If No One Is Dancing, You’re at the Wrong Club

On a balmy July evening at Good Room in Brooklyn, bodies are packed wall to wall, but no limbs are moving. It’s the New York edition of Kelela’s touring RAVE:N club night, in which the R&B experimentalist performs behind the decks alongside world-class DJs. Devotees in all black who waited outside for hours are now clustered around the DJ booth taking videos. Others stand in the back on their phones, barely swaying along to a deep house remix of the Weeknd. “This is the club, why isn’t anyone dancing?” I exclaim to a friend, as we attempt to catch a vibe. The only thing I could grasp was the palpable sense that people were waiting for something more interesting to happen. 

Scenes like this—in which people go to the club with no clear purpose other than to document they were there—have led to a crisis: “Is clubbing dead?” people in global metropolises have seriously questioned online. A viral TikTok asking whether Boiler Room has “ruined” DJing argues that the mass documentation of DJ sets online has led to an epidemic of vibelessness. A Chicago crowd at a Kaytranada set got chewed out in real time for recording on their phones. The New York City mainstay Eli Escobar took to Instagram to ask attendees to stop yapping in front of the booth. The Toronto bass stalwart Bambii put it best in her own post: “Toronto, I looked in my archives and can confirm we [are] not raving like we were raving in 2022. The passion, rage and sexual tension is gone. Y’all taking shit for granted again.”

Aside from the sunglass-wearing crowds bouncing tepidly through their K-holes and G doses, the sustainability of New York City’s scene has been put in question by a spate of small and midsize clubs closing this spring: Paragon, a Myrtle-Broadway simulacrum of Studio 54 that opened in 2022 and once was host to an Eric Adams presser; Black Flamingo, a small Williamsburg waterhole established in 2015; and TBA, a beloved Williamsburg warehouse-like space that had been running for 12 years. There are still outliers, like Nowadays, which has survived through its 24-hour “Nonstop” parties and a Patreon; the space on the edge of Bushwick and Ridgewood recently renewed its 10-year lease. 

Besides the obvious issue of rising rents, the problem boils down to dance music culture reaching maximum exposure. Boiler Room, business techno, and Gen Z “wearing Shein and taking photos with flash on”—they’re all symptoms of nightlife being squeezed by late capitalism. Parties meant to celebrate music and community have essentially become influencer events, with corporate sponsors and full-on filming. Themed nights based on pop stars, indie sleaze, or the Tumblr era have proliferated at indie venues like Market Hotel and 3 Dollar Bill due to their built-in marketing. DJs themselves feel forced to become their own brand. 

“People expect you to do something now,” says Jubilee, a New York-based DJ/producer who’s been playing events since 2008. “There’s a few DJs where their whole thing is, ‘Look at me dance around.’” Though attendees might stand there filming instead of dancing, Jubilee says there are more parties for her to play now because people are going out—though it might be a specific kind of clubgoer, one who can afford rising costs for tickets, drinks, drugs, and Ubers. 

“We’re moving towards pure corporate takeover,” says Luna La Sirena, a former Paragon employee, DJ, and videographer, who lost her job when the club closed in late April. “It’s not about the little man who wants to open up a club.” (For instance, Brooklyn Mirage, a Bushwick megaclub that can host tens of thousands of partiers, is flaunting a controversial multi-million renovation—its fourth in a decade.) La Sirena says an “exclusive” mentality trickles down to attendees, who hit the clubs to seem cool by proxy and “do ketamine in the green room.” “Everyone wants to be on the list because they want to be with the celebrities, which is a total illusion,” she says. “It’s just really sad because when you're paying for your ticket, you’re also supporting the workers behind the bar or at the door—you’re paying their bills.”

The current nightlife climate began to take shape in 2021, when Covid restrictions relaxed globally and short-form videos took over social media. Some returned to the dancefloor with a newfound ferality, leading to a “maximalist” party style, says the DJ and artist Nasir MF. “People [in 2022] were doing more drugs, partying too hard, not taking care of oneself, and just doing everything in excess.” Gen Z and young millennials clung to their phones as they hit the clubs for the first time. “Their early club years were destroyed, so they’ve never lost themselves on a dancefloor before,” says Jubilee. (The basic etiquette: mind your space, don’t get so fucked you can’t keep it cute, stay off your phone, yap elsewhere, and make room for the dolls.)

But for those still reeling from pandemic-induced social anxiety, or who didn’t have access to a nightlife scene, it could feel like they were “participating” in these uber-hedonistic parties from home. That led to the increased “influence of corporate entertainment via streams,” as the London-based DJ/producer Man Power put it in an X thread last fall. Boiler Room became a household name after Fred Again’s viral set amassed more than 40 million views since July 2022 (though its stronghold is now being rightfully threatened by a boycott campaign over its new Israel-funding owners Superstruct and KKR). “TikTok techno” became a scourge worldwide as short videos of dopamine-inducing drops found their way onto For You pages. And Charli XCX crossed over with Brat, turning “club culture” into a pop concept for possibly its second summer in a row; hearing one of my friends say he wanted to K-hole at her show at the nearly 20,000-capacity Madison Square Garden confirmed to me how above-ground it had all become. 

But there’s a stark difference between “clubbers” (people who participate in nightlife by connecting to clubs), and people who connect to megastars, as Man Power put it. The rise of the latter is evident in New York’s overground, where venues feel pressured to book well-known DJs to keep the lights on instead of local, up-and-coming talent, Nasir says. “Pre-pandemic, there was an understanding of what you’re getting into before you go to a certain [club]. It was like, ‘I need to go here because this is the vibe I would like to experience.’ Now it’s more about who is playing.”

Yet for every Zedd “bodega rave” sponsored by 5 Gum, or FKA twigs Eusexua matcha partnership, there’s also a local party organizer taking risks to push back against the culture’s mainstreaming. Ian Kumamoto, a writer, DJ, and cofounder of the queer POC party Whorechata, believes that New York nightlife is currently undergoing a renaissance, evidenced by the varied parties he covers in his TimeOut column: a queer kink party at Le Bain, a secret rave at a Bronx bodega, a party called HellTekk that seems like a supercharged Gen Z successor to GHE20G0TH1K. Nights centering Latin music, Afrobeats, and K-pop are proof of a diversifying ecosystem, he says. It rings true: Some of my favorite nights out last year were at H0L0, where I heard DJs at Maricón mix their sweaty blend of reggaeton and techno, and 8ULENTINA at Shock Value send it up with Arabic club music.

As always, there are underground parties, held in warehouses and private venues, that people need to work a little harder to find. Those, too, are thriving outside of the spotlight. “You have to talk to people who are working the door, the bartenders, and actually build community,” says Kumamoto. “People just want to consume and say, ‘This is not what I thought,’ but you’re also a person with agency who is in this space.”

To ward off the clout chasers and club virgins, many of New York’s parties are instating specific guidelines or creating barriers for first-time attendees. It’s not exactly a new principle—New York venues have gatekept since the Loft and Studio 54 parties in the ’70s—but some methods are novel. Book Club Radio, a New York-based party and YouTube channel that has gained a devoted following in less than three years, doesn’t post their ticket links or event locations publicly, but instead requires that people get vetted by “the Librarian.” The Instagram admin makes it “purposefully challenging” for newcomers to find tickets, says Book Club cofounder Jojo Lorenzo. At first, when the party was held at private homes, the Librarian was a necessary safeguard. 

As Book Club has moved into big warehouses and rooftops, Lorenzo says that such gatekeeping is still necessary for maintaining the party’s values, which are outlined in a “manifesto”: no phones, face each other instead of the DJ, and be open to new genres. “There’s a lot of [clubs] I could walk up to in Manhattan and they’re not going to let me in,” Lorenzo adds. “For us, it’s not about what you look like or how rich you are. It’s about how excited you are to come [and dance].” 

Some promoters have drawn ire for their preventative door codes, like when Zero Chill, a queer warehouse party from the organizers behind Unter, enraged bros last year over their policy that requires each group to have at least one “woman” in their group for entry—supposedly to prevent it from turning into a circuit party for cis gay men. My New Year’s bender at the rave confirmed this policy results in a crowd of fun and cunty freaks (though still plenty of men); at noon, the dancefloor was still packed with barely clothed bodies gyrating to punishing techno mixed by Juliana Huxtable, who made it hard to imagine wanting to go to bed, ever.

Gatekeeping isn’t a priority for Ben Shirken, founder of the record label and performance series 29 Speedway, which bridges the electronic and avant-garde music scenes. Rather, he feels the way he curates his lineups, crafts his fliers, and hosts his events in unconventional spaces ends up drawing a crowd that is there to seriously engage. For an event last October, he orchestrated a “maze” of rooms at an undisclosed location in Ridgewood, partnering with the non-profit Brooklyn Psychedelic Society and left-field soirée Honey Trap—leading to a crowd of curious listeners. “In New York, people get really tired with the same places, they start to associate a sound and a style with them, and narratives are built. A way for me to avoid that is by finding new spaces that people don’t know how to interact in yet,” he explains. “Instead of maintaining the ‘right way’ of being in a club, we’re trying to create something that never had a right way.” 

Shirken says the “older scene is either dying out or becoming institutionalized,” but with that comes freedom. “I hope to see more unpredictability in nightlife, more confusion, and less traditional programming and curation.” He cites parties like Dripping, an annual music festival in New Jersey that values the experimental. One particularly blissful night out was at one of Dripping’s Nowadays takeovers, where I saw a Japanese Butoh-inspired contemporary dance performance followed by a frenzied set from Chicago footwork legend RP Boo, who made the crowd move as if we were possessed. “[Parties like that are] important because it brings different groups of people together,” Shirken adds. “My favorite thing is when there’s a bunch of 60-year-olds partying with 40-year-olds and 20-year-olds. That’s very New York to me. It’s inspiring to everyone where they think, ‘I can still be involved in this for the rest of my life.’” 

On a Tuesday night in December at Brooklyn’s Bossa Nova Civic Club, a man approached me at the water cooler. The chaotic crowd, which is commonplace these days for the venue, included queer club kids from Berlin, a Hasidic Jewish man, an Asian guy old enough to be my uncle, young Manhattan normies, and everyone in between. The kids were losing their minds to hardstyle edits of Crazy Frog and Avicii’s “Levels.” “Where is the best location in New York, the real underground?” the man, who’s originally from France, asked me, getting visibly frustrated when I told him that those parties “usually don’t have a set location.” Even if I did give him an address, I would be sending him to warehouses that had returned to their barren husks. I didn’t have the heart, or the lucidness, to tell him that he needed to go on his own quest, maybe descend into a few Resident Advisor wormholes, where he would realize there’s a plethora of newer or more niche clubs he could explore—such as Jupiter Disco, Earthly Delights, Mansions, Gabriela, Signal, and Refuge—and that’s not even mentioning the burgeoning Manhattan venues that I’m honestly not as tapped into.

As I slipped back into the dancefloor fog, I thought of the nights I couldn’t casually make privy to a total stranger, the smudged memories I made with bleary-eyed friends. What I really wanted to tell him was: if you want to know what those parties are like, you’ll have to find out for yourself.