Pointless
My first attempt at satisfying 1/12th of 2002 Goal #2 is shaping up weakly. Want a peek? This is for BUST’s music issue. It needs a huge amount of work. I’m motivating myself to work on it by printing it in all its pointless horrifying entirety here.

Branded: Raver With A Capital R
Why Old Ravers Never Die

“This magazine is so phat,” he said, “because it’s for people like us.”

It was August of 1996 and I was sitting in the dingy efficiency apartment of a boy I’d bedded the night before. He was holding a copy of xlr8r, a national rave mag, and I was wearing my pants with 32 inch cuffs and a baby-doll t-shirt, last night’s glitter crusted into the corners of my eyes. I looked at the boy with a new-found interest.

People like us, he’d said. I rolled the delicious words over in my mind. It was the first time anyone had implied I was a raver. Me! A raver. My months of hard work had paid off. I was ecstatic, if you’ll excuse the pun.

Let’s ignore the fact that, by 1996, many thought the American rave scene was tired out, having been around for five years or more. Let’s ignore the fact that, at 21, I was probably too old to be starting my rave career. None of that mattered. I was completely in enthralled.

Almost six years later, although I still attend the occasional rave, “Raver with a capitol R” is hardly my preferred title. Oh sure, you can get into the semantics of it. What is a raver? What is a rave? In Seattle the cool ravers used to insist that they were “groovers.” “Ravers” were the 16 year olds on drugs. Others insisted that raves be called “parties,” or even worse, an “intentional gathering” (a euphemism used by hippy-raver crossovers). But let’s get down to it: we all know a rave when we see it, and when you say “I’m heading to a party, do you want to come?” it’s helpful to know whether it’s a wine tasting party, birthday party, or 500 person rave party.

So, at 26, I might not look like a raver any more: gone is my uniform of phat pants and a pacifier (yes, I actually had one), gone is the expensive designer drug habit, gone are the Adidas shoes, gone are the friends with names like “Boog-E.” But there’s a piece that remains, branding me forever as a raver identifiable to any pop-culture anthropologist: I still shake it like I’m in a warehouse.

I simply can’t dance without hearing and moving to the heaviest bass beat in the music. Doesn’t matter if it’s electronic or acoustic, live or recorded. I still hear the same thump that matches my heartbeat, and I still move to it.

No matter how far away I get from using words like “phat” or “dope,” no matter how many years it’s been since I wore holes in a pair of dancing shoes, no matter how gently I try to dance, I’m still a Raver. I might as well have still have pink hair and my name on all the guest lists, because there’s no escaping my fate: once a raver, always a raver.

It’s not a bad fate, really. I used to argue when folks referred to me as “my raver friend.” “I’m not a raver any more,” I’d protest, “I’m fully employed and sober!” Now I just laugh and agree with the title, because there is no sense in contesting my destiny.

Old ravers never really die, they just grow up, start wearing clothes that fit, and start listening to music called “downtempo,” or as a DJ friend explained, “raver easy listening.” Old Ravers meet each other in the oddest places, and share the secret handshake, telling stories of their favorite DJs or that night they did too much acid at the full moon. Old Ravers might look perfectly clean and straight, might have kids, might have grown into a love of sigur ros or Radiohead or Hell’s Belles, but when you see them dancing, they’ll probably be near the speaker and their eyes will probably be closed.

Or, as I wrote in a humor piece from 1997, “Raving is relief. Dancing is release. Dance connects me to a larger flow of energy, taps me into a universal connection through music and movement. They can take away my shoes, my fuzzy pants, the drugs, the Elmo doll, they can even take away my rave, but they can’t take away dance. They can try, but I will always find dance. Barefoot and naked, I’ll still be dancing.”

Ariel Meadow Stallings is the former editor of Lotus Magazine, and a current freelance writer living on the Left Coast. Her six year rave anniversary will be April 28th, 2002.