street musicians started playing live music for people who didn’t have a portable music player. Even those poor bastards who impersonate celebrities in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater stopped shilling for tourist dollars long enough to jump into the mix. At one point, we all took off our headphones to sing “Happy Birthday” to a passing stranger who was celebrating her 18th. Every time someone would let out a yowl or a scream of joy, the whole crowd would chime in. In other words, these things WOULDN’T WORK if they were as hermetic as they’re being painted in this article.
2: As for the issue of these events coming off like a “marketing stunt”... A: nobody has to have an iPod, just anything portable with earphones. B: the event itself stands in direct contradiction to the idea of “marketing” or “commercialization” in general, mostly because the DAMN THING IS FREE—no cover charge at the door, no overpriced drinks, no uber-hip DJ you’re supposed to give a shit about, no vendor in the corner selling “Silent Rave” t-shirts—just you, your music, your friends, and the space around you. In this hipster-driven era where “being more awesome than the other guy” is constantly getting more expensive, let’s face it, you can’t beat free.
3: It’s not like these events are some kind of replacement for genuine social interaction. Post-rave, we all danced up to the nearest bar, put away the headphones, got drunk with each other, and laughed our asses off about the experience we’d just had. In other words, silent raves—much like going to a real dance club, or a sporting event, or a movie, or a poetry reading, or a protest, or an orgy, or whatever—are only fun if you can giggle about it with your friends afterwards. The same standards of any other social gathering apply here.
4: Finally, if nothing else, they make for some amazing visual metaphors: as we were going down Hollywood Boulevard, dancing past store windows full of plaster dummies in overpriced clothing, with the police following us on the street with video cameras in hopes of figuring out what the fuck we were doing… SuperUnison, the kid who posted above, leans over to me and says: “It’s perfect—we’ve got the cops on one side, mannequins on the other, and in between, there’s us!”
So… which side are you on?
Comment by haynesholiday from Los Angeles — April 25, 2008 @ 2:59 am
I think you were closest when you guessed the silent rave might be about “being apart together”. That’s a pretty good summary of life in general. I’m for any art, performance or non-performance, that’s cool enough to explore “being apart together”.
Comment by Allison — April 27, 2008 @ 4:51 am