Jubilee on Showing Three Generations of New Yorkers How to Dance

In New York City’s underground club scene, time moves at warp speed. The spots that once hosted the best night of your life turn into children’s climbing gyms or boutiques selling dainty, overpriced jewelry seemingly overnight. That warehouse where you attended a rave you’ll never forget is now a condo with apartments you could never afford. 

Jubilee, who’s stewarded the NYC underground with her impeccably wubby taste for bass, electro, dancehall, rap, techno, and more, has kept pace with the city’s blinding momentum for 20 years. Whenever something’s popping, she’s there, either in the booth or on the dancefloor. In the last decade, she has run the crucial party Magic City—named in honor of her native Miami—which evolved into her own robust label with a roster of adventurous electronic music that challenges the confines of bass, breaks, electro, and more. The idea for the party and label was an outgrowth of Jubilee’s time working with legendary dancehall producer Dre Skull and his label, Mixpak. “Magic City started as this compilation on SoundCloud with Opening Ceremony,” she recently recalled, referring to the now-defunct SoHo boutique. “I would play fashion parties—which would never happen now, because I’m not an influencer. But there was a period of time where, like, Beyoncé was showing up to loft parties—New York was really kind of crazy, those few years.”

In the early 2010s, Jubilee played weird little dance parties for rave heads in concrete boxes with questionable fire-safety plans when she wasn’t taking part in huge sound-system battles in now-defunct midtown mega-clubs that were sponsored by Red Bull (back when corporations liked to fund the arts). She weathered the rise of EDM mostly intact, and experienced the industry’s temperamental attitude toward booking women DJs at festivals at parties: From practically no women to a smattering of women to fewer women once again. She watched the weird little dance nights morph into private parties held by crypto weirdos in Tribeca lofts. Through it all, though, her love of the rave remains constant.

“Ten years ago, everyone that came out to Magic City knew who I was,” she told me earlier this year, surveying a changing landscape. “I don’t think that that’s the case anymore. People will come because it’s recommended or their friends are going. But afterwards I’ll get this message, like, ‘Yo, you changed my life last night.’” 

I’ve known Jubilee for more than a decade, a familiar and friendly face from the club, and more than once has she “changed my life last night.” I cannot remember the first time we met, but when we got together to talk about the 10th anniversary of Magic City, she reminded me that I was the first person to write about her debut release, in 2009. As I noted in a review of her latest EP, I do very clearly remember one night at a rave in a warehouse in Bushwick that was so hazy and dark that we didn’t know we had been dancing next to each other for hours until 4 a.m., when the fog machine was turned off and the lights were (rudely) flipped on. We turned towards each other and started laughing. 

It’s been an auspicious year for Jubilee. The Magic City anniversary party took place at Bushwick’s House of Yes, where she DJ’d alongside the Canadian producer Tiga and bass icon Star Eyes, all beneath a coterie of dancers on swings whose neon bikinis glowed under the black light. She released the Jump Start EP, which begins with a siren-infused tornado of breaks and ends with a grime-inspired electro joint, and followed that with the equally juiced but musically disparate Freaqe EP. And she capped off the year with the Main Character EP on influential Glaswegian label Numbers, which to my ear is one of the best things she’s ever made: citified bass that unites Miami and New York, with a little swerve down to Jerz for a collab with Uniiqu3. “Lucky,” with its ascending synths and feelgood melody, is a standout—a glimmering monument to how precise her production has become (and how attuned she is to a dancefloor’s need for a 3 a.m. release joint). 

“I had a really crazy couple of years,” Jubilee said, explaining the song is about her “family and, it just sounds so corny, being in love—having love from all sides.” (She regularly DJs with her longtime partner, the producer and rapper NigelThreeTimes.) Her mother was diagnosed with a terminal illness, though the same week Jubilee released “Lucky,” the doctors realized it was a misdiagnosis. “The whole time I was putting out this record, I was going through this dark, horrible part of the year,” she said. “But after I put it out, I got a better answer. It was kind of cosmic.” 

When I spoke to Jubilee again last week, she was FaceTiming in from Tokyo, where she was in the middle of a short Japanese tour (to be followed by a much-needed semi-vacation from the life of a constantly touring DJ). “As somebody that has been doing this this long, I had a great year,” she told me. “I’m still here, I am getting booked, I think, for my personal taste. I played two of the best festivals in America, Making Time and III Points, and I went to Bali. The machine makes you feel like you’re not doing enough, but it’s not true. We’re all doing too much, actually.”

And even though New Yorkers love to complain about how the city is over, she says reports of its death are premature. “There are so many articles that are, like, ‘New York nightlife is dead.’ And I'm like, Are you fucking kidding me?” Jubilee laughs. “There are 40 things going on [every night], and they’re all packed.” 

Yes, there is a marked disparity between the infusion of new clubs in the city that tend to be cost-prohibitive and smaller, often queer dance parties being thrown at warehouses and more community-oriented spaces. But the spirit of New York will never die. Jubilee recalls a recent gig she played at Brooklyn’s Zero Chill, during which longtime promoter Seva Granik got married and the theme was wedding gowns. “I played from 4 to 7 in the morning, and when I got done DJing, there was a fashion show. By 8, I was like, I have to go to bed, but so many people that I knew were just walking in.” 

With the oversaturation of DJs—there’s even a DJ when you walk into Foot Locker, Jubilee notes—she finds that DJs in their 40s and beyond “are getting their moment” in New York, including herself. “When someone sees a DJ that really takes them somewhere, they stick with them,” she says. Not that there aren’t great newer DJs, Jubilee clarifies, but she can feel a fresh level of appreciation for the vets. “I am having a third wind in my career—probably because all three generations of people who have come to see me in the past are still going out.” Even in New York, some things never change.