A San Francisco Ravedream
A chronicle of Bay Area nightlife, part of the "Writing on Raving" series, originally published in print.
In 2023, I joined the Writing on Raving reading series, co-founded in Brooklyn by authors Zoë Beery, Geoffrey Mak, and McKenzie Wark, for a special San Francisco edition hosted at The Lab.
Over the course of several months, I wrote the following essay as I, and the city of San Francisco, were finally emerging from the polar stasis of lockdown. It is a chronicle, of sorts, of the decade-plus I spent participating in, building, and writing about the San Francisco club scene, circa 2011 to 2022.
More than that, though, I wanted the essay to function as a time capsule, a snapshot of the electricity that enlivened the streets (and clubs, and warehouses, and galleries, and so on) of this city during the brief interregnum between Tech 2.0 and 3.0—which we might define, very loosely, as the period between the Lehman Brothers crash of 2008 and the arrival of the Google bus protests of 2013-2014.
Reading back, I feel a swell of complicated feelings arising within. I'm proud of this work: I think it's one of the best essays I've written, and I'm enormously grateful to Geoffrey Mak for editing this essay and helping me shepherd it across the finish line. But I can't help but notice that, just as this essay was completed, San Francisco was on the cusp of yet another transformation, and has changed more drastically in the three years since I wrote this than in the 12-ish year span I catalogue here.
In 2024, this essay was published in print, alongside many other writers' works, in a Writing on Raving compendium, courtesy O/R Books. Here, I'm publishing it online for the first time.
1.
Am I too old for this shit?
Music is my first love, the single ordering principle of my whole life. All I can really remember about falling in love are the firsts. Like the first time, when I was eight, that I found a cassette tape that my sister, nearly a decade older, had brought home early in the '90s. Titled Rave 'til Dawn, it featured a selection of first-wave Belgian hardcore and breakbeat tracks, whose raw, frenetic sounds pressed a searing brand into my juvenile brain. Growing up in the suburbs, this tape was a portal into another world—one I had no idea existed, but that I desperately needed to know more about.
I listened in secret, after borrowing it—or stealing it—and sequestering myself away in my bedroom. I felt a vivid, all-encompassing sense that by listening, I was engaged in some sort of illicit act, that there was something forbidden and uncouth in this music. It was too brazen—something inherent in its very sound seemed against the law. I felt as if I had been struck by a lightning bolt, and though I couldn't have known it at the time, I would be chasing that dragon ever after.
Then there was the first time I went to a club. I had just returned to the Bay Area after school in Ontario, Canada, my first time living outside of the Bay. Though I had spent years immersing myself in dance music—learning whatever history I could find on the internet, picking and bootlegging favorite tracks—I had never been to a rave. I didn't understand what it meant to "go dancing," which, in my mind, was something that only people who went to their high school prom did. I was well-versed in the multitudes of electronic music in my head, but I was lacking its most fundamental education in the body.
At the time, I had just gotten out of a breakup, and my friend Jon suggested we attend a night called Warm Leatherette—named after the iconic post-punk song—at a spot I'd never heard of called Koko's near Geary and Franklin. It's gone now, but back then it was a nondescript dive with taps and bottles and disinterested bartenders serving a motley crowd of local barflies, men wearing 49ers jerseys, and groups of friends celebrating one thing or another.
Off in the corner, I spotted my people immediately: a group of ten or fifteen, crowded around a couple of turntables, blasting wiry synth-punk records to the total disinterest of the rest of the bar. Clad in black, they were arrayed head-to-toe with the subcultural signifiers that I spent my teenage years chasing after, in search of a personality. I lingered nearby with Jon, awkwardly—both of us were terminal internet addicts and had spent the majority of our lives socializing online, to the severe detriment of our interpersonal skills. But a few drinks loosened us up, and we joined the group and met new people.
Even though I hadn't heard any of the records the DJs were playing, they felt intimately familiar, like I had already encountered them in a dream. Each track was riddled with the manic, nervous energy of punk, but carried by an infectious electronic groove, like the electronic body music and proto-techno I had known and loved growing up. I had stumbled upon some kind of missing link.
Toward the end of the night, one of the DJs played the Dutch electro anthem "Space Invaders Are Smoking Grass," a track I had only ever heard at home, by myself—but never on a night out and certainly never in this context, sandwiched between raucous, wavy songs by disaffected European youth. Suddenly, I got it. The track sounded different, felt different. I was gripped by an unfamiliar energy. Listening amongst this tiny crowd of weirdos I had just met, I got what I had been missing out on, what I had lost by sitting at home with headphones: that music is so much more than an artform—it's a social binder, an aural glue that brings people together and ties them up in community.
I went up to the DJ and thanked him, told him I loved this track, that I had never heard it mixed with others like these before. He told me his name: Nihar. He was tall and deftly bearded with an unhinged frizz of curly hair, like Jack Nance from Eraserhead if Jack were brown, and he wore a torn and faded t-shirt bearing the insignia of some punk or metal band I had never heard of. That he was a DJ, even if just a hobbyist, seemed thrillingly cool to me, and shockingly accessible. In my naive mind, DJs were mythical figures, the stuff of legend: DJing was the province of Jeff Mills or Richie Hawtin, people whose mix CDs I'd find for sale in the racks at Amoeba. But I had it all wrong, of course—it was the amateurs who had always run the show. I didn’t know it then, but Nihar would become one of my best friends and longest-running musical collaborators. More and more would appear the deeper I immersed myself in the local scene.
