"Raving is not a crime."

That's the protest on a bumper sticker I'd given to my friend Joanna recently. She'd just gotten kicked out of Twilo while in her raver gear. Then, when she had approached the line outside again with pacifier still slung on neck, the bouncer told her to beat it. (I figured the sticker might give her some comfort.)

I remember my infatuation with raving back in the day. I had gone through my grungy phase during high school, and had always preferred Euro house music to any Korean gha-yo (music) or American pop even back then, but it was about a year and a half ago that I started bouncing to trance and jungle. A bunch of us would be calmly reading at the library when someone would chirp, "I can't wait for this Friday. PVD is gonna be sooooo good." You know that tingle of excitement that streams through your legs and prickles your toes? That's what just the very thought of going to a rave or ravish club did to us.

One fine stockbroker I used to work with is a former bouncer of raves. He had noticed my tendency to repeatedly pause at my computer to practice my glowstick moves using highlighters, those thick markers that simulated the 6" sticks. He told me and another desperado stockbroker who had no idea what freaky thing I was doing with highlighters clutched in both hands how he used to confiscate bags of drugs from raver kids while upstate. Unlike with simple clubbing, ravers (whether real or not) are usually perceived as being tied to drugs. Perhaps that's why they're considered to be an ill to society. We'll talk about that later.

I definitely don't consider many other Koreans or myself and Asians as true ravers, but many out there just love the music. The European influence of trance has gone international by now. I remember a night last summer at Apkujung's Galleria. This club attracted all sorts of characters from Itaewon, some sexy native girls and hot guys in knee-high shorts and sneakers (but yummy wife-beaters), and men in Japanese-style skirts. The music was pretty fun and inspired a lot of vertical shaking on the dance floor. (If you've seen native Asians dance, you'll picture what I mean.) It was kind of a bonding moment for the kyopos, there being this Us vs. Them nuance. Our liquiding moves were not quite appreciated, and even the taxi ajushis wanted to know what we were doing playing with those lighted sticks that one buys in fishing stores.

The house music in Asia and to me, even America, does not compare to how European DJs play with your head. I have been to only one real rave in my life featuring American DJs, and yet I don't feel like I'm missing much. After schlepping to Brooklyn at 11 PM, Joanna and I get off the subway car to spot like 60 kids tripping over their jeans and chains while trying to run down the stairs and catch this same train. The warehouse rave had been postponed until 5 AM at some commercialized club in the city. That was not so bad. Everyone bonded on that rickety subway car and played some jungle music (until a policeman stopped us at the next station). When the lights blinked and the ragged car jumped along the rail, we all whooped. Club Subway was hysterically fun, and afterwards everyone except us went to White Castle. The ravers were so nice. P.L.U.R., perhaps? (Just WHO came up with that?) Candee was opened and traded openly on that lone subway car, girls and I complimented each other's pants, and I made friends with this cute Russian kid on acid. Seriously, those kids are so nice at raves. They even told us later back at the club how they'd noticed us, the two Asian girls, missing at Club White Castle. (We had been eating in Ktown's JinGoGae instead.) The music was ok. Bad Boy Bill had this repetitive style going that night that I was unaccustomed to after hearing the spacey UK music of my favored DJs. I was sober, and so was keenly aware of the music.

There's one aspect to raving in America.

Someone once taught me how to listen to the progressions, the beat, and the third voice that blends them together. I even read a poem composed by a master liquider on the beauty of the sounds of trance. That is how I came to really love the music spun by the DJs who started it all. As my friend's AOL profile claims, "Going to Twilo and looking dumb on E is not raving!!!" He's right. I'm not sure what the exact definition of a raver is, but that's not it. Some dongsengs (younger kids) in California profess themselves to be ravers. If putting on BugGirl jeans, Chun Li hair, multiple bracelets, dilated pupils, a bugout T-shirt, and a nonstop grin makes you a raver, then so be it. Then there are the girls who think they can wear a bandeau and micromini, sling a dying glowstick onto their navel ring, shake their Ricky Martinesque hips, and be called a raver. Or just hold those glowsticks above their heads like bullhorns and roll their neck around. For many kids on the New York side of it, the ones who go sober and really listen to the music have been called "real ravers." I'm really not sure how fried your brain has to have been since high school to define whether or not you make an authentic raver, but I don't get the impression that DJs Oakenfold or PVD originally intended for their music to be taken with some drug concoction. The music they spin, however, is definitely a cultural norm on their continent.

 

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