The only fight people seek out of a
Sound Tribe show is a glow-stick war. And while I've known some to
trip out from being on the “wrong” side of a color exchange,
electronic enthusiasts pulse with the innocence of neon for the
simple sake of bright and shiny. Initially, I struggled with that
ease of satisfaction. When I first came onto the scene as an
overeager Earth pleaser, I spent countless hours talking to the most
tripped out chemists on lot to try to devise a way to recycle the
thousands upon thousands of damn glow-sticks that always end up
painting the grass in clear plastic by the end of the night. And
really, not one of these new wave ravers wanted to hear or think
about their toxic footprints. In fact, many say, “I never thought
of that before!” with complete wide-eyed honesty and just as
sincere a smile as they plunk right back into their dance or bra or pocket
for some molly to share.
Admittedly, I've always seen the sparkle-faced Bratz Dollz generation with glow-sticks and dubstep as “them.” Evil. I saw plastic and
computer glitch-beats as a robot-zombie plague upon the purity and
synergy of jam. But when ecstatic Dave at his first Bassnectar
concert squealed, “It's expendable energy!” and began collecting
and throwing glow-sticks like flowers bursting from the pit of his
highlighter-yellow soul, the electronic scene finally clicked into
mine. Ah! These self-proclaimed “bass-heads” don't want to suck
away souls, not out of the earth, music, nor each other...they just
want to have a good time.
And that time that my friends and I
left Charleston's Music Farm extremely perplexed as to how Nate
acquired a spatter of blood on his T-shirt after the STS9
show/danciest energy-a-thon ever, it took us to be in the dark
crashing five people on a bed and a couch to recognize the neon
nature of the stain. And yes, it tickled and cheered me to know it
was the reckless innocence of glow-stick goo.
Yes I will always be a jam band purist,
and in the electronic realm, I will always pick a band like Sound
Tribe or Lotus over a Macbook party like EOTO or Pretty Lights.
Still, I must pay tribute to the nonstop party wizzam-wow that the
dubsteppers celebrate and chase, as the ecstatic dance party is now a
routine therapy for my daily kitchen sanity. My gay best friend in
college explained the hypnotic rhythm of dubstep as such: “Sometimes
you don't need the fucking intricacies of everything. You just need
to wobble.” Me, still no—I'm not a wobbler, I'm a prancing
jamming pirate with skippy, stampy gazelle legs and a punk-rock
head-bang, and music like Phish and Toubab Krewe will always foremost
satisfy my multilayer thirst for kick-offs and crescendos. But
electronic music and the ecstatic dance parties have become a
parallel friend instead of an opposing force of evil: I love the
dance for the sake of feeling good, the wobble for a speedway into
the collective zen flow, and the oblivious love of everything for the
oblivious love of everything.
After the pounding headache that
consumed my body after vending Electric Forest summer 2011 next to a
K-holed kid pressing WAH-WAH-WAH-WAH
on his warble machine and slapping “DIRTY GIRLS LIKE DIRTY BEATS”
stickers on every shoulder passing by, I was convinced these
electronic dubsters truly were part robot, digitized beyond salvation
of the human soul, a foreign species—the enemy. But at the end of
that weekend, when a shirtless boy in a pink bandanna, cargo shorts,
and cowboy boots spray-painted the clop of cop-horse shit
razzle-sparkle pink, giggled and ran away with kicked up heels like a
naughty elfin farmhand, I had to smile, and even giggle too. What, really, is evil about bright and shiny? After all, calculating the damge of glow-sticks to the soil is not celebrating a festival to its highest potential, and it is human nature to want to have a good time,
Photo Credits: Meggy Schaeffer
Instagram @ Nut_Meggy
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