We all dance to a different drum...

Currently I am in the twighlight zone between hyper from jagerbombs and sleepy/pissed off. The reasons are thusly;

Tonight entailed me going out for my friend Kate's birthday. It started off well enough with me and my good friend Ollie getting out womens outfits on (mine considerably more serious and - if I do say so myself - convincing. We then proceeded to the "Yellow" pub where we chatted and drank and made merry. So far so good. Then we proceeded to a club called Base where everything started to go downhill.

Normally I enjoy clubbing and love nothing more than spending an evening dancing constantly and getting more and more drunk. The problem with tonight? A 'silent disco'.

For those who do not know a silent disco is an event where the club is for the most part "silent" and upon paying a £2 deposit you are given a pair of headphones with which to listen to the dj. Normally there will be two dj's on two different headphone channels playing different styles of music so people can choose which dj to listen to yet still be in the company of their friends. At least that's how they advertise it.

The reality is a little different. Yes you can listen to a different dj to your friends and still dance together but nothing quite ruins your night like trying to dance the night away to a particular song while the whole club is singing another. Tonight the offending song was Killing in the name of. This is a song that has only even been played in "dance music clubs" since it got to Christmas number one a year or so ago. Now obvious dislike for the overplaying and false popularity of the song aside it managed to ruin part of my night by causing the whole club to erupt into a cacophony of "fuck you I won't do what you tell me!" while I was trying to dance to the undeniably "radio 1" style dance song that had somehow engrossed me so.

 This happened a few times with a few different songs and it seemed like the whole club was after near instant gratification as they switched dj's in an almost unified manner.

Now correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the whole idea of clubbing to dance to some awesome music with your friends? Of course getting drunk/wasted/fucked on drugs can be sustituted for "having a good time" but I feel that it is relatively easy to have tremendous amounts of fun withoug getting drunk or wasted. I may have an overly "sentimental" view of clubbing but I truly believe that a club should be operating as one, dancing in time with the music, the rise and fall of each crescendo matching the rise and fall in adrenaline, the beating of hearts unified by the beating of the bass drum and the throb of the bassline, the mixing and eventual "drop" of a new song steering the night on its path.

The idea of going into a club is surely to dance to music with other people. If I wanted to stick on headphones and dance I could do it in my bedroom and have as good a time (if not better). There is something magikal about the way humans react to music and nothing beats a group of complete strangers, being on the same level, feeling the same feelings/emotions and going absolutley mental on the dancefloor to the songs being played by the dj.

I sincerely believe that clubbing has lost its way and that if allowed to continue it will end up being more and more diluted, and end up a quivering wreck, the ghost of its former self.

Another thing that got on my nerves was the lack of 'feeling' in the club. When music is played on top quality speakers at high volumes the music takes on a life of its own in the form of "feeling". This can best be felt when standing right next to the speaker and when you can feel the bass pounding through your whole body. This "feeling" is lost when listening through headphones and being the music nerd that I am, even if the songs are crap I can still enjoy good sound from a nice soundsystem.

Certain parts of the bodies (such as the back of the knees) are cavities. These cavities have a certain frequency and when these frequencies are played at loud volumes (around 96 db) they cause that cavity to involuntarily move. This means that when the kick drum of a song is tuned right it should make clubbers dance involuntarily. You can consciously stop it but if you're idly stood around chatting your legs will begin to twitch and eventually you should end up on the dancefloor. This effect is lost completely when wearing headphones.


And so I am left with nothing to say but "give me a good soundsystem, a room of unified people and you will have me dancing all night long!"


xx