It was one of those nights that the sky was clear and the stars were visible. I had just defeated the stress of finals and was now ready to be back in action; the late night activity of the San Francisco underground scene was calling my name. It is where a person could go and walk down one street and probably visit at least 30 clubs by doing this. There was a particular flavor I was in search of this night, something that could make me exert my body to its fullest extent. I needed to go and release some stress by dancing at a club, I needed to let loose.
When my friends Mike, Christina and I arrived in San Francisco our first destination was the Cat Club. It was a seedy little place hosted the break beat and jungle music. It wasn’t much to look at it, with its dark entrance and several vagrants sleeping in the street near the entrance. A different crowd hung out there. It was a mixture of old dance party burnouts and very young ambitious club-goers. I felt confident though, I was going to go in there and knock the crowd’s socks off. I was in my best fits (outfit); I was wearing my black old school Adidas running suit with white stripes, and a black Kangol hat. The Adidas Superstar shoes that I was wearing had my white fat laces in them, to add a little flavor, but the shoes themselves looked almost war torn; they were scared from many other late nights.
As the line moved forward closer to the entrance of the club, I could feel the pulsating vibes of the music like a gust of wind every time the door was opened to allow other patrons into the club. It sounded wild in there, I was outside and I wanted to be in there so bad. Just the sound of the music and feeling of the vibration was making me more anxious then ever. I felt like a little kid waiting for Christmas. I needed to be inside, on the dance floor, just it and me. I was going to dance tonight. Suddenly, the line had stopped. What was going on? This couldn’t be happening I needed to be inside; I needed to feel weightless and sweaty from some fast paced break dancing. My legs were jittery with anticipation.
Dance halls were growing increasingly popular, on average, most people attended at least once a week. Twenty-five percent of San Francisco youths regularly attended their local halls, according to American Mercury magazine. Admission ranged from fifty cents to dollar and a half (McCutcheon 217). Many times women would supervise so that the proper rules of dancing were overlooked. Proper dance rules were that the p...
Kate's family had rented out a ballroom in a neighborhood country club, and we intended to dance the night away. As I approached the scene, disco lights streamed through the large windows and ran all over the lawn. Music enveloped the parking lot as my adrenaline began to elevate. I sauntered in, waving to my friend...
Ten minutes after lining up, I went inside the nightclub. From the door, I could hear the song and the beat of the bass so loud that my heart could feel it. Inside the nightclub, I saw people were dancing everywhere, on dancing floor, on their own seats, everywhere. They would dance and take a big gulp of their beer. Even the bartenders were dancing too, following the rhythm of the loud funky music. The rainbow rays of light moved through the club to make the mood even more exciting and funky.
Diversi, M. (2006). Street Kids In Nikes: In Search Of Humanization Through The Culture Of Consumption. Cultural Studies <=> Critical Methodologies, 6(3), 370-390.
In Justin Pearson's memoir, From the Graveyard of the arousal Industry, he recounts the events that occured from his early years of adolesence to the latter years of his adulthood telling the story of his unforgiving and candid life. Set in the late 1970s "Punk" rock era, From the Graveyard of the Arousal Industry offers a valuable perspective about the role culture takes in our lives, how we interact with it and how it differs from ideology.
“I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Why would I do a thing like that?” she said.
A smoke filled bar, jazz music in the background and a poet, young men with goat-tees, some high on marijuana, listening intently and mutters a common phrase in those days of the beat poets, ‘cool daddy-o, I really dig that cat’. Like a lot of the young writers and poets of the late 1940’s and 50’s, the crowded bars were filled with people who were in some way influenced by writers such as Jack Kerouac, Allan Ginsberg, Neil Cassady and William Burroughs, all of whom were at the core of the movement that has endured in one way or another to this day.
We often wonder why we act a certain way in certain places and there must be a reason why? Why is that we act a certain way when we go to concerts or when we go to the library? Through a showcase of articles, we will discover the reason why we act a particular way. This is because we are entering a liminal space that has its own set of rules and boundaries where people can act out differently than the social norms because it is acceptable. We will specifically be looking at how the punks and ravers of the ‘70s entered the liminal space and what they experienced while they were in that space, along with a ritual clown from a Native American tribe.
van Elteren, Mel. “The subculture of the Beats: a sociological revisit.” Journal of American Culture, Fall 1999, v 22, i3, pg 71.
Firstly, the group of friends and writers most commonly known as the Beats evolved dramatically in focal points such as Greenwich Village and Columbia University, and subsequently spread their political and cultural views to a wider audience. The three Beat figureheads William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac each perceived an agenda within American society to clamp down on those who were in some way different from the accepted ‘norm’, and in response deliberately flirted with the un-American practices of Buddhism, drug use, homosexuality and the avant-garde. Ginsberg courted danger by lending a voice to the homosexual subculture that had been marginalised by repressive social traditions and cultural patterns within the United States.
So began my two-year ethnography on the American rave subculture. The scene described above was my initiation into the underground subculture where rave kids, typically under twenty-one years old, are given secret invitations to attend private warehouse parties with dancing, drugs, and thousands of their closest friends. Because of my youthful and unorthodox appearance, I was invited to join the then-highly-exclusive underground scene and attended numerous raves in several major cities in North Carolina. Although my chosen subculture was not typically examined by academia, I conducted an academic ethnography of what Maton (1993) describes as a "group whose world views, values and practices diverge from mainstream North American and social science cultures" (747). As a result, I received three graduate credit hours for "supervised research in ethnography" and conducted what may be the only academic ethnography on raves.
Dowd, Vincent. “How 80’s Club Culture Came to the Catwalk” BBC News. BBC, 10 July 2013. Web. 14 October 2013
In almost all instances that I have been ‘out’, either to a party, club, braai or any other social event, women are wearing sexualising clothing. Sexualizing clothing, for the purpose of this essay, is defined as clothing that reveals or emphasizes a sexualized body part; and has characteristics associated with sexiness and/or sexually suggestive writing (Goodin et al., 2011: 1). This reminds me of my first night out. It was my twentieth birthday and my friends decided to give me my first nightclub experience. I must say I was very much experienced, because clubbing was something one only read about or watched on television. It was autumn and the weather had stared to get a little bit cold, so I decided to add another (thin) layer of clothing. When we got to the club it felt like we were Eskimos, mostly me because my friends were on the notion that ‘it gets hot in the club (with all the movement and talking) and that an additional layer was unnecessary’. What I found to be unfortunate, about the experience is how the different sexes dressed. Yes, it was ‘hot’ in the club, but a lot of young women went overboard with respects to the amount of material worn. In that regard, I argue that women’s attractiveness, according to the social standards of ‘the night life’, is determined by sexualised clothing and also on the number of sexual advances made towards them in a single night. Therefore, one
Morgan, Bill. The Beat Generation in San Francisco: A Literary Tour. San Francisco: City Lights, 2003. Print.
It was about one-thirty in the morning in the town of Homestead Michigan. The almost florescent light of the moon bouncing off the fresh puddles that covered the ground. The grass and trees were covered in a thin layer of water causing every little beam of light to reflect back up. Anyone who may have been outside at this time would have without double, smelled the mix of fresh dirt and night crawlers. As the moonlight started to fade away through the cloud cover, three buses made there way through the streets and parked in front of HHS, the local high school.